"Israel took my land," ... "Now they want me to sell my house, but I will stay here and die here."
Near neighbours worlds apart in West Bank | 26 Mar 2007 18:04:55 GMT | Source: Reuters | By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

GIVON HA'HADASHA, West Bank, March 26 (Reuters) - A deep trench gouged along the planned route of an Israeli barrier cuts Sabri al-Ghorayeb's house off from the Palestinian village where his relatives live. His other neighbours are Jewish settlers.

For now, he can cross the trench over a narrow plank bridge. But his modest bungalow is also fenced off on three sides from the neat, red-tiled Israeli homes and well-paved roads of the settlement of Givon Ha'hadasha that almost surrounds it.
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"It's all hatred between us. They don't like us and we don't like them." He pointed to the metal netting over windows that he said had been repeatedly broken by stones thrown by settlers.

The elderly patriarch lives in the house with his wife, visited daily by their adult son and grandchildren whose home lies on the other side of the trench -- part of a barrier Israel says is a vital defence against suicide bombers.

"Israel took my land," Ghorayeb growled over small glasses of tea in his front room, recounting a continuing legal battle he is waging to prove his ownership. "Now they want me to sell my house, but I will stay here and die here."

STRUGGLE OVER LAND

He built his house with a permit from the Israeli civil administration in the West Bank. He also holds deeds that his lawyer says show he owns the land on which Givon Ha'hadasha was built.

That version gets short shrift from Arik Leshem, an Israeli who lives a couple of streets away in Givon Ha'hadasha.

"This place, unlike most settlements, is on land that was purchased by Jews," he said, referring to what he said were 19th-century transactions under the Ottoman Empire. "That person (Ghorayeb) built his house on Jewish land. He knew." ...
- posted by Editor @ 7:17 AM

because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?
Israeli Holocaust trustee blasts Hebron settlers | Reuters | Saturday January 20, 10:15 PM

A senior official of Israel's central Holocaust memorial on Saturday assailed Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians in a tinderbox West Bank city, saying the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism of 1930s Europe.

The attack by Yosef Lapid, chairman of Yad Vashem's advisory council, was prompted by Israeli television footage showing a Hebron settler woman hissing "whore" at a
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Palestinian neighbour and settler children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.

The spectacle stirred outrage in the Jewish state, where many view the settlers as opposing coexistence with a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who lost his father to the Nazi genocide, said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio that the acts of some Hebron settlers reminded him of persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of World War Two.

"It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn," Lapid said, reiterating remarks made earlier this week in Israel's Maariv newspaper .

"I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?" ...
- posted by Editor @ 4:14 PM

We must make peace with the Palestinians, and the Palestinian refugees must give up their right to return.
"How can you give someone back only a part of a house he lived in?" | Wednesday, February 07, 2007 at 9:25 PM GMT | By Henry Lowi

When debating the rights of the Palestine refugees, one often hears the following from left-wing supporters of Zionist racism, purporting to be "pragmatists":

"What's done is done. One can't always be turning back the clock. Otherwise, there would be no end. We must make peace with the Palestinians, and the Palestinian refugees must give up their right to return. Maybe a few can return on humanitarian grounds, the rest will have to accept token compensation."


This is the position of all the wings of "left" Zionism (and left "non-Zionism"), and all those who support the so-called "two-state solution" i.e. those who uphold the discriminatory and anti-democratic state structures of the Israeli regime.

The preposterousness of this position is illustrated by the position that Jewish organizations take toward claims for restitution of property that was seized from Jews by the Nazi invaders, and then re-seized by the "Communist" liberators.

Can you imagine someone saying:

"The Jews of Poland abandoned their homes voluntarily, and sought refuge in the Eastern zone under Soviet protection, planning to return with the victorious Allied armies, and thus forfeited their property"? Or "The Jews of Poland, when they had the chance to return to liberated Poland, chose not to do so but settled in the capitalist West, and thus forfeited their property"?

No one would dare.

Recognition of the right of European Jews to return to their countries of origin in Europe is not in issue. No one in their right mind denies it. It is irrelevant that a minority of European Jews actually seek to exercise this right of return.

In Europe, the only issue is the right to restitution and compensation. And when offered compensation for 15 per cent of the seized property, Naftali Lavie rejected it and responded: "How can you give someone back only a part of a house he lived in," Lavie said. "I would not call this a compromise ... it is depriving people of their property and parts of their lives," he said."

Isn't what is gravy for the goose gravy for the gander? ..
- posted by Editor @ 2:42 PM

Of Walls and Bantustans: Apartheid by Any Other Name
Of Walls and Bantustans: Apartheid by Any Other Name Contributed by Tom | By By Ronald Bruce St. John

Israeli policy in the West Bank is a form of apartheid in intent and implementation. Ethnic-based, as opposed to race-based, it shares an important characteristic with the South African model.
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In Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter portrays the dramatic growth in Israeli settlements over the last three decades, together with the road system and utilities built to support them. Outside East Jerusalem, there were some 7,000 settlers in the Occupied Territory in 1977. Today, 260,000 settlers live in the West Bank along with 2.5 million Palestinians. Exact figures are difficult to obtain, but it would appear that the more than 200 Israeli settlements on the West Bank occupy less than 10% of the land. But because their footprint does not reflect land set aside for security barriers, roads, and utilities, the settlements control more than 40% of the land.

This settlement process has regularly deprived Palestinians of basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to life and liberty of person, the right to work, and the right to freedom of movement. Palestinians are prohibited from using or even crossing many of the key roads connecting the settlements with each other and with Israel itself. And dozens of Israeli checkpoints are in place on roads the Palestinians can use, inhibiting vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The impact on Palestinians of this spider web of barriers, restrictions, and controls became clear when I worked in early 2002 with the Adam Smith Institute in London to develop parameters for a future land corridor, linking the Gaza Strip and West Bank in an independent Palestinian state.

In mid-November 2006, Peace Now, an Israeli group advocating Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank, leaked official information that documented widespread land theft by Israel. The data showed that Palestinians privately owned 39% of the land held by Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including large blocs Israel planned to keep in any future peace agreement. Nevertheless, settlement construction has continued in the West Bank. In early September 2006, the Housing Ministry issued tenders for the construction of 690 new housing units in the West Bank.

In late December 2006, Israel announced plans to construct a Jewish settlement at Maskiot, the first new settlement in the West Bank in 10 years. While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was visiting Israel in mid-January 2007, the Ministry of Construction and Housing, issued a tender for the construction of 44 new housing units in the settlement city of Ma'aleh Adumim.

Construction of the so-called security fence, what Carter terms the "imprisonment wall," accentuates the impact of new and expanded settlements in the West Bank. The fence weaves in and out, sometimes following the pre-1967 boundary, more often not. Largely built on Palestinian land, it separates Palestinians from Palestinians, dividing and compartmentalizing them. Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, said he was "shocked" when he visited Israel in late January 2007 and saw the extent to which the combination of Jewish settlement and security fence construction was cutting into land Palestinians wanted ­ and needed ­ for a two-state solution. He urged the Israelis to freeze West Bank settlements and stop construction of the security fence. ...
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In any case, the media storm in the United States over Carter's use of the word apartheid remains difficult to understand since Israelis themselves have long used the word to describe Israeli policy in the Occupied Territory. This helps explains why the book has drawn so little attention in Israel. As one example, Shulamit Aloni, a former education minister under Yitzhak Rabin, in early January 2007 published an article, "Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel," in which she candidly acknowledged "the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp."
Some critics go further in applying the term apartheid beyond the occupied territories. UCLA professor Saree Makdisi, in a mid-December op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, criticized Carter's book because the author limited his discussion of apartheid to the West Bank. Makdisi argued the concept of apartheid was equally applicable to Jewish and non-Jewish citizens within Israel itself. On that score, the Arab Center for Alternative Planning in mid-January 2007 revealed the results of a recent poll that showed that per capita Gross Domestic Product in the Israeli Jewish sector was three times that of the Israeli Arab sector. ...
- posted by Editor @ 11:27 AM

Israeli government destroys Moroccan Gate and parts of Al Aqsa Mosque area amid outcry
Israeli government destroys Moroccan Gate and parts of Al Aqsa Mosque area amid outcry | (Ramallah) Rashid Hilal | Tuesday, 06 February 2007

Israeli forces demolished the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque after destroying the Moroccan Gate bridge leading to the Muslim holy site. Chief Palestinian Justice Sheikh Taysir Tamimi said that the timing of the destruction in the Old City of East Jerusalem was purposeful as all eyes are on the meeting in Mecca and political leaders are enroute.

The Sheikh told a press conference in Ramallah this afternoon that the Israeli government is continuing with its plan to demolish the historic road at the Moroccan Gate with a major threat to the western side of the Mosque.

Israeli forces expelled all Arab workers and journalists Monday, increased the military presence in the face of nonviolent protests over the past two days, and closed all roads on Tuesday. ...
- posted by Editor @ 10:45 AM