www.benwhite.org.uk: the blog

“The Israeli government’s decision to place the separation fence east of Alfei Menashe, in order to bring it closer to Israel, has distanced Arab a-Ramadin’s 300 Bedouin residents from the West Bank - the focus of their lives. There are 7,000 Palestinians living like them, on the seam - neither here nor there. Their home is in the west, and their heart is in the east. Now the Israeli authorities are offering them a solution: packing up and moving to the other side of the fence, a voluntary - or perhaps not so voluntary - transfer…

Sfard told Brig. Gen. Mordechai that he appears to be suggesting a population transfer, whose objective is to “cleanse” the seam area of its Palestinian residents.

“Even if you believe there is a big difference between forced transfer and ‘voluntary transfer,’ the difference is minimal when those designated for expulsion are dependent on Civil Administration permits and permission for every little thing,” Sfard wrote to Mordechai. “You know that there are hardly any areas where the village residents are not subject to the mercy of the army and the Civil Administration…”

“This website was set up to publicise the campaign to prevent the deportation of Hicham Yezza (Hich to his many friends) and to fight his continuing persecution…”

He needs letters of support, donations, and publicity. Please do what you can.

“As a Palestinian human rights organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Al-Haq is deeply disturbed by the excessive and disproportionate use of force employed by Israeli Border Police in the village of Nilin last week, resulting in the willful killing of two Palestinian children…

The demonstration’s organizers quickly began to lead the children and elderly to safety. Ahmad Husam Musa, a 10-year-old child, hid in an olive grove. A member of the Israeli Border Police saw Ahmad Musa, left the Border Police vehicle, aimed his rifle and fired a live bullet. Shot from a distance of 50 meters, the bullet entered Ahmad Musa’s forehead and exited through the back of his skull. While two of the demonstration’s organizers attempted to carry Ahmad Musa to safety, they were fired upon by the Border Police. They succeeded in carrying the child to safety, but he was already dead…

Seventeen-year-old Yousef Amira, who was among the demonstrators, hid between two houses in Nilin and watched the clashes with a few other young men. They were approximately 150 meters away from the clashes. A Border Police jeep entered the village from the east, drove towards them, and then performed a u-turn. As the jeep turned, bullets were fired at the group. Two rubber-coated steel bullets penetrated Yousef Amira’s head. He was taken to the Ramallah hospital where he was pronounced brain dead upon arrival, but was kept on life support. On Monday, 4 August 2008 he was pronounced dead…

Al-Haq’s investigation reveals that neither of the children killed by Israeli Border Police in Nilin participated in stone throwing or other acts of civil disobedience when they were shot; rather, both boys were hiding. The boys were not armed and did not threaten the lives of the Border Police. Therefore, they were not legitimate objects of attack.

The intent to kill is manifest in the circumstances surrounding Ahmad Musa’s death in which live ammunition was fired at the boy’s head from a close range of 50 meters. While in Yousef Amira’s case Border Police employed rubber-coated steel bullets — ostensibly intended to inflict superficial injuries in policing contexts — the boy’s death shows that they can be easily used to lethal effect. The degree of injury sustained from a rubber bullet depends on its type, accuracy, the distance from which it is fired, and the part of the body it hits. In Yousef Amira’s case Israeli forces aimed for the head. Moreover, the type of rubber bullets used by the Border Police in this case, rubber-coated with a metal core, make them more dangerous than other forms of rubber bullets. Accordingly, the circumstances in which both boys were arbitrarily deprived of their lives amount to willful killing, defined as a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

“For the past fortnight, rumours have been circulating that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is considering a unilateral declaration of statehood. “Many agree that it’s time to end all this negotiation nonsense and work on peaceful resistance,” a Palestinian insider confided this past week.The PA is considering several options: stopping all negotiations with Israel and severing diplomatic contact, unilaterally declaring Palestinian statehood, or removing PA security forces, which act as a cover for humiliating Israeli military operations, from West Bank cities - a move suggested by the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad.

The 30 July announcement by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that he would resign after party leadership elections in September has left the ailing peace process in even greater trouble. In the Jerusalem Post, a PA official described “the chances of reaching an agreement with Israel before the end of 2008″ as “zero”.

But the Palestinians are not rushing to make their strategic move. The political analyst Ali Jarbawi believes that “waiting until the end of the year is best” and will allow the Palestinians to avoid blame for the talks’ collapse. The US’s insistence, against all the evidence, that a peace agreement can be reached by the end of the year also, paradoxically, strengthens the argument that a different way forward is needed.

There is a sense of déjà vu about all of this. In 2000, before the ill-fated Camp David talks, the PLO debated a unilateral declaration of statehood. Israel warned it might respond by annexing swaths of the West Bank - a threat that would ring hollow this time around, as it is already busy doing just that.

Jarbawi, for one, thinks it better to stop the negotiations in the face of Israel’s incessant creation of “facts on the ground”. He even hints at what would be the ultimate expression of Palestinian unilateralism: dissolving the PA.

“What will happen to the PA? Will we continue with the PA as a captive authority until Israel has finished doing what it wants? Or will we tell the world and Israel that enough is enough - we’ve been trying so hard for the last 15 years, we couldn’t reach a settlement, and we learned our lesson.”

The Palestinians say their new ideas are driven by the increasing perception that the peace process, and even the PA itself, simply provide a cover for Israeli occupation and land seizure with a pretence of “interim” autonomy.

If senior Palestinian officials decide to “go it alone”, it would be hard to blame them. In May, a former PA official told me that in private many officials admit they are just going through the motions of the peace process, waiting for the right moment to change both strategy and goal. That moment may now be a bit closer.”

‘The power of one’, New Statesman, 7 August 2008

Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev shows that not only is he shameless, but he also has a rather shaky grip on the meaning of the word “consensus”, as well as the basics of international law. Though he does at least reveal Israeli assumptions when it comes to ‘negotiating’:

“‘When you get into serious negotiations, does anyone really think that areas like Pisgat Zeev or Modiin Illit or Maale Adumim are not going to remain under Israeli control? It’s almost an international consensus‘”