Tuesday, 22 May 2012, 8:30 pm
ACMI Cinemas

Australian Premiere
Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi / Palestine/Israel/France/The Netherlands / 2011 / Doc. / 90 min / Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles

Sundance Film Festival 2012, Directing Award for World Documentary
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2011, Special Jury Award and Audience Award

In 2005, Israeli authorities began constructing a separation barrier on contested land near the town of Bil’in in the West Bank. Emad, a Palestinian villager with a hand-held camera, recorded the conflict: six years, and five cameras.  With each period he films, he is able to document the unlawful brutality inflicted against Palestinians protesting the wall, whilst capturing the enduring hope held by his community against the odds. Emad’s cameras bear witness in this very personal film, where peaceful resistance is pushed to the limit.

Source:  Human Rights Arts and Film Festival

First Place (Tie)
Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong
Jesse Lieberfeld
11th grade, Winchester Thurston

I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world—and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time. Once, I thought that I truly belonged in this world of security, self-pity, self-proclaimed intelligence, and perfect moral aesthetic. I thought myself to be somewhat privileged early on. It was soon revealed to me, however, that my fellow believers and I were not part of anything so flattering.

Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up. It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives. I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.

This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war. Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. “Genocide” almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms. Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a “difficult situation.” It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. “We need to defend our race,” they told me. “It’s our right.”

“We need to defend our race.”

Where had I heard that before? Wasn’t it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans sixty years ago? In that moment, I realized how similar the two struggles were—like the white radicals of that era, we controlled the lives of another people whom we abused daily, and no one could speak out against us. It was too politically incorrect to do so. We had suffered too much, endured too many hardships, and overcome too many losses to be criticized. I realized then that I was in no way part of a “conflict”—the term “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict” was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the “Caucasian/ African-American Conflict.” In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed, and I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.

I thought of the leader of the other oppressed side of years ago, Martin Luther King. He too had been part of a struggle that had been hidden and glossed over for the convenience of those against whom he fought. What would his reaction have been? As it turned out, it was precisely the same as mine. As he wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, he believed the greatest enemy of his cause to be “Not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who…lives by a mythical concept of time…. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” When I first read those words, I felt as if I were staring at myself in a mirror. All my life I had been conditioned to simply treat the so-called conflict with the same apathy which King had so forcefully condemned. I, too, held the role of an accepting moderate. I, too, “lived by a mythical concept of time,” shrouded in my own surreal world and the set of beliefs that had been assigned to me. I had never before felt so trapped.

I decided to make one last appeal to my religion. If it could not answer my misgivings, no one could. The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion. I wanted to place my dilemma in as clear and simple terms as I knew how. I thought out my exact question over the course of the seventeen-minute cello solo that was routinely played during service. Previously, I had always accepted this solo as just another part of the program, yet now it seemed to capture the whole essence of our religion: intelligent and well-crafted on paper, yet completely oblivious to the outside world (the soloist did not have the faintest idea of how masterfully he was putting us all to sleep). When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. “It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.” I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a “fact of life” was simply too much for me to accept. I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back. I thought about what I could do. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience. I could not live the rest of my life as one of the pathetic moderates whom King had rightfully portrayed as the worst part of the problem. I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.

It was different not being the ideal nice Jewish boy. The difference was subtle, yet by no means unaffecting. Whenever it came to the attention of any of our more religious family friends that I did not share their beliefs, I was met with either a disapproving stare and a quick change of the subject or an alarmed cry of, “What? Doesn’t Israel matter to you?” Relatives talked down to me more afterward, but eventually I stopped noticing the way adults around me perceived me. It was worth it to no longer feel as though I were just another apathetic part of the machine.

I can obviously never know what it must have been like to be an African-American in the 1950s. I do feel, however, as though I know exactly what it must have been like to be white during that time, to live under an aura of moral invincibility, to hold unchallengeable beliefs, and to contrive illusions of superiority to avoid having to face simple everyday truths. That illusion was nice while it lasted, but I decided to pass it up. I have never been happier.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

In a ruling on 31 January, the BBC Trust defended its decision to censor the word “Palestine” from a freestyle by rapper Mic Righteous on 1xtra in February last year. 3:00 minutes into the performance, he rapped:

“I still have the same beliefs
I can scream Free Palestine,
Die for my pride still pray for peace,
Still burn a fed for the brutality
They spread over the world.”

BBC production staff covered up the word “Palestine” with the sound of broken glass. The censored version was also aired in April. Responding to the original complaints, the BBC said that “Mic Righteous was expressing a political viewpoint which, if it had been aired in isolation, would have compromised impartiality.”

Yet its own guidelines make allowances for “individual expression” for “artists, writers and entertainers”, as long as services “reflect a broad range of the available perspectives over time”. The BBC argues that a late night music show was not the appropriate place to get into political debate as it was not obvious when these other views would be aired.

Amena Saleem, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign said: ‘”In its correspondence with us, the BBC said the word Palestine isn’t offensive, but ‘implying that it is not free is the contentious issue’, and this is why the edit was made.”

But the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is a fact, not a statement of opinion. The UN Security Council classifies Israel as the “occupying force” in the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, in upholding their decision, the BBC Trust has not addressed this key issue in the complaints. Consequently, nine complainants have said that their main point, that the BBC “demonstrated bias against Palestinians”, had been ignored.

At the time, the PSC made the point that the BBC did not ban the song “Free Nelson Mandela” in 1984, even though Mandela was considered to be a terrorist by many western governments.

The BBC Trust has decided it is not “proportionate or cost-effective” to proceed further with the complaint, but the original decision does not seem proportionate either. Indeed, had the BBC allowed the song to go through uncensored, it probably would not have been remarked upon (after all, it was two words, not a long political diatribe). As it is, this incident sends a very uncomfortable message.

If we had a wish list for 2012 as Palestinians and friends of Palestine, one of the top items ought to be our hope that we can translate the dramatic shift in recent years in world public opinion into political action against Israeli policies on the ground.

We know why this has not yet materialized: the political, intellectual and cultural elites of the West cower whenever they even contemplate acting according to their own consciences as well as the wishes of their societies.

This last year was particularly illuminating for me in that respect. I encountered that timidity at every station in the many trips I took for the cause I believe in. And these personal experiences were accentuated by the more general examples of how governments and institutions caved in under intimidation from Israel and pro-Zionist Jewish organizations.

A catalogue of complicity

Of course there were US President Barack Obama’s pandering appearances in front of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, and his administration’s continued silence and inaction in face of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, siege and killings in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of the Bedouins in the Naqab and new legislation discriminating against Palestinians in Israel.

The complicity continued with the shameful retreat of Judge Richard Goldstone from his rather tame report on the Gaza massacre — which began three years ago today. And then there was the decision of European governments, especially Greece, to disallow campaigns of human aid and solidarity from reaching Gaza by sea.

On the margins of all of this were prosecutions in France against activists calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and a few u-turns by some groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Europe caving in under pressure and retracting an earlier decision to cede connections with Israel.

Learning firsthand how pro-Israel intimidation works

In recent years, I have learned firsthand how intimidation of this kind works. In November 2009 the mayor of Munich was scared to death by a Zionist lobby group and cancelled my lecture there. More recently, the Austrian foreign ministry withdrew its funding for an event in which I participated, and finally it was my own university, the University of Exeter, once a haven of security in my eyes, becoming frigid when a bunch of Zionist hooligans claimed I was a fabricator and a self-hating Jew.

Every year since I moved there, Zionist organizations in the UK and the US have asked the university to investigate my work and were brushed aside. This year a similar appeal was taken, momentarily one should say, seriously. One hopes this was just a temporary lapse; but you never know with an academic institution (bravery is not one of their hallmarks).

Standing up to pressure

But there were examples of courage — local and global — as well: the student union of the University of Surrey under heavy pressure to cancel my talk did not give in and allowed the event to take place.

The Episcopal Bishops Committee on Israel/Palestine in Seattle faced the wrath of many of the city’s synagogues and the Israeli Consul General in San Francisco, Akiva Tor, for arranging an event with me in September 2011 in Seattle’s Town Hall, but bravely brushed aside this campaign of intimidation. The usual charges of “anti-Semitism” did not work there — they never do where people refuse to be intimidated.

The outgoing year was also the one in which Turkey imposed military and diplomatic sanctions on Israel in response to the latter’s refusal to take responsibility for the attack on the Mavi Marmara. Turkey’s action was in marked contrast to the European and international habit of sufficing with toothless statements at best, and never imposing a real price on Israel for its actions.

Do not cave in to intimidation

I do not wish to underestimate the task ahead of us. Only recently did we learn how much money is channeled to this machinery of intimidation whose sole purpose is to silence criticism on Israel. Last year, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs — leading pro-Israel lobby groups — allocated $6 million to be spent over three years to fight BDS campaigns and smear the Palestine solidarity movement. This is not the only such initiative under way.

But are these forces as powerful as they seem to be in the eyes of very respectable institutions such as universities, community centers, churches, media outlets and, of course, politicians?

What you learn is that once you cower, you become prey to continued and relentless bashing until you sing the Israeli national anthem. If once you do not cave in, you discover that as time goes by, the ability of Zionist lobbies of intimidation around the world to affect you gradually diminishes.

Reducing the influence of the United States

Undoubtedly the centers of power that fuel this culture of intimidation lie to a great extent in the United States, which brings me to the second item on my 2012 wish list: an end to the American dominance in the affairs of Israelis and Palestinians. I know this influence cannot be easily curbed.

But the issue of timidity and intimidation belong to an American sphere of activity where things can, and should be, different. There will be no peace process or even Pax Americana in Palestine if the Palestinians, under whatever leadership, would agree to allow Washington to play such a central role. It is not as if US policy-makers can threaten the Palestinians that without their involvement there will be no peace process.

In fact history has proved that there was no peace process — in the sense of a genuine movement toward the restoration of Palestinian rights — precisely because of American involvement. Outside mediation may be necessary for the cause of reconciliation in Palestine. But does it have to be American?

If elite politics are needed — along with other forces and movements — to facilitate a change on the ground, such a role should come from other places in the world and not just from the United States.

One would hope that the recent rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah — and the new attempt to base the issue of Palestinian representation on a wider and more just basis — will lead to a clear Palestinian position that would expose the fallacy that peace can only be achieved with the Americans as its brokers.

Dwarfing the US role will disarm American Zionist bodies and those who emulate them in Europe and Israel of their power of intimidation.

Letting the other America play a role

This will also enable the other America, that of the civil society, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the progressive campuses, the courageous churches, African-Americans marginalized by mainstream politics, Native Americans and millions of other decent Americans who never fell captive to elite propaganda about Israel and Palestine, to take a far more central role in “American involvement” in Palestine.

That would benefit America as much as it will benefit justice and peace in Palestine. But this long road to redeeming all of us who want to see justice begins by asking academics, journalists and politicians in the West to show a modicum of steadfastness and courage in the face of those who want to intimidate us. Their bark is far fiercer than their bite.

The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

They took this bold action to expose the racism and policies of segregation that pervade every aspect of life in occupied Palestine. To send the message to the world that separate is not equal. Not in the United States and not in Israel or Palestine. They also wanted to bring attention to the role of Israeli and international companies, such as Egged and Veolia, who operate these segreated bus lines, in perpetuating and profiting from the occupation.

The first bus drivers— seeing that Palestinians were waiting at the bus stop— passed without pause. Once a bus finally stopped and they boarded, the driver did not know what to do with Palestinians on board. He consulted with the Israeli soldiers, who had arrived on the scene after being alerted that Palestinians were standing at a Jewish bus stop. They instructed him to continue to the Hizmeh checkpoint, where the settlers were taken off the bus and soldiers got on. The Freedom Riders refused to get off, asserting their right to go to Jerusalem. One by one these non-violent protesters were roughly dragged off the bus and arrested, along with Fajr Harb, a supporter who had not been on the bus. All the Freedom Riders did to warrant arrest was to take a bus from one place in the Occupied Territory to another, using public transportation.

While Israelis are allowed to come and go as they wish in the Occupied Territory—even to settle in it in contradiction to international law— Palestinians’ movement in their own land is severely restricted, even criminalized. This kind of racism and segregation is as abhorrent today as it was 50 years ago in the Jim Crow South. Fadi Quraan, one of the arrested freedom riders, is a 23 year old Palestinian from Ramallah. He was born in Jerusalem and is currently a graduate student at Birzeit University finishing his master degree in Democracy and Human Rights. Right before being dragged from the bus by Israeli soldiers, he said: “We are not going to give up. We are struggling for justice, freedom, and dignity and we shall overcome. Stand with us in solidarity.

Please divest from the Egged and Veolia bus companies and all Israeli institutions. We will achieve freedom, justice, and dignity for this generation of Palestinians.” Fadi and his fellow Freedom Riders will keep boarding those buses until the day comes when all may do so freely. Palestinian Freedom Riders are asking US activists to step up alongside them, taking to the streets (or buses!) to show our solidarity with these courageous and historic protests. Learn more about segregated transporation in Israel/Palestine by watching this video or reading this report

Source: Jewish Voice for Peace

Chavez has long championed the Palestinian cause and has hosted Abbas on previous occasions.

Before meeting Abbas at the presidential palace in Caracas, Chavez reiterated his support for a Palestinian state.

Chavez said the Palestinians “have gone 63 years enduring abuses, invasions, bombardments, aggressions and UN resolutions” against them.

“I invite the entire Venezuelan people to support the cause of the Palestinian people,” he said.

Chavez said he hoped to establish a joint Palestinian-Venezuelan committee headed by the foreign minister that would be responsible for agriculture and trade cooperation.

He also said Venezuela would fund the construction of an eye hospital to Ramallah.

Abbas, on a Latin American swing to drum up support for his bid that also took him to El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, later landed in Venezuela to meet with Chavez.

He left Colombia empty-handed Tuesday after failing to secure support from President Juan Manuel Santos for his bid to gain state recognition at the United Nations.

“We want the Palestinian state to exist. But this can only come as the result of a (UN) vote or resolution. It must be the product of negotiations (between Israelis and Palestinians) because this is the only way to achieve peace,” Santos said after meeting Abbas in Bogota.

Abbas in turn said the PLO was “ready to return immediately to the negotiating table” after talks with the Israelis were suspended in September 2010 following a brief hiatus.

But he repeated a principal demand to resume the negotiations, calling for Israel to end settlement building.

Colombia is a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, where Abbas needs at least nine votes out of 15 to obtain a favorable recommendation for his request to have a Palestinian state gain UN membership.

Abbas is due to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday in Paris to discuss the Palestinian bid for UN recognition. France is a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Source: Maan News Agency

Israel and its influential lobby are pushing hard for the government to vote against Palestine’s membership, but the government has a duty to put Australia’s national interests, its international standing, values and commitments, above its own narrow party interests and that of Israel’s.

Australia should do the right thing and be on the right side of history, not appease the extreme-right Israeli government and its lobby.

Australian support of Palestinian membership will reflect the moral values Australia upholds, serve its standing in the international community and give credibility to the role it is working hard to achieve internationally. It is also a golden opportunity to correct its biased Middle East policy since the creation of Israel in Palestine in 1948.

Australia has a moral and historic responsibility towards the Palestinian people. It played a major role for the proposed partition of Palestine in 1947 and the creation of Israel in 1948, causing al-Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe and dispossession.

Israel, with the crucial support it received from Australia, became the 59th state in the UN; now, 62 years later and the joining of 134 more nations to the world body, it should be Palestine’s turn to take its rightful place among UN member states.

During a recent visit to Australia, Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, said Palestine’s membership was “long overdue”.

All international requirements are in place for recognition of the state of Palestine. Palestine has received its independence and birth certificate from UN resolution 181, the UN partition of Palestine, the same certificate that legitimises Israel’s existence.

In its 43rd session on December 15, 1988, the General Assembly defined the 1967 occupation of Palestinian territories, as did Security Council resolutions 605, 607 and 608.

Palestine’s recognition is a political decision. That is why about 126 countries have recognised the state of Palestine and established full relations with it. The long-standing policies of both Labor and Liberal are for two states, side by side. They supported the state of Israel in 1948; now is the time to support creation of the other state, Palestine.

For internal reasons, the United States may again misuse its veto power, as it has done 43 times previously, to shield Israel’s occupation of Palestine. But internal political interests here are served by Australia supporting the Palestinian bid.

While 88,800 Australian Jews can influence three federal electorates, all of which are safe, about 340,400 Muslims including Australian Arabs can influence 19 federal electorate seats, 13 of them marginal, according to my research based on the 2010 federal election results and the 2006 census.

Furthermore, most Australians repeatedly have shown they are on the Palestinian side.

Above self-interest, but not devoid of it, of course, Australia has an international responsibility to play a constructive role in bringing peace and stability to the Middle East.

Israel’s arguments for not supporting Palestinian membership are unconvincing and contrary to its actions on the ground in the occupied territories.

Israel has used negotiations as a smokescreen to give a false impression of a peace process, while turning the impression into a process for consolidating and legalising Jewish colonialism and brutal occupation.

Israel was created by the UN unilaterally, not through negotiation with the Palestinian people. Palestinians are going to the UN to get international recognition for their state and to end 4½ decades of bloody occupation.

Palestine’s membership of the UN would not be a declaration of war nor a substitute for negotiations.

Palestinians have shown commitment for the past 18 years to solve the issue through negotiation. Israel should make good its claim that it also wants to negotiate.

But the difference is that Israel would be accountable under international law as an occupying power. No longer could it claim as ”disputed” territories Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. And no longer would Israel be able to steal more and more land beyond the UN partition borders.

In 63 years, consecutive Australian governments have played very negative roles and adopted policies biased towards Israel.

An Australian vote in favour of Palestine would serve not only Australia’s national interests and put Australia on the right side of history, it would correct this historical record by advancing justice and peace in the Middle East, and therefore throughout the world.

Opinion

The current negative approach is damaging and can’t be justified.

THE arguments against recognition of a Palestinian state seem to rest on the simple proposition that agreement must be reached through negotiation and that a resolution granting statehood would set that process back.

If that argument was valid it would have been true in 1948 when the United Nations recognised Israel as an independent state. People should then have argued the Israelis must negotiate with the Palestinians, the people who were being pushed out, and once they had come to an agreement, we could recognise Israel.

If the argument is so thin, why are some Western powers so strongly against recognition of a Palestinian state? I suggest it is because of the lock that Israel has over the policies of too many Western countries. There is an Israeli lobby that governments are not prepared to offend.

There have been two major stumbling blocks to peace. The first is the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, the daily diminution of what might become Palestine. President Barack Obama, to his credit, tried to get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the expansions. He did not succeed. If other Western countries had supported President Obama at the time, that result may have been better.

The second problem concerns the divisions between Fatah and Hamas, and here both Israel and the West have played their part in perpetuating that division. Hamas won a legitimate election. Nobody claimed it was fraudulent. Indeed, people working in Palestine had predicted a Hamas victory because, in small communities across the territory, if people had needed help it was Hamas which would provide it and not Fatah, which was seen as self-serving and corrupt.

After Hamas’s election victory, much of the West, led by Israel and the US, said: ”Well, you are going to have to change your policy before we will talk to you. You must now accept the existence of the Israeli state.” That stand forced Hamas back to the weapons it had known for too long, most of which were psychological. Its rocket attacks on Israel caused little damage relative to the retribution exacted by the Israeli army against the people of Gaza. The main effect of those rockets has been, and remains, the propaganda weapon that it provides Israel.

The ineffective use of power by Hamas has been regarded as totally illegitimate, while Israel has used its official forces time and again in provocation or retribution. The violence is endless and who is responsible for cause and effect will depend very much on who you are talking to. There is no absolute truth.

If the West had said to Hamas, ”we will talk with you, we will negotiate with you, but we oppose absolutely your failure to recognise the state of Israel”, it could have done much to heal the wounds between Hamas and Fatah and provide a strong Palestinian entity that could negotiate with Israel. The West could also have said very clearly to Hamas, and I believe Hamas would have accepted this, ”while you do not recognise the existence of Israel now, once there are agreed boundaries of a Palestinian state, from that moment on you must recognise the existence and permanence of the Jewish state of Israel”.

Many would regard that as a fair bargain. Why should Palestinians recognise Israel when Israel refuses to talk substantively about realistic boundaries to a Palestinian state and while Israeli settlers are diminishing what might be and should be a Palestinian state?

One could almost argue that Israel, the US and Fatah are in an unholy alliance to destroy Hamas. They have not done so. To talk of negotiations leading to peace while ignoring the reality of Hamas is to talk nonsense. So Prime Minister Abbas is correct in pressing for United Nations recognition.

There are other reasons a new approach is needed urgently. The power of the US under current policies is diminishing in the Middle East. Its capacity to influence events in future will be less than it has been. Turkey has changed the substance of its relationship with Israel in major ways. It will never return to the old subservience to Israeli and American wishes. Likewise in Egypt. Whether the generals allow a true democratic state to emerge may be doubtful, but it is clear that the pro-Israeli policies followed by former president Hosni Mubarak are not now being followed by Egypt. As time passes without progress, Egypt’s stand is likely to become stronger and more effective. Saudi Arabia has also pressed the US very hard on this issue.

Recognition by the United Nations could give greater weight to Palestinian arguments and would put pressure on Israel of a new kind to end the policy of settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. That is an essential part of an ultimate settlement.

The lack of progress over 18 years is due not so much to Palestinian division or to the ineffective rocketry of Hamas, but to the determination of Israel and its closest friends to make sure that nothing is done that Israel does not support. The changes in the Middle East, not only in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia but across North Africa, will end in greater support for the Palestinian cause. These important relationships for the West may be irretrievably damaged if the West persists in its negative approach to the question of Palestinian statehood.

Malcolm Fraser was prime minister of Australia from 1975 to 1982.

Source:  The Age

It’s the show that time and the world forgot. It’s called the Occupation and it’s now in its 45th year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day.

Diplomats shuttle back and forth from Washington and Brussels to Middle Eastern capitals; the Israeli-Turkish alliance ruptures amid bold declarations from the Turkish prime minister; crowds storm the Israeli embassy in Cairo, while Israeli ambassadors flee the Egyptian capital and Amman, the Jordanian one; and of course, there’s the headliner, the show-stopper of the moment, the Palestinian Authority’s campaign for statehood in the United Nations, which will prompt an Obama administration veto in the Security Council.

But whatever the Turks, Egyptians, or Americans do, whatever symbolic satisfaction the Palestinian Authority may get at the UN, there’s always the Occupation and there – take it from someone just back from a summer living in the West Bank – Israel isn’t losing. It’s winning the battle, at least the one that means the most to Palestinians and Israelis, the one for control over every square foot of ground.

Inch by inch, metre by metre, Israel’s expansion project in the West Bank and Jerusalem is, in fact, gaining momentum, ensuring that the “nation” that the UN might grant membership will be each day a little smaller, a little less viable, a little less there.

How to disappear a land
On my many drives from West Bank city to West Bank city, from Ramallah to Jenin, Abu Dis to Jericho, Bethlehem to Hebron, I’d play a little game: Could I travel for an entire minute without seeing physical evidence of the occupation?

Occasionally – say, when riding through a narrow passage between hills – it was possible. But not often. Nearly every panoramic vista, every turn in the highway revealed a Jewish settlement, an Israeli army checkpoint, a military watchtower, a looming concrete wall, a barbed-wire fence with signs announcing another restricted area, or a cluster of army jeeps stopping cars and inspecting young men for their documents.

The ill-fated Oslo “peace process” that emerged from the Oslo Accords of 1993 not only failed to prevent such expansion, it effectively sanctioned it. Since then, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank has nearly tripled to more than 300,000 – and that figure doesn’t include the more than 200,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.

The Oslo Accords, ratified by both the Palestinians and the Israelis, divided the West Bank into three zones – A, B, and C. At the time, they were imagined by the Palestinian Authority as a temporary way station on the road to an independent state. They are, however, still in effect today.

The de facto Israeli strategy has been and remains to give Palestinians relative freedom in Area A, around the West Bank’s cities, while locking down “Area C” – 60 per cent of the West Bank – for the use of the Jewish settlements and for what are called “restricted military areas” (Area B is essentially a kind of grey zone between the other two). From this strategy come the thousands of demolitions of “illegal” housing and the regular arrests of villagers who simply try to build improvements to their homes.

Restrictions are strictly enforced and violations dealt with harshly.

When I visited the South Hebron Hills in late 2009, for example, villagers were not even allowed to smooth out a virtually impassable dirt road so that their children wouldn’t have to walk two to three miles to school every day.

Na’im al Adarah, from the village of At-Tuwani, paid the price for transporting those kids to the school “illegally”. A few weeks after my visit, he was arrested and his red Toyota pickup seized and destroyed by Israeli soldiers. He didn’t bother complaining to the Palestinian Authority – the same people now going to the UN to declare a Palestinian state – because they have no control over what happens in Area C.

The only time he’d seen a Palestinian official, al Adarah told me, was when he and other villagers drove to Ramallah to bring one to the area. (The man from the Palestinian Authority refused to come on his own.)

“He said this is the first time he knew that this land [in Area C] is ours. A minister like him is surprised that we have these areas? I told him, ‘How can a minister like you not know this? You’re the minister of local government!’
“It was like he didn’t know what was happening in his own country … we’re forgotten, unfortunately.”

“It was like he didn’t know what was happening in his own country,” added al-Adarah. “We’re forgotten, unfortunately.”

The Israeli strategy of control also explains, strategically speaking, the “need” for the network of checkpoints; the looming separation barrier (known to Israelis as the “security fence” and to Palestinians as the “apartheid wall”) that divides Israel from the West Bank (and sometimes West Bankers from each other); the repeated evictions of Palestinians from residential areas like Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem; the systematic revoking of Jerusalem IDs once held by thousands of Palestinians who were born in the Holy City; and the labyrinthine travel restrictions which keep so many Palestinians locked in their West Bank enclaves.

While Israel justifies most of these measures in terms of national security, it’s clear enough that the larger goal behind them is to incrementally take and hold ever more of the land. The separation barrier, for example, has put 10 per cent of the West Bank’s land on the Israeli side – a case of “annexation in the guise of security”, according to the respected Israeli human rights group, B’tselem.

Taken together, these measures amount to the solution that the Israeli government seeks, one revealed in a series of maps drawn up by Israeli politicians, cartographers, and military men over recent years that show Palestine broken into isolated islands (often compared to South African apartheid-era “bantustans”) on only about 40 per cent of the West Bank.

At the outset of Oslo, Palestinians believed they had made a historic compromise, agreeing to a state on 22 per cent of historic Palestine – that is, the West Bank and Gaza. The reality now is a kind of “ten per cent solution”, a rump statelet without sovereignty, freedom of movement, or control of its own land, air, or water. Palestinians cannot even drill a well to tap into the vast aquifer beneath their feet.

Almost always overlooked in assessments of this ruinous “no-state solution” is the human toll it takes on the occupied. More than on any of my dozen previous journeys there, I came away from this trip to Palestine with a sense of the psychic damage the military occupation has inflicted on every Palestinian. None, no matter how warm-hearted or resilient, escape its effects.

“The soldier pointed to my violin case. He said, ‘What’s that?’” 13-year-old Ala Shelaldeh, who lives in old Ramallah, told me.

She is a student at Al Kamandjati (Arabic for “the violinist”), a music school in her neighbourhood (which will be a focus of my next book). She was recalling a time three years earlier when a van she was in, full of young musicians, was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus. They were coming back from a concert.

“I told him, ‘It’s a violin.’ He told me to get out of the van and show him.” Ala stepped onto the roadside, unzipped her case, and displayed the instrument for the soldier.

“Play something,” he insisted. Ala played Hilwadeen (Beautiful Girl), the song made famous by the Lebanese star Fayrouz. It was a typical moment in Palestine, and one she has yet to, and may never, forget.

It is impossible, of course, to calculate the long-term emotional damage of such encounters on children and adults alike, including on the Israeli soldiers, who are not immune to their own actions.

Humiliation at checkpoints is a basic fact of West Bank Palestinian life. Everyone, even children, has his or her story to tell of helplessness, fear, and rage while waiting for a teenaged soldier to decide whether or not they can pass. It has become so normal that some kids have no idea the rest of the world doesn’t live like this.

“I thought the whole world was like us – they are occupied, they have soldiers,” remembered Ala’s older brother, Shehade, now 20.

A view of a different life
“It was a shock for me to see [Italy]. You can go very, very far, and no checkpoint. You see the land very, very far, and no wall. I was so happy, and at the same time sad, you know? Because we don’t have this freedom in my country.”

- Shehade Shelaldeh

At 15, he was invited to Italy. “It was a shock for me to see this life. You can go very, very far, and no checkpoint. You see the land very, very far, and no wall. I was so happy, and at the same time sad, you know? Because we don’t have this freedom in my country.”

At age 12, Shehade had seen his cousin shot dead by soldiers during the second intifada, which erupted in late 2001 after Israel’s then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon paid a provocative visit to holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. Clashes erupted as youths hurled stones at soldiers. Israeli troops responded with live fire, killing some 250 Palestinians (compared to 29 Israeli deaths) in the first two months of the intifada. The next year, Palestinian factions launched waves of suicide bombings in Israel.

One day in 2002, Shehade recalled, with Ramallah again fully occupied by the Israeli army, the young cousins broke a military curfew in order to buy bread. A shot rang out near a corner market; Shehade watched his cousin fall. This summer Shehade showed me the gruesome pictures – blood flowing from a 12-year-old’s mouth and ears – taken moments after the shooting in 2002.

Nine years later, Ramallah, a supposedly sovereign enclave, is often considered an oasis in a desert of occupation. Its streets and markets are choked with shoppers, and its many trendy restaurants rival fine European eateries. The vibrancy and upscale feel of many parts of the city give you a sense that – much as Palestinians are loathe to admit it – this, and not East Jerusalem, is the emerging Palestinian capital.

Many Ramallah streets are indeed lined with government ministries and foreign consulates. (Just don’t call them embassies!) But much of this apparent freedom and quasi-sovereignty is illusory.

In the West Bank, travel without hard-to-get permits is often limited to narrow corridors of land, like the one between Ramallah and Nablus, where the Israeli military has, for now, abandoned its checkpoints and roadblocks. Even in Ramallah – part of the theoretically sovereign Area A – night incursions by Israeli soldiers are common.

“It was December 2009, the 16th I think, at 2:15, 2:30 in the morning,” recalled Celine Dagher, a French citizen of Lebanese descent. Her Palestinian husband, Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of Al Kamandjati, where both of them work, was then abroad. “I was awakened by a sound,” she told me.

She emerged to find the front door of their flat jammed partway open and kept that way by a small security bar of the sort you find in hotel rooms. Celine thought burglars were trying to break in and so yelled at them in Arabic to go away. Then she peered through the six-inch opening and spotted ten Israeli soldiers in the hallway.

They told her to stand back, and within seconds had blown the door off its hinges. Entering the apartment, they pointed their automatic rifles at her. A Palestinian informant stood near them silently, a black woolen mask pulled over his face to ensure his anonymity.

The commander began to interrogate her. “My name, with whom I live, starting to ask me about the neighbours.” Celine flashed her French passport and pleaded with them not to wake up her six-month-old, Hussein, sleeping in the next room.

“I was praying that he would just stay asleep.” She told the commander, “I just go from my house to my work, from work to my house.” She didn’t really know her neighbours, she said.

As it happened, the soldiers had blown off the door of the wrong flat. They would remove four more doors in the building that night, Celine recalled, before finding their suspect: Her 17-year-old next door neighbour.  “They stood questioning him for maybe 20 minutes, and then they took him. And I think he’s still in jail. His father is already in jail.”

“You can’t go to Jerusalem to pray. And it’s only 15 kilometres away. And you have your memories there.”

- Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law school at Birzeit University

According to Israeli Prison Services statistics cited by B’tselem, more than 5,300 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons in July 2011. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, an estimated 650,000 to 700,000 Palestinians have reportedly been jailed by Israel. By one calculation, that represents 40 per cent of the adult-male Palestinian population.

Almost no family has been untouched by the Israeli prison system.

Celine stared through the blinds at the street below, where some 15 jeeps and other military vehicles were parked. Finally, they left with their lights out and so quietly that she couldn’t even hear their engines. When the flat was silent again, she couldn’t sleep. “I was very afraid.” A neighbour came upstairs to sit with her until the morning.

Stories like these – and they are legion – accumulate, creating the outlines of what could be called a culture of occupation. They give context to a remark by Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law school at Birzeit University near Ramallah: “I don’t remember a happy day since 1967,” he told me.

Stunned, I asked him why specifically that was so. “Because,” he replied, “you can’t go to Jerusalem to pray.  And it’s only 15 kilometres away. And you have your memories there.”

He added, “Since 17 years I was unable to go to the sea. We are not allowed to go. And my daughter married five years ago and we were unable to do a marriage ceremony for her.” Israel would not grant a visa to Saleh’s Egyptian son-in-law so that he could enter the West Bank. “How to do a marriage without the groom?”

A musical Intifada

An old schoolmate of mine and now a Middle East scholar living in Paris points out that Palestinians are not just victims, but actors in their own narrative. In other words, he insists, they, too, bear responsibility for their circumstances – not all of this rests on the shoulders of the occupiers. True enough.

As an apt example, consider the morally and strategically bankrupt tactic of suicide bombings, carried out from 2001 to 2004 by several Palestinian factions as a response to Israeli attacks during the second intifada. That disastrous strategy gave cover to all manner of Israeli retaliation, including the building of the separation barrier. (The near disappearance of the suicide attacks has been due far less to the wall – after all, it isn’t even finished yet – than to a decision on the part of all the Palestinian factions to reject the tactic itself.)

So, yes, Palestinians are also “actors” in creating their own circumstances, but Israel remains the sole regional nuclear power, the state with one of the strongest armies in the world, and the occupying force – and that is the determining fact in the West Bank.
“Existence is resistance.”

Today, for some Palestinians living under the 44-year occupation simply remaining on the land is a kind of moral victory. This summer, I started hearing a new slogan: “Existence is resistance.” If you remain on the land, then the game isn’t over.

And if you can bring attention to the occupation, while you remain in place, so much the better.

In June, Ala Shelaldeh, the 13-year-old violinist, brought her instrument to the wall at Qalandia, once a mere checkpoint separating Ramallah and Jerusalem, and now essentially an international border crossing with its mass of concrete, steel bars, and gun turrets.

The transformation of Qalandia – and its long, cage-like corridors and multiple seven-foot-high turnstiles through which only the lucky few with permits may cross to Jerusalem – is perhaps the most powerful symbol of Israel’s determination not to share the Holy City.

Ala and her fellow musicians in the Al Kamandjati Youth Orchestra came to play Mozart and Bizet in front of the Israeli soldiers, on the other side of Qalandia’s steel bars. Their purpose was to confront the occupation through music, essentially to assert: We’re here. The children and their teachers emerged from their bus, quickly set up their music stands, and began to play. Within moments, the sound of Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major filled the terminal.

Palestinians stopped and stared. Smiles broke out. People came closer, pulling out cell phones and snapping photos, or just stood there, surrounding the youth orchestra, transfixed by this musical intifada. The musicians and soldiers were separated by a long row of blue horizontal bars. As the music played on, a grim barrier of confinement was momentarily transformed into a space of assertive joy.

“It was,” Ala would say later, “the greatest concert of my life.”

As the Mozart symphony built – Allegro, Andante, Minuet, and the Allegro last movement – some of the soldiers started to take notice. By the time the orchestra launched into Georges Bizet’s Dance Boheme from Carmen #2, several soldiers appeared, looking out through the bars. For the briefest of moments, it was hard to tell who was on the inside, looking out, and who was on the outside, looking in.

If existence is resistance, if children can confront their occupiers with a musical intifada, then there’s still space, in the year of the Arab Spring, for something unexpected and transformative to happen. After all, South African apartheid collapsed, and without a bloody revolution. The Berlin Wall fell quickly, completely, unexpectedly.

And with China, India, Turkey and Brazil on the rise, the United States, its power waning, will not be able to remain Israel’s protector forever. Eventually, perhaps, the world will assert the obvious: The status quo is unacceptable.

For the moment, whatever happens in the coming weeks at the UN, and in the West Bank in the aftermath, isn’t it time for the world’s focus to shift to what is actually happening on the ground? After all, it’s the occupation, stupid.

Sandy Tolan is author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.  He is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.  He is at work on a new book, Operation Mozart, about music and life in Palestine.  He blogs at ramallahcafe.com.

Source: Aljazeera