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On International Solidarity Day, Al-Haq addresses root cause of Palestinian human rights violations: Israeli occupation
Date: 29 / 11 / 2006 Time: 17:22

Ma'an - The Palestinian human rights organisation, Al-Haq, has issued the following press release to mark International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People:

On 29 November 2006, the international community observes the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. As a Palestinian organisation dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Al-Haq takes this opportunity to emphasise that the root cause of the pervasive violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the OPT is the almost 40-year-old Israeli occupation. Both Israel and the international community have repeatedly failed to meet their international legal obligations with regard to the OPT. Consequently, the full realisation of the fundamental rights of Palestinians, including the right to self-determination, remains as distant as ever.

Israel continues to systematically violate, with impunity, international humanitarian and human rights standards in the OPT, as demonstrated by the recent incursions into Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip. Since 29 November 2005, Israeli military operations in the OPT have resulted in the deaths of 562 Palestinians, including 44 women and 86 children, and injured many more. Many of those killed were civilians not participating in hostilities. There are no justifications under international law for Israel’s clearly disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force against Palestinians, or for the continuing occupation of the OPT in violation of binding UN Security Council resolutions.

Israel, the Occupying Power, furthermore disregards its obligation to provide for the basic welfare of the occupied population, as illustrated by the recent drastic deterioration of the Palestinian economy and related shortages of food, water and medicine. Approximately two thirds of the Palestinian population now live below the poverty line, many of them children deprived of their basic needs. To aggravate matters, over 150,000 civil servants, upon whom at least one quarter of the Palestinian population depend for support, have only been paid a fraction of their wages since March 2006. This is a direct result of Israel’s retention of Palestinian tax and customs revenues and major donors’ withdrawal of financial aid to the Palestinian National Authority. As noted by John Dugard, the Special Rapporteur on the OPT, “the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions - the first time an occupied people have been so treated.”

International solidarity with the Palestinian people can be best expressed by ending the aforementioned economic sanctions and ensuring respect for international law. In this regard, Israel’s ongoing construction of the Annexation Wall, development and expansion of settlements, and sustained efforts to annex vast tracts of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in open defiance of international law as reflected in the International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion, must be brought to an immediate end.

At a time when the civilian population of the OPT finds itself denied the fundamental protections of international law, pressure must be exerted on every member of the international community to urgently and unequivocally stand in defence of the rights of the Palestinian people and find the political will to oppose Israel’s persistent violations. Adherence to international law, the ending of the occupation and the meaningful and effective exercise of the right to self-determination by the Palestinian people are essential to achieving a just and durable solution to the conflict.

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13 Palestinian human rights groups address UN Human Rights Commissioner
Date: 30 / 11 / 2006 Time: 11:50


Arbour speaking in Gaza City
(MaanImages)
Ma'an - Thirteen Palestinian human rights groups sumitted the following joint letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights during her visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories:

Dear Madame Arbour,

As non-governmental human rights organisations based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we would like to express our appreciation for your mission to the OPT. The current reality in the OPT is one of gross and systematic violations of international human rights law, as well as serious and grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, amounting to war crimes. These exigencies give this visit, which we have long urged, exceptional significance. We hope that your visit and its follow-up will mark a renewed, substantive engagement by the UN on the issue of Palestinian human rights.

We hope that you will take every opportunity to speak with Palestinians to witness first hand the ways in which the institutionalised framework of the Israeli occupation has severe and long-term repercussions on the human rights of every Palestinian, and by extension on the prospects for international peace and security.

The collapse in the political, humanitarian and security sectors as a result of Israeli actions, particularly in Gaza, has led to widespread violations of human rights. We trust that witnessing the situation on the ground will bolster your resolve to utilise the powers of your office to end impunity for those who commit violations of international human rights law. In this regard, we attach particular significance to the possibility that the mandate of the OPT-based Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights could be expanded to include monitoring and reporting on the human rights situation. This is of great importance at this juncture given Israels recent refusal to allow the entry into the OPT of the fact-finding mission called for by the Human Rights Council in its first special session and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a resolution calling for a fact-finding mission. The additional failure of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to abide by their obligations to protect civilians in the OPT offers additional urgency to our call for your leadership.

The Palestinian human rights community has worked diligently for many years towards the realisation of the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to self-determination. We are cognisant that our goal is a long-term one, but continue to persevere in the hope that eventually genuine strides will be made.

We face many obstacles in achieving this goal. The conduct of the Israeli occupying forces during military operations in the OPT is a consistent manifestation of the exigencies of state security being used as a justification for infringing fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention. As a result of Israels latest military operations in Gaza, which began on 25 June 2006, an estimated 359 civilians, including 83 children, have been killed and approximately 1,450 have been injured. Moreover, due to the unlawful targeting of civilian infrastructure not justified by military necessity, and prolonged closure of Gazas borders blocking vital supplies and assistance, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has become dire.

Lack of political will on the part of states to address the root causes of human rights violations is a burden we share with all who seek the realisation of human rights. There has been a lack of political will to address the nearly 40 years of occupation of the OPT as the root cause of violations of the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. In 2006, this led to devastating sanctions being placed on the Palestinian people with serious repercussions for economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights throughout the OPT. As John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur for the OPT, noted, this is the first time that an occupied people have been so treated.

These sanctions have been placed on a population already deep under siege. During your field visits we hope you will have an opportunity to see how the Annexation Wall and the over 500 Israeli military checkpoints separate Palestinians from their families, their livelihood, places of worship and educational and health services. Indeed, almost everyone you will meet has stories about a relation who was arbitrarily arrested, tried in a military court without fundamental due process guarantees and now languishes in jail. Similarly, people will explain how their loved ones died in a targeted assassination or were killed by shrapnel as bystanders. Travelling from one location to the next, you will see cities and villages dotted with homes that were demolished by the Israeli military. These are just some of the results of Israels systematic disregard for international law that we carry with us in our collective national memory.

Mindful that impunity only leads to further violations of the law, we respectfully request that you undertake the following:

-Urge appropriate UN bodies, and in particular the General Assembly, to convene a global conference on how to ensure effective implementation of Palestinian human rights in the OPT following almost 40 years of military occupation;

-Encourage the dispatch of the Human Rights Councils special procedures to the OPT;

-Ensure that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in its work on improving accountability for violations of human rights, duly considers the prospect of an international human rights court;

-Work to fill the gap in effective monitoring by the UN of rights violations by expanding the mandate of the OPT-based OHCHR to include monitoring and investigation which does not rely upon Israeli approval on a case-by-case basis;

-Actively support the Palestinian human rights community in our call for the reconvening of the Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Respectfully yours,

Al-Haq
Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens Rights
Democracy and Workers Rights Center
Womens Center for Legal Aid and Counselling
Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights
Ramallah Center for Human Rights Studies
Al Mezan Center for Human Rights
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights
Al Dameer Association for Human Rights
Defence for Children International Palestine Section
Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Ensan Center for Democracy & Human Rights
Addameer

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Palestinians are being denied the right to non-violent resistance - By Jonathan Cook
Date: 30 / 11 / 2006 Time: 13:10

Human Rights Watch has lost its moral bearings

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.

Despite the 'Man bites dog' news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly: it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.

It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission: according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.

Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the 'disengagement', the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.

Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.

Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family's lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.

Yet Western observers, and the organisations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.

Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its lastest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organisation, complacent Western societies and Fatma's memory.

In its press release 'Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks', which was widely reported by the international media, HRW lambasts armed Palestinian groups for calling on civilians to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military.

Noting almost as an afterthought that more than 1,500 Palestinians have been made homeless from house demolitions in the past few months, and that 105 houses have been destroyed from the air, the press release denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action to halt the Israel attacks. HRW refers in particular to three incidents.

On November 3, Hamas appealed to women to surround a mosque in Beit Hanoun where Palestinian men had sought shelter from the Israeli army. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the women, killing two and injuring at least 10.

And last week on two separate occasions, crowds of supporters gathered around the houses of men accused of being militants by Israel who had received phone messages from the Israeli security forces warning that their families' homes were about to be bombed.

In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, one of the world's leading organisations for the protection of human rights ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians' right to security and a roof over their heads and argued instead: 'There is no excuse for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack. Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm's way is unlawful.'

There is good reason to believe that this reading of international law is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured. Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing non-violent means. On HRW's interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.

HRW also applies a series of terrible double standards in this press release.

It refuses Palestinians the right to protect homes from attack, labelling these civilians 'human shields', even while admitting that most of the homes are not legitimate military targets, and yet it has not said a word about the common practice in Israel of building weapons factories and army bases inside or next to communities, thereby forcing Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army.

And HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law by the Palestinians -- their choice to act as 'human shields' -- and to demand that the practice end immediately, while ignoring the very real and continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families.

But let us ignore even these important issues and assume that HRW is technically correct that such Palestinian actions do violate international law. Nonetheless, HRW is still failing us and mocking its mandate, because it has lost sight of the three principles that must guide the vision of a human rights organisation: a sense of priorities, proper context and common sense.

Priorities: Every day HRW has to choose which of the many abuses of international law taking place around the world it highlights. It manages to record only a tiny fraction of them. The assumption of many outsiders may be that it focuses on only the most egregious examples. That would be wrong.

The simple truth is that the worse a state's track record on human rights, the easier ride it gets, relatively speaking, from human rights organisations. That is both because, if abuses are repeated often enough, they become so commonplace as to go unremarked, and because, if the abuses are wide-ranging and systematic, only a small number of the offences will be noted.

Israel, unlike the Palestinians, benefits in both these respects. After four decades of reporting on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, HRW has covered all of Israel's many human rights-abusing practices at least once before. The result is that after a while most violations get ignored. Why issue another report on house demolitions or 'targeted assassinations', even though they are occurring all the time? And, how to record the individual violations of tens of thousands of Palestinians' rights every day at checkpoints? One report on the checkpoints once every few years has to suffice instead.

In Israel's case, there is an added reluctance on the part of organisations like HRW to tackle the extent and nature of Israel's trampling of Palestinian rights. Constant press releases denouncing Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is being singled out -- and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism lies behind the special treatment.

So HRW chooses instead to equivocate. It ignores most Israeli violations and highlights every Palestinian infraction, however minor. This way it makes a pact with the devil: it achieves the balance that protects it from criticism but only by sacrificing the principles of equity and justice.

In its press release, for example, HRW treats the recent appeal to Palestinians to exercise their right to protect their neighbours, and to act in soldarity with non-violent resistance to occupation, as no different from the dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli army of abducting Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its troops.

Women vounteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.

According to HRW's approach to international law, the two incidents are comparable.

Context: The actions of Palestinians occur in a context in which all of their rights are already under the control of their occupier, Israel, and can be violated at its whim. This means that it is problematic, from a human rights perspective, to place the weight of culpability on the Palestinians without laying far greater weight at the same time on the situation to which the Palestinians are reacting.

Here is an example. HRW and other human rights organisations have taken the Palestinians to task for the extra-judicial killings of those suspected of collaborating with the Israeli security forces.

Although it is blindingly obvious that the lynching of an alleged collaborator is a violation of that person's fundamental right to life, HRW's position of simply blaming the Palestinians for this practice raises two critical problems.

First, it fudges the issue of accountability.

In the case of a 'targeted assassination', Israel's version of extra-judicial killing, we have an address to hold accountable: the apparatus of a state in the forms of the Israeli army which carried out the murder and the Israeli politicians who approved it. (These officials are also responsible for the bystanders who are invariably killed along with the target.)

But unless it can be shown that the lynchings are planned and coordinated at a high level, a human rights organisation cannot apply the same standards by which it judges a state to a crowd of Palestinians, people gripped by anger and the thirst for revenge. The two are not equivalent and cannot be held to account in the same way. Palestinians carrying out a lynching are commiting a crime punishable under ordinary domestic law; while the Israeli army carrying out a 'targeted assassination' is commiting state terrorism, which must be tried in the court of world opinion.

Second, HRW's position ignores the context in which the lynching takes place.

The Palestinian resistance to occupation has failed to realise its goals mainly because of Israel?s extensive network of collaborators, individuals who have usually been terrorised by threats to themselves or their family and/or by torture into 'co-operating' with Israel's occupation forces.

The great majority of planned attacks are foiled because one member of the team is collaborating with Israel. He or she not only sabotages the attack but often also gives Israel the information it needs to kill the leaders of the resistance (as well as bystanders). Collaborators, though common in the West Bank and Gaza, are much despised -- and for good reason. They make the goal of national liberation impossible.

Palestinians have been struggling to find ways to make collaboration less appealing. When the Israeli army is threatening to jail your son, or refusing a permit for your wife to receive the hospital treatment she needs, you may agree to do terrible things. Armed groups and many ordinary Palestinians countenance the lynchings because they are seen as a counterweight to Israel's own powerful techniques of intimidation -- a deterrence, even if a largely unsuccessful one.

In issuing a report on the extra-judicial killing of Palestinian collaborators, therefore, groups like HRW have a duty to highlight first and with much greater emphasis the responsibility of Israel and its decades-long occupation for the lynchings, as the context in which Palestinians are forced to mimic the barbarity of those oppressing them to stand any chance of defeating them.

The press release denouncing the Palestinians for choosing collectively and peacefully to resist house demolitions, while not concentrating on the violations committed by Israel in destroying the houses and using military forms of intimidation and punishment against civilians, is a travesty for this very same reason.

Common sense: And finally human rights organisations must never abandon common sense, the connecting thread of our humanity, when making judgments about where their priorities lie.

In the past few months Gaza has sunk into a humanitarian disaster engineered by Israel and the international community. What has been HRW's response? It is worth examining its most recent reports, those on the front page of the Mideast section of its website last week, when the latest press release was issued. Four stories relate to Israel and Palestine.

Three criticise Palestinian militants and the wider society in various ways: for encouraging the use of 'human shields', for firing home-made rockets into Israel, and for failing to protect women from domestic violence. One report mildly rebukes Israel, urging the government to ensure that the army properly investigates the reasons for the shelling that killed 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.

This shameful imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued against each party and in terms of the failure to hold accountable the side committing the far greater abuses of human rights, has become the HRW's standard procedure in Israel-Palestine.

But in its latest release, on human shields, HRW plumbs new depths, stripping Palestinians of the right to organise non-violent forms of resistance and seek new ways of showing solidarity in the face of illegal occupation. In short, HRW treats the people of Gaza as mere rats in a laboratory -- the Israeli army's view of them -- to be experimented on at will.

HRW's priorities in Israel-Palestine prove it has lost its moral bearings.
------
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book 'Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State' is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

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Another 128 foreign passport-holders given "last permit" by Israeli border authorities
Date: 30 / 11 / 2006 Time: 15:55

A Palestinian-American receives
his 'last permit' (MaanImages)
Ma'an - Another 128 passports belonging to spouses and children of Palestinian ID-holders who had applied for visa extensions have just been returned marked 'last permit', according to a press release from the Palestinian Campaign for the Right to Entry/ Re-Entry to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The campaigners state: "This is in addition to the 100 visa extension rejections issued last week by the Israeli Ministry of Interior (MoI) office at Beit El. Most of these foreign passport holders have to leave in the next two weeks, with some having 'minus' time left, and all are required to leave via Israeli controlled entry/exit points before the end of the year.

"Those who overstay their allotted time will be considered "illegal" and are subject to immediate deportation from the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). In an effort to avoid being considered "illegal" and threatened with arrest by the Israelis, some families are opting to relocate abroad. The pattern of refusing visa renewals for family members is part of an overall Israeli effort that denies entry to foreign nationals seeking access to the oPt.

"The impact of Israel's practice includes the forced separation of spouses, parents from their children, educators and students from their schools, health care, NGO and humanitarian workers from access to needy communities, and business owners from their investments. According to the Palestinian MoI, hundreds of applications for Israeli visa extensions following Israeli guidelines were submitted in October and are still pending. Israel is also refusing to process an estimated 120,000 family unification residency applications.

"Every denial of entry and visa renewal refusal impacts an estimated 10 people, many of whom subsequently resort to moving to another country. "This is a silent ethnic cleansing," said Basil Ayish, a spokesperson from the Campaign for the Right of Entry/Re-Entry to the oPt.

"Sixty-year old Anita Abdullah from Ramallah, a Swiss national married to a Palestinian ID-holder, applied to the Ministry of the Interior for an extension before her visa expired on November 1st. Her passport was returned on November 19 with a one month extension marked 'last permit'. Both Anita, a freelance researcher, and her husband have lived and worked in Ramallah for over 12 years. Their children and Anita's 92-year old mother all live abroad. If forced to leave Anita and her husband will have no means to support themselves and will become dependant on their children. If Anita stays illegally she will be denied re-entry when she does leave."

http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22965/1/
Farewell to Arms in Gaza
Rami Almeghari in Gaza, special to IMEMC - Wednesday, 29 November 2006, 17:30

The title of this piece is not related to Ernest Hemingway's novel Farewell to Arms, but is instead a reference to a conflict in the Middle East, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, particularly the part of that conflict being played out in Gaza, an area which has remained one of the most highly volatile places on this earth for several decades.

In the last decade, the conflicting parties have time and again said "farewell to arms" amidst deaths caused by their conflict, with the hope that such an announcement would save them from more bloodshed.

The past five months saw the most severe round of fighting in Gaza, that has so far claimed the lives of 479 Palestinians (an estimated 80% of whom were not involved in fighting), and resulted in injuries to 4200 others, all by the Israeli military's weaponry. In the same time period, Palestinian resistance fighters killed three Israelis -- two soldiers and one civilian.

In the aftermath of such a horrible period, both sides agreed on Sunday to a ceasefire, with the hope that this would lead to more calm and make way for peaceful means to be used instead.

The United States, patron of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, voiced the hope that this move would mark a serious breakthrough in the stalled peace talks.

Thousands of Palestinian security personnel have been deployed along the Gaza-Israel border to enforce the ceasefire, while Israeli forces pulled out from areas populated by Palestinians, after Palestinian resistance factions agreed unanimously to halt rocket attacks on nearby Israeli towns.

Lieutenant Colonel Abdelnasser Mesleh, chief of the Palestinian forces commissioned along the border, says that his forces would employ all power at their disposal to prevent any breaking of the ceasefire by Palestinian resistance.

"We will use all power at our disposal to prevent the firing of home-made rockets on Israeli areas, even by force, and we will first implement the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Then comes the West Bank", officer Mesleh maintains.

On the ground, Palestinian resistance factions see the ongoing Israeli attacks in the West Bank as a violation of the ceasefire agreement, as on Monday, two Palestinians including an elderly woman and a senior resistance fighter, were shot and killed by the Israeli forces in the West Bank town of Qabatia.

Abu Mojahed, the spokesperson of the Salah Eldin Brigades of the Palestinian popular resistance committees, regards the Israeli killings in the West Bank as an Israeli violation of the truce declaration.

"There is no way that we can enforce a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, while Palestinian blood is still flowing in the occupied West Bank. Just this morning, the Israeli occupation killed the leader of the Salah Eldin Brigades and an elderly woman in Qabatia. Unless the Israeli occupation forces remain committed to the ceasefire and stop aggression on our people in the occupied West Bank, the Zionist entity would open itself to renewed rocket fire". Abu Mojahed says.

Across the Gaza Strip, Palestinian residents who have been exposed to lethal Israeli arms since late June 2006, appeared somehow optimistic regarding the ceasefire.

Mohamad Alrefa'y, from central Gaza Strip, whose town was invaded by the Israeli army recently, considers this ceasefire as a chance for peace.

"I consider this ceasefire as a temporary truce that might lead to halt of Israeli attacks and leaves room for peace in the region. I hope that the Israelis realize the Palestinians' genuine will towards peace", Mohammad comments

'Farewell to Arms', that slogan of the lat author Hemingway, is still imprinted in its readers' minds. The question here is, will the Palestinians and Israelis' 'farewell to arms' this time be imprinted in Palestinians and Israelis' minds as the beginning of a new chapter of Palestinian-Israeli relations, ending decades of war and hatred between the two peoples?.

The Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem have been occupied by Israel since 1967, as the Palestinian people there have been fighting for the return of their lands, using all possible means at their disposal, the latest of which were crudely-produced home-made rockets.