View of the terraces in the Palestinian village of Battir, now a World Heritage site. Credit: Courtesy of Wikipedia

By Ido Liven
BATTIR, West Bank, Jul 13 2014 (IPS)

The Palestinian village of Battir, just six kilometres southwest of Jerusalem and a similar distance from Bethlehem, is the latest to be trapped in the gap between international recognition and Israel’s policies in the West Bank.

The village’s agricultural terraces covering the surrounding hill slopes, and the spring water-fed open irrigation channels that run through them, have been in use for centuries.

Last month, this unique landscape was designated a World Heritage site by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), making it only the second such Palestinian site after the Old City of Jerusalem site.

Already in autumn last year, the World Monuments Fund, an international organisation working to preserve important cultural heritage sites, had added Battir’s ancient terraces to its 2014 World Monuments Watch.Local residents, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, have been campaigning against the six-kilometre long Separation Barrier plans since 2005, and fear the barrier will take a toll, not only on the centuries-old living landscape, but also on their way of life.

The decision to inscribe Battir in the World Heritage list comes amid Israeli plans to establish a new section of its Separation Barrier at the foot of the terraced hill slopes, cutting through the Palestinian village’s lands.

According to the Israeli military authorities, this section of the Separation Barrier is mainly intended to protect the railway on the margins of the village’s lands. Military representatives told the Israeli Supreme Court in 2011, there is “specific intelligence about attempts of terror organisations to infiltrate into Israel from this direction.”

However, they also reiterated that “the abovementioned security threat is not at all posed by residents of Battir, but from other hostile elements active in this area and those especially coming to the Battir area due to the fact the barrier route is still incomplete there.”

Local residents, however, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, have been campaigning against the Separation Barrier plans since 2005, fearing the new six kilometre-long barrier will take a toll, not only on the centuries-old living landscape, but also on their way of life.

Over the years, their campaign has garnered much support, including from environmental groups such as the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME). Two perhaps unlikely other sources of support have been an Israeli field school in the settlement bloc of Gush Etzion and the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority (INPA).

Their environmental support might be genuine, but their objection to the Separation Barrier also fits well with their own political agenda, says Ofer Zalzberg, a Jerusalem-based senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.

INPA, in particular, has added its voice in support of protecting the Palestinian village’s traditional terraces, while managing a number of national parks – some of which are included in the tentative list of Palestine’s World Heritage sites.

In May last year, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered suspension of the works on the section of the barrier in Battir’s lands, but a final ruling is still pending. Now, the petitioners from the village and from FoEME are hopeful that the new World Heritage status could influence the court’s decision.

Nevertheless, Battir’s eggplants, vines and olives are closely intertwined with the greater Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The World Heritage nomination was submitted under a special emergency procedure a day after the latest court session, and right before this year’s deadline.

But it could have been made already a year earlier if it had not been for a request from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, according to Israeli daily Haaretz. Freezing the Palestinian bid, the paper reported, was meant to allow the renewal of peace negotiations. “Senior Foreign Ministry officials in Jerusalem noted that Israel is keeping track of the Palestinian move and will try to prevent it,” Haaretz added.

Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported that suspending Battir’s nomination was part of a deal whereby, in exchange, Israel would allow a UNESCO team to examine the Old City of Jerusalem, another World Heritage site.

Eventually, Battir’s application was successful and, in acknowledging the threat to the site, the World Heritage Committee also agreed to include it in its ‘in danger’ list, despite an expert opinion from the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the professional cultural heritage body advising UNESCO, which was generally sceptical about the merits of the site’s inscription.

However, Israel’s Ministry of Defence remains intent on going ahead with the barrier plan. “The barrier’s route in the area of Battir is intended to protect the citizens of Israel from terrorists and terror entering [the country],” read a statement from the ministry to IPS.

“The Security Barrier’s route will be established with no harm to natural assets,” it continued. “No terrace will be destroyed and the irrigation system will not be harmed. The IDF [Israel Defence Forces] is sensitive to the natural assets at the site, but it is first and foremost committed to the security of the citizens of Israel.”

And it does seem rather unlikely that Battir’s World Heritage inscription will have a significant impact on the Supreme Court ruling.  “I’d be surprised if, on these grounds, the Supreme Court categorically rejects building the barrier there,” Zalzberg told IPS.

“I think that’s not good for the image of Israel to be destroying World Heritage sites,” says Nader al-Khateeb, FoEME’s Palestinian co-director.

But Zalzberg believes such designation would not be seen by the Israeli government as a major factor. “There are already places where Israel has taken its own stance on things that are much more serious in the eyes of the international community,” he said.

Rather, an Israeli decision to go ahead with the barrier in Battir, thus defying the U.N. agency, “could be part of a trend where Israel further pushes UNESCO to the wall on anything related to managing sites, possibly also in Jerusalem.”

From the court proceedings, it seems that a barrier will eventually be built. In its latest session on the case, in January, the Supreme Court focused on ways to mitigate damage to the terraces, for example by examining the option of removing one of the train tracks, and by ordering the Israeli military to allow Battir farmers access to their lands through gates in the barrier.

Opponents, however, are concerned about additional, collateral damage to the ancient terraces landscape from the construction process involving heavy machinery.

Akram Bader, mayor of Battir, is concerned that building the barrier would not only take a toll on the local cultural heritage, but also on the peaceful situation in the area. “Through the last 64 years there have been no incidents in the area, so why are they saying they want to build a Security Barrier?” he asks.

In fact, establishing the barrier, ostensibly to ensure Israel’s security, could lead to violence, Bader warns. “If the terraces are damaged, it means that the people will not think about peace in this area. They will change their minds about it.”

Israel is, at least formally, committed to protecting cultural heritage in the West Bank, as a member of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and also as one of the earliest signatories of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in the Event of Armed Conflict.

Meanwhile, Battir might not be the last case of its kind. At least two proposals on Palestine’s World Heritage Tentative List could overlap the route of Israel’s Separation Barrier. In one, Umm Al-Rihan Forest, the barrier already exists. In another, El-Bariyah, also known as the Judean desert, plans to establish a stretch of the Separation Barrier triggered vocal protest from Israeli environmentalists six years ago.

In response, Amir Peretz, then Defence Minister and today Environmental Protection Minister, ordered works to be halted.

In July 2004, the International Court of Justice had issued an Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Separation Barrier, concluding that it was “contrary to international law” and calling on Israel to cease its construction. Exactly ten years later, Israel’s Separation Barrier looks set to defy the international community once again.

Israel's separation barrier as seen from Al Ram, once a thriving East Jerusalem community that now sits on the West Bank side of the barrier and has been severely economically affected. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM, May 26 2013 (IPS)

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”"It feels like they're coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police."
-- Abed Ajloni

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Togolese Soldiers line up on the tarmac after arriving at Bamako Senou International Airport in Mali in early February, 2013. The soldiers are a small part of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali. Credit: Thomas Martinez/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

With France withdrawing troops after chasing Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) from towns in northern Mali, the central government in Bamako should urgently launch a serious process of national reconciliation, particularly with the Tuareg and Arab minorities, according to a new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) released Thursday.

Among other steps, the authorities should prevent the persecution by the security forces of the civilian population, especially in communities allegedly associated with rebel or armed Islamist groups that controlled the north for the 10 months preceding the French intervention in January.

Bamako’s leaders also should not impose pre-conditions, such as immediate disarmament, that make dialogue with the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the Tuareg independence group, more difficult, according to the ICG.

They should also ensure that the country’s radio and television stations do not incite or aggravate existing ethnic divisions in the country, especially in the run-up to national elections that are supposed to take place in July, according to the 47-page report.

“Elections must be held soon but not at any cost,” according to Gilles Yabi, ICG’s West Africa Project director.

“The radicalisation of public opinion is a major risk, and Mali’s leaders and institutions must take firm action to prevent people, especially those in the south, (from) lumping together rebels, terrorists and drug traffickers with all Tuaregs and Arabs,” he said.

As if to underline the urgency of the challenge, the ICG report, ‘Mali: Security, Dialogue and Meaningful Reform’, was released just as Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced that two Tuareg men who had been detained by Malian soldiers in a small town near Timbuktu had died while in detention at Bamako’s Central Prison.

The two were part of a group of seven men, aged between 21 and 66, who were arrested in mid-February on suspicion of supporting Islamist groups, including AQIM. The men were subsequently transported to the Bamako prison, according to HRW which interviewed the men there Mar. 20.

HRW said the two men probably died of excessive heat, given the lack of ventilation in the room in which they were held, possibly combined with the injuries they received from the earlier abuse, which included repeated beatings and burning. The surviving five were reportedly moved to a different room after the two deaths, HRW reported.

The deaths came amidst continuing reports of abuses against Tuaregs, Arabs, and Fulanis by Malian soldiers who returned to the north alongside French forces in their drive to oust AQIM and its allies. Since then, HRW’s Sahel expert Corinne Dufka told IPS, at least 13 members of the three minority communities have been summarily executed by Malian security forces and at least another 15 have “disappeared”.

“These abuses by the army in reconquering the north are exacerbating already existing ethnic tensions,” she said.

The chaos into which Mali descended began at the beginning of 2012 when MNLA, whose forces were fortified by returning and well-armed veterans of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s security forces, chased the Malian army out of the north, precipitating a military coup that ousted the democratically elected government in Bamako.

AQIM, initially a mainly Algerian movement that had dug deep roots into northern Mali after its defeat in Algeria’s civil war, was able to wrest control of most of the region from the MNLA by last June.

As its control spread over the succeeding months, Mali’s neighbours and Western countries, including the U.S., which had provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and training to Mali’s military as part of its Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership Initiative during the previous decade, became increasingly alarmed.

By December, the U.N. Security Council approved a plan for the eventual deployment of a West African force to take back the region. In January, however, one of AQIM’s affiliates launched an offensive southwards, triggering the France’s intervention.

French troops quickly took the region’s three most important towns – Gao, Timbuktu, and Kidal – paving the way for both the return of the Chadian army and contingents of the West African peacekeeping force (AFISMA).

French and Chadian forces, backed by U.S. intelligence assets, notably reconnaissance drones newly based in neighbouring Niger, then entered the northern-most part of Mali to pursue AQIM militants into their sanctuaries as part of the ongoing “war against terrorism”.

Militants have since staged a number of suicide attacks against
targets in the cities. According to the ICG report, the ability of AFISMA, which is likely to absorb the remaining French troops as part of a rehatted U.N. stabilisation mission, to maintain security for the civilian population is “unclear”, while a senior Pentagon officials testified here earlier this week that it was a “completely incapable force”.

Paris announced this week that about 100 of its 4,000-troop intervention force have pulled out – the start of a phased withdrawal that will leave about 1,000 French soldiers as part of the proposed stabilisation mission by the end of the year.

At the same time, a 550-man European Union (EU) mission began training Malian soldiers last week in hopes that they will eventually play a major role in defending the country against the AQIM threat. The mission is also aimed at reforming the military institution, including fighting endemic corruption and subordinating itself to civilian control.

Meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers here, notably Sen. John McCain, who just returned from a trip to Mali, are pressing the administration of President Barack Obama to restore and expand military aid to the Malian army. Direct U.S. military assistance to the army was cut off after the coup, and the administration appears more inclined to defer to the EU at this point.

The ICG report stressed that political initiatives are at least as important as military measures.

“Focusing on terrorism alone risks distracting from the main problems,” according to Comfort Ero, ICG’s Africa director. “Corruption and poor governance are more important causes of the crisis than the terrorist threat, the Tuareg issue, or even the north-south divide.”

“The challenges for the region and the U.N. are to align their positions on the political process and to insist that Malians, especially their elites assume responsibility for reversing bad governance and preventing another crisis,” she said.

HRW’s Dufka agreed, noting that Mali’s collapse last year showed that “its so-called democracy was built on very, very weak foundations …but should also illuminate the challenges it faces – addressing endemic corruption, strengthening rule-of-law institutions, and ending chronic human-rights abuse.

“Addressing the Tuareg problem is key to the future of stability in Mali,” she noted, adding that top priority should be given to returning the tens of thousands of Malians now living in refugee camps to their homes.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.