BETHLEHEM UPDATES VOLUME 7, DECEMBER 8, 2008

Today in the News: Settlers Invade Mosque on Holy Day
Today is the Eid Al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday. In an-all-too-familiar show of racism and religious intolerance, dozens of armed Israeli setters stormed a Mosque south of Nablus, attacking the Imam. Fortunately no one was killed, no thanks to the Israeli army, who protect the illegal Jewish-only settlements and aid and abet the settlers’ crimes against the native Palestinian population.

More Holiday Ideas:
1) Send Doris Matsui, Mike Thompson, Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein (or your representatives and senators) a holiday letter to their district offices, asking them to stop supporting the occupation of Palestine. Ask them to refuse to take money from AIPAC or any Israeli lobby; ask them to put a statement on their website opposing aid to Israel and the occupation; ask them to go visit Gaza and the West Bank. Send them clips from our reports or from the reports of groups like the Ecumenical Accompaniment Project (www.eappi.org), the International Women’s Peace Service (www.iwps.info) or the Michigan Peace Team, (www.mptinpalestine.blogspot.com). Follow-up your letter with a phone call in a week or two to ask them what they are doing to end the occupation of Palestine and stop the siege on Gaza.
2) As part of holiday letters that you send to friends and family, include information about what is going on today in Bethlehem (and the rest of Palestine). Ask them to take action.
3) Support Palestinian farmers and the work of the International Solidarity and Free Gaza Movements by buying Palestinian olive oil. It is a great and year-round gift. For folks in the Sacramento area, contact Zohreh Whitaker 916-631-0565 or totalhood@aol.com. The 750ml bottles of delicious olive oil are $18. If you don’t live in the Sacramento/Davis area, call or email the ISM: larudee@pacbell.net; 510-232-2500.

Hebron Update
On Saturday (12-6-08), we went to Hebron to meet with human rights activists and see some of the damage from the settler pogrom that took place on Thursday (see our 12-5 alert). We went to the house that the settlers had been illegally occupying for about 18 months before the Israel army finally evicted them on Thursday. (We had been to the house for a demonstration a few weeks ago.) Next to the house is a cemetery that the settlers had vandalized. We also saw one destroyed car; a total of 18 vehicles were reported burned or damaged by the settlers in Thursday’s pogrom. We met two young Palestinian boys, one of whom had been injured in an attack by settlers on a local store; the other was injured by settlers when he was playing in front of his house.
We also went to the downtown area to see one of the 5 houses that settlers had set on fire. There is a heavy Israeli military presence in Hebron, but besieged residents reported that the Israeli army did nothing to stop the settler’s attacks. This was made very clear to us as there was a military outpost right next to the burned house we were visiting. A soldier standing in the outpost was close enough to speak to us as we stood right outside a room that had been burned.
On November 16, 2008, the Israeli court had ordered the Israeli settler family to leave the house. We heard from several people that by delaying the court ordered eviction for almost three weeks, the Israeli army gave settlers in the area time to prepare an attack on Hebron. In fact, in the wake of the eviction, there were settler attacks against Palestinians all over the West Bank. Settlers blocked roads and stoned Palestinian cars near Jericho, Nablus, Qalqilyia, and Huwara. This flare of pogroms is part of the ongoing harassment by Israel against the native Palestinians.

Villagers Resist the Taking of their Lands
There are several villages actively struggling to stop or undo the Israeli land theft that has cut them off from their livelihoods, including Burqa, Ni’lin, Bi’lin, and Jayyus. Demonstrations in all of these villages have been attended by local people, other Palestinians, internationals, and Israeli peace & justice activists.
Jayyus, a village of 3500, is near the 1948-armistice line in the West Bank. When Israel constructed its illegal apartheid wall, it uprooted several hundred of Jayyus’s olive trees. Since 2003, the residential part of Jayyus has been on the east side of the wall and most of its agricultural lands are on the west side. Israel has taken over the village’s water supply, allowing villagers very limited access to their wells through a locked gate that is under control of the Israeli military. To get to their trees, local farmers have to get Israeli permits. Only a limited number are issued – usually to old men, and rarely to young, more able-bodied men in the family. Some farmers haven’t been able to obtain permits for three years and if a farmer doesn’t work his land for three years, it’s confiscated by Israel.
In November, instead of waiting for a pending court decision, the Israeli military began re-routing part of the existing apartheid wall, a maneuver that will confiscate approximately 150 more acres than the former route, plus four village wells (We’ve heard it’s not unusual for the military to preempt or ignore court orders.) .
In response, Jayyus villagers held a non-violent demonstration on Friday November 14. A friend of ours with the Michigan Peace Team (MPT) attended. She stood arm-in-arm with a group of village women facing the young Israeli soldiers chanting in Arabic, “No, no to the Wall.” (A full account of this moving story and pictures are at www.mptinpalestine.blogspot.com)
At the demonstration the following week, November 21, our friend again went and reported: “The previous week the demonstration barely moved past the village limits. This week they arrived at the gate that had been closed to them for so long. This gate is the most relevant symbol of the occupation to the people who have been denied access to their own property. It is a barrier to a decent livelihood. The people can view their confiscated olive groves and citrus trees but not approach them to cultivate or tend the land. Their fertile land is lying fallow on the other side of the fence. For years they have been forced to stop at this point. However, on this warm, November, Friday afternoon, there was the possibility of something different. Someone climbed the fence. Someone else broke the lock. …They stepped over the line and onto the military road. Their resistance to years of occupation and humiliation targeted the gate, the closest part of the apartheid wall.”
Then electric sensors went off, alerting the soldiers, who then forced the demonstrators back toward the village using gunfire and tear gas. The village was put under curfew. Some internationals accompanying villagers home got arrested. (FMI: See the above blog.)
On November 28, we headed for Jayyus from Tulkarem in a collective taxi we shared with local Stop-the-Wall activists (see www.stopthewall.org) to attend the third demonstration. But there was a new military checkpoint at the base of the road going up to the village, which sits on a hill. The soldiers told us it was a closed military zone and that no internationals were allowed in, so we got out of the taxi.
We spent half an hour or so talking with three 18-19 year-old soldiers. One said God had given Israel the land. Another said that no power that takes land gives it back. The third one said if they weren’t there, the Palestinians would push the Israelis out. Two said that they didn’t like what they were doing, but had to join the army and were just doing what they were told. They said they’d tried to be nice to the Palestinians. We talked about the Nuremberg principles, that one can’t just follow orders. They said they hadn’t heard about those. We talked about what happened in 1948 and 1967, and what is going on today. We suggested they read Ilan Pappe’s book, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (After we returned home, we were heartened to hear some young Israelis are refusing to go into the military; see www.december18th.org)
We left the soldiers and walked away on a dirt road into the olive grove. We met two Palestinian boys going to the village by a different route and followed them. Once in the village we heard explosions. According to a Ecumenical Accompaniment Project Palestine-Israel (EAPPI) report, the demonstration was mostly peaceful. The village elders kept young boys from throwing stones as the demonstration moved from the center towards the wells. When the demonstration began to break up and people moved back to the center of the village, some of the boys did throw stones. The Israeli soldiers began shooting rubber-coated steel bullets and throwing tear gas canisters and sound bombs. (There are EAPPI volunteers throughout the West Bank as well as in Israel, accompanying people in danger and reporting on human rights violations. EAPPI has had a volunteer team in Jayyus since 2004; see team reports at www.eappi.org.)
This past Friday, December 5, the Jayyus villagers decided not to hold a demonstration.

What has happened here
In the US, we had heard people say that Israel had essentially made Swiss cheese of the West Bank of Palestine. But it was a concept hard to grasp on a visceral level.
The history and numbers do provide a framework; see “Brief History” below. A current West Bank map is also helpful; see the UN website www.ochaopt.org.
But there is nothing like being here and seeing one hill after another topped with a settlement or military tower. Or driving past the long blade of the Ari’el settlement, started in 1978, which now cuts through nearly half the West Bank, having stolen 3400 acres from Palestinian villages. Or seeing the ugly apartheid wall that surrounds, divides, and cuts off Palestinian villages and towns from each other. Or seeing how the Israeli army has split the tiny town of Shufa in half, blocking off the road that connects the lower from the upper part. But here also is resistance, as the Israeli peace group, Anarchists Against the Wall once again removes the army’s barriers across the Shufa road. And with resistance in Palestine and around the world, there is hope that the insanity of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing can be ended.

Brief History
In 1948, the Zionists took 78% of the land of historic Palestine (the 1947 UN partition would have given them 51%). In that first land grab, the Zionist militias ethnically cleansed about three quarters of the population, driving an estimated 800,000 people from 475 villages, most of which were destroyed. Those refugees fled to neighboring countries, to the West Bank and Gaza and to other villages inside what is called the “green-line” established by the 1948 armistice.
The next major wave of land theft was in 1967 when Israel attacked Jordan, Egypt, and Syria and took lands from all of them, including the West Bank, Gaza, land in what is now southern Lebanon, the Golan, and the Sinai. More than 400,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and lands; about half of those were already refugees from 1948. The Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1980-82, but the rest is still illegally occupied by Israel. In violation of the Geneva Convention, Israel began almost immediately to illegal build settlements for Jewish-Israelis only in Gaza and the West Bank; illegal settlement building started in the Golan in the 1970s. Although Israel pulled its settlements out of Gaza in 2005, it continues a devastating de facto occupation.
The illegal settlements were built around Jerusalem, forming a ring which now almost encircles the city – part of Israel’s goal to take the entire city. Other settlements are built along hilltops, penetrating the West Bank. The combination of settlements, roads to them (most of which are for Israeli-Jews only), Israeli military zones, and the apartheid wall started in 2002 and now 575 kilometers long, has now claimed 3,350 square kilometers, 57% of the Palestinian West Bank.
The apartheid wall, declared “contrary to International Law” in 2004 by the International Court of Justice, is concrete in some places, up to 8 meters high (the Berlin wall was 4 meters), and is electronic fencing in other areas, topped with razor wire. It is monitored by military observation towers. On the roads that Palestinians are still allowed to use between their villages, there are about 600 established Israeli military checkpoints as well as impromptu ones. Vehicles and pedestrians can be stopped and searched at any check point; the checkpoints can also be closed for short or long periods of time.
Within the remaining illegally occupied lands, Israel imposes curfews, illegally demolishes Palestinian homes, illegally destroys Palestinian agriculture and infrastructure, has confiscated Palestinian resources (water, trees, etc.), militarily invades at will, and controls the air space and the borders. Israel also allows and facilitates Jewish-Israeli settlers in their occupying of Palestinian homes and buildings outside of established settlements. Since the Nakbah of 1948, the Israelis have uprooted 1,350,000 trees and destroyed more than 70,000 houses. They have also killed thousands of Palestinians, wounded half a million, and imprisoned tens of thousands of political prisoners.