The homes of Palestinians, public buildings, cars, property and service infrastructure were damaged or destroyed during an Israeli military attack on Jenin in the occupied West Bank earlier this month. Photo credit: UNRWA

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jul 28 2023 (IPS)

The likelihood of further confrontations remains high following a major Israeli military assault on an impoverished camp of more than 23,500 Palestinian refugees in Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank earlier this month. The landlocked Palestinian territory, located between Israel to the west and Jordan to the east, has been illegally occupied, according to international law, following the invasion by Israel 56 years ago.

“The destruction I saw was shocking. Some houses were completely burned down; cars had been crushed against walls …I saw the trauma in the eyes of camp residents who had witnessed the violence. I heard them speak about their exhaustion and fear,” Leni Stenseth, Deputy Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the near East (UNRWA), stated after visiting Jenin on 9 July.

There have been numerous Israeli incursions into Jenin this year, and authorities claim the air and ground invasion on 3-5 July was to target Palestinian militant groups believed responsible for attacks on Israelis. Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli were killed, 900 homes damaged or destroyed, services decimated, and thousands displaced.

The military raid followed the death of four Israeli settlers by an armed Palestinian in the region in June. “Over the past hours, our security forces have been operating against terror hotspots in the city of Jenin,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on 3 July. Palestinian resistance groups have since strengthened their rhetoric. Israel intended “to kill any resistance, and they have failed in that 100 percent”, a Jenin Brigades spokesperson told the international media. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim the West Bank as part of their homelands.

Palestinian armed resistance groups have grown in the region in response to Israel’s harsh military occupation. Most Palestinians in the West Bank are refugees living with chronic poverty, unemployment, human rights abuses, deprivation of civil liberties and statelessness. All of this is especially acute for youth in long-term displacement camps.

“I am not surprised at what happened in Jenin. After 30 years [since the 1993 Oslo Accords], there is no plan for them [people of Jenin], no development and no political agreement. They are losing the future and losing hope,” Jawad Al Malhi, a Palestinian living in the West Bank, said in an interview with IPS.

The overcrowded Jenin camp, established in 1953, is home to three generations of Palestinians who were evicted from their home villages during the ‘Nakba’ of 1948. The ‘Nakba’ refers to the widespread dispossession of Palestinians of their traditional lands and villages during the formation of the Israeli state. It has a population density of 56,000 people per square kilometre.

Shu’fat refugee camp is home to 120,000 Palestinian refugees on the outskirts of East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. Credit: Jawad Al Malhi

In June, a United Nations special committee on Palestinian human rights in occupied territories reported that Palestinian fatalities at the hands of Israeli authorities in the West Bank in the first five months of this year had skyrocketed by 124 percent compared to the same period last year.

The Israel-Palestine conflict, in its 75th year, is one of the world’s longest. But the West Bank, which was governed by Jordan, became a battleground when Israel seized it and annexed East Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Successive Israeli governments have ignored condemnation of its occupation by the international community.

In further defiance, Israeli settlers have been encouraged to build permanent homes in the West Bank. And settler attacks on neighbouring Palestinian communities, involving physical assault and desecration of homes and property, have occurred with impunity for years. From 2020-2022, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians rose by 137 percent, reports the UN. The trend is unlikely to reverse following the election last year of a new hardline Israeli Government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has pledged to harden its hold on the West Bank.

The erosion of Palestinian rights and hope of the West Bank becoming the site of their future state has deepened the loss felt by those living in its many refugee camps. One of these is Shu’fat, a sprawling warren of congested buildings that are being built higher as each generation tries to live within its boundaries on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was established as a refugee camp in 1965 and is now flanked on one side by the Israeli separation or ‘apartheid’ wall.

Jawad Al Malhi was born in Shu’fat after his family, who were evicted from their village, moved there in 1966. His home is a few hundred metres from the narrow checkpoint, manned by armed Israeli soldiers, which he and other residents are forced to negotiate daily to go to the shops, the hospital and access public services and schools for their children.

The challenges of life have only intensified with the rapid growth of Shu’fat’s population. “In the 1980s, there were about 10,000 people living in Shu’fat, but now there are 120,000 people here. So, you no longer see the light; you don’t see the sun because of the higher buildings. There is no space, and it is difficult to walk anywhere. There are no places for cars and no places for people,” Al Malhi described, adding that life in the camp “has definitely got a lot worse over the last decade.”

The video, ‘Gas Station’ (2009), created by Jawad Al Malhi, portrays the reality of young Palestinian lives within the confines of Shu’fat camp. Credit: Jawad Al Malhi

Now in his fifties, Jawad has spent most of his life making art about life in the camp and the human experience of occupation. And he has been a dedicated art teacher to children in the camp. He described a video he made in Shu’fat, called the ‘Gas Station’, which gave an insight into the lives of Palestinian youth today. The video records the lives of young men working in a small gas station on the camp’s margins. As the hours pass and the day turns to night, their interactions around a pre-fabricated cabin and petrol tank unfold in an endless cycle of waiting. Time changes, but crucially nothing else does.

“Among the younger generation, there is now more distrust and suspicion [of people and the world]. Young people have a dream to leave the camp, but they can’t leave. It is very difficult for youths to build healthy social lives and relationships,” Al Malhi said. Unemployment among Palestinian youth is estimated at 30 percent.

Haneen Kinani of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy in Brussels told IPS that most of the younger generation “have never seen life without siege, raids and a brutal Israeli military regime that dehumanises them.”

Evidence of growing discontent among younger Palestinians is fuelled by numerous factors, including the failure of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, the absence of any tangible peace process and the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian Authority, responsible for administering Palestinian-held areas of the West Bank, to address Israel’s actions.

“At present, there are no prospects of a political solution. The Israeli Government has no willingness to engage and has no policy beyond possible formal annexation of parts of the West Bank. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority is too weak to be able to negotiate anything,” John Strawson, a Law Professor at the University of East London, told IPS.

Some nations, such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, have called for Israel to cease its aggressive settlement building, seen as a spur to violence. But commentators point to the unwavering support Israel receives from the United States as a major factor in its ongoing impunity.

Nasser Mashni, President of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, said it was time for this to change. “The UN and individual countries should be taking immediate and decisive action, as it has shown is possible with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Israel must be subject to UN and international sanctions until it abides by and meets its obligations under international law,” he told IPS.

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Karam and Adam, twin Palestinian babies born after their mother underwent IFV treatment using sperm smuggled out of the Israeli prison where their father has been held for the last 11 years. Credit: Silvia Boarini/IPS

By Silvia Boarini
GAZA CITY, Jul 31 2015 (IPS)

Thirteen-year-old Hula Khadoura sits on a large sofa in her grandfather’s home in the neighbourhood of Tuffah, Gaza City, her one-year-old twin brothers Karam and Adam on her lap. “I am so happy they arrived,” she beams, holding the babies’ feeding bottles in her hands.

There is an aura of mystery and something of the miraculous around the  twins’ births – their father, Saleh Khadoura, has spent the past 11 years in an Israeli prison and has had no physical contact with Hula’s mother, Bushra, since then.

Hula hears people refer to her brothers as ‘special babies’ but does not fully grasp what the fuss is about. She is completely unaware of the unusual obstacles her father’s sperm had to overcome to reach her mother’s eggs.“After the suffering I am put through with each visit [to her husband in an Israeli prison], with the searches and the humiliation, with this pregnancy, with Karam and Adam, I wanted to show that rules can be broken” – Bushra Abu Saafi

Freedom ambassadors

Bushra Abu Saafi, is one of around 30 Palestinian women who have conceived babies since 2013 with sperm smuggled out of the Israeli prisons in which their husbands are being held. She was only the second woman in Gaza to do this. Before her, two had tried but only one succeeded.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ NGO Addameer, there are currently some 5,750 Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israel. Of these, roughly 5,550 are adult males.

Women whose husbands are serving decades-long sentences do not want to see their dream of starting a family, or increasing its size, taken away by the very same authorities that took away their husbands.

Until recently, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) was highly sceptical that sperm smuggling could be happening at all. Spokesperson Sivan Weizman told the press that tight security made it very unlikely. Recently, though, they have acknowledged that it may be an issue.

The Palestinian National Authority and Hamas, on the other hand, have never shown any doubt and have financially supported women wishing to try this very unconventional method of conceiving.

In May in Gaza, the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners even organised a collective birthday party for the little ‘ambassadors of freedom’, as babies born this way are often called.

Families apart

“It was my husband who suggested we try ‘in vitro fertilisation’ (IVF) treatment with his smuggled sperm,” Bushra Abu Saafi told IPS from her father’s apartment, where she lives with her five children.

The majority of Palestinian households have at least one relative in an Israeli prison. For a people under occupation, political prisoners become part of the collective identity, they are adopted by Palestinians as long lost brothers, sisters, mothers or fathers and are celebrated at Prisoners’ Day marches and recurring demonstrations.

In the private sphere, the prisoners continue to be individuals and occupy prominent places in the home. Their handicrafts are displayed with pride, their photos adorn each room and the vacuum they have left is still palpable.

A flowery picture frame with a photo of her smiling husband Saleh in his twenties sits on a side table in Bushra’s living room. He was arrested at the age of 23, accused of being part of the Islamic Jihad. They had been married for five years and only two of their children have had the privilege of spending some time with him as a family.

When Saleh was imprisoned, Bushra was pregnant with Ahmed. “It hasn’t been easy these past 11 years,” she told IPS.  “We miss him terribly, my son Ahmad especially. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘father’. He tells me ‘when I grow up I want to be like grandad’.”

Smuggling new life out of jail

Entering a fourth pregnancy was something Bushra did not take lightly and her father worried about the extra pressure. “When Saleh proposed this to me from prison, I was sceptical,” she confessed. “My family and I worried about what people would say. Imagine, pregnant with a husband in jail!”

She need not have worried. The advice she was given, like other women undergoing IVF in this way, was to tell everyone in her family and village that her husband’s sperm had been brought out and would be used for insemination. Since then, local media stations have helped spread the story and both Palestinian society and local religious authorities have been highly supportive.

“In the end, my father saw that it was my desire to try for another baby and eventually supported my choice,” Bushra said. It took two months and many tests before she could be ready for the operation.

Although the women do not wish to discuss how the sperm is smuggled past Israeli security and out of prison, it is acknowledged that it may be slipped into the clothes of  unaware children.

While wives talk to imprisoned husbands through glass and over a phone, children are the only ones allowed physical contact at the end of a visit. The clinics performing the operation,  both in Gaza and in the West Bank, report that sperm has arrived in a variety of improvised containers, from sweet wrappers to eye drop bottles.

“The preparation, the waiting, it was all very tough,” said Bushra. “But when the news came that I was pregnant, the pressure was off and we finally celebrated.” The double surprise came later, when she was told that twins were expected.

She describes the steps leading to this pregnancy as being about resistance and overcoming challenges. “After the suffering I am put through with each visit, with the searches and the humiliation, with this pregnancy, with Karam and Adam, I wanted to show that rules can be broken.”

Fertility and non-violent resistance

According to Liv Hansson, a Danish public health specialist who has researched fertility in Palestine, the practice of sperm smuggling only makes associations between fertility and resistance easier to draw.

“In a context such as Palestine, where women are well educated and child mortality is low, a lower fertility rate would be expected according to classic demography,” Hansson told IPS. The fertility rate of 4.1 registered in Palestine between 2011 and 2013, then, must be seen in the light of Israel’s ongoing occupation.

Indeed, fertility has long been considered by Palestinians as part of resistance efforts against Israel’s military occupation. For its part, Israel views high fertility rates in the West Bank and Gaza, and in majority Palestinian areas inside Israel, as a very real threat. Talk of the ‘demographic time-bomb’ – the time when Palestinians will outnumber Jewish Israelis – is very common.

“Former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat famously stated that ‘the wombs of Palestinian women are the greatest weapon of Palestine’,” Hansson told IPS. “Fertility is seen as something of interest not only to the family but to the community, society at large and to politicians too.”

The wait

Bushra and her five children will have to wait three more years to be reunited as a family with Saleh. Since 2012, following the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Shalit, Israel’s Prison Service has been slowly reinstating visiting rights for family and prisoners from Gaza.

Ahmed saw his father two years ago for the first time, Hula six months ago and for the twins, the only meeting so far has been through the photograph on the side table, portraying Saleh as a young man eager to live life.

Edited by Phil Harris    

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness, who says that unless someone steps in to alleviate the financial crisis facing the U.N. agency, “ it is innocent refugees who will again suffer”. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
JERUSALEM, Jul 3 2015 (IPS)

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) faces a severe financial crisis which could see core services to desperate Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank halted unless donors step in before the end of September.

“Currently we have a deficit of 101 million dollars and, as things stand now, UNRWA will struggle to function after September because we don’t have enough money to fund even our core activities for the last few months of the year,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told IPS in an exclusive interview.

“However, following a number of stringent austerity measures already in place, we should be able to continue with life-saving, emergency services to the end of the year,” he added.“As things stand now, UNRWA will struggle to function after September because we don’t have enough money to fund even our core activities for the last few months of the year” – UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness

Due to the financial crisis, the contracts for 35 percent of the 137 internationals employed by UNRWA will end by Sep. 30 without further extension or renewal. The U.N. organisation has taken these steps to reduce costs while trying not to reduce basic services to Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

“UNRWA is facing financial crises on all fronts. Broadly speaking we have two sources of funding,” Gunness told IPS. “We have our general fund which funds our core services such as education, health relief and social services. Then we have our emergency funds which are for Gaza and the West Bank because there is a blockade and an occupation respectively.

“We’re also dealing with more than 400,000 displaced people in Syria, the 45,000 refugees who’ve fled to Lebanon and the 15,000 who’ve escaped over the border into Jordan.”

Following Israel’s devastating military campaign against Gaza in July and August last year, UNRWA launched a reconstruction initiative, worth 720 million dollars, at the international reconstruction conference in Cairo in October last year.

Part of the money was for rental subsidies for those Gazans whose homes were so damaged that they were uninhabitable and needed a roof over their heads, and part of it was for reconstruction.

“In February this year, we had to suspend that programme because there was a 585 million dollar shortfall. Due to the deficit not one single home in Gaza has been rebuilt, so there is a real crisis in regard to reconstruction,” said Gunness.

Last year in Syria, UNRWA launched an appeal for 417 million dollars but only 52 percent of this money was received. The shortfall forced the organisation to reduce its six cash distribution programmes from six to three.

Cash distributions have become one of UNRWA’s major emergency response programmes in Syria due to so many U.N. installations being bombed and destroyed as a result of the civil war raging there, thereby crippling its normal means of helping refugees.

With the money received for Syria, UNRWA was only able to distribute an average of 50 cents per refugee per day.

“Imagine trying to survive on 50 cents daily. It is almost impossible and although our donors have been very generous, they have not been generous enough,” said Gunness.

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees from Syria rely on UNRWA for various things, including rental subsidies so that they can have a roof over their heads.

“We had been giving out a 100 dollar monthly rental allowance. This gets you very little in Lebanon, which is an expensive country,” Gunness told IPS.

“When I was last in Lebanon I visited a Palestinian refugee family in the poverty-stricken Shatila camp in Beirut. They were paying 200 dollars a month to live in a room 20 feet by 20 feet [6 metres by 6 metres] with a tiny bathroom and kitchen.

“Their rental subsidy was cut at the end of June and I suspect that family is now living on the street. This is the reality of the crash crisis for just one family of refugees from Syria who have been made homeless.

“And this is only one story that relates to the emergency funding UNRWA receives,” Gunness added.

“In relation to the general side of our funding, what we’ve seen over the years is a gradual increase in the structural deficit of our general fund which has led to the current deficit of 101 million dollars.”

UNRWA’s monthly running costs are 35 million dollars. This includes the salaries of 30, 000 staff members, 22,000 of whom are teachers, as well as the distribution of basic necessities for refugees such as food.

“So, unless someone steps in to alleviate the crisis, even tougher decisions may need to be made in the next few weeks and it is innocent refugees who will again suffer,” said Gunness.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Gazan fishermen Ibrahim Al Quka and his brother Sami Al Quka, who had his hand shot off by the Israeli navy even though he was within Israel's restricted fishing zone. Credit: Mel Frykberg

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Jun 8 2015 (IPS)

Three Palestinian fishermen were injured last week after Israeli naval forces opened fire on fishing boats off the coast of al-Sudaniyya in the northern Gaza Strip, bringing to 15 the number of farmers and fishermen shot and injured by Israeli security forces recently as they attempted to earn a living.

The Israeli navy limits Gaza’s fishermen to a three nautical-mile zone off Gaza’s coast. However even fishermen within that zone have come under fire and been shot, injured and killed or had their boats destroyed or confiscated.“Gaza fishermen have come under fire and been shot, injured and killed or had their boats destroyed or confiscated … Gazan farmers trying to access their agricultural fields … are also regularly shot and injured, and sometimes killed”

As most of the shoals are further out to sea, Gaza’s fishing industry has been decimated and thousands of Gazans deprived of a living and unable to support their families.

Gazan farmers trying to access their agricultural fields within Israel’s 500 metre to 1 km buffer zone next to Israel’s border are also regularly shot and injured, and sometimes killed.

Gaza’s decimated economy has been further damaged by Israeli limits on Gazan exports to two of its biggest markets, the occupied West Bank and Israel.

Agricultural produce and manufactured goods used to underpin the coastal territory’s economy before Israel and Egypt enforced the Gaza blockade.

After last year’s war between Hamas and Israel, one of the conditions for a ceasefire was the easing of the blockade.

While Israel has allowed some goods to be exported from Gaza, this is insufficient to rejuvenate its economy.

Analysts and political commentators have repeatedly warned that Israel’s continued siege and restrictions on Gaza could destabilise the region further, leading to more violence and possibly a new war.

Destruction in Gaza following last year’s war between Hamas and Israel. Credit: Mel Frykberg

A report on the situation by the Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee of the Office of the Quartet Representative was released after a meeting in Brussels on May 27.

“Over a year on from the breakdown in talks between Israel and the Palestinians, there is still no tangible political horizon in sight,” stated the report.

“The last year has repeatedly presented us with reminders not just of where the flashpoints and difficulties persist, but also that in the absence of a political horizon, the vacuum quickly fills with animosity and violence.”

The report outlined how the removal or reduction of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, trade and access remained essential to securing economic growth.

“Movement and access restrictions, both physical and regulatory, hinder economic development in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and affect nearly all aspects of Palestinian life.”

Employment in Gaza and its economy would be boosted by Israel easing the blockade while the private sector would be strengthened. These in turn would reduce tensions and contribute to Israel’s security needs.

The failure of Hamas and Israel to reach any agreement is further aggravated by the stalemate within the Palestinian unity government due to the inability of Hamas and Fatah to reach consensus on jointly governing Gaza and the West Bank.

The rivalry between the two groups has delayed international aid, without which no reconstruction, redevelopment and economic growth in Gaza can take place.

The Office of the Quartet Representative pointed out five development areas that need to be focused on to improve the situation in the ground – an effective Palestinian government, movement and trade, reliable infrastructure, investment and sustainable land usage.

Meanwhile, Israel is continuing with new plans to relocate thousands of Bedouins in the West Bank and Israel after the move received the green light from Israel’s Supreme Court.

Some 7,000 Bedouins from the central West Bank, most of them situated east of Jerusalem, and 450 in southern Hebron will be “relocated” by force.

The forced removals have been accompanied by coercive measures such as the demolition of buildings and infrastructure on the grounds that they were built without permits, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

However, in area C of the West Bank, which comprises 60 percent of the territory, very few permits are issued by Israel’s Civil Administration, which controls the West Bank, because most of the land has been appropriated for Israeli settlement expansion.

“The Bedouins and herders are at risk of forcible transfer, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as multiple human rights violations,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

Bedouins in Israel’s Negev settlement within the ‘Green Line’ can also be forcibly relocated after the Israeli court rejected their appeal to be allowed to stay.

“This court is not the address for creating chaos,” stated Justice Elyakim Rubinstein recently in rejecting the appeal of Bedouin residents of the unrecognised Negev settlement of Umm al-Hiran, reported the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In the ruling, Rubinstein noted that the residents – who are slated to be evicted, and whose houses are to be demolished to make way for the construction of the Jewish town of Hiran – have been living in this place for 60 years, after moving to the Nahal Yatir area in 1956 at the orders of the military governor, and that the eviction and demolition of the 50 or so structures they built will affect the lives of hundreds of people.

Despite this, the judge said he believed that the eviction was reasonable and proportional due to the fact that the land in question was owned by the state and that buildings were erected without permits.

However, the Umm al-Hiran residents argued that they were the victims of discrimination and that their property rights were being infringed.

Jews were able to obtain property rights to land on which they had settled but the Bedouins’ right to land on which they had settled was never formalised.

Edited by Phil Harris

Azzum Atme checkpoint border crossing from the West Bank into Israel, where hundreds of Palestinian labourers cross into Israel each day using Israeli buses. These labourers already face long delays at the checkpoint and if they are banned from Israeli buses their trips will take even longer. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 24 2015 (IPS)

A  decision by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to segregate buses in the occupied West Bank has backfired after causing an uproar in Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, and political damage on the international stage.

This came as Israel faces mounting international criticism over its land expropriation and settlement building in the West Bank, and other forms of discrimination levelled against Palestinians.

Israel’s new extreme right-wing government is also being attacked on the domestic front with liberal Israelis, and Israeli NGOs involved in human rights, accusing the government of damaging Israel’s image and values.“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action” – Prof Samir Awad, political scientist at Birzeit University

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been waging a campaign to prohibit Palestinians, particularly labourers who work in Israel, from using their buses in the occupied West Bank for over a year, saying that they represented a security threat, refused to give up their seats for Israelis and expressed sexual interest in Israeli women.

Last week, approval was given for buses to be segregated but after the backlash the plan was quickly scrapped.

However, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon quickly denied that segregation or racism had anything to do with the issue and that the decision to ban Palestinians from Israeli buses had only been based on “security” needs.

Neither has Ya’alon given up on the plan. He intends to instruct the IDF to come up with a new plan to cover all 13 crossing points from the West Bank into Israel.

This development came simultaneously as European Union foreign policy head Federica Mogherini paid a 24-hour visit May 20-21 to Jerusalem and Ramallah in an effort to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward, stating that Europe wanted to play a more prominent role in the process.

But behind Mogherini’s visit was growing approval within the European Union for more pressure to be exerted on Israel to stop expropriating land from the Palestinians to build more illegal Israeli settlements and enlarge current ones.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry was on the defensive following its perception of bias from the European Union.

“The Israeli government will not be pressured by the European Union into making any concessions with the Palestinians in regards to the peace process,” said a spokesman from Israel’s Foreign Ministry – who insisted on remaining anonymous due to “ongoing problems at the ministry”.

“If the EU exerts one-sided pressure on Israel, without putting any pressure on the Palestinians, the situation will backfire because it will allow the Palestinians to avoid direct negotiations with us at the negotiating table,” the spokesman told IPS.

“Any future peace negotiations will have to involve face to face talks between the Palestinians and us. We will accept nothing less.”

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, quoting a mediaeval biblical scholar, instructed all Israeli diplomats not to apologise for Israel’s occupation, stating that “all of the land (meaning East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories) belonged to Israel.

As Israel finds itself painted into a corner politically, Palestinian and Israeli analysts have been debating whether there would be any European pressure on Israel and whether that pressure would have any effect.

Political scientist Prof Samir Awad from Birzeit University, near Ramallah, believes that the European Union will be able to successfully pressure the Israeli government, despite its extremism.

“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action,” Awad told IPS.

“EU pressure on Israel will also be buoyed by the fact that a number of EU countries have officially recognised a Palestinian state while others have recognised a state in principle and are critical of Israel’s continued occupation and land expropriation in the West Bank,” added Awad.

However, political analyst Benedetta Berti, a research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, is not convinced that the European Union will succeed in pushing Israel to any negotiating table.

“If we look at their record so far there has been a lot of rhetoric but not much actual action. So far, 16 out of the 28 EU ministers have told Mogherini to go ahead with labelling settlement goods exported to Europe,” Berti told IPS.

“It hasn’t happened yet as they have to get 20 of the 28 EU ministers on board for that and due to the divisions in the EU over Israel I’m not sure that it will happen in the near future,” explained Berti.

Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group has accused the Israeli authorities of being indifferent to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers and security forces.

“Most cases of violent crimes against Palestinians not only go unpunished – but often are completely ignored by the authorities. Even when criminal investigations against soldiers accused of such offences are opened, they almost always fail,” said Yesh Din, a volunteer organisation working to defend the human rights of Palestinian civilians under Israeli occupation.

The groups said that approximately 94 percent of criminal investigations launched by the IDF against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians, and their property, are closed without any indictments. In the rare cases that indictments are served, conviction leads to very light sentencing.

“Moreover, Palestinians who attempt to file complaints about crimes committed against them face staggering obstacles in their way. The complete absence of military police stations open to the Palestinian public in the West Bank, for example, makes it literally impossible for Palestinians to file complaints directly with the military police,” stated Yesh Din.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Palestinian children, no matter how young, are often victims of mistreatment in Israeli police and military detention facilities. Photo credit: UNICEF/El Baba

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 5 2015 (IPS)

Palestine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, has sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council demanding that action be taken against Israel over the abuse of Palestinian children after they have been arrested by Israeli security forces.

“Every single day and in countless ways, Palestinian children are victims of Israeli human rights violations, with no child considered too young to be spared the oppression being meted out by the Israeli occupying forces and extremist settlers,”  wrote Mansour. “These crimes committed against our children are intolerable and unacceptable.”

"Every single day and in countless ways, Palestinian children are victims of Israeli human rights violations, with no child considered too young to be spared the oppression being meted out by the Israeli occupying forces and extremist settlers” – Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s ambassador to the United Nations
The letter, sent on May 1, followed the detention of a nine-year-old boy, Ahmad Zaatari from Wadi Joz in East Jerusalem, who had been detained on the night of Apr. 28 for approximately eight hours by Israel police after they alleged that he and his brother, 12-year-old Muhammad Zaatari, had thrown stones at an Israeli bus.

Allegations of the mistreatment of Palestinian children while in Israeli police and military detention facilities in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank are not new.

“The ill-treatment of children who come in contact with the military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalised throughout the process,” said the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in a 2013 report titled Children in Israeli Military Detention, which recommended that 38 changes be made after consulting with Israeli authorities.

However, in February 2015, UNICEF released an update reviewing progress made in implementing the report’s 38 recommendations during the intervening period, which found that “reports of alleged ill-treatment of children during arrest, transfer, interrogation and detention have not significantly decreased in 2013 and 2014.”

In an April 2015 report on ‘Children in Israeli Military Detention’, rights group Military Court Watch (MCW), which monitors the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military detention, said that “at least 87 percent of UNICEF’s recommendations lack effective implementation and the ill treatment of children who come in contact with this system still remains ‘widespread, systematic and institutionalised’.”

Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP), a Palestinian human rights organisation specifically focused on child rights has been reported as saying that “Palestinian children are treated as mercilessly as adults. Most troubling are brutal beatings, other forms of torture and prolonged isolation in solitary confinement.”

According to DCIP, unlike Jews, Palestinian parents cannot accompany their children when interrogated, and there are cases of children even younger than 12 arriving at interrogation centres shackled, blindfolded and sleep-deprived.

Most experience physical abuse amounting to torture before, during and after interrogation, and “almost all children confess regardless of guilt to stop further abuse,” said DCIP, adding that the children are often forced to sign confessions in Hebrew which they cannot read or understand.

“Similarities in the situation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank exist because of the inevitable tensions that arise due to the prolonged military occupation,” Gerard Horton from MCW told IPS.

“You can tinker with the system as much as you like but unless the underlying causes are addressed the situation will remain the same.

“Most Palestinian children are arrested near Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. If you insert 500,000 settlers into occupied territory and the security forces’ job is to protect them, this inevitably results in the local population being terrorised,” added Horton.

Meanwhile, Israel was harshly criticised in a report of the board of inquiry regarding incidents during last year’s Gaza war released by U.N. Secretary General Bank Ki-moon on Apr. 27.

The board of inquiry concluded that Israel was responsible for the death of 44 Palestinians, and the injuring of 227 others, when they carried out seven attacks on six U.N. sites in Gaza where Palestinian civilians were sheltering.

Ban condemned the shelling attacks with “the utmost gravity” and said that “those who looked to them [U.N. shelters] for protection and who sought and were granted shelter there had their hopes and trust denied.”

According to Chris Gunness, spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the United Nations provided the Israelis with the exact locations of the U.N. facilities where the civilians were sheltering.

“The U.N. inquiry found that despite numerous notifications to the Israeli army of the precise GPS coordinates of the schools and numerous notifications about the presence of displaced people, in all seven cases investigated by the Board of Inquiry when our schools were hit directly or in the immediate vicinity, the hit was attributable to the IDF [Israel Defence Forces],” said Gunness.

However, the U.N. Secretary General also criticised Palestinian groups for putting some of the U.N. schools at risk by hiding weapons in some of them.

“I am dismayed that Palestinian militant groups would put United Nations schools at risk by using them to hide their arms. However, the three schools at which weaponry was found were empty at the time and were not being used as shelters,” said Ban.

Israeli diplomats put pressure on the United Nations not to release its findings into the war until the Israeli authorities had conducted their own investigation into alleged human rights violations. In September last year, Israel opened investigations into five criminal cases, including looting.

More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed during the Gaza conflict. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed by rockets and attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Israeli commander who blocked the writer’s entrance to the village of Kafr Qaddoum – as clashes were taking place – for over two hours. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
KAFR QADDOUM, West Bank, Apr 7 2015 (IPS)

It is becoming increasingly risky to cover clashes and protests between Israeli security forces and Palestinian protesters in the West Bank as the number of journalists injured, in what appears to be deliberate targeting by Israeli security forces, continues to rise.

During the last 12 months, Israel’s Foreign Press Association (FPA) has issued numerous protests at the manhandling, harassment and shooting of both members of the foreign media and Palestinian journalists.

“The Foreign Press calls on the Israeli border police (a paramilitary unit) to put an immediate end to a wave of attacks on journalists. In just over a week, border police officers have carried out at least four attacks on journalists working for international media organisations, injuring reporters and damaging expensive equipment. These attacks all appear to have been unprovoked,” was one of many statements released by the FPA last year.The rising trend of Israeli security forces using live ammunition against Palestinian protesters has expanded to include journalists as well.

“A change in policy appears to be the reason for unprecedented aggressive behaviour by the authorities against journalists covering demonstrations in Jerusalem,” read another FPA statement.

The assaults have included shooting rubber-coated metal bullets directly at journalists on a regular basis.

Tear gas canisters, which under Israeli law are meant to be shot from a safe distance in an upward arch so as not to endanger life, have also been shot directly at journalists from close range even when the journalists were out of the line of fire.

The rising trend of Israeli security forces using live ammunition against Palestinian protesters has expanded to include journalists as well.

Palestinian journalists and cameramen working for foreign agencies and local media appear to be bearing the brunt of these attacks, because assaulting and abusing Palestinians, males in particular, is an integral part of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.

A colleague of IPS, a cameraman from Palestine TV, was shot in the leg several months ago with a 0.22 inch calibre bullet fired from a Ruger rifle by an Israeli sniper as he filmed a clash in the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qaddoum.

Palestinian journalists in the line of fire. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

On a previous occasion, as he left the village, Israeli soldiers pulled his vehicle over, dragged him out and assaulted him.

Another IPS colleague, a cameraman from Reuters, was shot twice in both legs with a metal bullet with a 0.5 mm rubber coating at one Friday protest. The previous week he had been targeted directly with a tear gas canister.

“We are very concerned about the marked increase in the number of Palestinian journalists being deliberately targeted by the Israeli security forces,” said Reporters Without Borders in a statement  on the increase in violence by Israeli security forces against Palestinian journalists released last year.

“We reiterate our call to the Israeli authorities, especially the military, to respect the physical integrity of journalists covering demonstrations and we remind them that the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on 28 March recognising the importance of media coverage of protests and condemning any attacks or violence against the journalists covering them.”

The situation was even worse during the Gaza war from July to August last year, when 17 Palestinian journalists were killed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) even when they were not in the proximity of the fighting.

IPS has witnessed numerous attacks on journalists over the years and has also been harassed by Israeli soldiers when trying to cover clashes.

Last Friday, I was held up for over two hours in the sun by Israeli soldiers as I tried to enter Kafr Qaddoum where major clashes were taking place.

During this time other members of the media, ambulances and other protesters were refused entrance.

With Israeli government press accreditation, an accreditation denied to most Palestinian journalists, I was able to contact the IDF spokesman who coordinated my entrance, but only after several hours of standing in the sun.

I was neither assaulted nor was any of my equipment confiscated from me, another privilege of being white and Western.

Another Palestinian colleague and cameraman came in for very different treatment a month ago when he had had his camera confiscated by an Israeli soldier outside the Jelazon refugee camp, near Ramallah.

When he tried to retrieve his expensive piece of equipment he was warned to back off and knew better than to pursue the issue.

However, when I took the matter up with the commanding officer the camera was returned to its owner after the officer had taken me aside on a charm offensive while ordering the Palestinian journalists to stand back.

On another occasion, I was accompanying a Palestinian ambulance which was trying to reach Jelazon camp to help Palestinian youths injured during clashes with the IDF.

Several military jeeps blocked the roads leading to the camp and refused to move when asked by the ambulance driver.

After I got out and spoke to the soldiers, showing them my credentials yet again, the jeep moved to the side and allowed the ambulance to continue.

The Israelis still appear to be sensitive to a certain degree to how they are portrayed in the Western media.

This has become apparent to me when covering violent clashes. As soon as it has been established that I am Australian, white and a woman, the aggression of the Israeli soldiers has abated and they have tried to get me on side by asking me if I am alright and warning me to take care,

However, I know that I too could easily fall prey to Israeli ammunition if I am not exceedingly careful so, on this basis, I choose to stay well away from the frontlines of clashes.

Edited by Phil Harris  

Israeli settlers are hacking down Palestinian olive trees in an act of environmental terrorism “aimed at intimidating their Palestinian neighbours and economically crippling many Palestinian farmers who rely on harvesting olives to make a living”. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
AL SHUYUKH, Southern West Bank, Apr 6 2015 (IPS)

“Exactly which olive trees do you want to see? The Israeli settlers have cut down thousands. Can you be more specific?” asked the taxi driver, telling IPS that he wished to remain anonymous.

About a week ago, Israeli settlers from the illegal settlement of Mezad, in the southern West Bank near the city of Hebron, cut down approximately 1,200 Palestinian olive trees in an act of environmental terrorism, a vindictive act aimed at intimidating their Palestinian neighbours and economically crippling many Palestinian farmers who rely on harvesting olives to make a living.Israeli settlers are hacking down Palestinian olive trees in an act of environmental terrorism aimed at intimidating their Palestinian neighbours and economically crippling many Palestinian farmers who rely on harvesting olives to make a living

Not only is the harvesting of olives a major part of the Palestinian economy, supporting over 80,000 families, but it is also central to Palestinian culture and lifestyle.

Olives and olive oil are regularly served with Palestinian meals. The fruit and its oil have affectionately been called “green gold” by Palestinians, while ancient olive trees are incorporated into Palestinian art including paintings and embroidery.

As IPS attempted to take pictures of the remaining carcasses of the 1,200 olive trees hacked down by the settlers, bordering Mezad settlement, Israeli soldiers guarding the site started to approach.

We quickly left as the taxi driver, and an elderly Palestinian farmer who had shown us the way, did not want a confrontation.

This was the third attack on the olive trees, which belonged to Muhammad al Ayayadah, over a period of several months.

Mezad settlement is built on Palestinian land that was confiscated by Israel and the settlers appear to be trying to take over more land for expansion of their settlement.

The regular cutting down of olive trees, and the prevention of access to these trees by Israeli security forces, often forces Palestinian farmers off their land as crop losses can cripple them financially.

According to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), approximately 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

Following the farmers’ eviction, Israel settlers can argue that the land has been abandoned and then move in and take it over with Palestinians having little legal recourse.

“No action will be taken against the settlers by the Israeli police. The police will say they are coming to investigate but most times they don’t even show up,” ARIJ spokesman Suhail Khalilieh told IPS.

“Even if they do show up, they will say there is no hard evidence that settlers were behind the attack or they will say that the attack was in retaliation for Palestinians throwing stones.

“Moreover, most of the settler attacks take place under the guard of the Israeli military who do nothing to stop the vandalism,” added Khalilieh.

Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have also included the burning of homes and cars, the killing of livestock, stone-throwing attacks, running school children over and poisoning water wells.

One of the more serious acts of vandalism, in the eyes of a conservative and religious Palestinian society, has been the numerous arson attacks on mosques throughout the West Bank.

IPS visited one mosque which had been set on fire by the settlers where the settlers had placed piles of burnt Korans next to the bathroom in a concerted effort to offend.

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 324 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property were reported during 2014 alone.

While Palestinian farmers are struggling to survive, a simultaneous development in East Jerusalem has Palestinians concerned.

The Israeli authorities plan to build a construction waste site on land in occupied East Jerusalem.

The construction of the facility involves further expropriation of privately owned Palestinian land in the Shuafat and Issawiya neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.

Thousands of tonnes of construction waste from all over Jerusalem will be brought in to the site over the next 20 years.

The land grab will also see the eviction of Bedouin families living in an encampment between Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.

The area between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim is a controversial corridor known as E1. Israeli settlement expansion and construction there has caused friction between the U.S. administration and the Israeli government because the West Bank has effectively been cut off from Jerusalem.

Legal action taken by a number of Israeli rights groups on behalf of the Palestinians in Israeli civilian courts has so far not helped.

“The Israeli courts have not ruled against the construction in the E1 corridor as they have no civil authority over the West Bank which falls under Israeli military jurisdiction and this military rule is behind the continued expansion of the E1 corridor,” Khalilieh told IPS.

“Even if the Israeli civilian courts had ruled against this land expropriation and settlement building, it could not over ride decisions taken by Israel’s civil administration, or military rule, which will always justify its action under security or state needs.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Israeli sniper using live ammunition – Ruger rifle with 0.22 mm calibre bullets – against Palestinian stone throwers. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

A Palestinian youth lost his fight for life this week after lying critically injured in Ramallah Hospital for days after Israeli soldiers used live ammunition as a method of crowd control against stone-throwing Palestinians near a Palestinian refugee camp.

“Ali Safi had critical injuries to his kidneys, spinal cord, lungs and spleen,” Dr Sami Naghli, who runs Jelazon refugee camp’s medical relief services, told IPS.

Seventeen-year-old Safi was shot last week by an Israeli sniper armed with a Ruger rifle during clashes between Palestinian youngsters and Israeli soldiers.

The bullet which hit him was a 0.22 inch calibre bullet, which is considered less lethal than ordinary bullets of 5.56 mm calibre.“Many of the wounded have been shot at close range and it appears as if the soldiers are shooting to kill. In my five years as a surgeon, the situation has been getting progressively worse, especially lately” – orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ahmed Barakat

There has been a recent increase in the use of this kind of bullet against Palestinian demonstrators by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) despite disagreement within the Israeli military about the use of this controversial weapon for riot control when the lives of Israeli soldiers are not endangered.

The head of Israel’s security department in the Operations Directorate stated in 2001 that the Ruger could not be considered a non-lethal weapon and could only be used in circumstances which justified the use of live fire.

Due to the large number of Palestinians injured and killed by 0.22 bullets, the use of this ammunition was suspended during the second Intifada, or uprising, from 2001 to 2008.

However, they are once again being used by the Israelis and the number of Palestinians seriously injured by them is growing, with at least two deaths in the last several months.

“Recent months have seen a dramatic rise in Israeli security forces’ use of live 0.22 inch calibre bullets. The firing of this ammunition is an almost weekly occurrence in the West Bank in sites of protests and clashes,” reported Israeli rights group B’tselem in January.

“Most of those injured have been young Palestinians, including minors. Yet, in the last two months, one Palestinian woman, at least three photographers, and a foreign national who was taking part in a demonstration were also hit by these bullets,” said B’tselem.

The humanitarian organisation has also said it witnessed cases of Israeli soldiers provoking clashes in order to fire live ammunition at protesters.

The reintroduction of this controversial weapon prompted B’tselem to complain to Israel’s Military Attorney General (MAG), who responded confirming that “the Ruger and similar means are not classified by the IDF as means for dispersing demonstrations or public disturbances.”

Dr Naghli told IPS that the Israeli soldiers are also using a kind of bullet which fragments on impact, causing severe trauma and damage to bones, organs and nerves, although he could not confirm if this was a 0.22 or another type.

“During the last three months there have been over 40 wounded from these types of gunshots,” said Naghli.

Over the last few weeks, IPS has witnessed Israeli snipers firing repeatedly at Palestinians during several clashes in the West Bank when stones thrown landed at a distance away from the soldiers presenting no danger.

IPS also visited some of the wounded in Ramallah Hospital and spoke to orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ahmed Barakat who was treating them.

“Many of the wounded have been shot at close range and it appears as if the soldiers are shooting to kill. In my five years as a surgeon, the situation has been getting progressively worse, especially lately,” Dr Barakat told IPS.

In a related development, the IDF has also temporarily suspended the use of attack dogs when arresting Palestinians, most accused of stone-throwing.

This follows a video, which went viral and caused an outcry, of 16-year-old Hamzeh Abu Hashem, 16, of Beit Ummar near Hebron in the southern West Bank, being savaged by two dogs as soldiers arrest him.

A subsequent IDF investigation found that while the use of dogs in confrontations “could be justified, in the case in question, the youth could have been arrested using other means.” Abu Hashem has been incarcerated since the incident.

Meanwhile, torture of Palestinians in detention by Israeli security services has been on the rise since the second half of 2014, according to the Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT) in Israel, an attorney representing Palestinian prisoners and Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz daily.

“In years past there were a few rare cases of torture. But something has changed,” the attorney told Haaretz.

In all of 2014, 23 Palestinians filed a number of complaints of torture by the Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic intelligence agency).

Until 1999, thousands of Palestinian prisoners were tortured every year. PCAT estimates that most Palestinians questioned had experienced at least one kind of torture.

In September 1999, following a petition to the High Court of Justice, the court prohibited the systematic use of torture, but left a small opening for interrogators

This opening applied to cases known as “ticking time bombs” where the use of force is permitted to obtain crucial information.

However, critics have pointed out that what constitutes a “ticking time bomb” is open to interpretation as well as the fact that Palestinian prisoners who have been tortured have sometimes given false information just to stop the torture.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 21 2015 (IPS)

The “surprise” re-election of incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Mar. 17 elections has been met with a flood of media comment on the implications for the region and the rest of the world.

However, one of the reasons for Netanyahu’s victory has dramatically slipped the attention of most – the support he received from young Israelis.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, 200,000 last-minute voters decided to switch their vote to Netanyahu’s Likud party due to the “fear factor” and most of these were voters under the age of 35.

Roberto Savio

Perhaps the “fear factor” was actually an expression of the “Masada factor”. Masada is a strong element in Israeli history and collective imagination. The inhabitants of the mountain fortress of Masada, besieged by Roman legions at the time of Emperor Tito’s conquest of the Israeli state, preferred collective suicide to surrender.

Israelis today feel besieged by hostile neighbouring countries (first of all Iran), the continuous onslaught by the Caliphate and the Islamic State, overwhelming negative international opinion and growing abandonment by the United States.

Netanyahu played a number of cards to bring about his last-minute election success, including his speech to the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress on Mar. 3, which was seen by many Israelis as an act of defiance and dignity, not a weakening of fundamental relations with the United States.

His support for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, his denial of the creation of a Palestinian state and his show of contempt for an international community unable to understand Israel’s fears led Netanyahu’s Likud party to victory.

In Israel, being left-wing mean accepting a Palestinian state, being right-wing means denying it. In the end, the Mar. 17 vote was the result of fear.“Taking refuge in parties that preach a return to a country’s ‘glorious’ past, blocking immigrants who are stealing jobs and Muslims who are challenging the traditional homogeneity of society, country … is an easy way out”

Israeli’s young people are not alone in moving to the right as a reaction to fear. It is interesting to note that all right-wing parties which have become relevant in Europe are based on fear.

Growing social inequality, the unprecedented phenomenon of youth unemployment, cuts in public services such as education and health, corruption which has become a cancer with daily scandals, and the general feeling of a lack of clear response from the political institutions to the problems opened up by a globalisation based on markets and not on citizens are all phenomena which are affecting young people.

“When you were like us at university, you knew you would find a job – we know we will not find one,” was how one student put it at a conference of the Society for International Development that I attended.

“The United Nations has lost the ability to be a place of governance, the financial system is without checks and corporations have a power which goes over national governments,” the student continued. “So, you see, the world of today is very different one from the one in which you grew up.”

As Josep Ramoneda wrote in El Pais of Mar. 18: “We expected that governments would submit markets to democracy and it turns out that what they do is adapt democracy to markets, that is, empty it little by little.

This is why many of those of who vote for right-wing parties in Europe are young people – be it for the National Front in France, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain, the Lega Nord (North League) in Italy, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in Germany and Golden Dawn in Greece, among others.

Taking refuge in parties that preach a return to a country’s “glorious” past, blocking immigrants who are stealing jobs and Muslims who are challenging the traditional homogeneity of society, country, and bringing back to the nation space and functions which have been delegated to an obtuse and arrogant bureaucracy in Brussels which has not been elected and is not therefore accountable to citizens, is an easy way out.

This is a major – but ignored – epochal change. It was long held that an historic function of youth was to act as a factor for change … now it is fast becoming a factor for the status quo. The traditional political system no longer has youth movements and its poor performance in front of the global challenges that countries face today makes young people distrustful and distant.

It is an easy illusion to flock to parties which want to fight against changes which look ominous, even negative. It also partially explains why some young Europeans are running to the Islamic State which promise a change to restore the dignity of Muslims dignity and whose agenda is to destroy dictators and sheiks who are in cohort with the international system and are all corrupt and intent on enriching themselves, instead of taking care of their youth.

What can young people think of President Erdogan of Turkey building a presidential palace with 1,000 rooms or the European Central Bank inaugurating headquarters which cost 1,200 million euro, just to give two examples? And what of the fact that the 10 richest men in the world increased their wealth in 2013 alone by an amount equivalent to the combined budgets of Brazil and Canada?

This generational change should be a transversal concern for all parties but what is happening instead is that the welfare state is continuing to suffer cuts. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), young people in the 18-23 age group will retire with an average pension of 650 euro. What kind of society will that be?

Without the safety net now being provided by parents and grandparents, how can young people in such a society avoid feeling left out?

We always thought young people would fight for social change, but what if they are now doing so from the right?

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Unarmed Palestinian confronts Israeli soldiers during protest near Jelazon refugee camp, north of Ramallah, West Bank. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Mar 17 2015 (IPS)

As soon as the truck carrying Israeli dairy products entered Ramallah’s city centre it was surrounded by Palestinian activists who proceeded to remove and trash almost 20,000 dollars’ worth of mainly milk and yoghurt.

The driver of the truck, a Palestinian from the nearby Qalandia refugee camp, and an Israeli employee fainted after watching helplessly.

The goods, already paid for by Palestinian shopkeepers, were smashed up and stomped on before they were spread all over the street in front of the Palestinian police stationed at the traffic circle.

Activists from the Palestinian Authority (PA)-affiliated Fatah movement are behind a boycott of Israeli goods throughout the West Bank.“The strength of the grassroots organisations’ action against Israel is not going to go away anytime soon and will only continue to grow in strength internationally” – Professor Samir Awad of Birzeit University

The boycott follows the withholding by Israel of millions of Palestinian tax dollars in retaliation for the PA advancing plans to take Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged Gaza war crimes and abuses in the West Bank.

“We have entered the second phase of the campaign which is confiscating and damaging these goods,” said Abdullah Kamal, who is the leader of the campaign.

Several weeks earlier, the campaign had involved Kamal and his associates making the rounds of shops in Ramallah and ordering shopkeepers to rid their stores of Israeli produce and being warned not to purchase any more. Similar moves are under way in other cities of the occupied West Bank.

Although the Palestinian territories are not a huge part of Israel’s domestic market, the move is part of a number of grassroots campaigns of defiance by Palestinians against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza.

“The local boycott by Palestinians is peaceful and a way of exerting some pressure on Israel even if it not very strong,” Professor Samir Awad, a political scientist from Birzeit University near Ramallah, told IPS

“The least Palestinians can do is not finance the occupation.”

A more serious development, from Israel’s point of view, was a recent vote by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) executive committee in favour of discontinuing security coordination with Israel’s intelligence and security services.

Palestinians have long accused the PA of being Israel’s sub-contractor to the occupation and the Israelis rely on this security coordination to prevent another Palestinian uprising and control armed resistance.

A final decision on breaking off security coordination lies with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

“The situation on the ground is getting serious and it is possible that Abbas could make this decision before the end of the month,” Fatah member Murad Shitawi told IPS.

“We will not accept the continuing occupation with its economic and security implications,” said Shitawi, who is the coordinator of protests in the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qaddoum, and who was recently released from an Israeli jail.

Every Friday, dozens of villages throughout the West Bank and Gaza take part in protests against Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and the occupation despite the huge toll this has taken on Palestinians in terms of the number wounded and killed.

Shitawi pointed out that four or five years ago there were only a few villages taking part in regular protests on a weekly basis.

“Now there are many and the protests are not limited to Friday.”

Another act of Palestinian defiance has been the repeated building of protest tents and villages in Area C of the West Bank, 60 percent of the territory, in protest against Israel’s forced removal of Bedouins and other Palestinians who have lived there for centuries.

Israel has designated Area C off limits to Palestinians and exclusively for Israeli settlers, which is illegal under international law.

One of these protest camps near the village of Abu Dis, just outside Jerusalem, has been rebuilt 10 times after Israeli security forces rased it, confiscated equipment and arrested and assaulted activists who had encamped there.

Furthermore, Palestinian grassroots activists are also working in conjunction with their international supporters, and with Israeli peace groups, to up the pressure on Israel as the international Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign continues to strengthen.

A growing number of global businesses, church and university groups and artists are either refusing to visit Israel, do business with Israeli companies involved in the West Bank, or are boycotting Israeli institutions operating abroad.

Israel Apartheid Week, “an international series of events that seeks to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid policies towards the Palestinians and to build support for the growing BDS campaign” was held in a number of capitals across the globe during March.

Israeli peaceniks and grassroots activists have been among some of the most vocal critics of their government’s policies towards the Palestinians, spawning a number of organisations which take part in the weekly protests.

Groups such as Ta’ayush, Breaking the Silence, Ir Amim and Rabbis for Human Rights seek to educate people about the realities of life under occupation.

Some of them also accompany Palestinian farmers trying to cultivate their land under continued settler harassment.

“The strength of the grassroots organisations’ action against Israel is not going to go away anytime soon and will only continue to grow in strength internationally,” Awad told IPS.

“The PA will also continue with its plans to take Israel to the ICC and should Israel continue to withhold Palestinian tax money indefinitely, the PA could collapse and the result would be chaos.” (END/2015)

Edited by Phil Harris

Sahar Baker (left), with Ahed Baker (right) and sister-in-law in front of their beach camp house, with photographs of the four cousins killed by Israeli gunboats in summer 2014 while playing football on the beach in Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Mar 3 2015 (IPS)

“I have lost all meaning in life after the death of my child, I will never forgive anyone who caused the tearing apart of his little body.  I appeal to all who can help and stand with us to achieve justice and punish those who killed my child.”

As the tears rolled down her cheeks and with a rattle in her voice, 47-year-old Sahar Baker recalled the last moments of her ten-year-old son Ismail, who was killed along with three of his cousins after being targeted by Israeli gunboats while they were playing football on the beach during the Israeli attacks on Gaza last summer."We will not forget how our children were killed in cold blood without any reason. We hope that the Israeli army commanders will be tried before international justice and that they will be punished for the killing of the children" – Ahed Baker

Sahar’s plea for justice may soon be one step nearer now that the Palestine Government is set to formally join the International Criminal Court (ICC), which deals with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, on Dec. 31, after the U.N. Security Council rejected a Palestinian attempt to set a deadline for Israel to end its occupation of territories it captured in 1967. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said the Palestinians will formally join the ICC on Apr. 1.

Mohammad Shtayyeh, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), is reported as having said that a first complaint will be filed against Israel at the ICC on Apr. 1 over the Israeli war against Gaza last year and Israeli settlement activity.

Palestinian membership of the ICC “provides an opportunity to raise the issues on Israel’s use of force based on occupation and crimes against the people and the land in Palestine, where we did not have the capacity before to sue Israel for its crimes against the Palestinians,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Al-Malki told the press during a visit to Brazil to attend the inauguration ceremony of President Dilma Rousseff at the beginning of January.

The Baker family, who live in a beach camp in Gaza, is now hoping that Palestinian membership of the ICC will open the door for the prosecution of Israeli leaders and army officers for their crimes.

Sahar’s cousin Ahed Baker, father of Zakaria (10) and grandfather of Ahed Atif (9), shares her pain and bitterness. He is still looking for a way to bring the Israeli army to trial for the murder of his son and grandson, another two of the four young cousins killed on the beach. He told IPS that he and his family would do everything possible to ensure that their case makes its way to the ICC.

Sahar Baker holds a photograph of her ten-year-old son Ismail, killed along with three of his cousins during the Israeli attacks on Gaza in summer 2014. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

“We will not forget how our children were killed in cold blood without any reason,” said Ahed. “We hope that the Israeli army commanders will be tried before international justice and that they will be punished for the killing of the children.”

Palestinian leaders have long waved the card of membership of the ICC as a form of pressure on the Israeli government in their attempt to secure a Palestinian state.

However, apart from its political and legal benefits, Palestinian membership of the international court has created some serious implications for the Palestinians.

Israel has already frozen the transfer to the Palestinian Authority of tax funds owed to it. These funds are generally allocated for the salaries of Palestinian public employees and government operating expenses in Gaza and the West Bank, and the freeze is hampering the functioning of the Palestinian Unity Government and undermine the already weak public sector in Palestine.

Israel has also indicated that further ‘punitive’ steps will be taken soon against the Palestinians as a result of joining the ICC. Membership of the ICC thus appears to be the start of a new lengthy battle for Palestinians.

Some Palestinian human rights centres, including the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City, are now working against the clock to compile documentation on the numerous cases of civilians who were killed during last summer’s Israeli war against Gaza, to be able to submit all the documents required for the ICC to investigate war crimes in Gaza and hold Israel accountable.

“Over the long years of occupation, there has been no equity for civilian victims and this, in my point of view, was a key reason that Israel waged three wars in less than five years. In fact, it has been due to the absence of justice and a sense that occupation is immune to accountability,” Issam Younis, Director of the Al Mezan Centre told IPS.

“Going to the ICC will bring justice to victims through international justice and ensure that there are no repeated offences of occupation without accountability,” he said.

According to Palestinian human rights advocates, membership of the ICC carries two overlapping purposes for Palestinian people and their leaders.

For the Palestinian people, of Gaza in particular, it not only opens an important door to achieving justice but also helps to criminalise the entire Israeli occupation establishment and its vicious atrocities against humanity.

For the Palestinian leadership, on the other hand, it seeks to strengthen the political, legal and diplomatic status of Palestine at the international level and pressure Israel to accept the creation of an independent Palestinian state in future negotiations.

What underpins the two goals is a historical desire for real justice and protection. Whether the ICC can deliver, only time will tell.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Nasser Murad Safi, 15, was shot by Israeli soldiers with live ammunition breaking his leg during stone-throwing clashes between Palestinian youngsters and Israeli soldiers. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb 15 2015 (IPS)

Fourteen-year-old Malak al Khatib, one of the youngest Palestinian detainees and one of only a handful of girls, was released from an Israeli prison on Feb. 13 into the arms of emotional family members and supporters after being incarcerated in an Israeli prison for two months on “security offences”.

Details of what happened to the Palestinian minor were made public only after an Israeli gag order on the case was lifted on appeal after a global campaign for her release.

The slightly built, dark-haired girl, from the town of Beitin near Ramallah, was arrested in December last year and later charged with stone-throwing and possession of a knife. However, al Khatib says the confessions were coerced under duress during interrogation."[Palestinian] children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member" – UNICEF

Al Khatib was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, a suspended sentence of three months and fined 6,000 shekels (approximately 1,500 dollars).

According to volunteer organisation Military Court Watch, 151 Palestinian children are currently being held in Israeli detention for “security offences” in the Occupied Territories and within Israel.

The group added that 47 percent of these children were being held in jails inside Israel in contravention of the Geneva Convention because this limits the ability of family and legal representatives from the West Bank and Gaza to visit them.

Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP) says that in December last year 10 Palestinian children aged between 10 and 15 were incarcerated. However, children as young as eight have also been arrested by Israeli soldiers or police. According to DCIP, Israeli forces arrest about 1,000 children every year in the occupied West Bank.

However, it is not only the large numbers of Palestinian children arrested which is of concern to human rights organisations but also their treatment during incarceration.

In 2013, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was attacked by Israeli critics after releasing a report title ‘Children in Israeli Military Detention’, which slammed the Israeli authorities for using “intimidation, threats and physical violence to coerce confessions out of Palestinian children.”

Ahmed Othman Safi, 17, bears the scars after his skull was fractured by the back of a gun as Israeli soldiers were arresting him. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

“Children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member,” the report said.

IPS spoke to two Palestinian boys from the Jelazon refugee camp, near Ramallah, who were beaten, abused during interrogation and jailed on allegations of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli security forces and settlers.

One hundred heavily armed Israeli soldiers, their faces masked, broke down the door and stormed the home of Khalil Khaled Nakhli, 17, in the early hours of Aug. 11 last year, terrifying his six younger brothers and sisters.

“My arm was broken after the soldiers beat me as they arrested me. They accused me of throwing stones at Israeli settlers from the Beit El settlement near Jelazon camp,” Nakhli told IPS.

Nakhli was taken to an Israeli prison where he was roughed up during interrogation and eventually sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, despite refusing to admit to the charges against him.

The home of Nakhli’s friend Ahmed Othman Safi, 17, was similarly stormed in the early hours of Sep. 7 last year. This time the soldiers used explosives to blow the door open.

Safi was left bloody and his skull fractured when the arresting soldiers used the back of their guns to club him on the head. An inch-wide indentation, where the hair refuses to grow, remains on Safi’s skull to this day.

“I was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment even though they failed to force me to confess to anything,” said Safi.

Their treatment has only further angered the boys. “We all feel bitter at the way we were treated and this exacerbates our anger at living under occupation,” Safi told IPS.

Palestinian minors are treated harshly in comparison with how Israeli minors are treated following arrest.

“Two children, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who are accused of committing the same act, such as stone throwing, will receive substantially different treatment from two separate legal systems,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in a recently released report titled ‘One Rule, Two Legal Systems: Israel’s Regime of Laws in the West Bank’.

“The Israeli child will be afforded the extensive rights and protections granted to minors under Israeli law. His Palestinian counterpart will be entitled to limited rights and protections, which are not sufficient to ensure his physical and mental wellbeing and which do not sufficiently meet his unique needs as a minor,” said the report.

Moreover, in many cases, the criminal law applying to Palestinian minors is stricter and even more severe than the one applied to Israeli adults.

“If Malak al Khatib had been arrested for violent activity as an Israeli child she would have received certain rights. These were denied to her for being Palestinian,” ACRI spokesperson Nuri Moskovich told IPS.

Decades of ‘temporary’ Israeli military rule in the Occupied Territories have given rise to two separate and unequal systems of law that discriminate between Israelis and Palestinians. The legal differentiation is not restricted to security or criminal matters, but touches upon almost every aspect of daily life.

“A series of military decrees, legal rulings and legislative amendments have resulted in a situation whereby Israeli citizens living in the Occupied Territories remain under the jurisdiction of Israeli law and the Israeli court system, with all the benefits that this confers,” said ACRI.

“By contrast, Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to much stricter military legal law – military orders that have been issued by Israeli generals since 1967.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Johan Galtung
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2014 (IPS)

More senseless bombing of Muslims, more defeats for the United States-West, more ISIS-type movements, more West-Islam polarisation. Any way out?

“ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq-Syria] Appeals to a Longing for the Caliphate”, writes Farhang Jahanpour in an IPS column. For the Ottoman Caliphate with the Sultan as Caliph – the Shadow of God on Earth – after the 1516-17 victories all over until the collapse of both Empire and Caliphate in 1922, at the hands of the allies England-France-Russia.

Johan Galtung

Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone.

And imagine that they who had brought about the collapse had a tendency to bomb, invade,  conquer, dominate Catholic countries, one after the other, like after the two [George] Bush wars in Afghanistan-Iraq, five Obama wars in Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia-Libya-Syria and “special operations”.

Would we not predict a longing for the Vatican, and an extreme hatred of the perpetrators? Fortunately, it did not happen.

But it happened in the Middle East, leaving a trauma fuelled by killing hundreds of thousands. The Sykes-Picot_Agreement between Britain and France of 16 May 1916 led to the collapse, with their four well-known colonies, the less known promise of Istanbul to Russia, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration offering parts of Arab lands as “national home for the Jewish people”. Jahanpour cites Winston Churchill as “selling one piece of real estate, not theirs, to two peoples at the same time”.“Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone”

The Middle East colonies fought the West through military coups for independence; Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk was a model. The second liberation is militant Islam-Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algiers and so on against secular military dictatorships.

The West prefers military order against history.

The longing cannot be stopped. ISIS is only one expression, and exceedingly brutal. But, damage and destruction by U.S. President Barack Obama and allies will be followed by a dozen ISIS from 1.6 billion Muslims in 57 countries.

A little military politicking today, some “training” here, fighting there, bombing all over, are only ripples on a groundswell. This will end with a Sunni caliphate sooner or later. And, the lost caliphate they are longing for had no Israel, only a “national home”. This is behind some of the U.S.-West despair. Any solution?

The way out is cease-fire and negotiation, under United Nations auspices, with full Security Council backing. To gain time, switch to a defensive military strategy, defending Baghdad, the Kurds, the Shia and others in Syria and Iraq.

The historical-cultural-political position of ISIS and its successors is strong.

The West cannot offer withdrawal in return for anything because it has already officially withdrawn. The West, however, can offer reconciliation, both in the sense of clearing the past and opening the future.

Known in the United States as “apologism”, a difficult policy to pursue. But for once the onus of Sykes-Picot is not on the United States, but on Britain and France.

Russia dropped out after the 1917 revolution, but revealed the plot.

Bombing, an atrocity, will lead to more ISIS atrocities. A conciliatory West might change that. An international commission could work on Sykes-Picot and its aftermath, and open the book with compensation on it.

Above all, future cooperation. The West, and here the United States enters, could make Israel return the West Bank, except for small cantons, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital – or else! – sparing the horrible long-lasting Arab-Israeli warfare.

This would be decency, sanity, rationality; the question is whether the West possesses these qualities. The prognosis is dim.

There is the Anglo-American self-image as infallible, a gift to humanity, a little rough at times civilising the die-hards, but not weak.

If not an apology, at least they could wish to undo their own policies in the region since, say, 1967. No sign of that.

So much for the willingness. Does the West have the ability? Does it know how to reconcile?

After Portugal and England conquering the East China-East Africa sea lane around 1500, ultimately establishing themselves in Macao and Hong Kong, after the First and Second Opium wars of 1839-1860 in China, ending with Anglo-French forces burning the Imperial Palace in Beijing, did Britain use the “hand over” of Hong Kong to reflect on the past?

Not a word from Prince Charles.

China could have flattened those two colonies – but did not. Given that Islam has retaliation among its values, the West may be in for a lot.

Le Nouvel Observateur lists “groupes terroristes islamistes” in the world: Iraq-Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Chechenya.

The groups, named, grew out of similar local circumstances. Imagine that they increasingly share that longing for a caliphate; the Ottoman Empire covered much more than the Middle East, way into Africa and Asia. And more groups are coming. Invincible.

Imagine that Turkey itself shares that dream, maybe hoping to play a major role (in the past, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu a superb academic, a specialist on the Empire.)

Could that be the reason for Turkey not really joining, as it seems, this anti-ISIS crusade?

The West should be realistic, not “realist”. Switch to rationality. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Makeshift Bedouin home in a camp east of Jerusalem on the way to Jericho. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Oct 18 2014 (IPS)

Thirty-year-old Naifa Youssef and 50 other members of her Bedouin community live a precarious life, eking out a hand-to-mouth existence alongside the main road which links Jerusalem with the Dead Sea and the ancient city of Jericho.

Home for this community, east of Jerusalem, comprises a collection of shanty structures and hovels as well as tents erected on the rugged and rocky hills which line the road.

These makeshift homes are not connected to the electricity grid or to water and waste infrastructure. In winter the bitter cold rain and howling winds creep into the structures while mud and sewerage build up in pools around the tents.“We have nowhere else to go, we’ve lived here for many years and have no other land. We also can’t afford to move into a Palestinian village because we can’t afford the rent” – Naifa Youssef, a Palestinian Bedouin

Water has to be purchased and brought in by hand from the nearest village of Anata, a 15-minute and 5-km taxi journey away costing about two dollars per person.

Youssef’s community lives below the poverty line as the men folk struggle to make ends meet from casual day labour and herding their goats and sheep, with the area they can graze on limited by Israeli settlements.

The community has lived there for 50 years following their expulsion from the Negev Desert in 1948 when the Israeli state was established. The majority of the West Bank’s Bedouin communities were expelled from the Negev Desert during the same year.

Over the next few years, Israel plans to forcibly expel and relocate approximately 27,000 Palestinian Bedouins from Area C of the West Bank to make way for Israeli settlements.

This followed an announcement by the Israeli government in August that it planned to confiscate over 1,000 acres of West Bank land – the biggest land grab by the Jewish state in three decades.

The West Bank is divided into Area A, under nominal Palestinian control, Area B under joint Israeli-Palestinian control, and Area C (which comprises approximately 60 percent of the territory) under full Israeli control, although overall control of the entire West Bank ultimately falls under Israeli control.

The Israelis argue that under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Area C does not belong to the Palestinians and that most of the structures built there were constructed without permits.

However, obtaining the requisite Israeli building permits for Palestinians is notoriously difficult in East Jerusalem and most parts of the West Bank, and almost impossible in Area C. Critics argue that this is a deliberate policy by the Israeli authorities to keep the occupied territory part of Israel.

The Israeli authorities have warned the Youssefs and their neighbours that they have less than two months to evacuate and that if they refuse to leave they will be forcibly expelled by Israeli security forces.

“We have nowhere else to go, we’ve lived here for many years and have no other land. We also can’t afford to move into a Palestinian village because we can’t afford the rent,” Youssef said.

Youssef’s problems have been experienced by thousands of other Bedouins and will be experienced by thousands more once again as Israel moves to keep most of the West Bank free of Palestinians and exclusively for Israeli settlers and settlements.

In preparation for what some have labelled an accelerated wave of ethnic cleansing, officials from Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, have been demolishing Palestinian infrastructure in Area C including shacks, tents, animal shelters and homes and other structures deemed to have been built “illegally”.

As part of the forced relocation, more than 12,000 Bedouins will be relocated to a new settlement near the West Bank city of Jericho where they will be surrounded by a firing zone, settlements and an Israeli checkpoint which will limit their ability to graze their herds, the main source of income for these nomadic pastoralists.

Several Bedouin communities were forcibly relocated in the 1990s by the Civil Administration from near East Jerusalem to an area of land near a garbage dump in Abu Dis which falls in Area B.

The expulsion of the Bedouins in the 1990s was primarily to make way for enlarging the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, one of the largest in the West Bank.

Further to enlarging Maale Adumim, part of Israel’s plan has been to keep an area known as the E1 corridor, which links the settlement with East Jerusalem, contiguous and under Israeli control by building more settlements, effectively dividing the West Bank in two.

The move also further isolates East Jerusalem from the West Bank. East Jerusalem is of great importance to Palestinians due to cultural, educational, family, business, and religious ties. Palestinians also hope to establish a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

“The Civil Administration’s plan blatantly contravenes international humanitarian law, which prohibits the forced transfer of protected persons, such as these Bedouin communities, unless the move is temporary or is necessary for their safety or to meet a military need,” says Israeli rights group B’tselem.

“The Civil Administration’s expulsion plan meets none of these conditions. Israel, as the occupying power, is obligated to act for the benefit and welfare of residents of the occupied territory. Expansion of the settlements does not comport with this requirement.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Israeli settler home in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, following the eviction of a number of Palestinian families. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank , Oct 12 2014 (IPS)

A deliberate Israeli policy to Judaise East Jerusalem has forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and created a chronic housing shortage in the occupied part of the city.

Simultaneously, Israeli settlers have been encouraged by the Jerusalem Municipality to settle in the growing number of settlements mushrooming in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods, all illegal under international law.

The municipality has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

“Since 1967 the Israeli government has pursued a declared policy of maintaining a 72 percent majority of Jews over Palestinians in the city,” according to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).The municipality [of Jerusalem] has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state

“Towards that end it has not allowed Palestinians to build new homes, creating an artificial shortage of some 25,000 housing units in the Palestinian sector, while Palestinians are not able to access most of the Jewish neighbourhoods.

“This induced shortage raises the price of renting or buying, and since 70 percent of Palestinians live under the poverty line, they are forced to move outside the Jerusalem borders to acquire affordable housing where they can be stripped legally of their Jerusalem residency,” explains Halper.

“Such are the political machinations behind the seemingly justified policy of demolishing ‘illegal’ homes, a key element of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing,” he adds.

The International Peace and Cooperation Centre (IPCC) – a Palestinian non-governmental organisation specialised in urban planning and community development – issued an East Jerusalem Housing Review 2013 report describing some of the obstacles Palestinians face in trying to build new homes or extend current homes.

“House construction is severely stifled by deficiencies in the planning and, to a lesser extent, delivery systems, both of which have been derailed by Israeli policy makers,” stated the report.

“Building legally, by obtaining a permit through the planning system, is impossible within the majority of land in East Jerusalem. The permit system rigidly maintains requirements that cannot be met as a result of the planning and infrastructural deficiencies.”

According to IPCC, these include “insufficient outline and detailed master plans, inappropriate zoning of urban areas as low density or ‘green’ land, insufficient physical infrastructure, including road, sewage and water networks and the near total absence of registered land.”

Most of the land in East Jerusalem (92 percent) is unregistered, making it impossible to obtain building permits.

The IPCC report said that “development is further stifled by institutional shortcomings such as the unavailability of suitable housing loans, insufficient capacity or willingness of the private sector to plan and deliver large housing projects, the limited amount of suitable development land for sale and its extraordinary cost.”

As a result, Palestinians have been forced to build without the requisite permits. Over 70 percent of new construction from 2001 to 2010 was undertaken without building permits, with informal dwellings comprising between 42 and 54 percent of all housing.

Average room density is 1.9 people per room, making it 90 percent higher than in Jewish West Jerusalem.

While the Israeli authorities have set strategies concerning the Judaisation of East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers have been using other methods to slowly take over.

Muhammad Sabbagh is a resident of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem who, together with other Palestinian activists, is involved in a long, ongoing battle with Israeli settlers over home ownership and possible eviction.

His extended family is part of a group of 28 Palestinian refugee families who live right next to several Israeli settlement homes.

These Palestinian families were allocated land by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956 when the West Bank was under Jordanian rule. The Jordanian government had said that after three years the Palestinians would be given the homes.

However, following Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967 Israeli settlers tried to evict the Palestinians claiming they had documents proving ownership of the homes from the late 1800s during the Ottoman Empire.

The case went back and forth to the Israeli courts until an agreement was reached that the Palestinians could stay for the next 90 years if they agreed to pay rent.

When some of the families refused to pay the rent on the basis that the homes belonged to neither the Israeli government nor the settlers, they were evicted in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers and police.

Subsequent court action and original Turkish documentation proved that the settlers’ documents were forged and that the homes had never belonged to the Jewish community several hundred years ago as the settlers had claimed.

Further evictions have currently been frozen by the Israeli courts on the basis of the documents being forgeries but Sabbagh says that is insufficient.

“We are now fighting to have the homes returned to us as their legal owners and so that the families who were evicted can return home.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Mahmoud Raba’I in Jinba. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

By Pierre Klochendler
JINBA, Occupied West Bank, Dec 26 2013 (IPS)

Jinba is in the crosshair of ‘Firing Zone 918’ – and ‘Firing Zone 918’ is a microcosm of the Israeli occupation. Together with seven other communities, Jinba is slated for demolition to make way for an Israeli training ground. Forced eviction hangs over a thousand Palestinians.

Mahmoud Raba’i is sowing wheat in his field. Winter is here, but it hasn’t rained a single drop in the rugged, unforgiving, South Hebron Hills. “God willing, rain will come and fill the wells,” the Palestinian farmer murmurs.

Jinba is home to 300 Palestinian tent- and cave-dwellers who struggle for the right to carry on living on their land like their forefathers.“We and our children live here; our sheep graze here. They want us to carry our land on our back and leave.”

It’s a furrow these subsistence wheat farmers and sheepherders have been ploughing generation after generation for over 150 years – steadily, relentlessly.

“This is our land,” Raba’i seethes. “We and our children live here; our sheep graze here. They want us to carry our land on our back and leave.”

Jabarin enters his cave. Mattresses are piled up against dark walls near tools. Toothbrushes, a comb, are strewn on a makeshift shelf. A stove lights his weathered face. “My grandfather, my father, and I were born here.”

The villagers in Jinba are among the West Bank’s poorest Palestinians. Living off the land isn’t easy when the land is under occupation.

In all 60.2 percent of the West Bank is designated ‘Area C’ – that is, under full Israeli military and administrative control. The largest community in the South Hebron Hills, the village of Jinba, is in ‘Area C‘.

The village has no access road, no running water and no electricity, no building permits, only demolition orders.

“We were handed demolition orders against the concrete poured on the floors of our tents and clinic. For everything we do, there’s a demolition order,” Jabarin tells IPS.

Jinba abuts Israel. Here, the infamous ‘Green Line’ which marked the border between Israel and the West Bank prior to the 1967 War is a white furrow crisscrossing the desert.

Strange boundary stones mark an area encompassing 12 Palestinian communities.

On them, commanding inscriptions in English, Arabic and Hebrew: “Danger. Firing Area. Entrance Forbidden.”

“Let’s get rid of the occupation,” reads the Arabic and Hebrew graffiti sprayed on the opposite side of a marker.

“Why a firing zone here? There’s enough open space inside Israel. They want to expel us and move us into heavily populated Palestinian areas. This firing zone’s just an excuse for Israel to pursue its land grab,” asserts Jabarin.

In contrast, ten illegal settlement outposts located within the firing zone are under no such threat.

Head of Jinba and guardian of his community, Jabarin incessantly patrols the village by foot to protect it from Palestinian smugglers and workers who cross into Israel illegally and, above all, from incursions by the Israeli military stationed in the area.

He documents the routine raids for the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, and is one of the petitioners to the Supreme Court in Israel in a 14-year legal battle against the firing zone.

In September, the court interceded in favour of mediation between the Israeli authorities and the Palestinians. But the pressure hasn’t stopped.

Jabarin’s daughter Nawal, 12, is scared. Only a fortnight ago, Jabarin was arrested on suspicion of arson at a military base. “I wouldn’t have been released after eight days if I wasn’t innocent,” Jabarin scoffs.

The legal battle against forced eviction from ‘Firing Zone 918’ is part of a three-decade war of attrition waged by the Israeli authorities and local settlers against 4,000 impoverished Palestinian dwellers in the South Hebron Hills.

Land expropriation, harassment and acts of vandalism perpetrated by settlers against them are common practice, and the lack of law enforcement is glaring.

Earlier this month, a military squad was seen inspecting 25 uprooted olive trees in ATuwani area. In a separate incident, two days earlier, in Umm elAra’is, Israeli troops cracked down on Palestinians who complained of a settler trespassing on their land.

A week earlier on the same spot, soldiers stood idly by while settlers attacked Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority is powerless in the face of these acts as it doesn’t control the area.

In solidarity with the peasants, peace activists have entered the fray.

Founded in 2009 by two Israeli physicists-activists, ‘Comet’ is a joint Israeli-Palestinian initiative. Its purpose – to provide basic solar and wind energy access to the off-grid, marginalised Palestinian communities of the area.

“Our NGO is political in essence,” Comet’s co-founder Elad Orian tells IPS. “We support their struggle to stay on their land.”

‘Comet’ builds and installs hybrid wind and solar mini-grids. These stand-alone systems provide about two kilowatt-hours per family per day to 2,000 Palestinians.

Rural electrification facilitates socio-economic empowerment, say the Gawawis encampment dwellers.

“Sometimes there’s no sun, no wind, but in general, thank God, the electricity works fine,” Abu ElAbed tells IPS.

“It helps us economically. Women prepare more butter effortlessly with the electric butter churn. And we have a refrigerator, a washing machine, a TV.”

Sixteen of the 24 installations operated by Comet are under threat of demolition.

“You need a building permit. It makes sense. The problem is you have a bureaucratic mechanism whose purpose is to prevent people from obtaining permits,” says Orian. “And the people subjected to this bureaucracy aren’t Israeli citizens.”

Fortunately, Comet enjoys German government support, both financial and political, and can afford to fight legal battles on behalf of the Palestinian communities.

Abu ElAbed recalls that the army came to Gawawis two years ago with a demolition order, “but we haven’t heard from them since.”

In Jinba, the local clinic, mosque and elementary school remain off the grid. Fields remain under Israeli rule. But the Palestinian flag atop the elementary school leaves no doubt as to whom the land belongs.

Moshe Goldshmidt and his wife Lea at a new synagogue under construction in the Israeli settlement Itamar in the West Bank. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
HAR BRACHA SETTLEMENT, Occupied West Bank , Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Large spools of black tubing and plastic-wrapped water tanks lay strewn across a dusty construction site. A handful of Palestinian labourers, speaking quietly in Arabic, shuttle the items to the two unfinished, three-storey apartment blocs behind them.

This is Har Bracha, an illegal Israeli settlement near Nablus, one of the West Bank’s largest Palestinian cities. And on a sunny day this July, construction was moving quickly.

“The bigger and bigger we get, the more difficult it will be to ever evacuate us,” said Yonatan Behar, a resident of Har Bracha, during a press tour of the settlement.

“Ariel [a nearby Israeli settlement] is a city of 20,000 people or more. Who in their right mind would ever think of evacuating a city of 20,000 people? A small community of 300 families [like Har Bracha], that’s possible. But if we get to 1,000 families, and 2,000 families, and 5,000 families, then it’s very, very difficult,” Behar said.

The importance of establishing these “facts on the ground” – which means rapidly building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – is not lost on the Israeli government.“Itamar is continuing to grow throughout the decades. I call it a growth spurt and we haven’t stopped building.” -- Moshe Goldshmidt, resident of the ideological settlement Itamar near Nablus

As Israeli and Palestinian leaders resume negotiations Aug. 14 towards a peace agreement, Israel has untaken several steps to strengthen and expand its settlements. How this will impact the so-called peace talks does not seem to be a factor.

Earlier this week, Israel approved construction of nearly 1,000 new housing units in seven different West Bank settlements, and it plans to build 900 more units in East Jerusalem, south of the West Bank city Beit Jala.

The Israeli government has also added several West Bank settlements to its list of so-called priority communities that are eligible for government funding. This includes three settlements that were originally considered outposts – built in violation even of Israeli law – that earned retroactive recognition last year.

Israeli army radio reported that the Israeli population in West Bank settlements grew more than the population inside Israel proper in the first half of 2013, with the settlement population growing by 2.1 percent, compared to just a two percent increase in Israel.

Housing start-ups in West Bank settlements also increased during the first quarter of 2013 by an astonishing 355 percent compared to the last quarter of 2012, according to data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.

These ongoing and seemingly accelerated efforts to expand Israeli settlements as negotiations re-start show that the Israeli government has no intention of uprooting its sprawling settler population, estimated to number more than 600,000 today.

Instead, Israel continues – as it has done since the settlements were first established decades ago – to flout international law by actively promoting settlement growth, with a complete disregard for the consequences – since there are, in fact, none.

While some have argued that recent promises to build in the settlements are meant to appease right-wing factions within the ruling Israeli coalition government that oppose a return to negotiations, the reality is that negotiations have, since their inception 20 years ago, only facilitated the continuation of Israeli colonial policies.

Indeed, so-called peace talks have historically served as nothing more than diplomatic cover for Israel as it continued to confiscate Palestinian land and expand its settler colonies.

The last major agreement signed between the two parties was the 1993 Oslo Accords. Meant to be only a five-year interim agreement, the Oslo framework is still in place.

Today, it is hard to view Oslo as anything more than a failure. Through Oslo, Israel entrenched its occupation policies, and increased its settler population exponentially.

Between 1993 and 2010, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem more than doubled, going from 241,000 to over 500,000, according to Israeli human rights group Btselem.

Many Israeli settlers are unperturbed by the return to negotiations or by the prospects of an agreement; after decades of impunity, many boast just how secure they feel.

“Itamar is continuing to grow throughout the decades. I call it a growth spurt and we haven’t stopped building,” Moshe Goldshmidt, resident of the ideological settlement Itamar near Nablus, told IPS.

Goldshmidt said he has been hearing about possible evacuation of the settlements for 20 years now, but efforts to get them to move only strengthen the settlers’ resolve to stay.

“We’re not going to live in fear,” he said. “We believe very strongly in what we’re doing.”

A new neighbourhood under construction in Ariel settlement. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

By Pierre Klochendler
ARIEL, Occupied West Bank, Jul 19 2013 (IPS)

As the European Union delegitimises the settlement enterprise further by officially announcing that, effective Jul. 30, its 28 member states are required to differentiate between pre-1967 Israel and Israeli-occupied territories, Israelis supportive of a two-state solution vigorously lead their own boycott campaign against Ariel, a settlement town of 20,000.

The fresh EU directive bars funding or cooperation with settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Future agreements with Israel will stipulate that the settlements are not part of Israel, and thus will not benefit from these agreements.

Last month, Mc Donald’s-Israel declined to open an eatery in the first mall to be built in Ariel. With over 170 branches in the country, of which some 40 are kosher, the fast food chain’s franchise is owned by Omri Padan, a founder of Peace Now.

The activist group’s chairman, Yariv Openheimer, qualifies both decisions as “moral and legitimate”.

“The Israeli government is fighting a lost battle against a worldwide understanding that the occupation must end,” Openheimer tells IPS. “Israel can force neither individuals and companies nor diplomats to participate in settlements activities.”

How is the campaign perceived in Ariel?

Having just completed a four-day infantry exercise in the area, conscripts leave a pile of assault rifles on the lawn of the municipal pool and line up in front of the barbecue grill.

“That’s an Ariel burger,” jokes a soldier at the thought that the fast food chain spoiled their chance for a Big Mac delight.

“We’re against any boycott,” declares Ariel Mayor Eliyahu Shaviro. The Council of Jewish Communities of Judea and Samaria, the settlements umbrella organisation in the West Bank, demands that “all European projects (for Palestinians) be stopped until the unilateral EU decision is rescinded.”

“These are not boycotts against Israel,” Openheimer cautions. “Many Israelis also disagree with the settlements enterprise and don’t buy their goods, especially since peace talks hit a dead end (in 2010).”

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement appeals very little to pro-peace Israelis who suspect the initiative is not directed only at settlements but against Israel proper.

Ariel is the one settlements targeted by the Israel boycott campaign.

In 2011, 145 academics opposed to settlement expansion announced their boycott of Ariel College with its 18,500 students and staff – to no avail. Six months ago, the government officially recognised the college as a fully accredited university.

Several actors, authors and directors refuse to work at the town’s Centre for the Performing Arts inaugurated three years ago.

Many companies, including Barkan Winery, Multilock, Bagel-Bagel, all of whom exported goods manufactured in the Barkan industrial zone near Ariel, Israel’s largest in the West Bank, have relocated their factories.

“Arabs might return to a cycle of violence if they’re unemployed,” warns Shaviro. “We mustn’t harm education, culture or businesses. We’ve got to preserve coexistence and the fabric of life here.”

“The settlers take advantage of cheap Palestinian labour force with barely any rights,” counters Openheimer. “They reap hefty revenues from the flawed political situation.”

But why boycott Ariel and not other settlements?

“Ariel’s residents aren’t ideological settlers, just ordinary Israelis who moved there for cheaper housing,” says Openheimer.

“The settlers invest lots of energy to create a symbol of normalcy, as if Ariel resembled Tel Aviv. Thus most Israelis feel that the settlements are in Israel, which they’re not, and the boycott tells them that.”

“The state sent us here. We’re deep in the heart of the national consensus,” Shaviro tells IPS. “Whoever refuses to visit Ariel, we’re fine without him.”

In return for former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to unilaterally withdraw soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip eight years ago this month, former U.S. President George W. Bush stated in a letter the following:

“In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return” to the pre-1967 lines.

The oblique reference to “major population centres” meant that within a two-state solution, the U.S. would eventually consent to the annexation by Israel of east Jerusalem’s Jewish neighbourhoods and of four settlement blocs – including Ariel.

If attached to Israel, the ‘Ariel finger’ would be just that – a finger stuck in the midst of a future Palestinian state, almost dividing it in two subdivisions while being surrounded by it.

A 20-minute drive on Highway 5 exemplifies the finger-like link between Ariel and Israel. The road is insulated by fences.

“The people who built Ariel (in 1978) knew they had the power to prevent a Palestinian state,” reckons Openheimer.

President Barack Obama never endorsed the Bush Letter to the letter, declaring instead in 2011 that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed (territorial) swaps”, without referring to settlement blocs.

“There’s a wide national agreement that Ariel is part and parcel of Israel, with or without peace,” claims Shaviro.

When the ten-month settlement freeze ended in 2010, a building project broke ground in Ariel, which now materialises as a cottage neighbourhood with a view.

In all, 650 housing units are currently under construction. The university is putting the final touch on a new library edifice and expanding the campus. There’s a building boom in the air. But it might be short-lived.

“Not a single building permit has been allocated for a whole year,” the mayor says. “I expect the government to expand settlements.”

U.S. Secretary of State Jim Kerry, engaged in a sixth round of Mideast shuttle diplomacy, hopes to bring Israel and the Palestinian Authority back to the negotiation table before September.

Meanwhile, the soldiers enjoy a splashing moment at the pool with a water war game. The municipal host knows it – their guests are more at the heart of national legitimacy than his settlement.

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.”

Ibrahim Makhlouf stands on the roof of his home in the West Bank, from where he can see the Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
ASIRA AL-QIBLIYA, Occupied West Bank, May 16 2013 (IPS)

Ibrahim Makhlouf reaches for two wooden planks lying in the hallway and places them expertly in an L-shape along the seams of his front door.

“Open [the door],“ he beckons, knowing that doing so is nearly impossible. “Every night, we put this here,” he explains. “For the settlers.”

Makhlouf’s home sits on the outskirts of the West Bank village of Asira Al-Qibliya, only 500 metres from the illegal Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm, an offshoot of the equally illegal settlement of Yitzhar.

Makhlouf told IPS that his house is attacked by Israeli settlers at least two times per week and has been vandalised over 100 times. The windows on Makhlouf’s two-story home all have bars on the outside to prevent them from shattering when settlers throw stones.

“When we see the settlers, we send the children to another house. What can we do?” Makhlouf, who lives with his wife and six children, said. “We’re afraid. There is no safety.”"When we see the settlers, we send the children to another house."
-- Ibrahim Makhlouf

Since the Shalhevet Farm outpost was established in 1999, Makhlouf said he has been barred from accessing some 16 dunams of his family’s land, which was traditionally used to plant figs, grapes, olives and other trees, and from using a freshwater spring.

“It is my father and grandfather’s land, but now settlers are planting, and I can’t even enter it. They want to confiscate the land and houses and control the whole area to extend their settlements,” Makhlouf said.

“The [Israeli] government encourages them, with money and protection from the soldiers,” he added. “The government and the settlers are one.”

Illegal settlements

In recent weeks, international actors, including the United States, have renewed efforts to get Israel to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank in order to restart long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians. On Apr. 30, the Arab League said it would support potential land swaps along the 1967 Green Line in negotiations of final borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

But the growth of Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank, like Shalhevet Farm, has been almost entirely omitted from the conversation. Such outposts are often precursors to full-fledged settlements, both of which are illegal under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.

For Palestinians, both settlements and outposts have the same negative impact on their lives. But the Israeli government views only outposts, not settlements, as illegal, sometimes dismantling them for being built without the required permits and then relocating residents to nearby settlements.

Settlements are generally much larger than outposts and receive full services and infrastructure, although the Israeli government does also provide outposts, which generally begin as a few caravans on a hilltop, with basic services such as water and electricity. The Israeli army also protects outpost residents, as it does all other Israeli settlers.

Israeli settlement outposts were first built in the mid-1990s, during a freeze on settlement construction imposed by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A few years later, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon famously urged Israeli settlers to seize every hilltop. “Whatever you grab will be ours. What you don’t grab will not be ours,” he said.

In 2005, at the behest of the Israeli government, lawyer Talia Sasson reported that the outposts are illegal under Israeli law. To be considered legal, a settlement must be established by a government decision, be built on “state land”, possess a building plan, and have clear, territorial boundaries.

Outposts fail to meet these criteria, although earlier this week, the Israeli government announced plans to examine whether it could retroactively legalise four outposts.

Expansion for control

Today about 100 Israeli settlement outposts dot the West Bank. While most begin small, they develop quickly, and many have cement houses, paved roads, playgrounds and daycare centres.

In the case of Shalhevet Farm, Peace Now, an Israeli non-governmental organisation that works against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, found that the Israeli Ministry of Housing and Construction spent 1.1 million Israeli shekels (over 300,000 U.S. dollars) to connect the outpost to basic infrastructure. The national water company, Mekorot, provides it with water.

Many outposts also serve an important geopolitical aim.

According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, some outposts aim “to create Jewish continuity and connect isolated settlements with settlement blocs, in order to prevent future evacuation. Even though each of these outposts is home to only a few dozens of families, the outposts can completely control the land or the road around it.”

Violence against Palestinians and their property emanating from settlement outposts has also been well documented. After a Palestinian man killed an Israeli settler earlier this month near Nablus, Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq documented 13 settler attacks against Palestinians in one week in the area.

38-year-old Munir Jibreel Qaddous, a farmer from the West Bank village of Burin, told IPS about being viciously attacked by Israeli settlers in 2011, while the Israeli army and police looked on and did nothing.

White caravans of the settlement outpost of Bracha B, an extension of the Bracha settlement, overlook much of Burin’s farmland, and settlers regularly vandalise Palestinian property and attack their homes in the village, Qaddous explained.

Data collected by Yesh Din shows that between 2005-2012, over 91 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians against acts of Israeli settler violence were closed without an indictment. Of this, 84 percent were closed due to the Israeli police’s failure to properly investigate the crimes.

“All of them are the same,” said Qaddous, referring to Israeli settlers living in settlements and unauthorized outposts. He told IPS that he witnessed the Bracha B outpost’s construction and gradual expansion.

“In 1999, a watch-tower was put up, then trailers were erected. Then, there were 15 cement houses. Before the settlers came, they put [in] a road, electricity and water,” he said.

“This area is a very strategic area of the West Bank. After five or ten years, maybe you will see settlers on every hill.”

Anger surfaces in the West Bank at the funeral procession for Rushdi Tamimi. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank, Nov 21 2012 (IPS)

Hundreds of Palestinians marched through Ramallah Tuesday afternoon to mourn the death of a Palestinian protester who was fatally wounded during a demonstration against the ongoing Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.

“It’s mixed feelings, between being sad and angry, because he was killed in cold blood,” said 29-year-old Raya Ziada, a resident of Ramallah who participated in the march. “As a Palestinian, I’m here. It’s a Palestinian loss.”

Rushdi Tamimi, 31, died on Monday of wounds sustained over the weekend during a protest held in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh against Israeli violence in Gaza. According to an eyewitness account published by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), a group of grassroots Palestinian activists, Israeli soldiers shot Tamimi in the stomach with live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets.

Tamimi reportedly suffered from ruptured intestines and two ruptured arteries before succumbing to his injuries.

Israel continues to bomb the Gaza Strip amidst talks of an imminent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic party that governs the Palestinian territory. More than 135 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, and over 1,100 were injured in less than one week of fighting.

But the violence hasn’t been restricted to the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli army is using extreme force to suppress Palestinians from across the West Bank who have taken to the streets in outrage over the situation in Gaza.

In addition to Tamimi, 22-year-old Hamdi Al-Falah was killed Monday during violent clashes with Israeli soldiers in the southern West Bank city Hebron. Israeli soldiers reportedly shot Al-Falah four times with live ammunition.

According to Shawan Jabarin, director of Palestinian human rights group Al Haq, the general feeling among Palestinians in the West Bank is extreme anger and frustration at the killings in Gaza.

“I think people are very, very angry now about what’s going on in Gaza. Then the Israelis started using live bullets (in the West Bank). They are using excessive force against people. More demonstrations and more shootings will happen,” Jabarin told IPS.

He added that the popularity of Hamas is increasing, while the Palestinian Authority (PA), which rules over the West Bank, and PA President Mahmoud Abbas appear weak.

“The popularity of Hamas is increasing dramatically these days in peoples’ minds,” Jabarin said. “There are more and more voices to stop the security coordination between Palestinians and Israelis. People are angry (at the PA).”

Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported that over 50 people have been injured across the West Bank in demonstrations in recent days. Ma’an also reported that masked Palestinian gunmen opened fire on an Israeli military checkpoint near the northern West Bank city Jenin on Monday.

“The fire was probably carried out by a vehicle that fled the scene, with several structures in the area damaged. Soldiers searched the area for suspects while Palestinians threw rocks at them,” an Israeli military spokesperson told Ma’an.

Israeli settlers are also suspected of carrying out two attacks in the West Bank: a mosque was set on fire in the Palestinian village Urif, near Nablus, and a car was burnt and racist graffiti was spray-painted in Sinjil village in Ramallah area.

Dozens of Palestinians have been arrested across the West Bank in the past week. Israeli forces re-arrested Thaer Halahleh, a Palestinian prisoner who recently spent 77 days on hunger strike in Israeli jail in protest of his detention without charge. He was released after four days in detention.

“There’s definitely been a spike in arrests,” explained a spokesperson from Addameer, a Ramallah-based Palestinian prisoners’ rights association. “(The Israelis) are using this as an opportunity to arrest more young people. To suppress, they arrest them at a young age.”

In Ramallah, 67-year-old Aisa Hralif watched from the sidewalk as the funeral procession for Rushdi Tamimi made its way towards the city’s central square, Al-Manara. The scene made him feel, he told IPS, that a third Intifadah, or Palestinian uprising, was beginning.

“There will be more violence. Every day in Beitunia (village near Ramallah), there are clashes. It’s like a third Intifadah,” Hralif said. “Gaza is not alone. We’re with them.”

Protester Raya Ziada agreed. “With the massacres that are taking place in Gaza, the protests (in the West Bank) are getting bigger and bigger on a daily basis. If the massacres in Gaza are going to keep going on, it’s going to expand in the West Bank as well.” (END)

Palestinian children join in to make use of limited time given by the Israelis for gathering olives in Deir Istiya village in the occupied West Bank. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

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

Affixed to a large cement bloc, the rusted, grey gate leading Palestinian farmers from the northern West Bank village of Salem to their olive groves was opened for four days this year.

“The road is closed by this gate and it’s (always) closed except for two times in the year,” says Adley Shteyeh, a member of the Salem local committee.

Salem residents own approximately 10,000 dunams of land on the eastern side of their village. The area can only be accessed with a permit issued by the Israeli military authorities and after crossing the gate and an Israeli settlement bypass road.

“Usually we need ten days or more to do our work on the other side (of the bypass road),” Shteyeh said. Over his shoulder, a handful of villagers could be seen cutting branches off their trees, to make sure they get all the olives before their permits run out.

Last week, two Palestinian farmers from Salem attempted to cross the bypass road in a tractor to access the olive trees. Before they could manage to do so, an Israeli military jeep blocked their passage. Moments later, IPS witnessed two more army jeeps arrive on the scene.

Then, about a dozen Israeli soldiers held a group of Palestinian and international supporters, who were on a tour of the village, and local Palestinian residents, on the suspicion that Palestinian youth from the village threw stones at nearby Israeli settlers.

After over half an hour, the group was finally let go, and the farmers were given access to their olive groves.

“If someone tries to cross this road without coordination, he is either beaten or harassed by settlers or the Israeli army,” Shteyeh says. “Settlers have come in and vandalised land, and beat up people inside the village also.”

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories (UN-OCHA), there are 73 barrier gates in the West Bank. Closed year round, the Israeli authorities only open them for limited amounts of time during the olive harvest.

Since the start of October this year, UN-OCHA estimates that Israeli settlers have vandalised or destroyed approximately 1,000 olive trees belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank.

This destruction has negatively impacted the economic viability of the olive oil industry in the occupied Palestinian territories, which accounts for 14 percent of the agricultural income in the area, and supports approximately 80,000 Palestinian families.

“Any losses relating to settler violence, or the ongoing restrictions on access for farmers to their olive groves throughout the year, has an impact on the local economy,” Ramesh Rajasingham, head of UN-OCHA, tells IPS via e-mail.

“The sad thing here is that, in many of these cases, a family that could previously support itself has had its livelihood pulled from under them and therefore suddenly find themselves reliant on support from humanitarian organisations and donors; this reliance on aid, in turn, further contributes to the crisis of dignity. This situation is entirely avoidable.”

But harvesting olives is more than just a means of sustenance for many Palestinians.

“Our lives are bound to the olive trees,” farmer Jamal Abu Hijji tells IPS. A 48-year-old father of four, Abu Hijji spent a sunny October afternoon last week with his two brothers, their wives, and their children in his olive tree grove in the Nablus-area village of Deir Istiya.

Together, using ladders and small plastic rakes, they combed through each branch and knocked olives onto plastic tarps set up below the trees.

Abu Hijji explains that during the olive harvest season, he works from 6 am to 4 pm each day for about one month, to cultivate almost 300 trees. But, in addition to harvesting, he must work at a local olive press to meet his family’s needs.

“The outcome is modest to make a living, but it is important for us as we have lived here and inherited the lands and the trees from our fathers and grandfathers,” he said. “Its significance is not for a great materialistic value; it is more because of the moral value, the traditions and the land. I am Palestinian and I want to protect my land.” (END)

Palestinian protestors at the Qalandia checkpoint. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Walter García and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

With a shortfall of some 400 million dollars this year, the Palestinian Authority (PA) faces a “deepening fiscal crisis”, according to new reports released here Wednesday on the eve of a critical donors’ conference by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The two agencies said they hoped donors, who will meet at the U.N. Sunday, will help bridge the immediate gap, but that the PA’s viability depends in the longer run on Israel’s easing curbs on private investment and other initiatives to spur economic growth, especially in Area C, the 61 percent of the West Bank that remains under the Jewish state’s control.

“(R)estrictions put in place by the Government of Israel continue to stand in the way of potential private investment and remain the major impediment to sustainable economic growth,” the World Bank said in its 21-page report, entitled ‘Fiscal Crisis, Economic Prospects, The Imperative for Economic Cohesion in the Palestinian Territories’.

“Most notably, the continued geographical fragmentation of Area C (envisaged under the Oslo Accords as a temporary arrangement) poses a binding constraint to real economic growth, essential to support the future Palestinian state,” it said.

“Area C’s significance, as the only contiguous land in the West Bank connecting 227 separate geographical areas, is the key to economic cohesion and is the most resource abundant space in the West Bank holding the majority of the territory’s water, agricultural lands, natural resources, and land reserves that provide an economic foundation for growth in key sectors of the economy,” according to the report, which noted that expanding Jewish settlements in the same Area, unburdened by similar restrictions, were capitalising on opportunities the land offers.

The two reports, as well as the donors’ meeting, come amidst growing public discontent with the PA, which last week was forced to cut taxes and restore fuel subsidies that had triggered widespread popular protests against the government headed by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The Bank report noted that the budget shortfall coincides with other worrisome developments, including an economic slowdown; reduced donor assistance, notably from wealthy Gulf states; and “few positive prospects in the broader political environment”, a reference to the total lack of progress toward the creation of a Palestinian state coupled with the continuing expansion of Israel’s settlement enterprise.

All of these factors, as well as the continued split between Fatah, which runs the PA, and Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip since 2006, have raised new questions here and in the region about the viability of both the PA, as it is presently constituted, and the so-called two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The issue has even entered the political campaign here. While the Republican platform reaffirms the party’s support for a two-state solution, its presidential nominee, Gov. Mitt Romney, told a private audience of donors in May, according to a just-leaked video of his remarks, that the Palestinians didn’t want peace and that the best U.S. policy was to “kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Romney has already drawn fire for remarks he made while visiting Israel in late July. Without noting the ways in which the Israeli occupation has inhibited the growth of the Palestinian economy, the candidate asserted the two-to-one disparity between Israeli and Palestinian per capita income – in reality, it is more like 10 to one – could be explained by the differences in “culture” between the two populations.

The Bank and IMF reports did not address any cultural differences, but they both made clear that by far the most important constraint on the Palestinian economy was related to the Israeli occupation and the ways in which it discouraged investment.

The Bank’s report, which reiterated its previous assessment that the PA had made great strides in building key institutions and compares “favorably to other countries in the region and beyond”, is particularly damning about the effects of the occupation.

“Continued financial support by the donor community, and increased reform efforts by the PA, to be fully effective,” it said, “should also be combined with stronger action by the GoI (Government of Israel) to significantly ease remaining obstacles that prevent the Palestinian private sector from becoming the real engine of sustainable growth – the only medium term solution to exit from protracted fiscal crisis.”

The report offered many examples of how the occupation hinders investment, noting that, “Movement into and out of the West Bank continues to be severely constrained by a multi-layered system of physical, institutional, and administrative restrictions that have fragmented the territory into small enclaves lacking most forms of economic cohesion.”

Israel controls visas to enter the Palestinian territories, it said, and investors “report facing high levels of uncertainty in obtaining such permits which discourages them from exploring potential business opportunities.”

In addition, tight curbs on the import of “dual use” items that Israel regards as possible security threats, as well as restrictions on access to such resources as water and the electromagnetic spectrum, also harm the development of the Palestinian private sector. And traditional exports from Gaza to the West Bank and Israel itself have been cut drastically.

The report places particular emphasis on Area C, a relatively sparsely-populated part of the West Bank, which, under a 1995 Interim Agreement under the Oslo Accords, was to be “gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction”. It includes 63 percent of the West Bank’s agricultural lands, including the highly fertile Jordan Valley.

The report detailed major opportunities for private investment in telecommunications, tourism, housing and construction, agriculture, and in small and medium enterprises, but that Israeli control, as well as the growth of Jewish settlements and infrastructure, such as highways and telecommunications towers reserved for Israelis, made Palestinian development in these sectors problematic or impossible, in major part due to the inability to obtain building permits from the Israeli authorities.

The Bank report noted particular concern with the high level of youth unemployment – 26 percent in the West Bank and 43.5 percent overall. The IMF report warned that the economic continued slowdown, an increase in unemployment and the worsening fiscal crisis were “bound to fuel social upheaval”.

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

After more than 25 years spent fighting for women’s rights in the Gaza Strip, Andaleeb Shehadeh is now struggling for the right to complete her university education.

“This kind of studies is very important for the women who are active in women’s rights in the Gaza Strip,” the 46-year-old mother of four told IPS. “It’s not offered in Gaza or in the rest of the Middle East.”

In 1999, Shehadeh began a Master’s degree in gender, law and development at Birzeit University in the West Bank. One year later, after having completed only half of her degree, the Israeli authorities imposed a sweeping ban on Palestinians wanting to travel from Gaza to the West Bank for education.

Shehadeh, who works as executive director of the Community Media Centre in Gaza, hasn’t been able to attend classes in the West Bank ever since.

“They mention an excuse, which is that (the ban is) for security reasons, not for me personally, but for all students who want to go to the West Bank to study. For what security reason can students threaten Israel?”

There are nine universities in the West Bank and five in the Gaza Strip. There are approximately 30 percent more undergraduate programmes and 40 percent more graduate programmes offered in the West Bank than in Gaza, and several programmes aren’t offered in Gaza at all, including dentistry, medical engineering, veterinary medicine, and democracy and human rights.

“They aim to divide us. They aim to separate us from the Palestinians in the West Bank. It is to prevent us from a good education, and to strengthen their control on Gaza and Gazans,” Shehadeh added.

In late May, the Israeli High Court (Supreme Court) ordered the Israeli military to re-examine its refusal to allow Shehadeh, and four other female Palestinian students from Gaza, from reaching Birzeit University in the West Bank to complete their degrees.

According to Gisha, the Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, which submitted the Supreme Court petition with the Gaza-based Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights on behalf of the students, this travel ban violates Israeli obligations under international law as an occupying power, and Israel’s commitment under the Oslo Accords to treat Gaza and the West Bank as a unified territory.

“It seems like (Israel is) trying to prevent people from moving to the West Bank. When you’re young and you’re a student, you can meet a man or a woman and get married, and you will want to stay,” Ayelet Cohen, Gisha Spokesperson, told IPS. “They say that students have a ‘dangerous profile’.”

Before the outbreak of the Second Intifadah, between July and September of 2000, it is estimated that the monthly average of entries to Israel from Gaza was more than 500,000.

Today, Israel grants approximately 3,000 exit permits each month to Palestinians passing through the Erez border crossing between Israel and Gaza. Most of these permits are only given to businesspeople, or for critical humanitarian reasons.

In 2007, the Israeli High Court (Supreme Court) recommended that Israel set up a committee to individually examine the cases of Gazans wishing to study in the West Bank, and grant exceptions for those students whose studies could have “positive human implications”.

To date, however, such a committee has yet to be established.

“These women are really trying to make a difference. They are working for their society all their lives and they just want to learn how to do it better,” Cohen said. “You have businessmen going from Gaza to the West Bank and to Israel all the time. If they can go from Gaza to the West Bank, how come those women can’t?”

For Andaleeb Shehadeh, while finishing her degree at Birzeit University is crucial, working for the right of younger Palestinians from Gaza to study freely in the West Bank is equally important.

“I see the opportunity (for me) to rejoin Birzeit University. I think by (pressuring) the Israeli government and those who prevent us from having a permit to go to the West Bank, we will make a case which will allow the young people to join universities in the West Bank (also),” she said.

“The young people who want to complete their undergraduate degree should have permits and be allowed to join universities in the West Bank – in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron – because this is our land. We are Palestinians, and we have the right to be there whenever we want and for whatever reason we want.”

(END)