Wednesday, March 21, 2007

From Sharpsville to Nablus: Tragedies of Ethnic Apartheid

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Almost two weeks ago, my friend Dawud, a high school English teacher from Kufr 'Ain, called me nearly in tears to report the checkpoint hold-up that had cost him his six month-old son. Shortly after midnight on March 8th, my friend's baby began having trouble breathing. His parents quickly got a taxi to take him to the nearest hospital in Ramallah, where they hoped to secure an oxygen tent, which had helped him recover from difficult respiratory episodes in the past. As the family was rushing from their Palestinian town in the West Bank to their Palestinian hospital in the West Bank, they were stopped at Atara checkpoint, where an Israeli soldier asked for the father's, mother's, and driver's IDs. Dawud explained to the soldier that his son needed urgent medical care, but the soldier insisted on checking the three IDs first, a process that usually takes a few minutes. Dawud's was the only car at the checkpoint in the middle of the night, yet the soldier held the three IDs for more than twenty minutes, even as Dawud and his wife began to cry, begging to be allowed through. After fifteen minutes, Dawud's baby's mouth began to overflow with liquid and my friend wailed at the soldier to allow them through, that his baby was dying. Instead, the soldier demanded to search the car, even after the IDs had been cleared. At 1:05am, six-month-old Khalid Dawud Fakaah died at Atara Checkpoint. As the soldier checked the car, he shined his flashlight on the dead child's face and, realizing what had happened, finally returned the three ID cards and allowed the grieving family to pass.

Checkpoints and ID cards. Mention these words and any victim or witness of Apartheid can produce dozens of horror stories like Dawud's. South Africa employed a similar system with its former Apartheid "Pass Laws," which the South African Government used to monitor the movement of Black South Africans. Blacks had to carry personal ID documents, which required permission stamps from the government before holders could move around within their country. Similarly, Palestinians in the West Bank are required to carry Israeli-issued ID cards that indicate which areas, roads, and holy sites they are or are not allowed access to. Pass Laws enabled South African police to arrest blacks at will. Similarly, Israeli Occupation forces use ID cards not only to monitor Palestinian movement, but also to justify frequent arbitrary detention and arrest with general impunity. Jewish inhabitants of the West Bank (like all Jewish Israelis) have different ID cards, proclaiming their "Jewish" nationality, granting them automatic permission to access the modern roads and almost all holy sites that most Palestinians are restricted from.

Forty-seven years ago today, on March 21, 1960, hundreds of Black South Africans gathered in Sharpsville, South Africa and marched together in protest of the racist and dehumanizing Apartheid Pass Law system. South African white-controlled police forces fired on the unarmed crowd, killing at least 67 and injuring almost three times as many, including men, women, and children. Witnesses say that most of the people shot were hit in the back as they fled.

Almost fifty years after the Sharpsville Massacre, pass laws still plague the lives of the oppressed. Everyday I meet West Bank Palestinians living without permits and ID cards, either because Israel never granted them residency on their land, or because soldiers or police confiscated their IDs as punishment or just harassment. I recently interviewed the family of Ibrahim, a twenty-year-old veterinary student who was arrested three years ago for the crime of not having an Israeli-issued ID card. Ibrahim's parents were born and raised in the West Bank and own land in their small village of Fara'ata, where I interviewed them. In 1966, as newlyweds, the couple moved to Kuwait where they began working abroad. The year after, Israel occupied the West Bank and shortly after took a census. Any Palestinians who were not recorded due to absence—whether studying abroad, visiting family, or anything else—became refugees. Israel, the new occupier, stripped Ibrahim's parents and hundred of thousands of other Palestinians of their right to return to their homes and land, and effectively opened up the West Bank to colonization by any Jews who were willing to come.

Israel's census strategy of 1967 bears a striking resemblance to the Absentee Property Law that Israel employed after the 1948 expulsions. According to Passia (www.passia.org), the law "defines an 'absentee' as a person who 'at any time' in the period between 29 November 1947 and 1 Sept 1948, 'was in any part of the Land of Israel that is outside the territory of Israel (meaning the West Bank or the Gaza Strip) or in other Arab states'. The law stipulates that the property of such an absentee would be transferred to the Custodian of Absentee Property, with no possibility of appeal or compensation. From there, by means of another law, the property was transferred, so that effectively the property that was left behind by Palestinian refugees in 1948 (and also some of the property of Palestinians who are now citizens of Israel) was transferred to the State of Israel." To this day, the Jewish National Fund, which inherited much of the refugees' land, combined with the Israeli state owns about 93% of the land of Israel. This land is exclusively reserved for the Jewish people and almost impossible to obtain for Palestinian citizens of Israel or the owners of the land themselves: the 1947-1948 refugees.

When I say 93% of "the land of Israel," I am implying land within the internationally recognized 1967 borders of Israel, unlike the text of the 1950 Absentee Property Law itself, which defines "the Land of Israel" as all of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip together. This was long before 1967, but makes the territories' occupation less than two decades later either a tremendous coincidence or entirely unsurprising.

To this day, Palestinians like Ibrahim's parents who were in the wrong place during the 1967 occupation and census—and their children—must apply for what is called "family reunification" from the Ministry of the Interior in order to legally reside in their own homes and villages. Passia writes, "the decision to grant or deny these applications is, according to Israeli Law, ultimately at the discretion of the Interior Minister, who is not required to justify refusal. In May 2002, Israel suspended the processing of family reunification claims between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to prevent the latter from acquiring Israeli citizenship, arguing that the growth in the non-Jewish population of Israel due to family reunification was a threat to the 'Jewish character' of the state."

Family reunification applications not involving citizens of Israel were also frozen last year after the Hamas election, including the claims of Ibrahim and his family. The family returned legally to the West Bank in 1998 when Oslo dictated Palestinians would have their own state, but when Israel's occupation and settlement only accelerated, Ibrahim and his parents and five siblings were left with even fewer rights than the Palestinians with West Bank residency. Although the Palestinian Authority and DCO agreed that Ibrahim's family could live in their village (and even provided them free education and health care), they still needed permission from Israel.

Ibrahim began veterinary school at Al-Najaa University in 2000, but had to commute over the Nablus hills since soldiers manning the checkpoints would never allow him to enter the city without an ID card. On March 23, 2004, during Ibrahim's last semester before graduation, the Israeli Army caught him walking to school inside Nablus and put him in prison. This Friday marks three years exactly that Ibrahim—now 23—has been in jail, his only crime that he has no Israeli-issued ID card. The first year Israel imprisoned Ibrahim within the West Bank, but the past two years he was held within Israel, a violation of International Law—occupiers cannot hold prisoners and detainees from the occupied population in the occupying power's land, because of how severely it limits prisoners' rights. Indeed, Israel's policy of generally imprisoning Palestinians inIsrael means that their families often cannot visit them without permits to enter Israel, and they cannot even have a Palestinian lawyer since the lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza don't have permits to practice law in Israel. Ibrahim's father, for example, is a lawyer but can do nothing to help his son without an ID, let alone an Israeli license to practice law. Since he returned from Kuwait he has worked as a shepherd, since he can't safely go anywhere outside his village without an ID.

Ibrahim's situation is worse than most. Since his family has no ID cards they cannot even apply to enter Israel to visit him. Even Ibrahim's sister, who obtained an ID via her husband back when Israel sometimes granted residency through marriage, cannot visit her brother since it is impossible to prove to Israel her relation to a person with no official name or identity.

"Nobody from the family has seen Ibrahim in two years," his mother Hanan told me with my hand in hers after the report interview ended. "I send him gifts and receive news via the mother of another West Bank inmate in the same jail, a friend who occasionally gets permission from Israel to visit her son. Ibrahim is not even allowed the use the phone." Hanan began to cry. "He's the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing before I go to sleep. I cannot bear to imagine him there in prison, perhaps for the rest of his life, knowing how much he must be suffering, knowing that I can do nothing to help him. He did nothing wrong. His only crime is that he was born a Palestinian."

Hanan has six children total, three of whom decided to settle in Jordan, where they could enjoy citizenship (Palestinians in the West Bank before 1967 had Jordanian ID cards), and Hanan hasn't seen them in nine years. She wept again as she told me she has grandchildren and sons and daughters-in- law that she's never met. Even if she wanted Jordanian citizenship now, she's lost her chance having stayed outside Jordan for so long. And the family members who returned to claim their land and rights in the West Bank are now stateless, like so many millions of other Palestinian refugees in the diaspora.

In recognition of the tragic events of the 1960 Sharpsville Massacre, the UN declared May 21st the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, pushing states around the world to redouble their efforts to combat all types of ethnic discrimination. Yet within Israel, a member of the United Nations, ethnicity still determines nationality (there is no Israeli nationality: Palestinians are "Arabs," Jews are "Jewish"), resource allocation, and rights to own JNF and state land. There are discriminatory laws separating Palestinian families in Israel and threatening to revoke Palestinians' Israeli citizenship (these are discussed in an excellent recent interview with Israeli Knesset member Jamal Zahalka, called "A State of all its Citizens": www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12238 —highly recommended). Tel Aviv University Medical School just announced a rule that defacto targets Palestinian prospective students (see www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/ 837932.html for article, and www.adalah.org/eng/index.php or www.mossawacenter.org/ for more general information about minority rights in Israel).

In the rest of the so-called "Land of Israel," the ethnic discrimination is much worse, from segregated roads to separate legal systems. I know what Israel will say: this is only self-defense. On some level this is correct: if Israel desires to control the territory that it has for more than two-thirds of its history, and to remain the state exclusively of the Jewish people, and to be democratic as well, it must find a way to create a Jewish majority on a strip of land in which the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish. There are only so many possible solutions: there's mass transfer (as was tried successfully in 1948, and is currently advocated by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman), there's mass imprisonment (10,000+ Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails as I write), there's genocide... or there is apartheid. The more humane alternatives of Israel withdrawing to the 1967 borders or becoming a state of its citizens are not even on the bargaining table.

Apartheid and segregation failed in South Africa and the United States and they will fail in Israel and Palestine. Ethnocentric nationalism failed in Nazi Germany and it will fail in Zionist Israel. But until they do, the Ibrahims and baby Khalids of Palestine are counting on you and me to do something, to say something, since they themselves cannot. Silence is complicity. We cannot wait for things to get worse. The ethnic cleansing and apartheid have gone on long enough.

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

5 comments:

Free Israel said...

'Apartheid' MUSHROOMS VS 'Genocide' NIGHTMARE, Because Arab - 'Palestine" is worse than any "apartheid", because Arab - "Palestine" means Genocide


When will matter win over theater? reality over fantasy?

Enough of the games of silly definitions, of sheer absurdity, slanderous attack, smear campaign over & over again, time for assessment of reality, clarity amids confusion, calling a spade a spade.

I wonder when some in the UN will finally break away from the mighty grip of Arabian oil lobbyists mafia giants (Kofi Annan's legacy) forcing/pushing as to what should be an "agenda" or even a "burning subject" on the UN's diary, no matter how silly the "accusation" are & finally talk about real issues of real culprits.

Leave aside the "toy" 'apartheid' coined by the "Palestinian" drama-queens that grew into an all out Arabian Goliath propaganda machine, the criminal -- not only ridiculous -- slur on a people that merely try to survive against Arabs' genocide campaign since 1920. (yes, that's right, long before the "occupation" & other excuse were invented).

More importantly this serious question is to those robotic-echoing the "apartheid" slur without even thinking.

What does the overwhelming support among "Palestinian" Arab-Muslims for Hamas & it's genocidal ideology tell you?

Does this mean that only the "Palestinian" leadership is so evil in-fascism or is it that most "Palestinians" are no better?

Now try as hard as you can comparing the harsh reality & vivid campaigning from the Arab Muslim "Palestinian" side VS the Israeli struggle against terrorists on the other.





A Judenrein Palestine? By Rachel Neuwirth January 7, 2004 ... The same people and countries that condemned ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, Cyprus, Rwanda, ...
http://web.israelinsider.com/Views/3164.htm

Views: "Judenrein" Comes to Israel The aim was to make all of Europe, and eventually the whole earth, "Judenrein". The Nazis did not invent mass murder or ethnic cleansing of Jews. ...
http://web.israelinsider.com/views/4631.htm


'28% of Israel's Arabs deny Holocaust' Jerusalem Post
Israeli Arab Holocaust denial? Michael Greenberg - Canada (03/19/2007 17:09)
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1173879113692



'No Hamas leader will ever recognize Israel' The ruling "Palestinian" faction Hamas has reiterated, yet again, that none of its members will ever recognize Israel's right to exist. ...
http://www.jnewswire.com/article/1824


Hamas vows to 'drink' Jewish blood See terrorist group's video with messages for ... "and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. ..." http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48844

Your Correspondent said...

The death of the baby is a terrible tragedy. Soldiers and cops should not be put in the position of making medical diagnoses.

The checkpoints save many, many more lives than they take. The number of Israeli and Palestinian deaths would be very much higher without a stop to suicide bombing.

The purpose of taking down the checkpoints and the separation barrier is to permit the killing of more Jews and more Palestinians. That is the ONLY purpose.

The checkpoints are a result of the Arab-Israeli war, not it's cause.

The innocent baby was killed by the Intifada. Without the Intifada, there wouldn't be checkpoints.

Anonymous said...

free israel: You labor under some gross misconceptions. If the worst you can cite is a label (Apartheid) applied to a historical situation of violence done by Israel against the Palestinians, then I submit you are the one engaged in "theater" and "fantasy."

Allow me to clarify this for you: The author is an advocate for a disenfranchised group. As an advocate, she documents the violence done by those who have power against those who do not. Her message is clear: violence must end. Human rights must be respected.

Your apology for Israel does nothing to work toward those humane ends.

conefor4200 said...

Anna and Andy,
No doubt that you act in the name of an universal decency.
The suffering you are seeing, needs deep thinking to find a solution.
1. Before 1948, all residents of the Mandate were Palestinians.
2. The division of the Mandate was made between Jews and Arabs.
3. The Arab side with Eqypt went into attack mode, and denounced the division.
4. Even now, the attack calls by many Arab people have not stopped.

It is true that Israel has produced religious and nationalist messianic classes.

On the other hand, this was replied by Islamic messianism on the Arab side.

Only a secular compromise, without aggressive militarism from Iran and Wahhabi Saudis, can bring peaceful coexistence.

Can you explain these connections to the Palestinian people you meet?

I am making an effort to guide the Israeli side towards a moderation.

Steven

Anonymous said...

Dear Internetfred,

I am sure if you read some previous posts from Anna you would find out that the checkpoints and wall do not give security, there are and is always a way to get in to Israel, it just takes longer and is more physically exhausting, that is all.

Dear conefor4200,

There is an article in the brittish online news site called Guardian unlimited by Khaled Diab. I don't agree on all his points but he portrays realistically that the arab world has done little to help the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that is an important statement because Palestinians are not Arabs, just as Iranians are Persians and not Arabs. Palestinians are a group that refer to someones place of origin and not specifically their race (I think, I am sure Anna knows more about this).

There is another writer on the Guardian unlimited site that I like to read on, his name is Seth Freedman. His pieces are of course more pro-Israeli but he too is just coming to grips about what zionism really means:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html

he usually posts on the above link.
I think he sometimes creates balances in his opinion pieces.



Best of wishes: Me.