A fence guards a neighbourhood under construction in the Ariel settlement in the Occupied West Bank. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 2015 (IPS)

Just weeks after an 18-month-old baby was killed in an arson attack in the Palestinian village of Duma, located south of Nablus city in the Occupied West Bank, a United Nations special committee has blasted Israel’s policy of settlement expansion, saying it is the root cause of violence towards Palestinians.

In the first seven months of 2015, the U.N. has documented over 120 attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians living in the West Bank, including shootings, beatings, cutting down of fruit trees, poisoning of livestock and dumping of waste on Palestinian farmland.
Having completed their annual fact-finding mission to Jordan on Aug. 8, the same day that the father of the baby boy also succumbed to severe burns after settlers threw a fire bomb into the family’s home, the Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories stated it was “alarmed” at the escalation of violence towards Palestinians, blaming a “climate of impunity relating to the activities of settlers” for tragedies such as the attack on Jul. 31.

In a press release issued on Aug. 10, the committee revealed that testimony from a range of civil society groups and Palestinian officials all pointed to one conclusion: that until the government of Israel reigns in illegal settlement activity in the West Bank, the violence will likely continue.

According to the non-governmental organisation Peace Now, Israeli settlers in the West Bank currently number some 350,000, in addition to an estimated 300,000 settlers residing in parts of Jerusalem that Israel captured and illegally annexed from Jordan in 1967.

Settlements are primarily concentrated in a zone marked ‘Area C’, which accounts for 61 percent of the West Bank’s territory. Here, an estimated 60,000 Palestinians are squeezed into an ever-shrinking space, while new settlements further segregate and marginalize them in an already miniscule area.

Last year, Israel upped its annual spending on settlement activity in the West Bank to 100 million dollars, representing an increase of 600 percent from the previous year. Factor in settlement expenditure in the Golan Heights, and the number shoots up to 200 million dollars per year.

Peace Now says that since 2009 the Israeli government has approved bids for some 4,485 new units including houses, roads, industrial buildings and agricultural sites; in the last two years alone, two-thirds of fresh construction has taken place on the Palestinian side of a border agreed upon in the 2003 Geneva Initiative.

The U.N. has, on countless occasions, reiterated that the building of settlements on occupied land is illegal under international law. Despite repeated entreaties by a string of U.N. secretaries-general, including most recently Ban Ki-moon, there are now close to 220 Israeli settlements dotting the 2,100 square-mile West Bank.

According to one comprehensive report by the New York Times, these residences range from scrappy “hilltop outposts”, to sprawling cities that house their own universities and movie theatres.

The largest of these, an Orthodox enclave known as Modiin Illit, houses 60,000 residents and is growing at a terrific pace, recording 60 births every week in 2009.

The separation wall runs between the Israeli settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev and a Palestinian refugee camp. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS

Besides annexing Palestinian land and further fragmenting West Bank territory, settlement expansion has also contributed to a climate of impunity in which crimes against Palestinians – often at the hands of settlers themselves – continue unchecked.

A recent report by the Israeli rights group Yesh Din revealed that “only 7.4 percent of police investigations carried out by the SJ (Samaria and Judea) District Police into offenses committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians and Palestinian property in the West Bank have resulted in indictments against the suspects.”

The organisation says the figure is based on a sample of some 1,000 investigations carried out by the SJ District Police between 2005 and 2014. Many acts of violence and vandalism occur on Palestinian farmland, or on the outskirts of Palestinian villages.

Yesh Din has labeled these attacks as “a calculated strategy designed to restrict and dispossesses Palestinians of their land.”

In the first seven months of 2015 alone, the U.N. has documented over 120 attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians living in the West Bank. Reports by Yesh Din indicate that these violent incidents run the gamut from shootings and beatings, to running Palestinians over with vehicles.

Settlers also routinely attempt to destroy Palestinian farmland by cutting down trees, setting fields ablaze, damaging machinery or stealing and poisoning livestock.

Attacks on property account for 41 percent of all complaints filed, half of which involve the destruction of fruit trees. Since 1967, over 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted in the West Bank and Gaza.

Yesh Din also says that five percent of the SJ District Police’s investigative files “include the killing of farm animals, desecration of mosques and cemeteries, discharging of sewage into Palestinian farmland [and] dumping of waste on land belonging to Palestinians.”

A further 14 percent of criminal offenses against Palestinians involve settlers attempting to seize Palestinian land by practicing unauthorized cultivation, fencing off certain areas, illegally trespassing or setting up portable homes and greenhouses on the Palestinian side of the border.

Although the Israeli government often publically condemns settler violence, a quick look at the numbers paints a clearer picture of its policies: according to a comprehensive analysis of the settlements’ economic costs published by the Tel Aviv-based Macro Center for Political Economics in 2015, the state allocated 950 dollars to each Israeli resident in the West Bank in 2014, twice the amount spent on residents in larger cities like Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

Its expenditure on Israeli citizens in more isolated settlements amounted to 1,480 dollars per person last year.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, in the West Bank. Credit: Libertinus/ CC by 2.0

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Aug 28 2013 (IPS)

Israel and its domestic U.S. lobby are already in the early stages of the next 10-year aid package, which would not go into effect until 2017 and will be the first since Congress passed the Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008, which requires in part that U.S. military aid to Israel ensure that Israel maintains its “Qualitative Military Edge” (QME) over any combination of states and non-state actors.

QME has long been an understood negotiating principle between the United States and Israel, but now that it has been made law, the president is required to report to Congress every four years on Israel’s QME.

That requirement could be an important tool in the lobbying effort around renewing U.S. military aid to Israel, for while that aid is as certain as anything can be in Washington, increasing it currently faces some new obstacles.

“We’re looking at a holistic Mideastern picture, which includes growth of missile arsenals in Lebanon and Gaza,” Michael Oren, the outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the United States, told Defense News. He also pointed to the situations in the Sinai and Syria.

Israel does not oppose U.S. arms sales to “moderate” Arab states but insists that these sales be offset by higher quality sales to Israel. “If America doesn’t sell these weapons, others will,” Oren said. “We also understand the fact that each of these sales contributes to hundreds or thousands of American jobs. And we have an interest in a strong and vital American economy.”

Yet the fact that the U.S. economy remains depressed and its recovery slow has already affected aid to Israel. The sequester, or mandatory budget cuts effective earlier this year, sparked debate within pro-Israel lobbying groups about whether to push for Israel’s aid package to be exempted from the cuts.

The debate highlighted the concern American pro-Israel groups feel about balancing their mission to advocate for a foreign country while not wishing to appear more concerned for that country than their own.

Contradictory finances

Historically, aid to Israel has continued apace during difficult economic times in the United States. But this time, other factors could raise some eyebrows.

The 2008 law, for instance, makes no mention of Israel’s own responsibility to ensure its QME. Rather, it places the onus on the United States to balance arms sales to meet Israel’s needs and uphold Israel’s QME."Israel wants the extra aid but doesn't really need it."
-- Stephen Walt

Israel cut its defence budget in 2013, and the reduction of over 820 million dollars, which is more than 25 percent of the annual aid it currently receives, might raise the question of how Israel can request increased aid while reducing its own budget.

That question is bolstered by the fact that an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report issued in May projected 3.9 percent growth in Israeli gross domestic product (GDP) for 2013 and 3.4 percent for 2014. The average for OECD countries for those two years is 1.2 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively.

As Oren indicated, as the United States moves from one financial crisis to another, these conditions could present political problems for lobbyists pushing for more aid. The fact that Israel’s QME is now mandated by law, however, bolsters those lobbyists’ efforts. They no longer have to argue whether the United States should commit additional resources to assure the QME, because the law now demands it.

Settlements

The cuts in defence while Israel’s GDP rises are not the only contradiction Israel needs to overcome in making its case for increased aid. There is also the spectre of settlements in the West Bank.

For years the United States has largely turned a blind eye to ongoing settlement construction in the West Bank, merely criticising them as “obstacles to peace” but taking little action to press Israel to stop their spread.

Secretary of State John Kerry is currently trying to manage ongoing construction, which had been the sticking point preventing the Palestinian Authority from engaging in renewed peace talks, against Palestinian concerns that the spread of settlements moots the peace process.

But the settlements raise another question in the context of the aid request. If the United States objects to settlements and sees them as hurting peace prospects, should it not expect Israel to prioritise its own defence spending, which, given the circumstances Oren described, would seem to be more imperative, over spending on settlements?

The cost of settlements is unclear. In 2005, the Israeli government commissioned an investigation into government funding of so-called “illegal outposts”, settlements established without government authorisation.

The report produced from that investigation concluded that from 2000-2004, the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing officially spent around 20 million dollars on these unauthorised outposts.

The report’s author, Talia Sasson, bemoaned the impossibility of obtaining complete information and suggested that “the actual sum considerably exceeds the one mentioned,” given that “the sum also does not include money the Ministry of Construction and Housing paid for infrastructure, public buildings and planning in unauthorised” outposts.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2011, official spending on Israeli-authorised settlements increased by 38 percent over the previous year, reaching well over 400 million dollars.

That sort of increase in the face of a request for additional aid gives advocates for peace a potentially useful tool, according to Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

“Israel’s demand for a 10-year guarantee gives Obama and Kerry a useful bit of leverage, if they have the political will to use it,” Walt told IPS. “They should make it clear that Israel will get this guarantee if and only if it ends settlement expansion and agrees to the creation of a viable Palestinian state.”

“This is useful leverage because Israel wants the extra aid but doesn’t really need it,” Walt added. “It would retain its military edge for many years even if the U.S. stopped sending any aid at all.  So Obama and Kerry could use this pressure without actually endangering Israel’s security; indeed, by pushing Israel to end the occupation, they would in fact be enhancing it.”

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was originally established to promote U.S. aid to Israel, a purpose that remains at the heart of its advocacy.

Congress, where AIPAC’s influence is by far the strongest, must ultimately decide whether the president is fulfilling the commitment in the 2008 law to ensure Israel’s QME. That law is likely to play a crucial role in overcoming what appear to be more barriers to increased aid than AIPAC is accustomed to.

A new neighbourhood under construction in the West Bank's Ariel settlement. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Against the backdrop of two major announcements of Israeli settlement expansion, U.S.-brokered peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians resumed Thursday in Jerusalem.

The talks are the result of an intense effort by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to overcome the impasse that has kept talks frozen for nearly three years.

After preliminary meetings in Washington two weeks ago, the parties commenced what is expected to be a nine-month process of talks. But on Sunday, Israel announced that it was moving forward with plans to build nearly 1,200 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Many observers believe the timing was meant to forestall heavy opposition to peace talks from within Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Israeli Housing Minister Uri Ariel, a leading pro-settlement hawk, made the view of his faction very clear.

“We will build thousands of homes in the coming year in Judea and Samaria,” Ariel said on Israeli radio, using the biblical term for the West Bank. “No one dictates where we can build … This is just the first course.”

But the timing was aggravating to the Palestinians, who are taking a major political risk by engaging again in peace talks without an explicit Israeli promise to stop settlement construction. This was the sticking point for the Palestinians when they discontinued talks with the Israeli government three years ago, as Palestinian anger at many years of talks while settlements expanded and multiplied neared a boiling point.

Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, says that the problem is the massive imbalance of power between them and Israel.

“It is the Palestinian leadership’s participation in talks under these conditions that would appear to make the least sense, as evidenced by them now having to digest Israel’s new settlement announcements,” he wrote in an op-ed for Al Jazeera.

“Only if the Palestinians at least start to address the asymmetry could they gain from being in negotiations. Indeed, the only chance that the talks themselves will produce anything positive is if the Israeli-Palestinian power imbalance begins to shift.”

Palestinian embarrassment was magnified even more on Monday when Israel announced another 890 units would be built in the settlement of Gilo in East Jerusalem.

Gilo is a particularly sensitive settlement, as Palestinians contend its ongoing expansion is strangling the adjacent Palestinian city of Beit Jala. Israel considers it an integral part of Israeli Jerusalem, despite the fact that it lies beyond the 1967 border.

“It is clear that the Israeli government is deliberately attempting to sabotage U.S. and international efforts to resume negotiations,” Palestinian negotiator Mohammad Shtayyeh told the Associated Press. “Israel continues to use peace negotiations as a smoke screen for more settlement construction.”

Yet Shtayyeh and the rest of the Palestinian negotiating team reported to the talks on Tuesday as scheduled.

The settlement announcements, as well as rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli attacks on the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip in recent days have complicated Kerry’s work. But he said that he had convinced Palestinians President Mahmoud Abbas to stick with the talks because Abbas “is committed to continuing to come to the negotiation because he believes that negotiation is what will resolve this issue.”

While at a stop in Colombia, Kerry addressed the settlement issue, which he said the United States had been apprised of in advance. “As the world, I hope, knows, the United States of America views all the settlements as illegitimate. We have communicated that policy to all of our friends in Israel.”

Kerry seems determined to keep talks going, and certainly gives the impression of matching that determination with a belief that he can succeed despite difficult conditions and the recent obstacles.

While he primarily endeavored to prevent the settlement expansion from derailing the talks, he also, according to reports, communicated the same message to Netanyahu that he gave publicly in Colombia.

Kerry’s efforts have raised hopes among the backers of a two-state solution to the conflict.

Jessica Rosenblum, spokeswoman for the “pro-Israel, pro-Peace” U.S. lobbying group J Street, told IPS that, “The serious and sustained engagement of the administration in achieving a two-state resolution early enough in President Obama’s second term when they still have the time and influence to get it done is a potential game changer.

“What strikes me most about Secretary Kerry’s response is his zealous desire to safeguard the negotiations themselves and give them the space they need to take root and ultimately bear fruit,” Rosenblum added.

Israel released 26 long-term Palestinian prisoners ahead of the talks on Tuesday. The move was highly controversial in Israel, but the Palestinians needed a dramatic gesture to legitimise their participation in talks and this was seen as easier than a settlement freeze.

That decision, which engendered passionate protests by Israeli citizens, shows just how concerned Netanyahu is about the power of the settlers.

Even J Street acknowledges how formidable this obstacle can be, though even there, Rosenblum sees some hope. “Netanyahu has got a serious problem with the settler movement that will only grow worse as the negotiations progress,” she said.

“It’s clear that in order to make the concessions necessary to reach a two-state solution, the prime minister will have to form a new coalition that does not include his far-right flank. The good news for him is that he has already lined up MKs [members of the Knesset] willing to join a coalition that is actively pursuing a two-state solution, so the possibility of his government falling need not weigh in his considerations. “

The current wave of settlement expansion reflects a “map of national priorities,” which Israel released on Aug. 4. That map included funding for many settlements, including some outside the major settlement blocs.

So, despite the very real hope that Kerry’s efforts have engendered in some quarters, observers like former advisor to Ariel Sharon, Dov Weisglass, are more cynical.

“Economic benefits to isolated settlements scattered deep within the Palestinian territories undermine the possibility of an agreement and make a mockery of the Israeli government’s peace rhetoric,” Weisglass wrote in an op-ed in a leading Israeli daily.

That view seems to be well in the majority, on all sides.

Eid Jahalin. Credit: Lucy Westcott/IPS

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, May 30 2013 (IPS)

For thousands of years the Bedouin people have made their home in the desert of what is now Israel. But for almost the last six decades, the Bedouin have been on the move, repeatedly relocated to make room for Israeli settlements.

As the Bedouin fight to be recognised as an indigenous people by Israel, Eid Jahalin, 49, who lives in the desert near the Jerusalem area, is advocating for them. Jahalin believes that “land without people” is Israel’s sole focus, while the Bedouin’s vast knowledge about living in the desert, practiced over centuries and crucial to preserve with climate change looming, stands to be lost."Many children, some eight and younger, have diseases after being born next to the garbage dump." – Eid Jahalin

IPS correspondent Lucy Westcott spoke to Jahalin, who was in New York City and the United Nations for the first time, about the current state of the Bedouin and how their relocation impacts climate change.

Q: What are the most recent developments by the Israeli government concerning relocation of the Bedouin?

A: The Israeli government is continuing with the same proposals, the same project, and they’re working faster. There is no pressure on Israel and nobody is stopping the plan.

A few days ago there was resistance to the plan because when it was published at the beginning of last week, the settlers talked about a Bedouin city in Nuweimeh. The settlers said they don’t want to give a “prize” to the Bedouin when they have been told, because of Secretary of State John Kerry, who recently visited Israel, that they have to stop their settlement plans.

Moshe Ya-alon, the minister of defence, is new and he said he will study the Bedouin relocation plan, so at the moment there’s a little less pressure. I believe that the government and settlers are working together, that they’re partners. When there is pressure and the government is stuck in the mud, then they activate the settlers, and then they say it’s the settlers. What they can’t do, they get the settlers to do.

Q: How long has this situation been going on for?

A: It’s been going on since 1967. From 1967-78, it was only an issue with the army, who would take land and declare it as a military zone. A year and a half later they would give that land to the settlers. After 1978 began all the chaos with the settlers.

The last major forced displacement was in 1997-8 and almost 2,000 people were displaced. During that time, there was a process of taking those families and people and putting them in containers, leaving them next to the garbage dump. To this day, there are some people who don’t have money who are still living there, in tin shacks.

Q: What is the situation like for the Bedouin in 2013?

A: One of the worst problems is that many children, some eight and younger, have diseases after being born next to the garbage dump, that not even Hadassah, the main Israeli hospital in Jerusalem, recognises. There is one family – a mother, father and three children – that have this disease, and nobody knows what it is. Hospitals have said it’s the first time they’ve seen this disease and it’s unusual. The children are sick to this day, staying at home with the parents.

If you go down to Jerusalem from the Bedouin valley you’ll see Bedouin living next to the side of the roads. The government pressured the Bedouin: they can’t be on the desert on either side of the road, so they’re only able to be next to the road. If you allowed them, if you gave permission, you wouldn’t find one Bedouin next to the road. The Bedouin don’t always need to be near the road for communication and transport.

Q: What has your contact with the Israeli authorities been like?

A: If only the Israeli government would leave the Bedouin alone. They’ve closed access to the road for the school, for the whole community, and that’s their help?

The government won’t allow us to have any access to natural spring water, and if a Bedouin goes out into the desert, they take you to court and put you in prison with a fine of 1,000 to 2,000 shekels. The desert is the natural place for Bedouin, but the government won’t allow it. They’re closing the Bedouin off as though we’re people in a box.

And if they, the Israeli government, say ‘we’re helping the Indigenous people,’ I want to hear one example.

Q: What specialised knowledge about living in the desert do the Bedouin stand to lose with continued relocation?

A: A month ago, for example, I was down in the JordanValley in Jericho, and everybody was complaining about the unusually extreme heat. When I went home, none of my family was complaining about the heat because as Bedouin, we’re used to the heat and know when to go in the sun and when not, when there is danger in the desert and when there’s no danger.

In New York, I don’t know exactly where I am, but if I’m in the desert, I know everything. The weather is changing these days, but now we have to think forward and think what needs to be done. Because I live in the desert, it’s easy for me to deal with the changes, not like in the city or in villages.

This planet is a very small ball. If somebody makes a problem or damages on one side, then we feel it on the other, so we have to protect the land.

Q: As this is your first time at the United Nations, what do you hope the community will learn about the situation of the Bedouin people?

A: I hope they learn a lot. We hope to shine a red light on the situation of Bedouin, what’s happening to them, and the situation of global warming. I came here to alert the world to that.

Excerpt:

Israeli soldiers and police block Palestinians from one of the entrances to the old city in Jerusalem. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

Despite indications that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is committing a substantial amount of time and effort to revive the long-stalled Israel-Palestinian “peace process”, a growing number of experts believe a two-state solution is no longer viable and the lack of a realistic discussion of the issue in the United States is leaving the country without an alternative policy.

In the two months since confirmation in his post, Kerry has made three trips to the region. On Monday, he hosted an Arab League delegation, including the League’s secretary general, the Qatari prime minister and representatives from the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and Lebanon."Obama’s failure makes it clear that the U.S. will never be an honest broker." -- Harvard's Stephen Walt

The meeting was aimed at renewing the long-dormant Arab Peace Initiative (API), which promises full normalisation of relations between Israel and all Arab League member states in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967 and a “just resolution” of the Palestinian refugee issue.

Kerry hopes that the API can serve to get Israeli-Palestinian negotiations back on track.

But those efforts may yet be for naught, according to analysts, some of whom have long championed the two-state solution but who now believe that a combination of U.S. fecklessness and Israel’s establishment of “facts on the ground” in the predominantly Palestinian West Bank have made such a settlement impossible.

“The U.S. public has bought a narrative that is totally dishonest and misrepresents the obvious facts – and what can be more obvious that there can be no peace process if you simultaneously steal the land in question,” Henry Siegman, former national director of the now-defunct American Jewish Congress and current senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the US/Middle East Project, said at a recent talk hosted by the Middle East Institute in the halls of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“But the reason the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of the Israeli position is that it is uninformed on geography and world affairs… So it is not surprising that the public accepts a narrative that is totally unrelated to facts on the ground,” he said.

The effect of that distorted narrative is to cripple the United States’ ability to act as an honest broker in this conflict, Siegman said.

“It was always assumed that the United States’ great friendship and support for Israel meant at some point it would say ‘enough’ because if you cross this line, we can no longer invoke our common values – apartheid is not a common value. But the other reason for our failures is that presidents and Congress have never had the courage to act on that reality.”

Philip Weiss, editor of the anti-Zionist web site, Mondoweiss, clarified the reason for that inactivity, and contended that the key place to try and change things is within the U.S. Jewish community.

“The U.S. has allowed this to happen despite knowing Israeli ambitions (to control all of the West Bank) due to the Israel Lobby,” Weiss said. “The Lobby draws its strength from the U.S. Jewish community’s commitment to Zionism… Zionism was once a valid response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. But the need for Israel to be a Jewish state leads inevitably to the excesses of occupation.”

Professor Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and co-author of the controversial book, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, identified the United States as a major reason for the current impasse.

“The failure of the two-state solution means we have to start considering alternatives,” Walt said. “For the past 15 years or so, the two-state solution was the consensus of the foreign policy community. The problem is that this goal is further away than ever.

“Many believe it is now impossible, due to settlements, the Israeli drift to right and the split [between Fatah and Hamas] among the Palestinians.

“[President Barack] Obama’s failure makes it clear that the U.S. will never be honest broker…That’s why we need alternatives. People will want to know what the U.S. is in favour of instead.”

The “failures” Walt spoke of are not limited to Obama’s first term. Despite a well-received speech during Obama’s first presidential visit to Jerusalem as well as two trips to Israel by Kerry, the divide between Israel and the Palestinians seems more entrenched than ever.

Reports from Israel after Kerry’s visit earlier this month indicated that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Kerry’s formula for dealing with borders and security first as a way to restart talks with the Palestinians.

This cannot be surprising, as Netanyahu’s own party, Likud, as well as two of his three major coalition partners, the Israel Beiteinu and The Jewish Home parties, are strong supporters of the settlement franchise.

Kerry’s strategy to encourage progress through Palestinian economic growth was deeply undermined by the resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad just after that same visit.

While Kerry insisted that his economic initiative was not meant to replace a political peace process, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisted on focusing on the political issues such as Israeli settlements and the fates of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

Even Kerry’s attempt to build on the progress Obama made in rekindling diplomacy between Israel and Turkey by asking Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan to postpone a planned trip to Gaza was met with refusal and a sharp rebuke of Kerry from Turkey.

All of this suggests that there is no hope on the immediate horizon. Secretary Kerry testified before a Senate subcommittee recently and said there was a window of only one to two years for the two-state solution, and given the lack of opportunity now, this is strong evidence for the position that the path to two states is indeed closed.

In a clear signal of the international community’s frustration with the U.S.’s failure to find any progress in the conflict, a recent letter signed by 19 former European prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers urges European Union Foreign Affairs Representative Catherine Ashton to take immediate action to save the two-state solution.

“European leaders cannot wait forever for action from the United States,” the letter says, while advocating a clear EU statement that all Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 borders are illegal and calling for stronger efforts to unify the divided Palestinian leadership, among other measures.

Bab Al-Shams, the first tent encampment erected by Palestinian activists. Credit: Andreas Hackl/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
JERUSALEM, Apr 13 2013 (IPS)

Tent cities are being set up by Palestinians all over the West Bank to protest against Israeli settlements, building on a protest during the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama last month.

Holding signs reading ‘Obama: you are on the wrong side of history’ and ‘Obama: you promised hope and change – you gave us colonies and apartheid’, dozens of Palestinian activists set up tents on a hillside just outside of Jerusalem during Obama’s first official visit to Israel last month.

The tent village aimed to draw international attention to continued Israeli settlement building, and to unwavering U.S. support for Israeli policies. It was established in an area of the West Bank known as E-1, where Israel plans to expand the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim settlement.

Activists said in a statement that the village was a step “to claim our right as Palestinians to return to our lands and villages” and “to claim our sovereignty over our lands without permission from anyone.”

Hundreds of Palestinian activists built the first tent encampment called Bab Al-Shams, literally ‘Gate of the Sun’, on privately owned Palestinian land in the E-1 corridor in January. Despite being violently dispersed by Israeli police and soldiers a few days after it was established, Bab Al-Shams inspired the building of even more tent villages throughout the West Bank.

In February, tents were erected in the West Bank village Burin, the site of frequent Israeli settler attacks against Palestinian residents, and then near the southern West Bank town Yatta.

“Our hope is to encourage more and more of this and to build a national movement that brings Palestinians from different parts of Palestine, not only the West Bank, but also the Galilee and other places, to help each other stay on their land,” said Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian activist who participated in setting up many of the tent villages.

The author of ‘Popular Resistance in Palestine’, Qumsiyeh told IPS that the idea behind the tent villages builds on decades of Palestinian steadfastness in resisting Israeli efforts to displace them from their lands. “It’s not a new phenomenon,” Qumsiyeh said.

“There are six million Palestinians still living (here) after 90 years of ethnic cleansing, 90 years the Zionist movement tried to basically remove Palestinians from their land. The fact that they stayed is a form of resistance.”

According to a recent survey conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research of 1,270 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 71 percent of respondents believed that “creating facts on the ground, such as the placement of tent encampments in area C, would be an effective means of confronting settlement expansion and protecting land threatened by settlers.”

According to Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a leader in the West Bank village Bil’in, which has held weekly demonstrations against the Israeli wall and settlements for eight years, the tent encampments represent a new strategy in Palestinian non-violent resistance.

“We try to use creative ideas and new ideas. We try to build our tents, using this type of non-violent resistance, to stop the plans of the Israelis of building settlements,” Abu Rahmah, who helped build several of the tent villages, told IPS.

“We know about the danger of the plan in E1, in the area of Bab Al-Shams; if the Israelis continue this plan, it will destroy the dream of Palestinians for independence and their country.”"The fact that they stayed is a form of resistance."

Dena Qaddumi is an architect, and co-founder of arenaofspeculation.org, a website dedicated to exploring spatial resistance in Israel-Palestine. She told IPS that the tent encampments signal a less reactionary form of Palestinian resistance, especially since they sparked critical discussions both locally and internationally.

“Every day, Palestinians are spatially resisting in their particular localities but thus far it has been difficult to bring this together en masse so that they not only make international headlines, but expand the imagination – and this is critical – of Palestinians in Palestine and outside. On this latter point we can say (the tent villages were) a success.”

She said that uniting Palestinians across physical space – Israel bars Palestinians from the West Bank from going to the Gaza Strip, and vice-versa, for example – is something Palestinians must address.

“We need to find ways to overcome these spatial constraints. Finding a way to bridge these spatial realities together and narrate the injustice of this situation is paramount.”

Rehabilitation efforts have allowed 10,000 Palestinians to return to the old city of Hebron. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
HEBRON, Occupied West Bank, Dec 29 2012 (IPS)

Every day, Anas Maraka sees his family’s home, but can’t go inside. “It’s hardest for my grandfather,” said Maraka, referring to the house overlooking Shuhada Street, once the central marketplace in Hebron’s old city.

While he never lived there himself, Maraka explained that being so close – and yet, so far – from his family’s ancestral home motivates him to maintain Palestinians’ presence in the largest, and one of the most tense and volatile, cities in the West Bank.

“I like the old city. It’s our culture. Our goal is to rehabilitate houses in the old city and bring people back to abandoned houses. We want to improve the quality of life,” explained Maraka, a member of the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC).

Maraka told IPS that in 15 years of work, HRC has refurbished approximately 900 houses in the old city of Hebron. This rehabilitation, he said, has allowed some 10,000 Palestinians to return to the area.

“After the Second Intifada, most people left their houses. They were afraid to go back because of the Israeli settlers and the Israeli military. They can’t live easily in the old city, but we’re trying to bring them back. We can’t leave this area because the settlers would come to take the houses,” Maraka said.

According to a 2006 survey conducted by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, over 1,000 Palestinian homes were abandoned and over 1,800 shops were closed in the centre of Hebron as a result of Israeli restrictions in the area. This represents about 42 percent of homes, and 77 percent of businesses, that were originally used by the city’s occupants.

Currently, about 500 Jewish-Israeli settlers live in five settlements in the heart of Hebron in an area known as H2; their presence there is protected by thousands of Israeli police and soldiers.

Some 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinians also live in the old city, where they face a myriad of movement restrictions and a near-constant threat of harassment and violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers.

On Dec. 12, an Israeli border police officer shot and killed 17-year-old Hebron resident Muhammad al-Salaymeh at an Israeli checkpoint near the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron’s old city.

Officials said al-Salaymeh threatened soldiers with a gun. The alleged weapon later turned out to be a toy. Violent clashes broke out between the Israeli military and Palestinian youth in the volatile neighbourhood after the killing.

“We want to keep Palestinians living in this area and to keep resisting. It’s an important place in all of the West Bank. It’s difficult still, but we’re trying to help as much as we can,” Maraka said.

Historic buildings have been refurbished and renovated throughout Palestine for decades. Today, entire villages and towns are being rehabilitated. These efforts are seen as a way to insist on the Palestinian character of the area and to maintain Palestine’s unique, cultural heritage, according to Palestinian architect and planner Iyad Issa.

“It’s part of our history, part of our identity,” said Issa, who works with ‘Riwaq’, a Ramallah-based centre for architectural conservation, adding that rehabilitating buildings provides people with a lasting “visual memory and a tangible cultural heritage.”

Issa told IPS that Riwaq has documented some 50,000 historic buildings in Palestine that need conservation. To date, about 100 buildings in 90 different Palestinian villages have been refurbished, while four villages in the West Bank are currently undergoing overall reconstruction.

“It is a creative way to use the space. It provides social (and) cultural infrastructure and creates new functions for the (local) community,” Issa said, explaining that architectural value and social impact are the two main criteria used to select a building for conservation.

The Palestinian town of Birzeit, just north of Ramallah, is an example of a community that has benefited from overall rehabilitation. The town counts some 200 historic buildings, including over 100 in the historic old city, with some dating back to the Mamluk era.

After the Birzeit University campus moved, leaving dozens of buildings unoccupied, rehabilitation reinvigorated social and economic development, and brought tourism back to the town.

Still, according to Issa, keeping the focus on smaller, more isolated Palestinian communities is crucial, as is making sure that local residents use the buildings for their own needs.

“People in villages are quite marginalised. This heritage belongs to the community and should be used by the community,” he said. “Renovation is a process to see what’s possible, to envision a better future.”

(END)

Israel's proposed project ‘E1’ would sever occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Dec 20 2012 (IPS)

While the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip hasn’t been so quiet for the past two decades, it’s now the turn of the occupied West Bank to show signs of eruption.

As Hamas tries to export its resistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) territories, President Mahmoud Abbas’ repeated warnings of a third, yet “peaceful”, Intifada in the absence of peace talks might finally materialise.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Hamas was founded in Gaza while the first Intifada (1987 to 1991) against the Israeli occupation erupted. The uprising was dubbed, retrospectively, the “stones Intifada” for it contrasted with the second “armed” Intifada (2000 to 2005).

In commemoration of the anniversary, rallies were organised in the West Bank on Friday by the Islamist movement and, a first since Hamas overthrew the PA in Gaza in 2007, authorised by Abbas.

Hamas had celebrated the anniversary of its creation in Gaza a week earlier, greeting Khaled Meshal’s first-time visit to the embattled strip of land with grand rallies.

Abbas’s Fatah party dignitaries in Gaza were allowed to welcome the head of the Hamas politburo. And in the wake of Israel’s eight-day military operation on Hamas in Gaza, Abbas ordered the release of Hamas activists imprisoned in PA jails.

So would these commemorations signal a thaw in relations between the competitive nationalist and Islamist groups?

Not necessarily.

On the face of it, add Israel’s onslaught on Hamas and Hamas’s self-declared victory to Abbas’s United Nations statehood triumph, and the competing national and Islamist groups, now on equal popularity footing, would seem to want to mend their five-year schism.

But when on Friday thousands of Hamas supporters assembled in the main cities of the West Bank, displaying, in a sea of green Islamic flags adorned with Quran inscriptions, the true potency of the Islamic Resistance Movement in PA-administered territories, they were contained by Abbas’ security forces.

In Hebron, demonstrators attempted to cross the Israeli-controlled ‘H1’ sector of the divided city to confront Israeli troops stationed there. Instead, they ended up battling Palestinian policemen in the Palestinian-administered ‘H2’ sector.

Yet, the Israeli defence establishment fears that Palestinians are on the brink of another Intifada in the West Bank, not just against Israel’s occupation and settlement policy but for de facto (in addition to de jure) independence of their upgraded state – this, despite the fact that Abbas’s modus operandi has proven fundamentally non-violent.

After all, Abbas outspokenly criticised the violence of the second Intifada, which, in effect, ended in 2005 when he was elected president. Since then, he’s been steadily and convincingly opposing armed resistance by Palestinian guerrillas.

Actually, security cooperation between Israel and the PA was reinforced (with little U.S. prodding) to unmitigated heights – to the extent that for the past seven years, the West Bank has been remarkably peaceful – until the last two weeks.

Why then would Abbas tolerate, even support, a new upheaval, or at least ride on its wave?

The U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) recognition of Palestine as “non-member observer state” last month enthused his West Bank constituency. But the next day, the elation turned to frustration and anger, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the UNGA vote by boosting Israel’s settlement enterprise.

His cabinet approved the construction of 3,000 housing units and furthered the planning procedures for thousands of additional units in and around East Jerusalem, especially in an area designated as ‘E1’.

If implemented, project ‘E1’ would sever occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank, and thus would make the establishment of the capital of the future Palestinian state in the holy city virtually impossible.

That’s when the Israeli military comes into play.

Signs of eruption had hardly been noticeable. Weekly and largely peaceful demonstrations against Israel’s notorious separation wall, which dissects chunks of the West Bank, were staged as usual in the villages of Ni’lin, Bi’lin and Kfar Qaddoum.

But the Israeli military top brass paid attention to the changes on the ground.

Two Palestinians were killed in the West Bank while protesting the Israeli military operation. In Hebron, a soldier was slapped by a Palestinian security officer. And in Kfar Qaddoum this time, troops chose to run away from Palestinian stone throwers.

Filmed by Palestinian activists, the Kfar Qaddoum incident went viral on the web and, as a result, in the Israeli media.

There were those who, in fear of losing their military’s deterrence, advocated an uncompromising ‘iron fist’ policy against Palestinian demonstrators; other commentators, a minority, praised the Israel Defence Forces’ ‘soft glove’ policy for their “heroic restraint”.

“It’s better to accept embarrassment and criticism than to cause fatalities, to risk (…) an international trial and to inflict diplomatic damage. Restraint is power; restraint in the presence of cameras is also common sense,” stated an editorial in the liberal daily Haaretz in reaction to the “humiliating” YouTube clips.

The Israeli media spill-over also focused on the declaration attributed to “a high-rank Israeli officer”. “It’s our duty,” he declared, “to act proportionately and fire a weapon only as last resort. We don’t want to hurt non-combatants and fire indiscriminately.”

Yet, despite the intended rules of engagement, a Palestinian teenager was killed on Wednesday by a female soldier from the paramilitary Border Police unit at a checkpoint near Hebron.

The Israeli military fear the risk that they might lose control, or that Abbas might lose ground.

The first Intifada was a popular uprising, which the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, then in exile in Tunis under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, joined belatedly. When Arafat tried to “ride” the second Intifada “tiger”, he failed.

Two years after the start of the “Arab Spring”, the risk of a third Palestinian uprising is precisely what Abbas might want Israelis to believe – if only to deter Netanyahu from adopting more “punitive” measures, and to try to influence Israeli public opinion ahead of the January general elections that, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, peace talks must be resumed.