Category: Writing

Articles by Mya Guarnieri

Demolition fears haunt Israeli neighborhoods

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

Al Jazeera English, December 18, 2012

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled last week that the state cannot extend its separation barrier through the West Bank village of Batir, located next to the Green Line that divides Israel from the Palestinian territories.

Petitioners argued the wall would destroy Batir’s ancient agricultural terraces and unique irrigation system, both of which are still in use today, shattering the ecosystem and villagers’ livelihood.

Meanwhile, though, another battle dragged on just a few kilometres away in Jewish neighbourhoods on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Kiryat Menachem and Ir Ganim, two communities visible from Batir, are also fighting the state to preserve their identities. While the agricultural terraces that characterised these areas before the 1948 war are long gone, as are the Palestinians who tended them, locals say there is still something worth saving here.

Kiryat Menachem and Ir Ganim are struggling against the Jerusalem municipality and investors’ attempts to gentrify the area. Their story is a microcosm of Israel – a state that was once socialist-leaning, a people that boasted “us Jews take care of one another”, has given way to rampant capitalism. New apartment buildings are mushrooming up all across the country, often on lands that were Palestinian-owned.

The Israel Land Administration (ILA) now controls Kiryat Menachem and Ir Ganim’s lots, which were just a handful of the tens of thousands of hectares of Palestinian land the state appropriated under the 1953 Land Acquisition Law. With the ILA’s blessing, the city has given investors permission to demolish some 900 apartments and build high-rises in their place. The new towers will include commercial centres and about 3,600 apartments that will attract more than 10,000 additional residents.

Meir Pele is the investor behind the first phase of the project, which will see some 250 apartments destroyed and 900 built on Nurit Street. Speaking to Haaretz, the Jerusalem municipality called it a “golden opportunity” for residents.

But those living there say the government and city gave the land away without their knowledge or consent. In some instances, they gave developers the green light to destroy buildings that include privately owned apartments. And developers’ plans are likely to push low-income locals out of their homes.

Mike Leiter is an Ir Ganim resident and activist. Leiter says that Pele is offering residents apartments in the new towers and will waive building maintenance fees for the first three years. But after that, residents will be subject to charges that will be unaffordable for many.

For developers to move forward, however, they must get residents to sign a contract saying they agree to the plans.

The city, which is struggling financially, stands to make a tremendous amount of money from the taxes the new residents will pay. The municipality, Leiter says, “is so hungry for this to succeed that they have let loose this [investor, Pele]. He’s threatening people that if they don’t sign, he’ll take them to court.”

Pele denies claims he is coercing people into signing contracts.

But whether Pele is pressuring them or not, the fact is many in Ir Ganim and Kiryat Menachem are Ethiopian immigrants who barely speak and read Hebrew. Under Israeli law, if a majority of those in the buildings designated for demolition sign, the developer can sue the holdouts, twisting their arm into agreeing.

“[Pele is] aggressively pushing people to sign a 68-page contract – 68 pages. I couldn’t sign that without a lawyer,” adds Leiter.

While a number of residents have signed, word quickly spread through the Ethiopian community not to agree to anything without an attorney.

A number of the buildings slated for demolition are in poor condition. Residents complain about a lack of insulation and leaky pipes that drip sewage. It’s a runaway process: Because the occupants are poor, they can’t afford to pay maintenance fees. And so the buildings continue to deteriorate.

Gabriel, an Ethiopian resident of Ir Ganim who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, immigrated to Israel 15 years ago. He managed to buy his apartment with a special government-subsidised mortgage that is offered to new citizens from Ethiopia. His home is one of those that will be torn down to make way for the towers.

“I want a new apartment. The building is falling apart,” he says. “If there will be an earthquake our building will crumble. When people go down the stairs, [those inside the apartments] can feel the building moving.”

However, he is concerned about the impact of the high-rises and the massive influx of new residents. The area’s infrastructure isn’t built for large neighbourhoods. The traffic in and out of Kiryat Menachem and Ir Ganim will be unbearable during rush hours, Gabriel and other locals say.

When asked if building maintenance fees might eventually drive him out of the new towers, Gabriel shrugs. “I don’t know what I will do. Maybe my financial situation will improve in the meantime.”

Desperate to provide his wife and baby girl with a safe home, Gabriel isn’t thinking about the long term. “I’ll solve today’s problems today,” he says. “Tomorrow I’ll take care of tomorrow.”

While Leiter’s building will not be affected by the plans – known as “pinui-binui”, or “evacuation-construction” – he is concerned about the impact they will have on Kiryat Menachem and Ir Ganim’s character.

Tensions between different groups of Jewish Israelis are common throughout the country, sometimes pitting secular against religious; Jews of Eastern European descent against those with roots in Arab countries; and immigrants against native-born Israelis. But Leiter says Ir Ganim is an exception to this rule, and that’s one of the reasons why the neighbourhood must be saved from gentrification.

The area is home to Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe; Jews who immigrated from Morocco, Egypt, and Iran; Russians who came to Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union; recent arrivals from Ethiopia; and American-Israelis such as Leiter, who has lived in Ir Ganim for more than 30 years.

“What’s beautiful about this neighbourhood is that we have three elementary schools and there’s a big population of Ethiopian kids and they all go to the schools here,” Leiter says. “It’s not like other places [in Israel] where we hear on the radio that they’re not letting [Ethiopian] kids in.”

Ethiopian Israelis face widespread discrimination in Israel. In 2010, British journalist Jonathan Cook revealed that Israeli doctors were pushing Ethiopian immigrants to take Depo Provera, a birth control shot with a wide range of side effects.

Last week, Israeli journalist Gal Gabbai reported that Ethiopian women are being coerced into taking the drug and, in some instances, are not being told the shot is for birth control.

Ir Ganim is a rare bright spot, a place where most, Leiter says, “make an effort” to get along regardless of their ethnic background.

Gabriel’s take on coexistence among the various ethnicities is less than rosy. “There’s racism here … I didn’t expect it in a state where the people went through so many problems all over the world. I didn’t expect it from a people who experienced racism themselves.”

While Gabriel doesn’t think developers’ plans constitute discrimination, many believe the city and businessmen have targeted the area because the population is disadvantaged.

“It’s a [population] transfer,” Leiter says. “They’re pushing out weak people. We say, as a community, we want these people here.”

The Jerusalem municipality and ILA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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.

Israeli policy splits Palestinian families

by adminin Palestine, Writing

Al Jazeera English, November 7, 2012

To Westerners and Palestinians, Gaza “is hell”, says Ali Batha. “It’s a scary place … It’s the last place in the world [people want to go].”

There’s Gaza’s 30 per cent unemployment rate, and the Israeli blockade that restricts imports and exports. Clean drinking water is increasingly scarce. Fuel and electricity shortages cause daily blackouts.

And, according to the United Nations, the Gaza Strip “will not be liveable by 2020” unless the blockade, isolation, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict all come to an end.

 

Despite the bleak outlook, and despite the fact that Batha, 31, is in the prime of his life, he is planning to leave the West Bank to move to Gaza. It’s the only place where he and his wife, Rehab, can live together.

Because of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, it’s been three-and-a-half years since the two have seen each other.

Batha and Rehab are just one of thousands of Palestinian families who have been torn apart by Israel’s “separation policy”.

“The dominant aspects of it are to disallow travel between Gaza and the West Bank, to prevent Palestinians from Gaza from moving to the West Bank, and to induce or coerce Palestinians from the West Bank to move to Gaza,” says Sari Bashi, executive director of Gisha, an Israeli NGO that advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement.

When asked about the separation policy and its aims, Guy Inbar, a spokesman from the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activity in the Territories, answers that because “terrorist groups in Gaza” seek “to relocate the existing terrorist infrastructure to [the West Bank], Israel has adopted a policy which reduces movements between Gaza and [the West Bank]”.

Batha and Rehab met in 2000 at Birzeit University in the West Bank, where Batha studied economics and Rehab earned a degree in business administration. “It was in a discussion about mythology,” Batha recalls. “She started to talk and I was like, ‘Oh my god, there is a beautiful girl and she is talking about serious things in an [intelligent] way.'”

The two quickly became friends. After one month, Batha confessed his love to her, adding, “I don’t need an answer from you, just take your time.”

He then embarked on a campaign to win Rehab’s heart. “I did a lot of crazy things,” Batha smiles. He scaled the side of her dormitory to reach her balcony. He also covered the sidewalk to her building with drawings and poetry.

Rehab fell for him and they moved in together.

When Rehab graduated in 2004, the couple struggled to decide whether Rehab should travel to the Gaza Strip to visit her parents.

Although Rehab was born in Lebanon, her family moved to Gaza in the early 1990s, as Israel was beginning to restrict Palestinian freedom of movement. In 2000, Israel blocked Gazans from travelling to the West Bank to study. Rehab was one of the last to receive permission to do so.

Because Rehab worried that she wouldn’t be able to return to the West Bank to complete her studies, she did not visit Gaza while she was earning her degree.

After much discussion, Batha and Rehab agreed that she would spend a month in Gaza with her family. But, just as the couple feared, Israeli authorities refused the travel permit she needed to return to the West Bank.

The couple reunited and married in Dubai in 2007. When they tried to go back to the West Bank a year-and-a-half later, Israeli soldiers refused entry to Rehab because she had a Gaza ID. So the two went to Egypt, where Rehab’s family now lives, and tried to solve the problem from there.

They conferred with high-ranking officials from Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) who, according to Batha, suggested they obtain a referral to a West Bank healthcare facility. Israeli authorities allow a small number of Palestinians to travel from Gaza for medical purposes.

While Palestinians are free to move to Gaza, Israel prevents family reunification in the West Bank, Bashi explains, “unless you are an orphan under the age of 16 with no relatives to care for you in Gaza, an elderly person in need of constant care with no relatives to care for you in Gaza, or a chronically ill person with no relatives to care for you in Gaza”.

Bashi calls the policy “extraordinarily restrictive”, pointing out that it excludes “any healthy adult”.

In addition to recommending that Rehab get a medical referral, PA officials said she might have a stronger case if she were in Gaza. So in 2009 she went alone. As a woman who does not wear a hijab, Rehab found the move to conservative Gaza difficult. But she remained there, without family, for three years before returning to Egypt.

On numerous occasions, the couple submitted the necessary paperwork to the PA, which passes on requests to the Israelis.

“[Our] file has been with the [Palestinian] Ministry [of Civil Affairs] for a long time,” Ali says, adding he has made countless attempts to follow up on the application.

“The Israelis say, ‘We didn’t receive anything from you’ … [The PA] says ‘bring your papers, bring your papers’. I don’t know where [the PA] put the papers. Maybe in the garbage.”

While Batha is angry with the PA for not doing more to help, he blames the Israeli government for the painful separation from his wife, which he likens to “a prison”.

Israel also maintains the Palestinian population registry, which gives it the final say regarding official address changes.

In Nisreen Asaid’s case, this means that Israel decides whether or not the 30-year-old mother of two will be able to live with her children.

Asaid was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint inside the West Bank in 2007 as she tried to travel from Ramallah to Qalqilya. Soldiers told Asaid that her address was registered in Gaza, where she had lived until she was 14.

She was interrogated and then transferred against her will to the Gaza Strip. Asaid was not allowed to say goodbye to her daughter, who was 10 at the time, or her toddler. She has not seen her children, who remain in the West Bank, for more than five years.

Thanks to a 2011 gesture brokered by the Quartet, Asaid has managed to update her address to the West Bank. But she has been unable to get permission from Israel to travel back from Gaza.

Her son doesn’t understand why his mother disappeared from his life and why she can’t come back to Ramallah. When they talk on the phone, Asaid says, he sometimes tells her, “We will bring a car to the Erez checkpoint and we will raise the fence and you can go underneath.”

Another family has a similar problem. A mother who is stranded in Gaza, raising five children on her own, got her address changed to her husband’s home in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Now Israeli officials say she must pick up the new ID in the West Bank. They refuse, however, to issue her the necessary travel permit.

Bashi says Israeli attempts to control Palestinian movement within Gaza and the West Bank violate international human rights law.

“Because Gaza and the West Bank are part of a single territorial unit, Israel is obligated to respect the right of Palestinians to travel freely within the territory and to choose their place of residence within the territory,” she explains.

“Any restriction on that right can only be implemented for security reasons, or out of security concerns about the passage [through] Israel.”

But a spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories disputes this, saying the Israeli Supreme Court has found “no fault” with the policy.

“There is no legal obligation to allow free movement between Gaza and [the West Bank] … Regarding this specific issue, Gaza and [the West Bank] cannot be declared as a single territorial unit.”

Bashi points out that Israel does not have security claims against any of the families interviewed. “And there is certainly no security reason to prevent these families from being together,” she says.

As the peace process stagnates and the blockade grinds on, Asaid waits and hopes to see her children. And Batha contemplates his next move: “I can go to Gaza, I can go to hell – whatever – just to feel that I can be with her.”

Israeli promises of family reunification fall short

by adminin Palestine, Writing

IRIN, November 2, 2012

Until “that day” in 2007, Nisreen Asaid was a wife and a mother. She was also a hairdresser. But life as she knew it came to a sudden end when Asaid was sent, against her will, from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli authorities have not allowed Asaid to return to her home in the West Bank’s de facto capital, Ramallah. Her husband got tired of waiting and divorced her. Asaid has no close relatives in Gaza, and, with unemployment hovering around 30 percent, she has been unable to find work. She is dependent on her family in the West Bank, which wires money to her so she can stay afloat.

Despite her difficulties and uncertain future, Asaid’s biggest worry is that her two children do not remember her face.

Asaid, 30, was born in the Gaza Strip, a poor, isolated territory under blockade, lacking water, electricity and housing for its 1.6 million inhabitants. In the mid-1990s, when she was 14, she and her family moved to the West Bank. Although Israeli restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement began several years earlier, it was still relatively easy to travel between the territories.

So Asaid did not worry what address was listed on the Israeli-controlled population registry. After all, her life was in the West Bank. She got married and gave birth to her first child, a girl, in the West Bank. She divorced, remarried, and bore a son in East Jerusalem. She worked in Ramallah and owned an apartment in the West Bank city of Qalqilya.

At night, Asaid often slept with her children, snuggling with them and measuring their small bodies with her hands to see how much they had grown. Today, their relationship takes place on the phone.

Asaid has not seen her son and daughter since 2007, when she went to visit her sister in Qalqilya. Although she was travelling from one Palestinian city to another, Qalqilya is in Area C (where Israel retains military authority and full control over the building and planning sphere, while responsibility for the provision of services falls to the Palestinian Authority). When Asaid tried to pass through an Israeli checkpoint – a checkpoint she had been through countless times – she was arrested because her identification listed her as a Gaza resident.

After Asaid was detained and interrogated, Israeli forces took her straight from the checkpoint to Gaza. She did not have a chance to say goodbye to her children before she was transferred. Her daughter was 10 at the time; her son was two.

With the help of Gisha, an Israeli NGO that campaigns for freedom of movement, Asaid has waged a legal battle in the hope of returning to her two children. She managed to get her address updated to the West Bank and got a new ID that reflects the change. But the Israeli authorities will not allow Asaid to leave the Gaza Strip despite the fact that they have no security claim against her.

Guy Inbar, a spokesperson of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said the army had not received an application from Asaid to travel from Gaza to the West Bank. He said such requests must first be filed with the Palestinian authorities, which Asaid insists she has done via the Palestinian Ministry of Civil Affairs.

While Asaid’s story is not unique, it is impossible to know exactly how many Palestinian spouses have been split between Gaza and the West Bank due to Israeli policies and how many parents have been separated from their minor children.

“One of the problems is that people stop asking [the Israeli authorities for permission] to travel to reunite because they know that the answer is no,” Gisha Executive Director Sari Bashi told IRIN. “We know that it affects a lot of people and it has a disproportionately negative effect on women.”

In February 2011, Israel agreed to allow 5,000 Palestinians to change their address from Gaza to the West Bank. Many were West Bank residents who lived under constant fear of arrest and forced transfer. Some, like Asaid, had already been sent to Gaza. A year and a half later, the gesture, which was brokered by Quartet Special Envoy Tony Blair, has only been partially implemented.

According to Bashi, thousands of applicants are still waiting for an answer. Others were initially told that their address could be changed, only to have the Israeli army rescind the decision. And some are like Asaid – they have new IDs but are unable to get permission to travel to the address they are now registered at.

“Changing a person’s address within the Palestinian territory should not be subject to the whims of a political gesture,” Bashi said.

But the Israeli government says security considerations are at play: “Due to the security threat today, caused by the Palestinian terrorism in general, and particularly the desire of terrorist groups in Gaza to relocate the existing terrorist infrastructure to [the West Bank], Israel has adopted a policy which reduces movements between Gaza and [the West Bank],” Inbar told IRIN by email. The policy, he continued, “enables transition of Palestinians from Gaza only in humanitarian cases.”

Bashi argues that since Israel has recognized Gaza and the West Bank as a single territorial unit, freedom of movement was to be allowed. Under international human rights law, that means a Palestinian resident may choose to live in Gaza City or Ramallah as he or she likes.

She said the so-called “separation policy” is driven by the fact that Israel has territorial claims in the West Bank, but has abandoned those claims in Gaza. (Palestinians are free to change their addresses from the West Bank to Gaza and are also allowed to move to Gaza. But they cannot return to the West Bank.)

“[Israel] hasn’t given much information about what [the policy] is,” Bashi said, “but the dominant aspects of it are to disallow travel between Gaza and the West Bank, to prevent Palestinians from Gaza from moving to the West Bank and to induce or coerce Palestinians from the West Bank to move to Gaza.”

But for COGAT, “regarding this specific issue, Gaza and [the West Bank] cannot be declared as a single territorial unit.” Inbar said the policy has been examined again and again by the Supreme Court, which found no fault.

“We emphasize, as was decided time after time by the Supreme Court, there is no legal obligation to allow free movement between Gaza and [the West Bank], and certainly, if the request obligates transition through Israeli territory.”

In December 2009, the Israeli Supreme Court received a petition filed by Gisha on behalf of Samir Abu Yusef. Although he was born in Gaza, Abu Yusef lived in the West Bank from 1990 till 2007, when the Israeli authorities arrested him and transferred him to Gaza, under the same pretence that was used to expel Asaid: he had a Gaza address on his ID.

A few months after the petition was filed, the Israeli authorities allowed Abu Yusef to return to the West Bank, sparing the court from making a decision on the issue of separated families.

Israelis fight over neighborhood’s soul

by adminin Politics, Writing

Al Jazeera English, September 27, 2012

Just like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ongoing struggle for Kiryat Yovel began with a small strip of land.

Residents of this predominately secular neighbourhood of West Jerusalem call it “Warburg Lot”. Located in the heart of Kiryat Yovel, locals have taken to holding cultural events on Warburg on Friday nights, sometimes offending their ultra-Orthodox neighbours. Friday night also marks the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, the holy day. The observant do not use electrical appliances, handle money, or play musical instruments during this time.

Perach Adom, a band whose name means Red Flower, plugged into amplifiers and played Greek rebetiko to an audience of several hundred secular Israelis on a recent Friday night. A table set up on the edge of the field offered beer and snacks in exchange for a donation. Volunteers asked concert-goers to sign a list to get emails from Free Kiryat Yovel, a grassroots movement that would like to preserve the “pluralism” that residents say define their neighbourhood.

The fight for Kiryat Yovel began on a hot August morning in 2008, when tractors arrived and began digging on the Warburg lot. Residents understood the lot to be public and they used the space to exercise, walk their dogs, and to park cars. Surprised to see the construction, locals rushed out and asked the workers what they were doing.

When the workers hesitated to explain, residents stood in front of the tractors and called the municipality. Eventually, it became clear that the men had come to install two caravans and connect the structures to water and electricity. The buildings would serve as kindergartens to the ultra-Orthodox community, a group that insists upon having their own educational system, separate from both the Palestinians, as well as secular Israelis.

But there was no ultra-Orthodox community in Kiryat Yovel. And the workers did not have the appropriate papers from the municipality to carry out the construction. Rather, they had received verbal permission from then-Deputy Mayor Yehoshua Pollack, who is ultra-Orthodox and was later arrested in an unconnected real estate scandal. Among other charges, he was accused of taking bribes.

Dina Azriel is an activist with Free Kiryat Yovel. She says the attempt to build the kindergarten was reminiscent of the founding of some Israeli settlements. “They come, they dig, they put a caravan, and that’s it.”

Just as infrastructure helps pull Israelis across the Green Line, schools and synagogues serve as a magnet to attract new religious residents to traditionally secular neighbourhoods of Jerusalem. Additional infrastructure is then built to accommodate the new residents. Religious buyers sometimes come and make secular homeowners generous offers, and little by little the veteran residents are edged out. It has happened across Jerusalem – to the extent that some 20,000 secular Israelis have left the city in recent years.

While secular Israelis represented about 40 per cent of Jerusalem’s population a decade ago, today the city of 800,000 is split almost evenly into thirds between the secular community, Muslim Palestinians, and the ultra-Orthodox.

Though their birthrates have dropped in recent years, the ultra-Orthodox still have more babies than Palestinians, Arab Israelis, and secular Jewish Israelis. It is estimated that 20 per cent of the country will be ultra-Orthodox by 2034 – meaning they are expected to change not just the landscape of Jerusalem, but the face of Israel.

But the secular residents of Kiryat Yovel are determined to stay. The day after construction workers attempted to build the ultra-Orthodox kindergarten, Azriel and other locals started a committee to protect the neighbourhood.

“We blocked the entrance to the lot with cars so tractors couldn’t enter,” Azriel recalls. The community also filed a lawsuit that effectively prevented the ultra-Orthodox from using the land for their own purposes.

Still, the ultra-Orthodox community – or Haredim as they are known in Hebrew – have made inroads in Kiryat Yovel. They have a visible presence in the neighbourhood and managed to open a kindergarten next to a secular kindergarten. To the alarm of many secular and some ultra-Orthodox residents, the city erected a separation fence between the two schools. And, because the ultra-Orthodox complained that their children would see secular Israelis with immodest dress and little boys without kippot  – the skullcap worn by observant Jews – through the fence, the barrier was covered with a blue tarp.

Azriel and her husband, Danny Unger, emphasise that they and other members of Free Kiryat Yovel do not take issue with the ultra-Orthodox themselves. Rather, they are concerned by the anti-pluralist and anti-democratic trends that, they say, come with the community.

“The problem is not that they’re coming,” Unger remarks. “We’ll gladly accept them. The problem begins when you come and want to make a separation [between yourself and the existing community].”

Azriel and Unger are also concerned about the allocation of the city’s resources. They say that public space should be used for the good of the whole neighbourhood, not for a specific population that is new to the area and that will keep others out.

“Public space has to stay equal and open to everyone,” Azriel says.

City councilwoman Laura Wharton shares this sentiment. “This is my position also about East Jerusalem,” she says, where Palestinians receive services that are disproportionately less than those received by their Jewish counterparts, despite the fact that Palestinian residents pay taxes. “The resources of a given area [should be] devoted to the people who live there.”

Wharton lives in Beit HaKarem, a predominately secular neighbourhood where a park was bulldozed to make way for a mikveh – a bath for ritual immersion – despite the fact that the area is home to only a handful of ultra-Orthodox residents.

While they remain a minority in both Jerusalem and Israel, the ultra-Orthodox wield a disproportionate amount of political power because they tend to vote in a bloc. And perks like subsidised housing and financial assistance for large families come with that power.

The ultra-Orthodox are, for the most part, poor and don’t pay a lot of taxes. Because Jerusalem is struggling to stay afloat financially, the municipality has given developers the green light to build luxury apartment buildings and commercial spaces in the place of apartment buildings that are home to low- and middle-income Israelis. The occupants of these new buildings will pay more taxes, carrying those in the city who don’t pay enough.

As Israel moves away from the welfare state that characterised the country’s early days and becomes increasingly capitalist, in part to keep the ultra-Orthodox afloat, more Israelis are attracted to the ultra-Orthodox’s ranks.

“A lot of their appeal is related to the growing socio-economic disparities,” Wharton explains. “Because the ultra-Orthodox are well-organised and they raise money abroad and obtain funding for things, not always legally, they can do things like offer kindergartens that work until later.”

Wharton points out that the ultra-Orthodox have gotten a stronger foothold in poor areas of Kiryat Yovel, where residents need the services once provided by the state.

But the ultra-Orthodox struggle with housing and infrastructure issues of their own. As their population has outgrown their traditional neighbourhoods, they head toward secular areas – or the illegal settlements over the Green Line.

“The biggest and fastest-growing settlements …are ultra-Orthodox,” says Wharton, who is also a political science lecturer at Hebrew University. “The current government is interested in attracting settlers, and they offer land for free and really good mortgages and really good social systems … so the state uses the [ultra-Orthodox] and the [ultra-Orthodox] use the state.”

Which is exactly what Azriel and Unger don’t want to see in Kiryat Yovel. “Israel can be a democratic state,” Azriel says. “But there has to be a separation between religion and state.”

Mistreatment of refugees in Israel doesn’t stop at border

by adminin African refugees, Writing

The National, September 17, 2012

Earlier this month, 21 Eritrean asylum seekers, including a 14-year-old child and two women, spent over a week trapped between fences on the Israeli side of the Israeli-Egyptian border. As the temperatures soared, the group was not provided with any shelter; the “most moral army in the world” gave the refugees only small amounts of water and scraps of cloth to protect themselves from the sun.

Soldiers did not give them food and turned away the activists who tried to bring the asylum seekers something to eat.

After the two women and the child were let into Israel – where they were taken to prison – and the men were returned to Egypt, reports surfaced that the army behaved violently towards these refugees. According to the three who entered, soldiers shot tear gas at the group and used an iron pole in an attempt to push them back to Egypt. The 18 men who were returned to Egypt were returned by force.

According to testimony taken by lawyers from the non-governmental organization We Are Refugees and published on +972, Israeli soldiers, “threw the… men onto a tarp and dragged them underneath the Egyptian fence.” Fearing violence from the Egyptians and deportation from Egypt to Eritrea—where they face imprisonment without charge, torture, and death—the men “screamed ‘kill us right here.’”

International law prohibits states from forcibly returning asylum seekers to countries where their lives or liberty might be in danger, as does the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

While this was a dramatic example of the Israeli army’s treatment of the refugees, African refugees in Israel have faced the state’s structural violence and an increasingly hostile public for over six years.

Although small numbers of African asylum seekers have been coming to Israel since the 1980s, a tremendous majority of the 60,000 refugees who are here now have arrived since 2005. More than 80 per cent are from war-torn Sudan or Eritrea, which are gripped by brutal dictatorships. After they enter the country, usually via the Egyptian border, those who are caught are jailed without charge for an arbitrary period; when Israel needs to make way for more prisoners, the asylum seekers are dumped in south Tel Aviv and other cities.

For those bearing the scars of war, detention in Israel is traumatizing. Sunday Dieng, a 26-year-old asylum seeker, left his village in South Sudan when he was 10 years old after he saw his parents murdered by Sudanese forces. In Egypt, Dieng says, he faced racism and violence on the street. So, in 2006, he headed to Israel – only to spend his first 14 months behind bars.

“To live in jail for one year and two months for no reason … it’s terrible, it’s very difficult,” Dieng says. “It causes some damage to the [mind], because you know you didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t do any crime.” Although Dieng was an adult when he arrived, unaccompanied minors make up a significant part of Israel’s refugee population. And those children are also detained without charge.

Once out of jail, the state either refuses to process refugees’ individual requests for asylum or arbitrarily rejects them without adequately investigating their claims. Instead, Israel gives citizens of Sudan and Eritrea group protection. So they get visas, but not work visas – forcing refugees onto the black market where they face exploitation.

Many are unable to find jobs at all and, because they do not have citizenship or residency, they do not get help from the state. South Tel Aviv’s parks are filled with homeless, emaciated refugees. Others scrape by on odd jobs and live in crowded apartments; sometimes two dozen asylum seekers will share a single room.

Their children, even those who are born here and speak fluent Hebrew, are not recognized by the state. Although they can attend municipal kindergartens and schools from the age of three, before then, their parents don’t get help paying for day-care as poor Israelis do. So they are forced to send their toddlers to cheaper, unregulated black market day-cares, places one NGO worker refers to as “storage of children”.

Mimi Hylameshesh, a single mother from Eritrea, earns approximately 2,000 Israeli shekels (about 500 US dollars) a month working as a house cleaner. Her rent is 1,500 shekels; day-care for her toddler runs another 600 shekels. What about food?

She shrugs and looks away, embarrassed. “It’s hard for me,” Hylameshesh says. But her child always eats.

When Hylameshesh doesn’t have the money, she goes without–just like those 21 refugees who spent over a week on the border.

Reflection on limitations on life for West Bank Palestinians

by adminin Palestine, Writing

The National, September 15, 2012

Running tests boundaries – both those we place on ourselves as well as those imposed upon us by the outside world. Whether those external limits are social, cultural or political, the runner collides with them in a way that the casual pedestrian does not, thus serving as a mirror for the issues that affect one’s time and space.

A woman in a male-dominated society, for example, might face cat calls or even physical assault while running; Palestinians living under Israeli occupation have, literally, nowhere to run. Trapped inside a labyrinth of Israeli military checkpoints and permits, bordered by illegal settlements, freedom of movement is nonexistent.

In Ramallah,Running is a collection of prose and visual art that expresses how one moves through – or doesn’t move through – occupied space. Edited by Samar Martha, the co-founder of ArtSchool Palestine, and the London-based writer Guy Mannes-Abbott, the book brings together prominent Palestinian artists and writers as well as several from the international stage.

They offer reflections on Ramallah, the city that has become the de facto centre of Palestinian cultural and political life. As contributor Najwan Darwish writes in his powerful essay Ramallah Versus Ramallah, the focus on Ramallah as a “temporary capital” is “meant not only to make us forget Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, the Galilee and all of Palestine that was occupied in 1948, but also to overshadow the importance of Jerusalem”.

Mannes-Abbott’s contribution is a 14-part series about his runs and walks in Ramallah. His descriptions can border on the lyrical – rendering the beauty of the land and his love for the place and its people. But they are also laden with the claustrophobia and fear that typify Palestinian life: “… in the prison of these hills, in lovely Ramallah itself, there is no freedom. Here, in this place, life spirals within abysmal limits.”

His essay reveals the physical limitations imposed by the Israeli occupation; more importantly, Mannes-Abbott points to how those restrictions linger inside the psyche, long after one has entered the so-called “autonomous” areas. But his depiction of Palestinians is also almost too sympathetic. One villager is “comically, sweetly” emphatic, another’s voice “betrays a sweetness of character that is very Palestinian”.

As a foreigner who can easily leave Ramallah and its suffocating environs behind, Mannes-Abbott spends a little too much time on stage. There are less than 150 pages of prose and art in the book and his essay – while moving, nuanced and deeply researched – takes up more than 70. In Ramallah, Running is at its best when those whose very existence is intertwined with dispossession and occupation – the Palestinians – speak for themselves.

Khalil Rabah, a Palestinian artist who lives in Ramallah, presents the reader with a simple image: a photograph of two worn leather loafers. At first glance, the brain interprets it as a pair of shoes. But something is amiss. It is actually two right shoes. It is, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for Ramallah. The shoes are shiny and seem business-like – just like the city, which is awash with foreign aid and seems to be booming – but the person who wears them is cobbled; if they manage to run, they won’t get far.

Forced relocations from the West Bank fit decade-old plan

by adminin Palestine, Writing

The National, August 28, 2012

South Africa has decided that anything produced in the West Bank must be labelled as coming from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, rather than Israel, as the labels now read. The ruling suggests that the global movement known as “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” is picking up speed.

But Israel is also stepping up its process of forced relocations from the land, increasing pressure on Arabs on both sides of the Green Line. The forced transfers most often associated with the 1948 war did not end with the armistice agreements. They continue today, through overt plans to “relocate” Bedouin citizens of Israel using bureaucratic manoeuvring and the manipulation of the law that pushes West Bank Palestinians off their ancestral lands.

The United Nations reports that in the first six months of this year, Israeli demolitions in “Area C” – which makes up 61 per cent of the West Bank – led to the “forced displacement” of 615 Palestinians and Bedouins, more than half of them children. If demolitions continue at this rate, displacements will exceed those of 2011, in which 1,095 people were made homeless by Israel.

In Area C, dozens of Palestinian and Bedouin villages are threatened with demolition, and over 27,000 men, women and children face forced transfer. Most of these people are refugees.

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem says the Israeli civil administration will begin by relocating those closest to Jerusalem and will work its way out, finishing with those in the Jordan Valley. The 2,300 Bedouin men, women and children who live alongside the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, which many Israelis consider a suburb of Jerusalem and which the state intends to expand, are in the most immediate danger of expulsion. Among other options, the Israeli government is examining the possibility of moving them to the edge of a rubbish dump.

In other cases, Israel is not offering Palestinian and Bedouin residents an alternative location – the state is simply destroying their homes, leaving families to fend for themselves.

That’s the story in Susya, a small village in the south Hebron Hills. Israel claims the structures there are illegal because they were put up without building permits. But for the most part, the civil administration won’t issue building permits to non-Jews in Area C.

And if the state has its way, another 1,500 Palestinians will be displaced from the area that Israel has just recently named Fire Zone 918. Ten Israeli outposts have been built in such fire zones; their residents do not face expulsion.

Israel also has plans for Palestinian citizens of Israel who live inside the Green Line. Under Israel’s Prawer Plan, between 30,000 and 40,000 Bedouin face forced transfer from their villages in the Negev to townships that are little more than ghettos. Before the Prawer Plan was approved by the Israeli cabinet last September, the state had already demolished the unrecognised Bedouin village of Al Araqib dozens of times. At the time of writing, Al Araqib has been destroyed 41 times in two years.

But demolitions and forced transfers are not new to the Negev. In his book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White notes that more than 2,000 Palestinians “were ‘transferred’ to Gaza in 1950” from the Negev and villages near the borders. Between 1949 and 1953 Israel expelled some 17,000 Bedouin from the Negev, White adds. In the decades that followed, Israel demolished thousands of homes in unrecognised Bedouin villages.

Elderly residents of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights recall Israeli soldiers forcing Arabs from their homes during and after the 1967 war. Decades later, witnesses described how Israeli soldiers “forced [Syrians] from their homes … fired their guns into the air and told them to leave”. They also described how those who took refuge from the fighting in neighbouring villages were prevented from returning to their houses. Approximately 120,000 Arabs were expelled or fled the area, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1981.

The Israeli government also uses other, less direct methods to encourage non-Jewish Arabs to relocate. In the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has purged more than 150,000 Palestinians from the population registry – making it impossible for them to return or to get identification cards.

B’Tselem estimates that nearly 650,000 Palestinians who live in the occupied territories have an immediate family member who is unregistered, and thus paperless. Israel has ignored over 100,000 requests for family reunification.

In the West Bank, Israel restricts Palestinian and Bedouin access to water, crippling agriculture, the traditional livelihood of many residents. And of course there is the separation wall and the system of checkpoints and permits, making it difficult for many – and impossible for some – to reach schools, work, health care, friends and families. The resulting economic and psychological pressures have led some to emigrate.

Al Araqib and the Prawer Plan – and the rise in demolitions and displacements – made international headlines, which may give the impression that forced transfers are a new Israeli strategy, or at least one that has been resurrected from the 1948 war. But this is not the case. The current and upcoming relocations must be understood as part of an ethnic cleansing process, taking both overt and bureaucratic forms, that began 64 years ago and that will end only when the international community no longer allows it to continue.

Israeli settlers lured by subsidies

by adminin Miscellaneous, Writing

Al Jazeera English, August 23, 2012

It is the stereotypical image of an Israeli settlement: a man with sidecurls and skullcap, and an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. A mob uproots olive trees and harasses Palestinian farmers. A mosque is set ablaze in a so-called “price tag attack”, retaliation for a slight – real or perceived.

But surveys have found that many, if not most, of those who moved to East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank are not driven by ideology, religion or politics. They have been lured by government subsidies that significantly lower their cost of living.

Bar Malul, 21, lives in the West Bank settlement of Ariel and works at the health food store in the town’s commercial centre. As she weighs freshly ground coffee, Malul explains that her parents moved the family from Israel to the West Bank 15 years ago, “because it was comparatively cheaper than other places”.

A sign in Ariel advertises four-bedroom homes starting from $200,000. In Tel Aviv, the same amount of money buys a two-room apartment in Kiryat Shalom, a poor neighbourhood in the south of the city.

The settlements are also appealing to young families. The Israeli Ministry of Education spends more per pupil there than it does in Israel proper. According to the Israeli non-governmental organisation Peace Now, the ministry invests about 8,000 Israeli new shekels ($2,000) a year on every student over the Green Line – the pre-1967 boundary with the West Bank. That is nearly double what it spends on a pupil inside Israel.

Most of Ariel’s residents are here for economic reasons, Malul says. “There are a lot of Russian [immigrants]; the majority are Mizrachim… a small amount are Ashkenazim.”

Both Mizrachim, Jews from Arab countries, and recent immigrants crowd around the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Ashkenazim, Jews of Eastern European descent, are generally more affluent. Under greater financial pressure, the Mizrachim are pushed toward the settlements and Israel’s less desirable peripherial areas. The Ashkenazim tend to cluster towards the centre of the country. The daughter of a Tunisian father and a Russian mother, Malul reflects on this trend.

Now, Ariel residents say prices are rising. Evgeni Siprmov, 29, emigrated from the former Soviet Union to the Israeli city of Petach Tikva with his parents in 1994. He moved to Ariel four years ago to study at the settlement’s college. He was also drawn by the low cost of living.

“The food was never cheaper but the rent, yes, it was cheaper,” Siprmov says as he sits at a green plastic table outside a kiosk and cracks open a can of beer. “It used to be that you would pay 400,000 [Israeli new shekels, or $99,875] to buy a small house here. It’s 600,000 [$149,813] now – the same as Petach Tikva.”

Siprmov, who just finished a bachelor’s degree in economics and has yet to find a job on either side of the Green Line, adds: “There is no true [free market] competition here … It’s all cartels.”

Inside the Green Line, Israelis struggle to keep up with runaway housing costs, high taxes, and increasing food, gas, and electricity prices on relatively low wages – which sparked last summer’s “social justice” protests. But, rather than investing in affordable housing inside of Israel, the state has instituted austerity measures and is giving more to the settlements.

According to the Israeli financial daily the Calcalist, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has increased spending on settlements by 38 per cent. Peace Now reports that 2011 saw a 20 per cent rise in settlement construction. And the number of settlers has grown by 4.5 per cent in 2012.

While Ariel is quickly becoming unaffordable, it still holds some economic appeal.

Yusuf Jaber, 23, lives in a nearby Palestinian village and works at a restaurant in Ariel. Education and job opportunities are limited for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Many like Jaber are left with no option but to work on the settlements built on Palestinian land, which pose a threat to an independent Palestinian state.

Jaber says he’s less concerned about politics and more worried about making a living. He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter if the [residents] are Palestinian or Jews – it’s work.”

Lea Gal, 57, is an alternative medicine practitioner. She lives in Raanana, north of Tel Aviv, but spends an hour and a half each day commuting to Ariel. An immigrant from Russia, Gal explains, “I speak two languages [Hebrew and Russian] and that’s needed here.”

While the economy squeezes them out of Israel proper towards work and homes in the West Bank, small numbers of ideological settlers have begun moving back. Some relocate to Jewish-majority areas in hopes of radicalising Israeli society, and harnessing more support for settlements. Others have moved to mixed areas, where Jewish Israelis and Palestinians live in relative harmony, in order to assert a Jewish presence.

In south Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighbourhood, a small group of former West Bank settlers have been instrumental in whipping up anti-African sentiment. Sharon Rothbard, a Shapira resident and historian, says the settlers’ move to the area is an attempt “to build a coalition” on both sides of the Green Line.

As economic pressure grows, settlements expand, and the Israeli public drifts to the right, prospects for an independent Palestinian state fade. When asked if she believes settlements are an obstacle to peace, Malul expresses her disagreement with a curse. “No,” Gal says. “The [Second] Intifada started in 2000 and there was nothing here.”

While Ariel was founded in 1978, nine years before the First Intifada, many of the settlers interviewed echoed Gal’s sentiment: settlements and occupation were both a response to the Intifada.

Ariel residents agree an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank is unlikely. But they find a one-state solution just as improbable. Gal says while she is opposed to evacuating Israeli settlements, she is also against the evictions of Palestinians. According to the United Nations, the rate of Israeli demolitions of Palestinian and Bedouin homes and structures in the West Bank has increased in 2012, resulting in the “forced displacement” of more than 600 Palestinians – about half of them children.

The Palestinian villages of Susya and Zanuta are under threat of imminent demolition, and 1,500 Palestinians who live in an area the Israeli army calls Firing Zone 918 face eviction.

When Palestinians are displaced, it is usually to make way for expanding settlements and infrastructure. “What is there to do?” Gal asks. “Throw thousands of people from [the West Bank]? It doesn’t matter [whether they’re Palestinian or Israeli], it’s impossible.”

Malul agrees, adding Palestinians should be able to move freely between Israel and the Occupied Territories. “They were born here and I was born here … they should be able to enter, too.”

Malul admits, however, her views are not necessarily representative of most settlers, or mainstream Israeli society. “It pains me to hear ‘death to the Arabs’ … and at the checkpoints when [soldiers] take them off the buses. [The Palestinians] are good people … they’re people who want to work, who want to make a living for their families.”