Category: Israel

How to End the Eritrean Refugee Crisis

by adminin African refugees, Israel, Writing

The Nation, December 2, 2015

Tesfu Atsbha, 35, stands in the alley behind an unmarked Eritrean community center in south Tel Aviv, just blocks away from the park where a memorial service was held for Habtom Zerhum a few days before. Zerhum, an Eritrean asylum seeker, was killed when he was mistaken for a Palestinian terrorist during an attack on the Beer Sheva bus station. He was shot by an Israeli security guard, and as he lay bleeding on the ground, he was beaten by onlookers. One of them picked up a bench and dropped it on Zerhum’s head.

Atsbha is the chairperson of the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation, one of the biggest diaspora-based opposition parties seeking to depose Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki. The group’s headquarters are in Ethiopia, where Atsbha lives. He landed in Israel in late October to find its community of 45,000 asylum seekers—most of whom are from Eritrea—in mourning and shock.

Not that things have ever been easy here. When African asylum seekers cross the border from Egypt to Israel, they are imprisoned. After they get out of jail, they are not allowed to work legally. So they take black-market jobs, where they are subject to exploitation. Israeli politicians and the mainstream media call them “infiltrators”—a loaded term that, for many Israelis, is associated with Palestinians. The Prevention of Infiltration Law, which Israel drafted in the early 1950s to stop Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes inside the newly created Jewish state, has been broadened so that the state can use it to detain African asylum seekers as well.

And for many years, the Israeli government refused to process their requests for refuge. Now officials take the paperwork and don’t reply. Or they summarily reject applications for asylum without thoroughly investigating claims, human-rights groups say.

It all stems from the state’s goal to “make their lives miserable”—the laws and policies are meant to deter African asylum seekers from coming, while pressuring those who are here already to leave. So far, it has worked. Several years ago, the community numbered 60,000. The South Sudanese who lived in Israel were deported in 2012; others who faced indefinite detention versus “voluntary deportation” chose to leave. Some who left Israel have tried to go on to Europe; a number drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. A handful were killed by ISIS.

Despite the immense pressure they face in Israel, many Eritreans were surprised by what happened to Zerhum, an event that the Israeli media called a “lynching.” During the interviews I conducted in the wake of his death, some told me that it pointed to how dire their situation is in Israel. Others remarked that it’s yet another tragic reminder of how urgent it is to stop the repression in Eritrea.

That’s why Atsbha’s here.

While he supports asylum seekers’ rights, he doesn’t believe that absorbing Eritreans and those fleeing other repressive regimes is a sustainable answer to Europe or Israel’s migrant crises.

“To accept thousands of refugees is not an easy task. It costs millions of dollars.… It’s not sustainable. The solution is to get rid of the system,” Atsbha says, referring to Afwerki and his regime.

A crowd of about 200 Eritrean asylum seekers, donning white jerseys emblazoned with the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation logo, have gathered in the community center. Every chair is full. In the back, rows of men stand. They crowd around a pool table, the game they’d been playing moments before forgotten. All eyes are trained on Atsbha, whose story is not unlike their own.

Atsbha had only heard about prisons and torture in history class, when he’d studied the Ethiopian occupation of his homeland, Eritrea. But that changed in 2001, when he found himself detained without charge or trial.

Atsbha was a student at Asmara University then. He was in his final year, working toward a degree in public administration, when 20 people—11 high-ranking government officials and 10 journalists, a group that Eritreans call the G-15—disappeared.

Students, including Atsbha, started asking questions about the G-15, about “starting a democratic process, and [the] implementation of the constitution that was ratified in 1997,” he recalls. The head of the student council made a little too much noise and was arrested; Atsbha and others went to the courthouse in a show of solidarity. But justice was nowhere to be found—the group, which numbered in the hundreds, was rounded up and taken to jail.

Or something like it. They were held in an outdoor pen—300 people, Atsbha estimates, crammed into a 100 meter by 50 meter space. They were surrounded by a fence and armed guards. There was nowhere to bathe or go to the bathroom; the soldiers took them out once a day so that the prisoners could relieve themselves. Meals consisted of little more than bread and small amounts of water. There was no roof or shade of any kind, nothing to guard them from the searing heat.

Three of the students died from heat stroke while they were detained.

During the day, soldiers marched Atsbha and the other prisoners out of the pen to collect stones. Many Eritreans who have been detained or imprisoned speak of forced labor; other interviewees have told me that they were taken outside mid-day to dig ditches. Atsbha’s story is unusual in that he and the other students were held outdoors. Most Eritrean asylum seekers I’ve spoken to who have been detained describe dark underground prisons.

After 45 days, Atsbha was released. The experience, he believes, was meant to break any glimmerings of resistance. Instead, it planted the seed of revolution in his heart.

After Atsbha finished his degree, the government called him up to return to Sawa military camp, where he’d undergone three months’ basic training before university. From Sawa, Atsbha was sent to do civil service in the ministry of education. He received $10 a month for his work. Atsbha suspected that the government would never release him from duty—indeed, other Eritrean interviewees have been forced to spend a decade or more in the army, earning anywhere from $10 to $20 a month, with no end in sight.

Atsbha points out that keeping young men in the military indefinitely is another way to prevent the people from revolting.

Atsbha knew that if he went AWOL and was caught, he would be jailed. Still, he decided to flee. It was risky—many Eritreans have been killed by their own government as they’ve attempted to cross the border. So he left the country at night, crossing into Ethiopia in the dark in 2003.

He spent two years in a refugee camp there before joining his extended family, who had immigrated decades ago to Denver, Colorado. Atsbha arrived there in February of 2005, he recalls, and the streets were full of snow. He laughs as he remembers how shocked he was by the sudden change in both culture and climate.

But Atsbha adjusted to life in America. He began working part-time at a grocery store and studying medical technology. He got citizenship. He was comfortable, he says, but he couldn’t sleep at night.

“I never forgot about my land. Every day we heard bad news: people are dying, people are arrested, people are going out [emigrating].”

By this time, Eritreans were already making the trip to Libya, where smugglers ferried them across the Mediterranean to Italy. They began to arrive in Israel in 2006; some interviewees have told me that they went to Israel after they’d waited for months in Libya, only to give up on getting to Europe.

“What will be the future of the country [if everyone leaves]?” Atsbha asks. “We, as a people, will have a very ominous future.”

He worried about the fate of his parents and six siblings, who remain in Eritrea. He also thought about his “ancestors,” he says. “I have the land where I was born that I was given by God.”

In 2012, Atsbha decided to return to Africa. Because it was too dangerous for him to enter Eritrea, he went to Ethiopia. There, he got involved in the Eritrean Youth Solidarity for National Salvation, which was founded in the same year; it later changed its name to the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation in order to broaden its appeal.

Today, the movement is trying to strengthen its network between those in Ethiopia and other nearby countries and “clandestine organizations” in Eritrea. But Atsbha admits that it’s impossible to overthrow the regime from the inside at this point. So the first step, he argues, is to get the Eritrean diaspora organized.

It’s no short order. Since they began to leave the country in large numbers around 2000, Eritreans have fanned out across the globe. Various opposition movements have sprung up; Atsbha puts the number at 17. These groups must be unified, he says, under a clear goal—a lesson they could learn, perhaps, from the Palestinian struggle, which does not have one crystallized aim and is plagued by internal conflicts.

The organization also aims to raise awareness about Eritreans’ plight through various nonviolent means, including seminars, workshops, and demonstrations; they hope that this will cause the international community to put diplomatic and political pressure on Afwerki to step down.

Ultimately, resources from the diaspora must be pooled so that the opposition movements can “gain…the necessary equipment for the revolution,” Atsbha says. “The sharpest…edge of any struggle is armed struggle.”

“But that’s not our choice,” he’s quick to add. “That’s a final resort.”

In some respects, the group’s efforts are reminiscent of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s in its early days. And just as the Palestinian struggle was—and continues to be—often misunderstood, so is the situation in Eritrea.

“Right now, the international community doesn’t recognize the exact cause [of people’s leaving Eritrea]. Some of them, they see it as an economic case…. others say it’s the endless military conscription,” Atsbha reflects. “What makes them leave the country in such numbers and risk their life? It’s a question of liberty. It’s a question of political rights.”

This is What the Israelis Really Want

by adminin Israel, Palestine, Politics, Writing

The World Post at The Huffington Post, October 23, 2015

It’s Wednesday night. I’ve just left the memorial for Habtom Zarhum, the Eritrean asylum seeker who was mistaken for a Palestinian during the attack on the Beersheba bus station. Zarhum was shot by a security guard and was then “lynched”by an Israeli mob. They cursed the asylum seeker, spat on him and kicked his head as he lay on the ground bleeding.

The gathering held in Zarhum’s memory took place in a south Tel Aviv park, near the Central Bus Station. I board a “sherut” — a minivan that serves as a shared taxi — to head home.

Two older women are seated inside. They’re Mizrachi, Jews from Arab lands. It’s easy to tell from their accents. As I make my way past them, I squeeze past a large suitcase, which is taking up much of the aisle.

“Is it yours?” one of the women asks.

I cluck my tongue — the standard Israeli response for no.

A young man gets on behind me.

“Is that your suitcase?” They ask him as he sits down. A foreigner, he offers them a vacant look. He wears a kippah and a smile.

“Ken,” he says, yes.

“Take it,” one of the women commands.

The man, whom the women have already dubbed “the Frenchman,” does nothing. I gather he doesn’t speak Hebrew.

“Nu, come on, take it already! I don’t want it exploding next to me,” she shouts.

The woman is saying what the others around us were surely thinking. Whose suitcase is this? What’s in it? It’s what we call a “hefetz hashud,” a suspicious object.

“Maybe we should check it,” her companion says as the sherut starts to move. “Is it his? The Frenchman’s?”

The women don’t speak English so they continue yelling at him in Hebrew, trying to ascertain that the suitcase is, indeed, his and trying to figure out what’s in it.

“Is this your suitcase?” I translate for the young man.

“Yeah, it’s mine,” he says. He’s got a heavy American accent.

“The women want you take it.”

He wheels it down the aisle. But this doesn’t calm the women down. A few blocks later as the driver slows to pick up a passenger, one of them shouts “Don’t let him on, he looks suspicious.”

The driver ignores her, stops, and the man boards.

It’s quiet as he walks down the aisle, the woman’s remark still in our ears. We size him up. He sits down. It’s silent as faces pivot towards him, eyes trying to read his clothes, his hair, his skin, his facial expression, his movements. Does he look nervous? Is he reaching for something in his pocket?

He takes the only open seat, in the back row, wedged between the American-“Frenchman” and an Ethiopian Jew who wears a kippah. I wonder if he wore it a week ago, before Zarhum was killed. Or is it something new, something so he won’t be mistaken for a non-Jew, a terrorist.

The sherut lurches forward and, after a few uneasy moments, the women — who mention that they’re visiting Tel Aviv from Ashkelon — start chatting with the driver, asking him if it’s safe here.

“Sure,” the driver says. “This is Tel Aviv. What do the terrorists want with us? We’re all left-wingers. Vegans, everyone!”

Tel Aviv is known to Israelis as habuah, the bubble, because it is supposedly very different from the rest of the country. Here, the thinking goes, we’re isolated from the conflict. Here, everyone is, supposedly, a liberal.

“The leftists loves human beings,” the driver adds.

The women grow defensive. “We’re right-wing,” one says. “And the rightists love human beings, too.”

“But are you vegan?” the driver asks.

“What are you crazy?” one answers.

The driver launches into a speech, one he has clearly given many times. Eventually their discussion, which turns into an argument, becomes about kashrut, keeping kosher. Then the women identify themselves as masorati, traditional — like many other Mizrahi Jews, they’re neither secular nor religious. This leads, inevitably, to the driver asking them about their family roots. The women’s parents come from Yemen and Morocco.

“So you’re Arabs,” the driver says, adding that his family are Yemeni Jews, too.

“Gross,” the women shout. “We’re not Arabs.”

“Listen to your own accent,” the driver insists. “You’re an Arab. It’s okay. We’re all Arabs here.”

The women make noisy protest, one of them saying that Arabs are murderers and terrorists and that she is a Jew. As though Jews don’t kill people, too. As though dozens of Palestinians haven’t been shot to death by Israeli forces in recent weeks.

I realize, too, that she’s dehumanized both the Palestinians and the Jews in one fell swoop. Palestinians are “monsters” who kill people; Jews are saints who join the“most moral army in the world.” As an American-Jewish-Israeli who is married to a Palestinian, I’m doubly offended.

I also want to tell them that one can be both an Arab and a Jew. The child I’m carrying in my belly — our first, a girl — is living proof.

But I keep my mouth shut because there’s two of them, one of me, and who knows what the other people on the sherut think, how they’ll react.

The second woman takes a different approach than her friend, explaining to the driver that we have to distinguish between language and culture versus ethnicity. She admits to having the accent and, maybe, even some of the culture. “Sure, I cook some of the food,” she says. But that’s where the similarities end, in her mind.

“I’m not an Arab,” she says. “I’m a Jew.”

The driver, whose eagerness to embrace his Arab roots is uncommon amongst Israeli Jews, gives up. He steers the topic back to safer territory.

“Do you eat eggs?” he asks the women.

They say that they do.

“How can you eat eggs? Have you seen the cages those poor chickens live in?”

If he can’t persuade the women to embrace their Arabness, at least he’s going to make good vegans out of them.

***

As I ran errands in Tel Aviv last weekend, I passed a kiosk. The mainstream Hebrew daily Ma’ariv grabbed my eye.

“66%: Separate from the Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem,” the headline read.

The picture below showed the cement blocks that were placed around Palestinian parts of the city last week.

I was intrigued. Giving up on half of Jerusalem — which Israel claims as its “eternal, undivided capital” — is usually associated with the “left” (I use the term loosely in regards to the Israeli left — many argue that there isn’t a left left here). But the past few elections have shown that the public has moved right.

As I studied the picture, I wondered if the uptick in violence has made Israelis realize that the occupation is unsustainable, if they finally see that attempting to control another people — by corralling them into ever shrinking spaces like the one shown in the picture, by restricting their freedom of movement — is not only impossible but inhumane.

I took the bait and bought the paper. After I picked up a few things from the market, which was a bit quieter than usual but still busy, I headed home and settled in to check out the article about the survey.

When I opened the paper, I was disappointed.

“The principle is to separate” the headline said.

The poll revealed that while, yes, Jewish Israelis say that the state should leave the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem — which writer Ben Caspit admitted is “left wing” — 58 percent also support a “voluntary transfer” (whatever that means) of “West Bank Arabs” (read: Palestinians).

Where are they supposed to go? I wondered.

Caspit accurately pointed out that this is a “right wing” sentiment. “In reality, it’s the same result,” he continues. “We want to quit the Arabs. It’s not important how. That they’ll leave us, that we’ll leave them, the principle is to separate.”

But separation — which was formalized and deepened by the Oslo Accords — has only made things worse. It has wrought our current reality. It has brought us to the present day, to two peoples who think of the “other” as faceless enemies.

Then there’s the issue of collective punishment: 61 percent of Jewish Israelis who were surveyed “support an economic boycott of Arab Israelis following the ‘wave of terror.'” And 88 percent support “punitive measures towards the family members of terrorists.”

The latter translates to home demolitions — after a Palestinian kills a Jewish Israeli, the state destroys the family’s house, even if the suspect himself is dead or in jail. Violence begets violence begets violence.

Where will it end?

And that glimmer of hope that I’d had — that recent events had led Israelis to understand that they need to give up on the occupation, that they’d moved to the “left”? On the contrary. The survey showed that despite the “wave of terror,” 64 percent of Jewish Israelis have not changed their political affiliation. “Only three percent report that they’ve moved left,” the article says, while 30 percent have moved further to the right.

Hold that one-third in your mind as you consider this: 67 percent of Israelis aren’t satisfied with how Netanyahu is handling the “wave of terror.” The next government will likely be even more right-wing than this one.

***

While I don’t know a lot of rightists — politics are divisive here and people self-segregate into like-minded groups — their conversations are omnipresent. On the bus, in cafes, in restaurants. And what I hear leaves me even more disheartened than what I see in the newspapers.

Wednesday, on my way to Zarhum’s memorial, I sat and had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Persian place. Three middle-aged men and a young soldier sat at the table next to me. One of the men remarked that the place, which is usually busy at lunch time, was empty.

“Where is everyone?” he asked. “It’s because of the matsav, the situation, I guess.”

“The situation” — that’s what Israelis call the conflict.

The men began to chat about recent events, one casually mentioning that not only should terrorists’ homes be destroyed, but their families should be deported.

This, another chimed in, is the solution to the conflict. “Deport all of them and put walls on every border.” He took a bite of his food, chewed. “What can we do? We already live in a ghetto.”

A brief argument about the West Bank follows. If we annex it, one says, “All the Arabs will come here.”

“But if we leave, it will turn into Gaza,” another declares. “There’s nothing to do.” Both separation and occupation must continue.

The soldier complained that his commander is some sort of leftist who “wants a peace agreement with the Palestinians.” He snorts. “If we had a peace agreement with them, they’d make a “balagan.” A mess.

***

I’m saddened by this conversation and the poll, too, but I’m not surprised. When the violence ticks up — when the Palestinians no longer take dispossession and occupation like docile lambs — Israelis don’t self-reflect. They don’t ask “why are these people angry?” “What might they be trying to say?” “Have we done something to provoke this?”

Instead, Israelis look for simple, external answers: They’re anti-Semites, they hate us, they want to kill us, they want to drive us into the sea.

While I don’t understand this utter inability to self-reflect, I have to admit, I understand where it comes from: fear. I feel it, too, as I move through Tel Aviv. I, too, eye the people I pass on the street, sizing them up. Forget about racial profiling — I’m scared of everyone I don’t know right now. I try not to stand too close to anyone, God forbid they pull a knife out of their bag or pocket. Soldiers and police seem to be targets of attacks, so I make sure not to get too close to them, either, as I don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.

An elderly man and his wife — tourists who speak heavily-accented Hebrew — try to stop me and ask for directions one afternoon and I shout the directions to them over my shoulder as I keep moving.

That, I figure, is the key. Just keep moving.

I realize my thoughts and behavior are absurd. Totally irrational.

But even my husband — who is one of those “West Bank Arabs” that most Jewish Israelis would like to see transferred “voluntarily” — says he is more worried about me now than he was during the war last summer. Because “anything can happen anytime anywhere.” It could be a Palestinian attacker, it could be an armed Jewish Israeli who freaks out. Who knows?

And as I talk to people, I find that I’m not alone.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a blonde, even,” an acquaintance says, speaking of the hysteria and panic that seem to be spreading through Israeli society, “someone starts screaming that you’re a terrorist and you’re done.”

***

As good humanists, we say these things and we try to believe them. We try pretend that this could happen to anyone. But, Sunday night, we’re reminded that it’s the dark-skinned among us who are most likely to be falsely accused, as was the case with Zarhum. In a rare moment of clear-eyed reporting, the Israeli media calls it a “lynch.”

On Wednesday, after I left the restaurant, I headed to south Tel Aviv to conduct some interviews related to my book and to attend Zarhum’s memorial. As I passed the Central Bus Station, I noticed that there were even more guns here than a week ago. It wasn’t just the increased police and army presence. I also saw several civilians — all of them men — with handguns tucked into the waistbands of their pants or jeans.

The firepower didn’t make me feel safer. On the contrary. I crossed the street to try to get away from the police and soldiers — again, they’re targets — but there they were, on the other side of the road, too. Looking at all the uniforms made me feel like I have a reason to be worried, that there’s something to be anxious about and I began, again, to look intently at the people around me.

I passed a policeman. We made eye contact. I realized he’s sizing me up and I understood just how on edge he was — how on edge everyone is — when even a pregnant Jewish Israeli woman waddling down the street like myself can be considered a possible threat.

It struck me that this pervasive sense of fear and insecurity that has begun to permeate every aspect of life here — that sense that anything can happen anytime anywhere — is familiar. It reminds me of what I felt when I lived in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, of how I felt when I passed through a checkpoint, of how I felt when I heard that soldiers were raiding houses down the road from me.

No, Israelis are not under occupation. But now they’re getting a little taste of what those “West Bank Arabs” and East Jerusalemites feel on a daily basis. They’re getting a little taste of what comes from inequality, occupation and separation — things that Israelis view as necessary to their survival, things that won’t be going away anytime soon.

Welcome to Palestine.

Asylum seekers mourn lynched Eritrean man

by adminin African refugees, Israel, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 23, 2015

Hundreds of Eritreans and Sudanese nationals gathered in south Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park Wednesday evening to mourn Habtom Zerhum, the asylum seeker who was shot and severely beaten Sunday night during a terrorist attack in the Beer Sheva bus station.

They lit candles and wept.

Desale Tesfay, 35, from Eritrea, explained to +972 that the gathering also served as a moment for members of the community to come together and talk and support one another.

Mourners expressed shock and anger at the accidental killing of the innocent man, who was mistaken for a terrorist and shot by a security guard. Some, like Tesfay, also criticized the Israeli government, calling on it to formulate a meaningful policy to help asylum seekers.

Speaking quietly during a moment of silence, Tesfay reflected on Zerhum’s life and violent death.

“He’s a human being who ran from [Eritrea] because there’s no democracy there,” Tesfay explained. “He was a young man who didn’t do anything wrong, he went to renew his visa and look what happened to him.”

Tesfay left Eritrea in 2008 after he was forcibly conscripted to the Eritrean army for eight years, for very little pay and with no end in sight. “It’s a dictatorship, that’s why we left. If it was a democracy, we wouldn’t be fleeing.”

When asked if Israel is also a democracy, Tesfay laughed long and hard.

“Yes, there’s democracy here, as they say, for their people [the Jews]. But for the refugees?”

Tesfay, a father of two, points out that his children cannot receive Israeli citizenship even though they were both born here. His visa stipulates that he does not have permission to work. And, when Tesfay arrived in 2008, he spent six months in Saharonim prison, without trial.

He added that while he has not been summoned to Holot, the desert detention facility where Israel sends asylum seekers, he feels like he is “still in prison.”

“It’s like the government put a long string here,” he said, pointing to his ankle. “I go to work, I come home and [otherwise] I don’t move.”

“Now, today, we are supposed to go to jail again,” he said, referring to Holot. “It’s not how things should be. We don’t deserve jail. What did we do? We requested [protection] as refugees.”

Tesfay said he does not fear for his personal safety after what happened to Zerhum. But because he has no rights in Israel, he added, he feels he must accept whatever happens to him “quietly… even if someone comes to kill me.”

Next to us, the mourners began to wail again.

This is What Palestinian Youth Really Want

by adminin Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Writing

The World Post at The Huffington Post, October 19, 2015

It’s Friday morning and East Jerusalem is on lockdown, the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods cut off by new, hastily erected checkpoints — massive cement blocks manned by Israeli soldiers.

In Tel Aviv, however, it’s the beginning of the weekend, and it feels like it. The streets are full of life as Israelis sit in sidewalk cafes, lingering over breakfast, as they shuffle towards the beach, or head to the shuk, the open-air market. I’m going through the motions myself, running a couple of errands before the Sabbath begins.

But as I move freely through Tel Aviv, I can’t stop thinking about East Jerusalem. A majority of those who have attempted or have carried out recent attacks on Jewish Israelis have come from the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Indeed, some journalists and commentators are pointing to the area as the epicenter of the current unrest, or intifada, call it what you will.

East Jerusalem is a place I know well. As a journalist, I wrote about the housing shortages and inequalities that plague the area due to Israeli policy. I also taught at a Palestinian university in Abu Dis, a Jerusalem neighborhood on the “other” side of the separation barrier that I lived in for some time, as well.

When I think about East Jerusalem now, however, I think less about my own experience and more about my former students, who came from there and the West Bank. They were 17, 18, 19-years-old. Freshmen in college. They were not unlike the university students I’d taught in the United States. Some were hardworking and devoted to their studies; others came to class unprepared and full of excuses. All worried about their grades.

In short, they were normal kids who wanted normal lives.

They wanted to come to college without having to pass through Israeli checkpoints. They wanted to return home and find all of their family members present, that none of their fathers or brothers had been taken to administrative detention (imprisonment without trial). They wanted to sleep through the night without the fear of soldiers raiding their house, turning it upside down, or stationing themselves on the roof — events a number of my students described in their essays.

They wanted their younger brothers and sisters to be able to go to school, something that isn’t always possible in East Jerusalem. The West Bankers among them wanted to be able to visit Jerusalem without a permit. Those who lived in East Jerusalemwanted neighborhoods where the garbage had been collected, places where the police helped keep law and order, where they could feel safe, where there was decent infrastructure, where they could get permits to build houses or add on to existing structures. Where their homes would not be demolished.

All of my students wanted to graduate and find decent jobs, something increasingly difficult to do in both East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where the economies have been de-developed by the Israeli occupation and where unemployment is rampant. They wanted to marry one day and start families of their own.

My students wanted what any human being wants, regardless of nationality.

Whether they hailed from the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has control over designated areas, or East Jerusalem, where there is no PA presence and where Israel shirks its responsibility towards Arab residents, my students had little faith in the Palestinian leadership to help them out.

During the 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense — which claimed six Israeli lives and saw more than 100 Palestinian casualties — my students convened a town hall meeting to discuss the events and strategies for protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. They openly expressed their frustration with all Palestinian political parties, including Fatah, which leads the PA. They called not for the resurrection of the largely defunct parties like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine but for something completely new, something from the ground up.

Fast forward to today’s protests and stabbings. The latter are cries of despair and hopelessness, tragic suicide missions that are unlikely to accomplish much of anything besides more needless bloodshed.

Foreign analysts have been quick to claim that recent events are about Al Aqsa, and they’ve been even quicker to argue about whether or not this is a third intifada. But both discussions miss the point.

Yes, Israeli provocations at Al Aqsa were a proverbial match. But the tinder is the occupation and the many forms of violence — literal and structural — that Palestinians experience at Israel’s hands every day. And because Al Aqsa is in Israeli-occupied territory, it can be understood as both a religious and political symbol.

Those who call this a religious war, and who point to Abbas’ words as incitement, have got it backwards. Abbas — whose term expired in 2009 and has little legitimacy on the Palestinian street — is trying to insert himself into recent events in a bid to regain popularity.

But the Palestinian youth who are protesting and carrying out attacks on Israelis care little what he or other politicians say. Indeed, their actions can also be understood as moves against the current state of politics, including the Palestinian Authority itself. The young people are calling for something new, for something more than endless negotiations that go nowhere or that buy Israel the time to build more settlements and deepen the occupation. After all, this is the generation that was born and raised after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 — their difficult lives are a testimony to what negotiations will get the Palestinian people. That is to say, little.

The youth are calling for their human and civil rights, for equality, for hope. Will Israel — and the world — listen?

How does Israel stop Palestinians from protesting?

by adminin Israel, Palestine, Politics, Writing

Al Jazeera English, October 19, 2015

Israeli police came to activist Adan Tartour’s home in Jaffa at half past midnight on October 7, and pounded on the door. When the Tartours opened it, police said that they had an arrest warrant.

Adan Tartour, 18, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was put under arrest for “suspicion of violence and terror” – only because she’d signed up to take a bus to a protest in Nazareth.

Tartour, and other activists, were detained on suspicion of planning “illegal” demonstrations.

“They had an arrest warrant for me and my father,” Tartour explains, adding that this was the case with other female detainees. “They were arrested with their fathers… It’s humiliating and chauvinistic,” she told Al Jazeera.

She and her father were taken to a local police station before being transferred to Nazareth, where they arrived at 4:30 in the morning. During the interrogation, which began at 5:30am, police repeatedly told Tartour that she “is a shame to her family” and that her actions are “not good for her family”.

She felt that this orientalist appeal to “family honour” was an attempt to dissuade her from protesting.

“But what they don’t understand is that our [Palestinian] families stand by their daughters,” she says.

Rights groups say that dozens of Palestinians are being detained in what they describe as a wave of “preventive arrests” that reflect Israel’s attempts to quell Palestinian resistance against its excessive use of force against protesters and the extrajudicial killings of Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

According to Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the detainees have been subject to preventive arrests before they attended demonstrations. Like Tartour, most of those detained have no criminal record.

As of today, between 160 to 200 Palestinian activists have been arrested either before or during protests, according to Adalah. Of those detained, 40 are still being held as Israeli authorities seek to lengthen their imprisonment.

Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, says that these arrests are illegal. “According to Israeli law, you cannot arrest a person based on the fear that in the future they might commit a crime,” she explains, adding that stopping people from protesting is a “violation of their right to freedom of expression”.

It’s not only demonstrators and their family members who are being locked up. Several bus drivers who attempted to transport protesters to Nazareth – but were turned back by police outside of the city – were later arrested.

“Police claimed that the drivers themselves had participated in an ‘illegal’ demonstration,” Zaher says, even though the protest “did not need authorisation in the first place” and despite the fact that the buses did not actually reach the protest sites.

The buses were also impounded. As of October 13, the vehicles were still in police custody.

Not only have the courts upheld requests to extend the activists’ detention, but they have also, at times, accepted highly questionable “evidence”.

“Judges referred to onions [found on demonstrators] as an indication that the protesters meant for a violent demonstration,” Zaher explains. “We have never seen onions being referred to as a legal defence.”

Onions are sometimes used as temporary treatment for exposure to tear gas, which Israeli military and police forces regularly use on peaceful Palestinian demonstrators.

Zaher adds that judges have also detained Palestinian citizens based on investigation material to which she and other defence attorneys do not have access.

In one case, a minor who doesn’t know Hebrew was being held on the basis of a “testimony that was written in Hebrew” and signed by the child.

Minors’ legal rights are being violated in other ways, as well.

According to Israeli law, minors’ parents should be informed and are allowed to be with their child during questioning. Children may also have a social worker present, and minors should not be interrogated after 10:00pm.

Lawyers have seen some or all of these rules ignored by Israeli authorities during this wave of arrests.

Farah Bayadsi, a lawyer representing a number of activists and minors who were detained, echoes similar views about police preventing detainees from getting the legal counsel they are entitled to according to Israeli law.

“A police officer intervened when I was giving a 14-year-old teenage [girl] legal consultation before her interrogation, as [provided for in] the law. The policeman kicked me out of the office and told me that my time was up,” Bayadsi says.

 

For some, the recent events are reminiscent of the Israeli military regime that ruled over Palestinian citizens of the state from 1948 until 1966.

Shira Robinson, an associate professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University and the author of Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the birth of Israel’s liberal settler state, remarks, “There were tonnes of preventive detentions” of Palestinian citizens of Israel between 1948 and 1966. “It was the name of the game.”

She offers the example of Israeli authorities’ attempts to stop the commemoration of the Kafr Qasim massacre, which took place in October of 1956.

In the days and nights before the anniversary, “Israeli authorities would round up known activists ahead of time. That was standard fare”.

Zaher says that it’s unnecessary to look that far afield. She remarks that the manner in which Israeli police and courts have handled protesters points to a fundamental difference in the way the state treats and views its Palestinian citizens versus its Jewish ones.

Ultimately, she says, Israeli authorities handle Palestinian citizens similarly to Palestinians in the occupied territories: “It doesn’t matter where you are – if you’re Palestinian, you’re an enemy and you’re a threat.”

The Israeli legal system, Zaher continues, “is based on a perspective of a Palestinian … as an alien. When they are viewed as an enemy and this is anchored in the law, then you have the legitimisation to do anything”.

While Adan’s father was released early morning on October 8, her detention was upheld and extended by an Israeli court. After four days, she was let go with the caveat that she might be taken in for additional questioning, and under the condition that she stay away from Nazareth for two weeks.

She is also “forbidden from joining protests”.

And that’s the ultimate goal, according to Tartour and others: The Israelis want to frighten Palestinian citizens and thus stop them from demonstrating.

Reflecting on her experience, Tartour is troubled by a number of things, particularly the treatment of minors, the court’s role in upholding and extending detention, and the state’s attempts to depict Palestinian protests as illegal.

When Tartour appeared in court and her detention was extended, Tartour recalls: “The judge said because of what’s happening in the state … they couldn’t interfere with the police’s work. So what is the courts’ job?”

Read the longer version at +972 Magazine.

 

 

Which is the ‘right’ side of the Green Line these days?

by adminin Israel, Palestine, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 12, 2015

Thursday morning: I wake up and check the news this morning to see what happened last night and then head to the doctor’s in north Tel Aviv. I’m 24 weeks pregnant — yes, with a Jewish-Palestinian baby. My physician in Florida, where we live now, has advised me to keep up with my medical care in Israel even though I’ll only be here for six weeks to freshen up my research for the book I’ve just sold.

I’m a few minutes late to my appointment . When the doctor’s door opens, the woman who is scheduled after me steps right on in. She shuts the door in my face. I check the list next to the door and announce the time of my appointment aloud.

“So, it’s your turn,” the other women who are waiting say. They urge me to knock and assert myself.

I knock and the patient who just entered opens the door. “I’m sorry,” I begin, “but I had the 8:40 appointment.”

She shrugs, smiles. “But you were late.” And the door slams shut in my face again.

“Israelim,” Israelis, one of the women smirks.

When the door opens again and the patient emerges, I’m quick to make my way into the doctor’s office. We talk for a few minutes about what tests I’ve already had in the States, their results, and how I’m feeling. At my American doctor’s insistence, I’ve brought my medical records with me. I offer them to the doctor. He says they’re not necessary and then he sends me on my way to get checked for gestational diabetes.

As I’m leaving, there’s a commotion in the lobby. A Filipino man has followed an elderly Israeli couple into the building.

“They hit my car!” he shouts in English.

No one responds.

“You hit my car!” he tries again to the couple.

The clerk — a Palestinian citizen of the state I spoke to on my way in — goes about his business. Another elderly couple puzzles over a piece of paper.

“You hit my car and you’re angry with me?” his voice indignant.

I step onto the sidewalk just as the Filipino man is heading towards parallel parking.

“Look,” he says, pointing. “I was there, they pulled in and hit me, and then they got out, didn’t apologize, and yelled at me.”

“Israelim,” I say.

“Look at how much room they took!” he continues, pointing to the couples’ vehicle, which was, indeed, taking up two spaces. “And they hit me!”

The worst part, he tells me again, is that when they got out of their car, they started shouting at and blaming him rather than apologizing.

I think of Israelis’ reactions to the events of this week — their inability to reflect on what has brought Palestinians to this point. I think of Israelis’ unwillingness to understand the stabbings as violent responses to the violent occupation that began in 1948 for some and 1967 for others, depending on who you ask.

I think of what’s happening, specifically, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where Israel has taken most of the land and resources and is constantly expropriating more. Where there isn’t enough land and houses for normal population growth, where Palestinians are forced to build “illegally” because the Israeli government refuses to grant them the necessary permits. Where one might have to then pay for the demolition of their own home.

Where the economy has been crushed by the occupation; where there is no freedom of movement; where the lack of freedom of movement further suffocates the economy, feeding only the sense of desperation.

Where there is no hope. No hope for anything — a decent job, a good income, a normal life. Where there is little trust in the PA or politicians or negotiations that wrought the current reality, Oslo, or the negotiations that are resurrected from time to time just maintain an unbearable status quo.

I think of the place my former students live, the place where they left home every morning for school, uncertain that they would make it through the checkpoints and arrive, let alone on time. The place where a student might find that a friend hasn’t made it — maybe his classmate has been taken to administrative detention. Or maybe he has been shot. Who knows? One’s fate is just as uncertain as the roads in the territories.

The stabbings are screams of frustration, rage, despair, hopelessness. They’re the screams of people who are lost, who have no leadership and see nothing on the horizon. I think of the Israelis’ inabilities to hear these screams; I think of how they hear no one’s voices but their own.

Next to me, the Filipino man is still going on about his car.

He’s looking for consolation, which he won’t get from the elderly couple. I simply repeat back to him what he’s already said to me. “Israelis don’t take responsibility for their actions,” I say. “Instead, they get angry and blame others.”

He shakes his head and cradles his face in his hands as he stands on the sidewalk, looking at the damage done to his vehicle.

Later that day, when I arrive back at the city center, I notice a pile of old hand-painted tiles on the sidewalk near my apartment. They’ve been placed there, neatly stacked one on top of the other, by the Palestinian workers doing the renovation in the building next to mine.

I pick a tile up, brush the dust off, and examine it. I contemplate taking it back to Florida to join the other pre-state tiles I collected in both Tel Aviv and Bethlehem — souvenirs from a time when things were different, from a time when the land wasn’t divided. Remnants from a time when there was still such a thing as Palestinian Jews.

One of the workers joins me on the sidewalk. “Something interesting to you here, miss?” he asks.

“These,” I say. “Are they garbage?”

“Yes, that’s why they’re here.”

As we’re talking, another stabbing is taking place. This time, it’s in Tel Aviv.

“It’s a pity,” I say, “to throw these things away.”

“Death,” he says. “That’s what’s really a pity.”

Read the full article at +972 Magazine.

The long road to Bethlehem: part three

by adminin Israel, Palestine, Writing

+972 Magazine, July 27, 2015

The New Year comes and passes. It’s January 2014 and I’ve been living in the territories for almost a year. But rather than becoming more comfortable in my new surroundings and feeling like my usual curious and adventurous self—I am the woman, after all, who has traveled some 20 countries, mostly alone—I find myself turning inwards. I prefer to stay in Bethlehem, close to home.

This is not me.

The occupation and the checkpoints, particularly the flying checkpoints, have something to do with the change: on my way back to Bethlehem from Ramallah one afternoon, a flying checkpoint pops up near Jabaa’. As the soldiers take the IDs of everyone in the service taxi, I don’t know what to do—do I give them my American passport or my Israeli teudat zehut?

In theory, I could be headed from Qalandia—which is technically part of East Jerusalem—to Hizme, which is in Area B. I’m legal here, I tell myself. Or am I? I try to picture myself on the map that shows the zones: A, B, C.

Where is Jabaa’?

Where am I?

Who am I supposed to be right now?

It happens again as I’m driving back to Bethlehem from Jerusalem one afternoon. I’m on the little, rolling two-lane road that takes me to Beit Jala. Usually, I glide by the small army base on the edge of Beit Jala and from there, it’s a short drive to Bethlehem and I’m home. But today: when I bank the hill, I see soldiers standing in the middle of the road—a road I’ve never seen them on—checking IDs as Palestinians drive into Beit Jala. But why? If checkpoints are about security, then why would they be scrutinizing Palestinians headed into a Palestinian area? Are they looking for someone? Are they making sure that no Jewish Israelis are headed into Area A? Are they enforcing segregation?

Whatever the army’s doing there, I panic, slam on my brakes, and make a U-turn in the middle of the road, just meters from a soldier. As I speed away and he grows smaller in my rearview mirror, I realize the stupidity of what I’ve just done. I realize how suspicious it must have looked.

I also realize that I’m not sure how I’m going to get home. If there’s a flying checkpoint outside of Beit Jala, surely things will be tight at Checkpoint 300, too. There’s one more way in—a settler’s checkpoint that leads to a road that eventually splits and takes me to Beit Sahour, which neighbors Bethlehem.

But what if there are soldiers at that fork in the road, too?

I call Mohammad and ask him what I should do.

“Go back to Jerusalem, have a coffee, and try again.”

“What if the soldiers are still there?”

“They won’t be—they won’t stay forever. By the time you get back, they’ll be gone.”

Intellectually, I know that this is true. I’ve seen flying checkpoints many times before and I’ve seen them disappear as quickly as they appear. But something inside of me has changed and I find myself less able to use my head and reason through things. All I know is what I feel and I feel like the soldiers are everywhere.

Indeed, they showed up at a neighbor’s house recently—even though we live deep in Area A—asking about another neighbor’s rifle. Not only do they seem to be everywhere, they seem to know everything, even what people have in their private homes.

No, under occupation, even homes aren’t private.

I feel like the soldiers will never go away, they’ll stand there on the road between Jerusalem and Beit Jala forever and that’s the route I always take, that’s my “safe” road, and now they’re there and I’ll never get home.

Read the full article at +972 Magazine

Israel cracks down on anti-war protesters

by adminin Israel, Writing

Al Jazeera English, 5 August 2014

More than 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested by the Israeli police since the country’s military offensive in Gaza began in early July, according to a lawyer representing a number of the detainees.

While some have been arrested for protesting the Israeli incursion into Gaza, dozens are currently being held without charge. Many say they have been detained based on policemen’s “lies”, while some have been beaten to the point of needing medical care.

Maisa Arshid, an attorney for dozens of the detainees, said that the crackdown on Palestinian citizens is only getting worse, with 20 to 30 Palestinians getting picked up every week in the Nazareth area alone.

“All of them are accused of participating in illegal demonstrations,” Arshid told Al Jazeera, adding that “part of these demos were permitted by the police themselves”.

In many cases, the Israeli authorities have presented no evidence that the accused have participated in a protest other than a police officer’s word. Arshid also said that the police frequently hold people for short periods without registering their detention, likely putting the number of those who have been picked up by the police even higher than 1,000.

When the wave of arrests began earlier in July, Palestinian citizens were detained and quickly released while others were placed under house arrest, or ordered to do community service. But as Israel’s assault on Gaza has gone on, Palestinian citizens have been subject to much longer detainments.

This week, Arshid visited a group of detainees who had been held without charge for nine days. “Each day the court is delaying their hearing,” she said, adding that hearings initially scheduled for Sunday, were pushed back to Tuesday.

This way of prolonging their detentions has a chilling effect on demonstrations against the war in Gaza and “terrorise the population” into silence, Arshid argued. “If people in the street know that people have been arrested for nine days, it will prevent protest.”

Israeli police provide a security presence when Jewish-Israeli leftists protest against the war. But these activists are facing increasingly violent attacks from their countrymen.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher attended Tel Aviv’s most recent demonstration against the ongoing Israeli operation in Gaza, which drew approximately 5,000 protesters. There were only a few hundred right-wing counter-demonstrators, Rothman-Zecher told Al Jazeera, “but they were really, really energetic”.

Israeli police stood between the two groups, preventing any potential clashes, but when the protest ended, right-wingers confronted the anti-war protesters on the street. They shouted at the demonstrators, calling them “smelly traitors”. A counter-protester who was carrying an Israeli flag began to beat someone with the flagstick, while another started hitting an anti-war protester on the head with a crutch.

Rothman-Zecher said that the right wing “desire for violence” is not new. “But there’s a new level of acceptability,” he said.

He used the Jerusalem Day protests – when right wing Israelis march to mark the “reunification” of the city – as an example. In the past, it “was nationalistic and aggressive” but leftists would be shocked to hear right wingers openly chant “Death to the Arabs”, Rothman-Zecher said. “It was under the surface but it was still surprising. Now it’s become the baseline.”

Although no one is organising the counter-demonstrations – and Rothman-Zecher pointed out that they tend to come from poor, marginalised communities – he argued that Israeli leaders are responsible for right wing violence.

“When the leaders of the country call openly for revenge and violence, of course it becomes kosher,” he said. He added: “You have members of Knesset calling for population transfer, [a former] member of Knesset [boasting] that [he] killed Arabs… I believe very strongly that discourse shapes reality.”

Palestinian citizens have recently also been arrested for “incitement” for calling for demonstrations against the ongoing Israeli offensive. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, points out thatthese citizens “were arrested even before any demonstrations began”.

Among them was Rafaat Awaishi, who Israeli police placed under house arrest without a hearing, after he posted a call on Facebook for people to join protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Noting that Awaishi’s hearing was scheduled for July 13, “the same day that the police-imposed house arrest is to end”, Adalah called the police-imposed detention a “denial of due process”.

The conditions detainees face also seem intended to deter protests. According to Arshid, several of her clients have been beaten while in custody and needed medical treatment for their injuries. During an interrogation, police allegedly removed a detainee’s kuffiyeh [traditional Palestinian scarf], urinated on it, and then put it back on the man’s neck, Arshid said.

The arrests and detentions seem to be part of a broader crackdown on dissent and freedom of expression. On Wednesday, the Israeli Knesset heard a bill that proposes to outlaw “discrimination against soldiers in uniform” the Jerusalem Post reported.

Pnina Tamnu-Shata, the Knesset Member who presented the bill, pointed to protests against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge as proof that Israel “must set limits for words of incitement against soldiers. Not everything is allowed in the name of democracy”.

Palestinian citizens who attend Israeli universities have already been subject to disciplinary hearings and expulsion due to remarks made on Facebook against Israeli soldiers. In a letter to the Council of Higher Education in Israel, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) likened the universities’ monitoring of Palestinian students’ social media accounts to a “witch hunt”.

In a press release, ACRI stated that “only Arab students have been punished, even though the social forums are simmering with racist comments by Jewish students, which raises a concern that the heads of the institutions are acting according to patriotic and emotional motives that do not align with their professional obligations”.

Saher Jeries is a 22-year-old marketing and advertising student who lives in Haifa. He said he was at a protest there, standing in the back, when police officers began to beat him. He and other protesters were put on a bus where they were held for six hours before they were driven to the police station for interrogation.

During questioning, Jeries found that the Israeli police were not only trying to control the discourse about Gaza, but also seemed intent on reshaping his identity. “They said to me, ‘You’re Christian, why are you doing things like this?’ As though I’m not part of the [Palestinian] people,” Jeries said.

*Illustrative photo by tola via Flickr

Strained Silence

by adminin Israel, Writing

The Caravan: A journal of politics and culture, December 1, 2012

As is the case at most falafel stands across the country, the radio station of choice at my neighbourhood falafel stand is the Israeli Defense Forces’ Galgalatz. The station, I thought yesterday afternoon as I waited for lunch, is inescapable. It blasts from my neighbours’ stereo on Friday mornings; it drifts from the windows of passing cars. From clothing stores to coffee houses, it’s “Gal-Gal-Gal-Galgalatz”, as the jingle goes, “because of the music”.

The station plays a mix of Israeli and international pop (excluding that from the Arab world, of course). But the feeling of normality is broken by the top-of-the-hour-every-hour news bulletins that follow an alarming series of beeps, reminiscent of those that signal an emergency broadcast, lest listeners forget we are surrounded by “enemies” and that we are in a state of war. This radio station is run by the IDF, after all.

In recent days, there has been another reminder that Galgalatz is government-owned and soldier-manned—the station has refused to play a new song by famed Israeli musician Yizhar Ashdot. Titled ‘Inian Shel Hergel (A Matter of Habit)’, the song is highly critical of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and describes, in explicit detail, soldiers’ abuse of Palestinians. As military service is mandatory and nearly every Israeli has a relative, friend, neighbour or acquaintance in uniform, the army is something of a holy cow. No matter what one thinks or feels about the occupation, you don’t criticise ‘our’ soldiers.

While Galgalatz has taken flak for its decision, others support the station’s choice. “I don’t think [Ashdot] should even be called a singer,” a commentator on the radio remarked yesterday as I waited for my falafel.

Maybe it’s just a song; and maybe it’s unrealistic to expect a station manned by soldiers to play something critical of soldiers. But the controversy over Ashdot’s song is symptomatic of a larger crisis in Israeli media, which has suffered in recent years as the government has, in numerous instances, clamped down heavily on freedom of speech.

For instance, during Operation Cast Lead, the December 2008-January 2009 war between Israel and Hamas, both local and international media were banned from entering the Gaza Strip to cover the conflict. Even after the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban, the press was still not allowed to enter—suggesting that the army and the state hold little regard for the judiciary.

In July 2011—just days before Israeli protesters pitched tents in Tel Aviv to protest the ever-rising cost of living—the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, passed the Boycott Law. The legislation penalises public calls to boycott individuals and institutions that represent the state of Israel, as well as Israeli goods, including those produced in the West Bank settlements—though many argue that the settlements themselves are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Those who break the Boycott Law are subject to stiff fines. The legislation drew widespread criticism from both the right and the left as an unconscionable curb on free speech—and, by extension, democracy—in Israel; this is particularly significant since Israel has long-promoted itself as an oasis of democracy in the Middle East.

The legislation has had a chilling effect on Israel’s media, which finds itself unable to print opinion editorials that support boycotts. According to some observers, the July 2012 conviction of journalist Uri Blau has further frightened reporters and editors into silence. A reporter for the prestigious, left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, Blau received classified military files from a former soldier Anat Kamm. After he used the leaked information for several articles that were critical of the Israeli military, Kamm was arrested and eventually sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail; this, despite the fact that the articles had passed through and been approved by Israel’s military censor. Blau’s own conviction in the case resulted in four months’ community service. According to Haaretz, Jack Hen, one of Blau’s attorneys called the prosecution “precedent-setting… The public’s right to know and freedom of the press were seriously damaged by the decision to put a journalist on trial.”

Other factors, too, have long undermined the country’s freedom of press—such as the military censor, which has the power to pull any story it deems a threat to national security. Also of concern is the influence of oligarchs in leading publications, such as Israel HaYom (Israel Today), owned by Sheldon Adelson, an American billionaire and staunch supporter of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The paper, which openly promotes Netanyahu’s Likud party, is distributed for free throughout the country, reportedly at a loss for Adelson.

Ben-Dror Yemini, who is a columnist for Maariv, the country’s third most widely read paper, has calledIsrael HaYom a “danger to democracy”. But the editorial voice of the relatively independent Maarivitself has been susceptible to pressures. Speaking of 2011’s tent protests, which were anti-capitalist in nature, Maariv reporter Haggai Matar said that there was “less coverage or negative coverage in the privately owned papers. In the case of Maariv, support would risk the other parts of the company.”

Publications also worry about losing readers if they are too critical of the establishment. “The attempt to be accepted by the mainstream and not scare readers or viewers away and not to be branded as the ‘leftist media’ has an effect, especially on coverage of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict,” said Matar.

This kind of self-censorship in the Hebrew media starts with reporters, who are sometimes fresh out of the army themselves, and reluctant to criticise the military. It occurs at the level of language, with outlets repeating the government’s words rather than using neutral terms; one example is the Israeli media’s tendency to call African refugees “infiltrators”—a loaded term favoured by right-wing politicians. Human rights organisations say that using the word “infiltrators” is akin to incitement.

Censorship also occurs at the editorial level. In 2009, a reporter for Yedioth Ahronoth—Israel’s second-most popular daily—wrote a lengthy exposé about Israeli military officers intentionally breaking the rules of engagement during Operation Cast Lead. Editors killed the story. Eventually it was published inThe Independent, a British newspaper, instead.

Haaretz is one of the few publications whose writers are consistently critical of government policies, the army, the occupation, as well as the oligarchs who have increasing economic control. In the words of Uri Tuval, an editor at Haaretz and a member of the newspaper’s union: “[Haaretz] is the only independent newspaper in the country without political or capitalist interests. We have absolute freedom.”

But Haaretz represents only a sliver of the Israeli market, pulling in between five to 10 percent of the country’s readers. And like many media outlets in Israel and around the world, Haaretz is struggling to convince subscribers to pay for news they can find for free on the Internet. In an attempt to tighten its fiscal belt, the newspaper has laid off dozens of workers; more pinks slips are soon to come. Both former and current employees report that the newspaper’s wages have been stagnant for years while rents and expenses throughout the country continue to spiral upward. Tuval and other Haaretzemployees have protested the paper’s downsizing—a recent, day-long strike brought the paper to a temporary halt.

Some observers say that market pressures—both to adopt a more conservative stance, as well as to compete with free online sources of information—could force Haaretz to close. “The fall [of Haaretz] is predicted because some people won’t subscribe to the printed paper,” Tuval said. But in his view, the paper will survive this challenge. “We’re not a big paper. We were never a big paper,” he said. Haaretz’s small size, in Tuval’s view, will allow it to survive through these turbulent times in the Israeli media, without compromising on its liberal editorial vision.

Israelis react to rocket fire from Gaza

by adminin Israel, Writing

Al Jazeera English, November 16, 2012

At a commercial center in Kiryat Malachi, a short walk from the apartment building where three Israelis were killed Thursday morning by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, an elderly man selects tomatoes at a small produce stand. The 74-year-old man, who immigrated to Israel from Algeria with his family when he was a teenager and who does not wish to be identified, says that he is not worried about additional rockets.

“I’m safe here,” he says, as he examines a tomato, “I’m following the [Israeli Army Home Front Command’s] directions and doing what they say. So there’s no problem.”

The father of six and grandfather of nine said that he like most Israelis support “Operation Pillar of Defense,” which has taken the life of 15 Palestinian residents of Gaza since it began on Wednesday.

“I support our [army] officers, Defense Minister [Ehud Barak], and Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu],” he adds.

***

Two men, sipping beer out of plastic cups outside of a nearby cell phone accessories store, voice similar feelings.

Eli Chalilo, a 38-year-old who emigrated from Uzbekistan with his parents when he was 18, says, “Right now we feel fine, but this morning was a little stressful.” He adds that his house is just 200 meters from the building that was hit by a rocket.

Chalilo, who is currently unemployed, wears a white sweat suit and sunglasses. He sent his two children to family in Jerusalem because he is worried about their safety. But, he adds, he is not concerned about his own security. He points to the sky, “God’s up there.”

The two men are joined by Eli Pozielov, 31, the owner of the cell phone accessories store. The father to three children, aged three, four and five, says, “My kids are crying. They’re scared, I’m scared, I don’t know what to do, where to go.”

His wife works in Ashdod and, with schools and kindergartens closed, Pozielov left the children with his sister so he could come to work. But, “no one’s coming to the store [to buy anything]. People aren’t going out of the house.”

Pozielov feels the operation is necessary and thinks that Israeli ground forces need to enter the Gaza Strip. “We must, we must. We have to do like we did during Operation Cast Lead but this time stronger.”

He adds that Israel needs to reoccupy the Gaza Strip. When asked about the 1.7 million Palestinians who live there, he answers, “They got used to it already.”

Chalilo jumps in, “The Arabs are like donkeys.”

“Like animals,” Pozeilov agrees.

“You have to give them a beating so they won’t raise their heads,”  Chalilo continues, adding that he knows what he’s talking about because he came from a Muslim-majority country.

When asked about his experience living in Uzbekistan, however, he admits, “Everything was fine.”

But Israelis can’t live with Arabs or Muslims, Chalilo insists, “Because this is the Jewish state. It’s our country.”

Although a four-year-old and seven-year-old were killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli army fire, both men insist that “Operation Pillar of Defense” is “pointed” and that “only terrorists” are dying.

***

Esti, a 31-year-old math teacher, was home with her children Thursday morning when a missile fired from Gaza hit Kiryat Gat. The bomb shelter attached to her building was locked, she says, so she and the children stood in the stairwell.

When asked how she feels in the wake of the strike, Esti, a religious woman who wears modest clothes and a wig to cover her hair, says, “The messiah needs to come.”

She adds that the army needs to enter Gaza “to show [the Palestinians] who is really in control.”

Like the men in nearby Kiryat Malachi, she feels that Israel should reoccupy Gaza or, “do something absolute to finish [the conflict with the Palestinians].”

“We’re suffering [from rocket fire] now,” she continues, “but someone who lives in Gaza is suffering [from Israeli fire] all the time. For how long now? So we have to find a solution. If the solution is an occupation, it’s an occupation.”

When asked about the implications for Israel’s demographics—wouldn’t reoccupying Gaza mean that a Jewish minority is ruling over a Palestinian majority?—Esti answers, “I don’t know. The solution has to come from above. We’re just people.”

She looks towards her kids, including a little blonde boy who wears a colorful, embroidered kippah (religious skullcap), who are sitting on play horses inside the dark, deserted mall. Only the food court is open. “The people there [in Gaza] also have children,” Esti says. “There are people there who want to live a normal life and an occupation would give them a chance to [do so].”

Despite the fact that Palestinian citizens of the state receive disproportionately less resources and face discrimination in both the public and private sectors in Israel, Esti points to them as an example. “Look at the Arabs in Ramle. They have work, they’re living well.”

“I think the solution is to occupy Gaza and then manage it like a normal state, give them their rights and benefits.”

***

A handful of Israelis have gathered on a lookout point outside of Sderot. From here, they can see smoke rising from the Gaza Strip. Two men drink beer and eat potato chips; I’m there to cover Israeli reactions for Al Jazeera English and, when I ask the men if they are willing to be interviewed by AJE, they curse. A few boys joke that they have come “to see the fireworks.”

But Amos, a 53-year-old mechanic from Sderot, says that he felt scared and anxious alone in his home with the siren going off. His ex-wife and son live in Jerusalem. So he came to the look-out because he feels safer here.

The siren goes off in Sderot moments before I enter the small, depressed city in the south of Israel. I’m with a group of journalists and Phil Weiss, who is driving, stops the car. I crouch alongside a rear door, as though the thin metal could defend me from a missile. The Iron Dome defense system intercepts the rockets fired from Gaza, rendering them white puffs in the sky above my head.

When we enter Sderot, I see that the streets are mostly empty, save for African refugees milling about near a bomb shelter and a few families that have ventured out for food. Cars rush through town, pausing at stop signs.

Bert Luski, an unemployed factory worker, stands outside of a restaurant that serves falafel and other Middle Eastern foods.

Luski, 56, remembers the days that he worked alongside Palestinians from Gaza. Although he got along fine with the laborers, he says, “They don’t understand peace. They want to take our girls, our money, our houses, our pants.”

Despite “suffering 12 years” of rocket fire, Luski says he’s not scared and he won’t leave Sderot. “What, every time someone throws a stone, I should run from here? That’s absurd.”

“If Bibi Netanyahu stops now, he’ll be making a mistake,” he adds.

While interviewees disagreed on the goals of “Operation Pillar of Defense” and they also disagreed as to who is responsible for rocket fire from the Gaza Strip—with some blaming the Israeli government itself—all called the offensive necessary. But they also agreed that the current round of fighting is unlikely to bring peace.