A just-released report from the UNESCO Chair on Human Rights at An Najah National University in Nablus focuses on the impact of this policy of collective punishment on the right to education of over 100 University students from Awarta.

The Israeli military operations carried out in Awarta over the past month and a half have left the entire community traumatized, but in many ways has especially impacted the students from the village. Over 100 students attend An Najah National University, located 15 minutes away in the West Bank city of Nablus. Since March 12, An Najah students from Awarta have been forced to miss days and sometimes weeks of class, including crucial exam periods due to curfews, closures and abuse and arrest of the students and their families. Class material and research has been destroyed and/or confiscated during the raids of their homes, resulting in lost graduation projects and notes for the entire semester. Additionally, students report an overall inability to concentrate on their studies because of sleep deprivation, anxiety and economic hardships caused by the raids and arrests of family members.

Students also feel certain that the attacks on their village have not yet ended. Settler leaders from Itamar have openly called for the ethnic cleansing of “Arabs” from the West Bank, and residents have reported increased settler violence including stone throwing by settlers on the road to Awarta and an attempted kidnapping. One student articulated the profound sense of vulnerability within the village, stating “There’s no such thing as protection for our rights.”

Ed. Note:  The following is a report from Bi’lin resident Yasser Awad Yasin on his  interrogation by Israeli security forces.

 My name is Yasser Awad Yasin.  I am 27 years old and I’m from the village of Bil’in. I’m married and I have two sons and one daughter.

The Shabak (Israeli security ) had called me on the phone and told me to go to their office.  I didn’t go, so the army raided my house.  I was sleeping with my wife and children when they woke us all up.  I asked them what they were doing because I hadn’t done anything. They asked me for my ID and they told me to go to the Shabak offices the next day. I asked them why they didn’t arrest me now and then the soldiers gave me papers ordering me to go for questioning. 

When I went there, first they strip-searched me and asked if I have any weapons.  I told them I have a packet of food and they took it off me.  Then they took me to the  head of the Shabak who told me many things about myself and my family to make me scared and to make me believe that they know everything.  He  told me they knew I have a son who has kidney problems and  ” we wanted you to come here to help you.  You can send him to hospital in Israel and we can make sure he gets all the help he needs. I understand your situation because I also have children and I love them.”  When I heard this I told him I have two sons who are sick, not one.  He asked me what the problem is with the second child and I told him he has heart problems. He asked me which hospital he goes to and I told him the hospital in Ramallah.  “Why don’t you send him to an Israeli hospital where he can get better treatment?  We can help you to arrange that.” 

Then I understood that he would want something in return for this offer and he said we can do anything for you if you help us and work with us in Shabak.  I told him that the treatment was OK there and he doesn’t need to go to an Israeli hospital. He replied that my son may die if he doesn’t get the best treatment, in order to make me scared.  But I told him, “If he dies it will be because of your weapons and your gas every Friday.  I live near the Wall and we have to leave our home every Friday to protect the children from these things, otherwise they may die.”  Then he started in a different way.  He asked me if I have a house and maybe I need money.  I told him I have a house and a job and I don’t need help from anybody. 

After that he returned to the problem of my son who needs treatment in Israel because he knew that I have a real problem there and this was the best way to get my cooperation to be an informer against my own people.  He asked what I would do if they refused to give him permission to go through the checkpoint to take my son to the hospital and I said that his mother could accompany him.  “And what if we refuse to give her a permit?”   I replied that his grandmother would go.  “And what if we refuse his grandmother?”  I said I will take him to Jordan.  “And what if we stop him at the border?”  I replied “I will take him to Ramallah – and may God help us”

A military order to take effect April 13th so drastically expands the IDF’s power to deport people from the West Bank that it threatens mass arrests and exile, according to Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual in Israel.

In a request to the military commander, Hamoked asks that implementation of the order be delayed until there is input from the non-military sector of Israel, including human rights organizations like Hamoked.

In order to clarify the extremity of the orders, we shall state at this early point that according to their wording, every living person in the West Bank would become a criminal who faces a penalty of three to seven years imprisonment. Additionally, according to the orders, the West Bank could be emptied of all its inhabitants in a fast track three-day procedure, which, prima facie, does not require any judicial review. In view of the conduct of military officials and the positions they have presented to the court, there is grave concern that this scenario will become a reality, despite lacking any legal basis.

The order amends an  existing Order to Prevent Infiltration, changing the definition of infiltrator from referring to one who enters the Area  from an unfriendly country, to “ a person who is present in the Area and who does not hold a permit as required by Law.”  The permit must be “issued by the commander of IDF forces in the Judea and Samaria area or someone acting on his behalf”.

Ha’aretz reports on the Orders and their ramifications, including the likelihood that the people most likely to be immediately targeted are people born in Gaza and their West Bank- born children, those whose residency status has not been renewed, often because of deliberate Israeli inaction, and foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.

In an International Middle East Media Center Report, Fateh Central Committee Member Nabil Shaath described the Orders as ”yet another episode of ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people”.  Chief Palestinian Negotiator, Dr. Saeb Erekat, sent letters of protest to the U.S. Administration and the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.

Photo accompanying Bronner's NYT article

 As  the New York Times long-standing Jerusalem bureau chief,  with primary responsibility for reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict,  Ethan Bronner has  endured bruising criticism for pro-Israeli bias, recently  exacerbated by charges of conflict of interest upon the revelation that his son has been inducted into the Israeli army.  

So Bronner craned his journalistic neck to peek at things from another perspective with a front-page story called  “Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance,” and you know right away from that headline that he’s got it wrong. 

 Bronner  makes several  big mistakes.  First, he ignores the long history of Palestinian nonviolent struggle against colonization, beginning in the 1930’s,  and characterizes current nonviolent protest against the Occupation in the West Bank  as  a “new approach.”  And second, he credits the movement entirely to the efforts of Fatah political leadership and the business community:

Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance

The facts are the opposite–Fatah officials are Johnny-come-latelies to the grassroots nonviolent movement in the West Bank that began with construction of the Wall in 2002, led not by politicians but  by popular committees.  

Finally, Bronner declares:

Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent.

Now Bronner is back in known territory — where Israel’s military gets to define what violent is, and Bronner gets to make pronouncements about Palestinian intransigence, without attribution or analysis or any other basis for his conclusions.  

In his post in Mondoweiss on Bronner’s article, Alex Kane makes reference to several books that could have educated Bronner about the facts of nonviolent resistance in Palestine, including Rashid Khalidi’s “The Iron Cage:  The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood”, and Neve Gordon’s “Israel’s Occupation.”  To this I would add Mary Elizabeth King’s “A Quiet Revolution,” and Professor Joel Beinin’s article in The Nation, ”Building a Different Middle East”, for an overview of the expanding nonviolent movement in villages throughout the West Bank,  and the participation of Israeli and International activists in that struggle.

Here’s hoping Mr. Bronner continues down the path of telling the Palestinian side of the story to the American people, this time armed with facts and a more open mind.

Now  Jonathan Cook reports on a group of Jews and Arabs who are petitioning the Israeli Supreme Court to be recognized as “Israelis,”  in a case that officials fear may threaten the country’s self-declared status as a Jewish state. 

Israel refused to recognize an Israeli nationality at the country’s establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction between “citizenship” and “nationality.” Although all Israelis qualify as “citizens of Israel,” the state is defined as belonging to the “Jewish nation,” meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.

Critics say the special status of Jewish nationality has been a way to undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights, naturalization, access to land and employment.

Arab leaders have also long complained that indications of “Arab” nationality on ID cards make it easy for police and government officials to target Arab citizens for harsher treatment…

The government opposes the case, claiming that the campaign’s real goal is to ‘undermine the state’s infrastructure’.  Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former member of the Knesset,  understands the purpose of the current nationality system is to give Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens:

The State of Israel cannot recognize an ‘Israeli’ nation because it is the state of the ‘Jewish’ nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.”

Adeeb Abu Rahma at Bil'in Demonstration

Adeeb Abu Rahma, a taxi driver from the West Bank Village of  Bil’in, is known for his  firm committment to nonviolence during the weekly demonstrations against the Wall. At the July 10, 2009 demonstration, he was grabbed by Israeli soldiers  as he walked away from them, his message of resistance on a sign he held.  He has been imprisoned ever since, without trial.   Adeeb is the sole provider for his nine children, wife and mother.

Bil’in Village reports on an interview with Adeeb’s wife, Fatma Abu Rahma:

Fatma Abu Rahma and five of her nine children have gathered in the living room of the family’s prospective son in law. The house is fully equipped, but its sterile immaculateness divulges its lack of inhabitants. Doha, who is nineteen, will move in once she is married, but has been postponing her marriage until the release of her father Adeeb. Fatma’s tiredness, frustration and despair read from her eyes and are confirmed in her muttering speech, calling on Allah to help her family. She repeatedly exclaims that she lacks information on her husband’s current state of being, which cause her grave irritation and concern.

My husband has been away from me and my family for almost nine months. On July 10th 2009 Adeeb attended the weekly demonstration in Bil’in, on this day soldiers grabbed and arrested him. He was officially charged with incitement to violence. The truth is that he is arrested for nothing more than taking part in a popular demonstration against land theft committed by Israel. Adeeb encouraged others to join the protests, while Israel clearly wants to annihilate the popular resistance. He is imprisoned for defending his people’s rights.

I am grief-stricken since Adeeb’s imprisonment. However, I cannot allow myself to lament my husband’s loss as I have a family of nine to take care of. Since Adeeb has been away, I have to be both mother and father to my children. We shared the care over the children, this is now my sole responsibility. We miss him very much.

Batuh, the youngest daughter, has caught on the topic of the conversation, stops playing, and stresses the tension by softly, but firmly addressing her mother: “I want to go with you, to see ‘baba’!”

We have only been allowed one visit since Adeeb’s arrest. Batuh was there to see her father, but she was afraid of the pale and sad figure that her lively father had turned into. She did not even recognize Adeeb and refused to talk to him. Since this visit, no one from the family has been allowed to visit. We are all considered to be “security threats”. Generally, prisoners are entitled to two visits every month. We are not allowed to send him a letter or call him. Even his lawyer has only been allowed one visit. The little information we have on Adeeb, we gather through prisoners who have been released. Apparently, my husband was hospitalized for four days recently, but nobody told us!

The living conditions in Ofer prison are said to be extremely harsh. During his first days of detention, Adeeb was beaten severely by his guards. He had been drenched by the stinking chemical water that the army used during the demonstration. The prison administration would not provide fresh clothing, so fellow prisoners gave him another outfit. Four months after his arrest, I took three of our daughters to visit Adeeb in prison and bring clean clothing. We were not allowed to give him his trousers, supposedly because he had not demanded them on the prison’s official request form! Clearly, that is a lie.

Alaah, 17 years old, was particularly moved by the visit: “My father looked very sad and tired. I felt such desperation this day. We were so close, but kept apart by a glass barrier in the prison’s visiting area. I wanted to sit next to him and touch him.”

Together with ten other prisoners, my husband spends day and night in a prison cell of less than 15 square metres, which includes the bathroom. Sunlight is limited in this cramped cell. A tiny bathroom window and small openings in the ceiling are the only sources of daylight. Adeeb can only escape this cage and grasp a sense of the real world during a daily ten-minute walk outside.

Financially, it has been really difficult on us. Adeeb used to work as a taxi driver, so our family suffers from this loss of income. We still have a little shop, opened by two of my children, but it does not cover my family’s necessary expenses. Our two eldest daughters are in university, which is very expensive.

It has been even harder on an emotional level. Two months ago, Alaah, my daughter of 17, was very sick and was even hopsitalized twice. She could not walk or move, as if she was paralyzed. The doctors could not find anything wrong with her and decided it was psychosomatic…

Adeeb has had 15 court hearings so far. His case has been remanded until the end of legal proceedings, which may take up to a year or longer. Basically, we do not know when he will be back home.

Postscript: the family was allowed one visit on March 17, shortly after this interview.

Video of Bil’in July 10th 2009 demonstration shows Adeeb (in orange shirt) leading demonstration and then being dragged away by Israeli soldiers; he has been imprisoned without  trial ever since

Bassem Abu Rahmeh at a Bi'lin Demonstration

Ha’aretz reports that  a year after Bassem Abu Rahmeh was fatally shot in the chest by a tear gas grenade as he stood unarmed at the weekly protest against the Wall in the West Bank village of Bi’lin,  the military prosecution has decided that it would not investigate his death.

Although ballistic experts had concluded that the grenade was fired directly at Abu Rahmeh based on footage of the shooting from three separate video cameras, the military found no basis to this claim, and offered two possible explanations:

A. The injured man was standing on an elevated spot, and intersected the firing line of the grenade or B. The ammunition fired hit the upper wires of the fence, which changed its trajectory.

The family’s attorney, Michael Sfard, said that the decision shows that internal Israeli probes could not be trusted.

The military prosecution’s decision provides more regrettable proof that the Goldstone Committee had been right to say we cannot rely on Israeli law enforcement and an internationally monitored investigation is necessary…Someone deciding not to investigate is someone who has something to hide. If the effort and creativity invested in preventing investigations were instead directed to unraveling the killing of unarmed civilians, maybe the military prosecution would not need to resort to using physical theories that sound like they were taken from a cartoon.

VIDEO:  Bassem’s last words- “Rega! Rega!” (Hebrew for “wait”)

Palestinian Child Being Arrested

In the West Bank, there is a two-tiered system of justice, including for minors.  For settler children, justice is administered according to Israeli domestic law, with all the due process protections that affords.  They  cannot be  charged as adults until they reach 18, in accordance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory.  For Palestinian children, military law applies, and that  pretty much means due process, and the  tenderness of their years,  is irrelevant.   Their childhood itself is cut short, both by the circumstances of the Occupation and the letter of military law.  Until recently, they could be charged as adults as young as 12 years of age.  A recent military order “reformed” that anomaly by setting their age of majority at 16 –still two years earlier than their settler counterparts, and two years younger than required by the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  But the reality is that children as young as 12 continue to be arrested and imprisoned in adult military jails.  In the majority of cases the soldiers who arrest them say that the children were throwing stones, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Defence of Children International-Palestine reports that arrests of children have been increasing .  Presently approximately  350 West Bank children under 17 are being held in Israeli prisons.   Defence of Children provides testimonies of the children, detailing the brutal circumstances of their detention and interrogation, and their confinement with adult prisoners.  Urgent appeals on behalf of the children are issued by Defence of Children, including in the case of masse arrests (17 children taken in a night raid from Al Jalazun Refugee Camp near Ramallah), and the  transfer of children to prisons within Israel, where family members cannot visit because of restrictions on movement of people under Israel’s military Occupation.

Tuwani: Ancient Palestinian Village Struggles to Survive

Here is another report from the Christian Peacemaker Team, who look out after the children in the area of the At-Tuwani village in the southern Hebron hills  as they try to make their way to school.   Once again, the Israeli military fails to patrol the children as they are required to do to protect them from attacks by adult settlers.  And once again, the children and their parents manage to overcome the dangers and make it through to the precious school day. 

 As the report makes clear, the village children are learning about dignity and resistance.  Imagine what the settler children are learning.

Like Carter, many of us are ill-informed or confused about the reality of life in Israel for its Arab citizens.

Now the truth is made accessible in a remarkable video produced by Adalah (“justice” in Arabic), the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel.  Mixing the hard statistics about institutionalized racial discrimination with the musical revelations of Arab-Israeli rap artists and on-the-street  interviews by  undercover Arab comedians, who gently elicit the disturbing and sometimes laughable bigotry of Israeli passersby, Adalah takes us on a short but illuminating odyssey through the separate and unequal world of Israel.  Watch it now!

Targeted Citizen – English from Adalah on Vimeo.