Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh

Mazin Qumsiyeh reports on his likely arrest next week by the Israeli military when he returns from a lecture tour in the U.S.  to his village in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem.  His crime?  Participation in nonviolent protests against the military  takeover of the only remaining  open land in Bethlehem, which the Jewish-Israeli settlers covet for themselves.

Qumsiyeh is a  U.S. citizen and professor who lived in America for 29 years before returning to Beit Sahour in 2008.   He contrasts the freedoms he enjoyed as a human rights advocate in America with the severe repression faced by him and all  those who engage in civil resistance  in the occupied West Bank.

On March 1, shortly after I left my village near Bethlehem for a visit home to the United States, the Israeli army invaded the neighborhood and surrounded our house at 1:30 a.m. My mother, sister and wife, terrorized for no reason, told the military I was out of the country but would be “happy” to talk to them upon my return.

The soldiers delivered a note demanding my appearance in a military compound five days later – a date I have missed because my ticket was scheduled for a few days later. I thus face the likelihood of arrest, administrative detention or worse when I go back.

My story is just a minor manifestation of a disturbing pattern. As civil resistance against Israel’s West Bank apartheid wall and settlement activities have increased, there has been an escalation of Israeli repression of nonviolent protesters.

Qumsiyeh calls on the United States  to defend the right to nonviolent protest against abusive Israeli policies that the U.S. itself condemns.

Given that the Israeli government receives billions in U.S. military aid, my taxes and yours at work, our government should defend those of us who engage in nonviolent protests. I was encouraged last week, therefore, in meeting with the office of U.S. Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that his office will pursue my concerns with the State Department and the Israeli government.

We will not be deterred from nonviolent protest. Despite being let down by numerous governments, we look to the United States and elsewhere in the international community to help defend us from abusive and violent responses to nonviolence.

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Ush al Ghrab (‘Crow’s Nest’) is a small piece of land being targeted by a group of Jewish settlers and their allies. The area had previously served as a military base, before being evacuated in 2006. Since then, local Palestinians and international NGOs have sought to make the most of the space, in a community whose natural expansion is prohibited by Israeli colonisation. In recent times, right-wing Jewish settlers have targeted the area as a site for a possible new settlement (‘Shdema’).”

The protests are being organized by Mazin Qumsiyeh, a “professor, author, and Beit Sahour resident”  who is on the board of the US Campaign to End the Occupation.

“The Bethlehem area is now surrounded by settlements — to take this area will be finishing off the district.” Qumsiyeh’s fears are borne out by the statistics: only a fragmented 13 per cent of the Bethlehem district is available for Palestinian use.

The Israeli military is at least somewhat supportive of the settlers, building a guardtower on the land they covet that will presumably help protect their efforts. However, the author draws three lessons from the episode:

Firstly, there is the relationship between settlers and the military. On countless occasions recorded by human rights groups, settler fanatics have attacked Palestinians and their property with impunity, in front of Israeli soldiers. In Ush al Ghrab, under pressure from the settler movement, the Israeli military has facilitated their repeated visits, and now, has made the decision to establish permanent infrastructure.

Secondly, the tussle over Ush al Ghrab is also a legacy of how the Oslo Accords of the early-mid 1990s divided up the Occupied Palestinian Territories into Areas A, B, C, helping to define the limits of Palestinian ‘autonomy’ until today. As the UN has documented, everyday Palestinian existence, including the ability to build, is severely restricted by Israel in 60 per cent — Area C — of the West Bank. Ush al Ghrab also shows just how harmful, and ridiculous, the categorisation can be, even dividing parts of the same town.

Thirdly, the case of Ush al Ghrab, and the rationale offered by those settlers keen to make sure that ‘Shdema’ becomes the latest colony around Bethlehem, is a microcosm of official Israeli state policy in Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank (and indeed, inside Israel itself). The aim is to prevent the emergence of Palestinian territorial contiguity and development, breaking up areas of Palestinian population into more ‘manageable’ enclaves.”

The article ends by calling on international support. We have seen time and again how such support makes all the difference to encouraging Palestinians to participate and eventually causing Israeli allies to emerge. Hopefully this is the first of many such protests and it will spread to more towns.

See video of Israeli troops attacking Sunday mass protesting military installation in Beit Sahour.

Amira Hass traces the nibbling away of much of the land of the West Bank town of Beit Sahour for Jerusalem municipality and settlement expansion; the abandonment of an Israeli military base in 2007 opening the door for construction of a playground and hospital for Beit Sahour residents; and recent military orders declaring the area once again a closed military zone, and allowing construction of a guard tower there.  Both the settlers and Beit Sahour residents agree that the reason for the re-opened military zone is not, as the military claims, for security, but is the result of a vehement settler campaign to “stop Arab Construction” in this largely Christian town outside of Bethlehem.

For their part, the settlers say the tower will eventually be integrated into a Jewish city that will connect the Gush Etzion settlement bloc with the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem. The Beit Sahur residents have no reason to doubt either the settlers or the Har Homa neighborhood committee chairman, who declared that, “This could become a reality, just as Har Homa spilled beyond what was planned and expected.”