This is a roundup of news related to Palestine with a particular focus on grassroots action and peaceful civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories and within the borders of Israel proper.
We use the name Filasṭīn, since that is the pronunciation preferred by Arabic speakers (irrespective of faith) for their homeland.
Israel to detain female Palestinian lawmaker for 6 months, lawyer says (YNet)
52-year-old PFLP member being held under Israeli administrative detention after violating Israeli ban on entering Ramallah, where she lives.
The IDF has placed a female Palestinian legislator under detention for six months without trial, a lawyer for the lawmaker said Monday.
Khalida Jarrar, a senior political leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a left-wing Palestinian militant group, is being held for alleged activities in a hostile organization, lawyer Mahmoud Hassan said.
Jarrar, 52, is being held under Israeli administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold detainees for up to six months at a time without charges, the lawyer said. The detention and any extensions are approved by a judge, and evidence can be kept from defense lawyers.
Israel says administrative detentions prevent attacks by militants. Rights groups say international humanitarian law permits administrative detention in exceptional cases, but that Israel is out of bounds with its large-scale use of the method.
Israel was holding
almost 500 people in administrative detention last year as per B'Tselem:
Although detainees are brought before a judge to approve the detention order, the judicial review is merely a semblance of a just legal system: most of the material submitted by the prosecution is classified and not disclosed to the detainees or their counsel . Since the detainees do not know evidence there is against them, they are unable to refute it. Given the inherently inferior position of detainees in such proceedings, military judges and High Court justices presiding over these cases have a duty to serve as “temporary defense counsel” for the detainees, but they often shirk this responsibility and almost always accept the position of the security establishment.
Soldiers enter home of B'Tselem volunteers in Hebron, awake children, photograph them, and confiscate footage filmed by the volunteers (B'Tselem)
On Tuesday night, 10 March 2015, at about 2:00 A.M., a group of soldiers under the command of a captain entered the home of B'Tselem volunteers ‘Imad and Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh in the Tal Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron. The soldiers spent about half an hour there, during which time they searched the house, awoke the children, and photographed the children and the parents’ identity cards. The soldiers devoted most of their time to watching video footage, which was filmed by ‘Imad and Fayzeh Abu Shamsiyeh, on the family’s computer. The footage was saved on an external hard disk, which the soldiers connected to the computer. When they left, the soldiers took the hard disk and a memory card with them. According to ‘Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, the materials taken include footage of Israeli security forces in Hebron apprehending a B'Tselem volunteer and of settler violence in Tal Rumeida.
Unicef issued a bulletin on
Children in Israeli Military Detention earlier in the year. CRIN issued one earlier in the year:
Children in the Israeli Military Justice System
On Wednesday 21 January, news broke that a 14-year-old girl from Ramallah had been sentenced to two months in prison and fined $1,528 by an Israeli military court. She was arrested on the 31 December and charged with throwing stones, obstructing the road and possession of a knife and detained for 22 days inside Israel before the court issued the sentence. Speaking to Euro-Mid Observers for Human Rights, the girl’s father said he believed she had been coerced into confessing and described his experience of the court hearings: “[w]e could only see her in the court; we were not allowed to talk to her. She seemed to be very sick and scared.”
This story captured the attention of the news: the plight of this one girl put a face on a system that routinely runs roughshod over children’s rights. But behind this story there is a broader issue.
Successful olive tree planting action in Bruqin (Pal Solidarity)
On 4th April 2015 over 25 Palestinian activists from Bruqin and the surrounding area of Salfit region of the West Bank, gathered on top of a near by hill to plant roughly 30 olive saplings. The group were joined by international activists who accompanied the locals in planting the young trees across the hill side.
Unusually, this time the protesters managed to successfully plant all trees mere meters from the settlement without facing harassment or violence from settlers or military. Locals are planning further actions to continue their grass-roots non-violent struggle.
Haaretz Editorial board says Israel must help Yarmouk’s Palestinian refugees
Israel must do its part in the international effort. It should sit down with Abbas to evaluate ways of helping these refugees, some of whom are closely related to Arabs in Israel.
[...]
Among other things, Israel could offer Abbas the possibility of absorbing some of the refugees into the Palestinian Authority, defray some of the costs involved and provide medical services to those who manage to come. Political considerations and disputes with the PA should be set aside at this time. This is a humanitarian task of the first order that Israel cannot shirk.
Over at "972mag, they saying
Stop calling us 'Israeli Arabs':
The phrase ‘Israeli Arabs’ is meant to divide us from the rest of the Palestinian people. Thankfully, more and more young Palestinian citizens are no longer scared to openly confront their own Pharaoh and reclaim their story.
and
Factions in Gaza march in solidarity with Yarmouk (Ma'An News)
Several political factions marched in Gaza on Thursday to express solidarity with the besieged Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria.
Walid Awad, a member of the Palestinian People's Party, said that the only way to save Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk is to allow them to return to their homes.
[...]
During the sit-in, the PFLP said that "all official and concerned sides to hold their responsibilities and duties to protect our people in the refugee camp and support them by opening humanitarian tunnels to provide them with everything they need to face these terrorist groups working on displacing our people from the Yarmouk."
On Sunday, hundreds filled the streets in a march organized by Hamas in support of fellow Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk.
Soldiers fire live ammo, wound two in Nabi Saleh protest (+972mag)
Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition against nonviolent Palestinian protesters in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Friday. Two Palestinians were wounded, including activist Manal Tamimi.
Tamimi was shot in her leg as she was standing and talking to her friends, only minutes after the protest had begun, along with another young Palestinian. Both were transferred to a Ramallah hospital where they received treatment for their wounds.
NYU Faculty call for divestment from companies linked to IDF (NYU News)
41 individuals volunteered for NYU-SJP’s burgeoning campaign to support NYU divesting from corporations complicit in Israeli human rights abuses. Thus far, 119 NYU faculty have called for divestment from such corporations.
Jerusalem tourism gets lifeline from unlikely source: Muslim visitors (Haaretz)
On the interim days of Passover, Jerusalem hotels were only about 60-percent full, and for the seder night and the last days of the holiday, capacity ranges from 80-85 percent. Aryeh Zumer, director of the Jerusalem Hotels Association, says these figures are about 20 percent lower than last year.
However, salvation for the city’s tourism industry may well come from a surprising source: Muslim countries, including Arab states.
Last week, a group of clerics from the Gulf states issued a ruling permitting and encouraging visits to Jerusalem. This fatwa (religious decree) now joins a growing political and religious debate that has been roiling the Arab world for the last three years; statistics show there has been a significant increase in the number of Muslim pilgrims coming to the city.
[...]
Last year, Israel welcomed 26,700 tourists from Indonesia; 23,000 from Turkey; 17,700 from Jordan; 9,000 from Malaysia and 3,300 from Morocco. The Gaza war brought the flow to a halt. But in the first two months of this year, at least 10,000 tourists from Muslim countries have already entered Israel.
The Palestinian and Arab discourse on the subject began in 2012, when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on Muslims to visit Jerusalem. Hamas is adamantly opposed to Muslims visiting the city, even if the tour is for religious purposes and would primarily help Palestinian businesses. Because the city is under Israeli control, Hamas believes that visiting it would amount to de facto recognition of Israel.
[...]
Most Muslim tourists enter Israel via the Allenby Bridge, but some arrive through Ben-Gurion International Airport. “Often, people tell me they don’t want to come from Tel Aviv [the airport] because that’s Israel. So we explain to them that all of the crossings are controlled by Israel,” says Atiya. He says the security inspection at Allenby can last up to eight or 10 hours, which is very difficult on tourists. “It’s part of the politics. They intentionally make it unpleasant so they won’t come back.”
67 years later, Deir Yassin still bleeding wound for Palestinians (Ma'An News)
Palestinians on Thursday marked the 67th anniversary of the massacre of more than 100 Palestinian civilians by Zionist forces at the village of Deir Yassin.
"The Deir Yassin massacre was a turning point in the history of the people of Palestine, and it continues to serve as a necessary reminder of Israel’s ongoing policies of displacement, dispossession and dehumanization, and its willful erasure of the Palestinian narrative and human presence in historical Palestine," senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi said in a statement.
Ashrawi noted that the massacre was one of the first in what would become a long line of Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians, noting: "Deir Yassin, Nasir al-Din, Haifa, Yazur, Bayt Daras, al-Tantura, al-Lydd, al-Dawayima, Saliha, Qibya, Kafr Qasim, and Shuja'iyya, among other names, will remain forever engraved in our hearts and minds and always serve as symbols of Palestinian steadfastness and perseverance."
[...]
Deir Yassin has long been a symbol of Israeli violence for Palestinians because of the particularly gruesome nature of the slaughter, which targeted men, women, children, and the elderly in the small village west of Jerusalem. The number of victims is generally believed to be around 107, though figures given at the time reached up to 254.
Settler in IDF intel unit to be indicted for leaks
An Israeli soldier in an intelligence unit arrested on suspicion of leaking classified information to fellow residents in the radical settlement Bat Ayin is to be charged on Sunday by the Military Advocate General.
The soldier, Ya’akov Sela, 25, who has been under arrest for over a month, is a non-commissioned officer in an intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces’ Etzion Brigade.
[...]
Sela is also suspected of leaking information about operations by the Judea and Samaria police district, as well as the movement of forces and the activities of the police unit in charge of far-right political crimes.
Play about slain pro-Palestine activist returns to NY stage (Yahoo News)
A play about American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, is winning quiet acceptance in New York, where uproar postponed its debut a decade ago.
Her parents and the play's director say the dimming controversy reflects a shift in American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinian conflict.
"I think the landscape really has changed," Rachel's mother Cindy Corrie told AFP of the 12 years since her daughter was killed in 2003. Witnesses said she died trying to stop a Palestinian home from being demolished.
In February, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the state was not liable for Corrie's death because it was a military act committed in a war zone.
Cindy believes Rachel's story has helped shift that understanding, in addition to Israel's wars and military operations in the region over the last decade.
"Just the numbers of people who are willing to move away from what I think has traditionally been almost unquestionable support for Israel," she said.
The operational logic behind terrorizing Palestinians (+972mag)
Four Israeli soldiers carry out a routine procedure of ‘showing presence’ by throwing a smoke grenade into a Palestinian home. Its real purpose? Terrorizing innocent people.
The incident in question, given the daily routine of the occupation, is relatively minor. On December 3rd, 2007, Adnan Abu Haniyeh, a resident of the West Bank village Yanoun, woke up from the sound of an explosion. Something blew up, the windows of his house were shattered and the house was filled with smoke. His little girl screamed in terror, and for a time the family feared that her hearing was permanently damaged. The walls of the house were covered with soot. Abu Haniyeh then heard the sound of a military Hummer.
The rest of the incident will be described according to the investigative files of the Military Police Criminal Investigations Division (MPCID). According to the files, the incident happened this way:
That night, four IDF soldiers arrived in a Hummer at the outskirts of Yanoun to carry out a routine procedure, which the IDF calls “showing our presence.”
[...]
All the soldiers interrogated testified that a short while before this incident, that very evening, they were all at the village Furiq, together with Deputy Company Commander Itsik (DCC). There, they carried out a very similar action: they threw stun grenades randomly, made a lot of noise, and then continued on (without DCC Itsik) to Yanoun. The IDF took no issue with the incident in Furiq.
To American ears, this sounds like a
21st century version of the KKK "riding about" terrorizing black neighborhoods.
SodaStream changes labelling to ‘Made in the West Bank’ following human rights complaints (The Independent)
SodaStream has changed the labelling of products made in an Israeli settlement in the industrial zone of Ma’aleh Adumimm to ‘Made in the West Bank’ following complaints from a coalition of human rights activists in the US.
Fair trade activists complained to the Oregon Department of Justice in May 2014 that SodaStream was violating fair trade laws by labelling products made in occupied territory ‘Made in Israel’, according to a report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Under Oregon’s fair trade laws, companies are banned from false advertising and can be held accountable for misleading packaging.
SodaStream immediately said it would change its labelling when it found out about the complaints. The new labels have since appeared on SodaStream packaging in Oregon stores.
A similar attempt is being made to force Trip Advisor to clearly label hotels that are located in the occupied territories.
Doctor's orders led this journalist to discover his Palestinian neighbors (Haaretz)
After heart surgery, doctors told journalist Eliezer Yaari he needed to walk. His feet led him to a nearby Palestinian village – a microcosm of political developments in Jerusalem – and a new book with some frank observations.
[...]
Yaari provides fascinating documentation of the complexity of Palestinian life in Jerusalem: On the one hand, efforts to achieve social and economic integration in Israeli society; on the other, tenacious adherence to a Palestinian and Islamic identity, and to waging the struggle against the occupation. Above all, though, the book offers a picture of an intimate, unforgettable acquaintanceship between neighbors on the two sides of the border in Jerusalem.
[...]
The village is strongly identified with Hamas, and until a few weeks ago, residents flew the movement’s green flag in its center. But when one actually crosses the dark mountains of images, a far more complex reality presents itself. Though Tsur Baher is associated with the Islamist Hamas, it may also be the most feminist Palestinian village in the West Bank. Many of it s female residents run businesses, NGOs and other organizations, many of the drivers on the roads are women, and the local girls’ school is a major source of pride.
Palestinians protest settler marathon in West Bank (ActiveStills & +972mag)
Israeli ‘Biblical Marathon’ shuts down main West Bank road connecting Ramallah and Nablus, ‘is part of an apartheid policy,’ says Abdullah Abu Rahmeh.
[...]
“Everything the army and the settlers do in the occupied territories is part of an apartheid policy, and we cannot accept the fact that they are shutting down a major road,” said Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, one of the protest organizers, adding that the demonstration was held under the banner of freedom of movement.
Two weeks ago the third-annual Palestine Marathon took place in Bethlehem. Runners in the Palestine Marathon were forced to essentially run laps on a track made of city streets because organizers were unable to find an uninterrupted 42-kilometer (26 mile) mile stretch of road under Palestinian control.
In disregard for Bedouin, Israel is forgetting its founders (Haaretz)
It's not that Negev Bedouin are inherently nomadic – it just suits the Israeli government to treat them as such. Ironically, pre-state Jewish immigrants saw Bedouin as the model for the New Jew.
Israeli Arab citizens marked the 39th anniversary of Land Day last week with an "awakening march," led by Knesset members from the Joint List in support of the Negev Bedouin community. The Prawer Plan genie was out of the bottle again – as protesters decried it as a looming threat. The plan, which calls for relocating nearly 30,000 Bedouin into recognized communities in what is actually a shrewd attempt to displace them from their land, has sparked an ongoing debate over the fate of so-called "unrecognized villages." This, in turn, has led many Israelis to wonder: Why is it that Israel, which prides itself on its democratic character, continues to dismiss Bedouin land rights?
[...]
as the Israeli government has been concerned, the Bedouin community was meant to remain unsettled, and thus stateless, unlike the Jewish communities of the Negev. Ironically, this policy was justified by projecting a settler narrative onto the Palestinian Arab Bedouin: They are conquerors, invaders and barbarians responsible for the destruction of what had been a fertile granary of the Land of Israel.
Ten things you didn't know about Mimouna (+972mag)
Mimouna, the traditional festival celebrated by North African Jews on the last day of Passover, is often overlooked when discussing the Jewish holiday of liberation. Here are 10 things you might not know about the celebration that once brought Jews and Muslims together.
[...]
2. Mimouna symbolized North Africa, and specifically the close relations between Jews and Muslims there. In many places it was the Muslims who brought wheat, milk and butter to the Jews at the end of the holiday so they could make food. Jews in Morocco were viweed as ones who blessed the land for the entire year, and the Muslims saw the holiday as an opportunity to pay back their Jewish neighbors. In the city of Azemmour, Muslims allowed the Jews to use their fields and gardens for the entire day, out of a belief that the Jews would bless the land and leave it fertile.
[...]
8. It turns out that Jewish communities outside of North Africa would also celebrate the end of Passover with similar traditions: the Iraqis customarily went out into nature and took a dip in the Tigris. The Persians also went out into nature. In Egypt, Israel and Turkey, the Jews celebrated the opening of a new year.
This is a roundup of news related to Palestine with a particular focus on grassroots action and peaceful civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories and within the borders of Israel proper. The goal is to provide a bi-weekly update on the non-violent resistance movement.
Diplomatic negotiations and actions by armed resistance groups are covered quite widely by the mainstream press and in other diaries on DKos so they will rarely be included.
We use the name Filasṭīn, since this is the pronunciation used by Arabic speakers (irrespective of faith) for their homeland. The more familiar Palestine is the Hellenic or Roman variant. Filasṭīn refers to the geographic entity roughly encompassing Israel and Palestine. It is a likely cognate of "Philistine", the name used in the Hebrew bible to describe a rival of the Jewish kingdom of that era.
Prior diaries:
April 5, 2015: Filastin Week: Segregated Streets in Hebron, Palestinians observe Land Day
March 29, 2015: Filasṭin Week by Week: A March for the Bedouin, A License to Kill & To Teach the Nakba
