Palestinians are now ‘illegal residents’
by Amira Hass
October 14, 2003

Ha’aretz Printer Friendly Version
EMail Article to a Friend
One of the questions raised immediately after it became clear that for the most part, the separation fence would not be built along the length of the Green Line, but in fact somewhere to the east of it, was the fate of the Palestinians living to the west of the fence. As of now, this fate is shared by approximately 12,000 persons living in 15 Palestinian villages and towns, from Salim in the northern West Bank to Mas’ha, to the south of Qalqilyah (near the settlement of Elkana). They are shut in between the separation fence to the east, and the Green Line to the west. As construction of the fence continues, deep into the territory of the West Bank, more Palestinians will find themselves in this situation.

Additionally, the fence affects the lives of tens of thousands of other people, whose homes are east of the fence, and whose land, on which they earn their livelihood, is to the west. All told, according to the findings of the Palestinian Department of Negotiations, the route that the first stage of the fence will take (up to Elkana on the south) has so far cut off from the West Bank about 100,000 dunams (25,000 acres) of Palestinian-owned land, some of which is settled, most of which is farmland.

The issues are real; already, the most serious concerns have been proven true. Even before the Palestinians had a chance to come to terms with the loss of their land for the sake of the series of fortifications that is known as the “obstacle,” they discovered that their ordinary lives had been completely disrupted – that it was possible to further disrupt their already disrupted reality of internal closures in the West Bank, curfews on cities and villages and military attacks. Farmers cannot make their way to their land; hothouses and orchards have been destroyed; olives are left unpicked; teachers and students fail to get to school because the gate of the separation fence is not opened on time; feed for the livestock does not arrive consistently – and the animals are being sold or slaughtered, or left to die; water pipes for drinking or irrigation have been cut; siblings and parents are not permitted to visit; garbage trucks are unable to complete their routes; cesspits are not being drained on time. All of the above examples have been documented, with a hundred different variations, in all of these trapped communities.

A bureaucratic, official answer to the question was given last week. The regular disruption of ordinary life will henceforth be defined and delineated in a series of new army orders. They will gradually apply to tens of thousands of additional Palestinians that will soon find themselves living or working between the fence and the State of Israel. The latest army orders create a new category of Palestinian resident – “long-term resident” – a category that distinguishes between Palestinians living west of the fence and those living to its east, a new classification that will command the attentions of the swelling Israeli military bureaucracy.

Permit required from age 12

At the end of last week, residents of the villages that are trapped between the fence and the Green Line, in the Tul Karm and Qalqilyah districts, found that the army had distributed forms that bore the heading: “Israel Defense Forces, Security Directives Order (Judea and Samaria) (No. 378) 1970.” They found the forms taped to the gates of the separation fence, or on electricity poles, or on the concrete blocks of the manned army roadblocks, or tossed next to the door of the local grocery store.

They found four types of forms, all of which referred to Order No. 378: signed on one form was the name of Major General Moshe Kaplinski, the commander of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria, dated October 2, 2003. It is an “Announcement of the closure of territory.” In it, Kaplinski declares the closure of the seam zone; and the seam zone is “all of the territory that is bounded by the obstacle, which is marked on the (enclosed) map with a red line, in the direction of the State of Israel.” The obstacle, Kaplinski defines, consists of “fences, walls and patrol paths that are meant to prevent terror attacks and prevent the entry of assailants from Judea and Samaria into the State of Israel.”

The meaning of the closure: “A. An individual will not enter the seam zone and will not stay there; B. An individual found in the seam zone will have to leave it immediately.” This prohibition does not apply to: “1: An Israeli; 2: Anyone who has received a permit … to enter the seam zone and stay there … ” Kaplinski also defines `Israeli’: “A. A citizen of Israel; B. A resident of Israel who is listed in the Population Registry of Israel; C. Anyone entitled to immigrate to Israel according to the Law of Return.”

The non-Israelis for whom this announcement of closure of territory

tch this video , please : –

The Zionist conspiracy to divide the Arab states into small units

The *FREE ARAB VOICE*
July 22, 2000

In 1982 the Hebrew-language magazine Kivunim (Directions), the
official organ of the World Zionist Organization published an
important article entitled, “A Strategy for Israel in the
Nineteen Eighties”. The Editor of Kivunim is Yoram Beck,
Head of Publications, Department of Information, of the
World Zionist Organization. Also on the Editorial Committee
of Kivunim is Amnon Hadary, a member of the Palmach during
the 1948 atrocities. Israel Shahak, professor of organic
chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and chairman
of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights translated the
article into English and wrote the following foreword to it. It
was published in 1982 as a pamphlet by the Association of
Arab-American University graduates. Professor Shahak states:
The following essay represents, in my opinion, the accurate and
detailed plan of the present Zionist regime for the Middle East
which is based on the division of the whole area into small states,
and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states. I will comment
on the military aspect of this plan in a concluding note.

Here I want to draw the attention of the readers to several
important points:
1 . The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down,
by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in
Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze’ev Schiff,
the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the
most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about
the best that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq :
“The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni
state and the separation of the Kurdish part” (Ha’aretz,
2/6/1982). Actually this aspect of the plan is very old.
2. The strong connection with neo-Conservative thought in the
USA is very prominent, especially in the author’s notes.
But, while lip service is paid to the idea of the defense
of the West from Soviet power, the real aim of the author,
and of the present Israeli establishment is clear: To make
an imperial Israel into a world power. In other words, the
aim of Sharon is to deceive the Americans after be has
deceived all the rest.
3. It is obvious that much of the relevant data, both in the
notes and in the text, is garbled or omitted, such as the
financial help of the US to Israel. Much of it is pure
fantasy. But, the plan is not to be regarded as not
influential or as not capable of realization for a short
time. The plan follows faithfully the geopolitical ideas
current in Germany of 1890-1933, which were swallowed whole
by Hitler and the Nazi movement, and determined their aims
for East Europe. Those aims, especially the division of the
existing states, were carried out in 1939-1941, and only an
alliance on the global scale prevented their consolidation
for a period of time.
Israel Shahak Kivunim’s plan states that all the Arab states are
fragmented as follows:
“The Arab Muslim world, therefore, is not the major strategic
problem which we shall face in the Eighties, despite the fact
that it carries the main threat against Israel, due to its
growing military might. This world, with its ethnic minorities,
its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly
self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran
and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its
fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real
threat against the State of Israel in the long run, but only
in the short run where its immediate military power has great
import. In the long run, this world will be unable to exist
within its present framework in the areas around us without
having to go through genuine revolutionary changes. The Moslem
Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together
by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties),
without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been
taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states,
all made of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which
are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state
nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in
some a civil war is already raging. Most of the Arabs, ll8
million out of 170 million, live in Africa, mostly in Egypt
(45 million today).
Maghreb States:
Apart from Egypt, all the Maghreb states are made up of a
mixture of Arabs and non-Arab Berbers. In Algeria there is
already a civil war raging in the Kabile mountains between
the two nations in the country. Morocco and Algeria are at
war with each other over Spanish Sahara, in addition to the
internal struggle in each of them. Militant Islam endangers
the integrity of Tunisia and Qaddafi organizes wars whi

October 9, 2007

Exporting Democracy with Missiles
When Governments Thrive on a State of War
By BRIAN ENO

Speech at the “Illegal” Troops Out demo, Trafalgar Square, London on Monday 8 October 2007.

Simon Jenkins from the Guardian wrote

“Amid the past week’s political sound and fury, one subject slid unnoticed under the platform. Britain is at war. Its soldiers are fighting and dying in two distant lands. Foreign policy, once the stuff of national debate, is consigned to clich and platitude.

With casualties mounting in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians dare not mention it, let alone disagree. The prime minister declared to his party conference in Bournemouth that “the message should go out to anyone facing persecution anywhere from Burma to Zimbabwe . . . we will not rest”. Britain will defend the oppressed anywhere in the world. Unfortunately Britain is doing nothing in Burma or Zimbabwe, while the message from Iraq and Afghanistan is that Britain chooses bad wars at America’s behest in which it gets beaten.

All the airbrushing in the world will not remove the greatest legacy that Tony Blair left his successors, that of “liberal interventionism”. Never articulated except in a confused speech in Chicago in 1999, it asserted Britain’s right to meddle in any country to which it took offence, under the rubric of “humanitarian just war.”

Now Simon Jenkins isn’t a crazy leftist firebrand–I’m not even sure what part of the political spectrum he occupies, but it probably isn’t the same as mine. However, I trust his intellectual honesty in a way that I can no longer trust the honesty of most of our government.
There are, however, a few clear-sighted people in Parliament. I’d like now to read something that Ming Campbell recently wrote–which as far as I know went virtually unreported outside of the Yorkshire Post, where it was published:

He said:

“Britain’s right wing press, politicians and commentators have an unshakeable habit of working themselves into a fury about power-sharing in Europe. They see themselves as the great defenders of British sovereignty, against the political ambitions of our continental partners.

Yet those same people remain largely silent over the transfer of British sovereignty in crucial areas of national security to The United States.

In a three-paragraph written statement slipped out in July, just one day before Parliament rose–and almost completely unnoticed by the press–the Defence Secretary announced that the Government is permitting the US administration to install additional equipment at Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire, to support its unproven missile defence system.

There has been no public debate in Britain about the desirability or workability of missile defence, let alone about the strategic assumptions that underpin it.

.. The political will to persevere with it has been driven as much by industrial as military priorities. Its original justification was to defend against China: now it is said that it will protect against Iran, depicted in Washington as an implacable, long-term enemy.”

What this says to me is that the current American government–and ours, for as long as we follow them – thrives on a state of war. They need it because it allows them to carry on with business as usual whilst at the same time suppressing dissent ‘for security reasons’. It allows them to sidestep the democratic process by maintaining a continuous state of emergency.

For the sake of our country, and Iraq – as well as for the sake of all those who in the future are going to be cast as ‘our enemies’, we must get off this war-mongering treadmill. Our government talks about our ‘special relationship’ with America, but we should be asking how special that really is. And I think we should be looking at another relationship we have that seems to me much more special: that with Europe. If we’d followed the European line rather than the American, it’s likely not only that we wouldn’t have been part of this stupid invasion, but that it wouldn’t have happened at all. Our cooperation was what gave the Americans the figleaf to cover the dirty little secret that this was an invasion carried out for their benefit alone. Our complicity made it look acceptably international.

In the last couple of weeks several people at the BBC have resigned because someone called a cat Socks instead of Cookie, and because the Queen was wrongly depicted as being in a huff. At the same time we are waging and losing a pointless war that has killed perhaps as many as one million people. Will there ever be any resignations over that?

We have a serious problem on our hands. We have a government that was elected by 22% of the eligible voters, but somehow gained 55% of the seats in Parliament. We have been conned into an illegal invasion by shameless propaganda and media manipulation. We have a foreign policy in place that is hugely unpopular, but which continues nonetheless. We have ris

October 4, 2007

Two Knights and a Dragon
The Power of the Israel Lobby
By URI AVNERY

There are books that change people’s consciousness and change history. Some tell a story, like Harriet Beech Stowe’s 1851 “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, which gave a huge impetus to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Others take the form of a political treatise, like Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat”, which gave birth to the Zionist movement. Or they can be scientific in nature, like Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, which changed the way humanity sees itself. And perhaps political satire, too, can shake the world, like “1984” by George Orwell.

The impact of these books was amplified by their timing. They appeared exactly at the right time, when a large public was ready to absorb their message.

It may well turn out that the book by the two professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, is just such a book.

It is a dry scientific research report, 355 pages long, backed by 106 further pages containing some thousand references to sources.

It is not a bellicose book. On the contrary, its style is restrained and factual. The authors take great care not to utter a single negative comment on the legitimacy of the Lobby, and indeed bend over backwards to stress their support for the existence and security of Israel. They let the facts speak for themselves. With the skill of experienced masons, they systematically lay brick upon brick, row upon row, leaving no gap in their argumentation.

This wall cannot be torn down by reasoned argument. Nobody has tried, and nobody is going to. Instead, the authors are being smeared and accused of sinister motives. If the book could be ignored altogether, this would have been done–as has happened to other books which have been buried alive.

(Some years ago, there appeared in Russia a large tome by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world-renowned laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, about Russia and its Jews. This book, called “200 Years Together”, has been completely ignored. As far as I know, it has not been translated into any language, certainly not into Hebrew. I asked several of Israel’s leading intellectuals, and none of them had even heard of the book. Neither does it appear on the list of Amazon.com, which includes all the author’s other works.)

* * *

THE TWO professors take the bull by the horns. They deal with a subject which is absolutely taboo in the United States, a subject nobody in his right mind would even mention: the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby on American foreign policy.

In a remorselessly systematical way, the book analyzes the Lobby, takes it apart, describes its modus operandi, discloses its financial sources and lays bare its relations with the White House, the two houses of Congress, the leaders of the two major parties and leading media people.

The authors do not call into question the Lobby’s legitimacy. On the contrary, they show that hundreds of lobbies of this kind play an essential role in the American democratic system. The gun and the medical lobbies, for example, are also very powerful political forces. But the pro-Israel lobby has grown out of all proportion. It has unparalleled political power. It can silence all criticism of Israel in Congress and the media, bring about the political demise of anyone who dares to break the taboo, prevent any action that does not conform to the will of the Israeli government.

In its second part, the book shows how the Lobby uses its tremendous power in practice: how it has prevented the exertion of any pressure on Israel to for peace with the Palestinians, how it pushed the US into the invasion of Iraq, how it is now pushing for wars with Iran and Syria, how it supported the Israeli leadership in the recent war in Lebanon and blocked calls for a ceasefire when it didn’t want it.

Each of these assertions is backed up by so much undeniable evidence and quotations from written material (mainly from Israeli sources) that they cannot be ignored.

* * *

MOST OF these disclosures are nothing new for those in Israel who deal with these matters.

I myself could add to the book a whole chapter from personal experience.

In the late 50s, I visited the US for the first time. A major New York radio station invited me for an interview. Later they cautioned me: “You can criticize the President (Dwight D. Eisenhower) and the Secretary of State (John Foster Dulles) to your heart’s content, but please don’t criticize Israeli leaders!” At the last moment the interview was cancelled altogether, and the Iraqi ambassador was invited instead. Criticism was apparently tolerable when it came from an Arab, but absolutely not coming from an Israeli.

In 1970, the respected American “Fellowship of Reconciliation” invited me for a lecture tour of 30 universities, under the auspices of the Hillel rabbis. When I arrived in New York, I was

please watch thisvideo and judge for yourself :-

http://en.netlog.com/go/videos/videoid=221365

June 30 / July 1, 2007

Occupation? What Occupation?
A Dark Summit
By URI AVNERY

There never was a darker Middle East summit meeting. The darkest there can be.

The four leaders at Sharm al-Sheik did not sit together at an intimate round table. Each one sat alone behind a huge table of his own. That ensured a striking separation between them. The four long tables hardly touched. Each one of the leaders, with his assistants behind him, sat like a solitary island in a vast sea.

All four–Hosni Mubarak, King Abdallah of Jordan, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas–bore a severe countenance. Throughout the official part of the conference, not a single smile could be seen.

One after the other, the four delivered their monologues. An exercise in shallow hypocrisy, in empty deceit. Not one of the four raised himself above the murky puddle of sanctimonious phrases.

A short monologue from Mubarak. A short monologue from Abdallah. A medium-length monologue from Abbas. An interminably long monologue from Olmert–a typical Israeli speech, overbearing, educating the whole world, sermonizing and dripping with morality. Held, of course, in Hebrew, with the obvious aim of appealing to the home public.

The speech included all the required phrases–Our soul longs for peace, The vision of two states, We do not want to rule over another people, For the good of coming generations, bla-bla-bla. All in standard colonial style: Olmert even talked about “Judea and Samaria”, using the official terminology of the occupation.

But in order to “strengthen” Abbas, Olmert addressed him as “President” and not as “Chairman”, which has been the de rigueur title used by all Israeli representatives since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. (The wise men of Oslo circumvented this difficulty by referring -in all three languages–to the head of the Authority by the Arab title of Ra’is, which can mean both president and chairman.

And the word that did not appear throughout this long monologue?
“Occupation”.

* * *

OCCUPATION? What occupation? Where occupation? Anybody seen any occupation?

The occupation was not on the agenda of this dark summit. Even in their wildest dreams, the Arab participants could not imagine anything more wonderful than “easing the restrictions”. Making life a little bit less difficult for the suffering population. Giving back the Palestinian tax revenues. (That is to say, Israel may give back some of the money it has pocketed.) Moving some of the roadblocks that prevent people from going from one village to the next. (That has already been promised many times and will not happen this time either, because the army and the Shin Bet object. Olmert has already announced that it is impossible for “security reasons”.)

With the air of a Sultan throwing coins to the paupers in the street, Olmert announced his intention of releasing some Fatah prisoners. 250 coins, 250 prisoners. That was the “generous gift” that was to make the Palestinians jump for joy, “strengthen” Abbas and awaken to new life the dry bones of his organization.

If Olmert had not been sitting so far away from Abbas, he could just as well have spat in his face.

First at all, the number is ridiculous. There are now about 10,000 (ten thousand) Palestinian “security” prisoners in Israeli prisons. Every night, about a dozen more are being taken from their homes. Since there is no more room in the prison facilities, the wardens will be pleased to get rid of some inmates. In previous gestures of this nature, the Israeli government has set free prisoners whose term was nearing the end anyhow, and car thieves.

Second, fraternization between Fatah and Hamas is well established in prison. The violent struggle in Gaza has not been projected into the prisons. The famous “prisoners’ document”, which laid the foundation for the (now defunct) Unity Government, was worked out jointly by Fatah and Hamas prisoners.

Olmert’s announcement of his readiness to release Fatah–and only Fatah–prisoners is designed to sabotage this unity. It could stigmatize the Fatah people as collaborators, and Abbas as a leader who is concerned only with the members of his own organization, not giving a damn for the others.

* * *

SO WHAT did come out of this summit conference? Some say: zero plus, some say: zero minus. No wonder that the Arab participants looked so somber.

What was it good for? Abbas was in need of strengthening after losing the Gaza Strip. Olmert promised the Americans to strengthen him. But after the conference, Olmert could have used the phrase customarily uttered by Israeli leaders visiting bereaved families: “I came to strengthen, but it is I who have been strengthened.”

The sole winner was Olmert. The conference has proved that Mubarak’s and Abdallah’s influence on Israel is nil, and that Abbas’ position is even worse.

To eliminate any doubt about this, Olmert sent the army at once into the kasbah of Nab