Scottish Friends of Palestine 

Briefing Paper

Palestine’s War of Independence  

November 2006

Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:59 PM

Subject: Ramallah today

These are the present 'facts on the ground' in Ramallah right now:

1. Complete economic breakdown as all employees have not been paid for 9 months.

2. Post Office closed down.

3. Government Hospital closed.

4. All Government schools closed.

5. All government Offices closed.

6.  Rubbish collections suspended. What next?

UN human rights envoy says Gaza a prison for Palestinians Reuters - 27/09/2006

Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison for Palestinians where life is "intolerable, appalling, tragic" and appears to have thrown away the key, a UN human rights envoy said on Tuesday.Special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territory John Dugard said that the suffering of the Palestinians was a test of the readiness of the international community to protect human rights.

"If ... the international community cannot ... take some action, [it] must not be surprised if the people of the planet disbelieve that they are seriously committed to the promotion of human rights," he said in a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The South African lawyer, who has been a special UN investigator since 2001, repeated earlier accusations that Israel is breaking international humanitarian law with security measures which amount to "collective punishment." Israel says its security restrictions, which include the construction of a steel and concrete barrier in the West Bank, are designed to stop suicide bombers entering Israel. Bombings have declined since the barrier was built. It also maintains tight restrictions on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza also due to security measures.

Dugard also attacked the United States, the European Union and Canada for withdrawing funding for the Palestinian Authority in protest at the governing party Hamas's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Hamas, a militant Islamic group that came to power after elections in January, is sworn to Israel's destruction.

"Israel violates international law as expounded by the Security Council and the International Court of Justice and goes unpunished. But the Palestinian people are punished for having democratically elected a regime unacceptable to Israel, the U.S. and the EU," Dugard said.

There was no immediate comment from either Israel or its main ally the United States, but the Palestinian question was due to be debated by the Human Rights Council later on Tuesday.Past criticism, however, has been strongly rejected by Israel and the United States, which say that the current crisis has been provoked by attacks by Palestinian militants.

Dugard said that three-quarters of Gaza's 1.4 million people were dependent on food aid. Bombing raids by Israel since the June 25 capture of an army corporal by Palestinian militants had destroyed houses and the territory's only power plant.

"Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key," he said.

The West Bank also faced a humanitarian crisis, albeit not as extreme as Gaza, in part due to the barrier, which Dugard alleged was no longer being justified by Israel on security grounds but was part of a move to annex more land.

Palestinians living between the barrier and the Green Line, the frontier at the end of the 1967 Six Day War, could no longer freely access schools and places of work and many had abandoned local farms, he said.

"In other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing but political correctness forbids such language where Israel is concerned," Dugard said.

Genocide in Gaza Ilan Pappe (palestinechronicle.com 16/09/06)

Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is just the morning, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes the parts it covets - half of the West Bank - and cleanses it of its native population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an arrangement cannot work in the Gaza enclave - Egypt unlike Jordan has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel - although geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its midst.

The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. There were relative better periods where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are gone. Harsher realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the outside world was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically, most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge. The leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or another.

The conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing employed successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine's population, and against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are not useful here. You can slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you cannot do it in the Gaza Strip - once you sealed it as a maximum-security prison camp.

As with the ethnic cleansing operations, the genocidal policy is not formulated in a vacuum. Ever since 1948, the Israeli army and government needed a pretext to commence such policies. The takeover of Palestine in 1948 produced the inevitable local resistance that in turn allowed the implementation of an ethnic cleansing policy, preplanned already in the 1930s. Twenty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank produced eventually some sort of Palestinian resistance. This belated anti-occupation struggle unleashed a new cleansing policy that still is implemented today in the West Bank. The Gaza imprisonment in the summer of 2005, which was paraded as an Israeli generous withdrawal, produced the Hamas and Islamic Jihad missile attack and one abduction case. Even before the abduction of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army bombarded indiscriminately the Strip. Ever since the abduction, the massive killing increased and became systematic. A daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts.

The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day now that one of them is the General Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the Israeli airforce issued orders to its pilots to abort missions if within 500 square meters of their target they spotted innocent civilians. Not that these orders were kept, but the pretense for internal moral consumption was there. It is called in the Israeli airforce, the "Lebanon Procedure" [Nohal Levanon]. When the pilots asked a year ago if the "Lebanon procedure" is intact for Gaza, the answer was no. The same answer was given to the pilots in the second Lebanon war.

The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave a few thousand dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign - the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip - either in the name of human aid, international intervention or the people's own desire to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be the response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will be the Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.

Much depends on the international reaction. When Israel was absolved from any responsibility or accountably for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda. If the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal policies would be tolerated by the world, it would expand and used even more drastically.

Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of

innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip. There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of 150 - do not cease to write about it, but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us hope the world will not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.

Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include among others The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and forthcoming, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)

Addressing Congress in Washington, Olmert declared: “We extend our hand in peace to the Palestinian people”. Senators and representatives gave him a standing ovation. At the very same time that Israel’s Prime Minister uttered these words, Israeli forces conducted a large scale invasion to the heart of Ramallah - Manara Square . . . the soldiers opened fire and shot to death four Palestinian youths

Gush Shalom ad in Ha’aretz (26/05/06)

Not an internal Palestinian matter               Amira Hass         Ha’aretz 24/09/06

The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called "what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens."

These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the prisoners' usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of people - the sick, heads of families, professionals, children - to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip's only entry/exit.

Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax revenues collected by Israel that belong to the Palestinian treasury), so as to force the nonpayment of the already low salaries of most government employees for months; present the firing of homemade Qassam rockets as a strategic threat that can only be stopped by harming women, children and the old; fire on crowded residential neighborhoods from the air and the ground; destroy orchards, groves and fields.

Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic booms; destroy the new power plant and force the residents of the closed-off Strip to live without electricity for most of the day for a period of four months, which will most likely turn into a full year - in other words, a year without refrigeration, electric fans, television, lights to study and read by; force them to get by without a regular supply of water, which is dependent on the electricity supply.

It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them into a pressure cooker and see what happens," and this is one of the reasons why this is not an internal Palestinian matter.

The success of the experiment can be seen in the miasma of desperation that hangs over the Gaza Strip, and in the clan feuding that erupts almost daily there, even more than in the battles between Fatah and Hamas militants. One can only wonder that the feuding is not more frequent, and that some bonds of internal solidarity have been maintained, which saves people from hunger.

In contrast to the feuding between clans, Sunday's battles in Gaza and campaigns of destruction and intimidation, mainly in West Bank cities, were not the result of a momentary loss of control. They are generally viewed as battles between two militias, each of which represents one half of the population, but they were initiated by groups within Fatah to put a few more nails into the coffin of the elected leadership.

The security forces of the Palestinian Authority - in other words, of Fatah, or in still other words, the ones that Mahmoud Abbas is in charge of - are hiding behind the genuine distress and protests of public employees who have not been receiving regular salaries. And they are doing so despite the fact that everyone knows that the failure to pay salaries is not a managerial failure, but is above all due to Israeli policy. These forces were dispatched in order to sow organized anarchy, as taught in the school of Yasser Arafat.

And why is this, too, an Israeli matter? Because those who dispatched these militants have a shared interest with Israel in regressing to a situation in which the Palestinian leadership collaborates with the appearance of holding peace talks, while Israel continues its occupation and the international community sends hush money in the form of salaries for the Palestinian public sector.

And there is another reason why this is also an internal Israeli issue: Whatever the outcome, the Palestinian feuding and the risk of civil war directly affect about 20 percent of Israeli citizens, the Arabs. They affect the Arabs, and also those segments of the Israeli public that have not forgotten that Israel will remain the occupying and ruling force

over the Palestinians as long as the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in all of the territories occupied in 1967 is not realized.

With the tacit consent of Washington, the Karni Checkpoint - Gaza’s main artery - was kept closed for months on end. Agricultural products from the hothouses left behind by Israeli settlers rotted on the Palestinian side, never reaching the European markets where they might have fetched good prices - and whatever industry Gaza possesses stood idle for the lack raw materials of the which piled up on the Israeli side.

The Other Israel Sept-Oct 2006

Murder on Rucarb Street Eliza Ernshire, Ramallah (from Return Review Sept 2006)

At 9pm, August 28, undercover Israeli Special Forces walked down the main street of Ramallah. They wore civilian clothes and Palestinian police-caps. They carried M-16s as all the police force does. No one looked at them twice. They walked straight past us as where we stood at Al-Minara discussing work with a third colleague. They walked straight past the Palestinian Police Force as well which is always stationed there. They continued walking straight down Rucarb Street until they were opposite the famous Rucarb Ice Cream shop where families gather every evening in the summertime. Then they opened fire. They opened fire after they failed to catch the two “wanted” men who were also in Rucarb street along with half the population of Ramallah. The two men wouldn’t come out when called and so the undercover Israeli officers opened fire. It is not easy to explain the horror of seeing the cold-blooded murder of the young man who had turned to escape on realising the situation.

It is not easy to explain the horror of hearing the name of the killed youth spreading from mouth to mouth until the whole of Ramallah knows that the young man killed was from the village of Deir Ghassan. Nor is it easy to explain the horror of rushing with everybody else who knows the victim from that village or a nearby one to the hospital. The relief if the body pulled from the fridge is not your son . The anguish if it is. Grown men falling on the ground to beat at the dirt and cry. The parents of the killed man stumbled into the hospital at midnight. The father could not even see his son because he was temporarily blinded by the shock and the sceams of the mother could be heard from the street.

Palestine has been so reduced and so humiliated that it is now a country where the Occupying force can walk into a main city on nightfall, can walk down the main street of that city, kill a man and then walk away again as if that is a damn right of theirs and no one is going to blink an eye at it.

The boy they killed was just a village boy, and the children who witnessed this killing were just children. As in all parts of the world, children who had begged their parents for an ice-cream before going to bed.. Now they must live with this violation of their sensitivity forever.

And the thugs could just walk away! They did not even need jeeps to perform their action of terror.

These men were not desperate. Not one of them would tie an explosive belt around his waist. What I am most afraid of is that they enjoy what they do. To them and to too many others, the lives of Palestinians are, at most, only

countable................ the purpose of this article is only to register horror at the nighttime terror that came in so particularly

a disgusting way to the streets of Ramallah four hours ago. And also to say that now the city is angry.

The young men who have been gathering for hours in groups on street corners are angry. Some have been crying, and all have been voicing their disbelief at how on earth Israel can continue to get away with their inhuman actions.

How much more can the Israeli occupying state degenerate? How much lower can the army that’s called the Israeli defence forces sink? It is carrying out acts of bombings, killings and murder. We have passed despicable legislation which enables the army to do whatever it likes in the Occupied Territories without the need to pay compensation. It is permissible to injure, destroy, torture and kill. There is no justice and there is no judge.

Amir Peretz is following the war crimes path trodden by his predecessors. Three days ago during the Shavuot celebration, he spoke of Jewish Justice and the concept of Love and Care for the Other. But in reality we are becoming a despicable Apartheid state, everything said about Jewish Justice has been turned into dust and ashes.

And now we have a law which prohibits Israeli citizens who happen to be Arab the right to family reunification with spouses from the Occupied Territories. A jurist friend of mine tells me that these people are from an enemy country. An enemy country? Who has been ruling those parts for nearly forty years? Who has been stealing land and water and turning towns and villages into detention camps? Everything is permissible because there is no partner But there has never been a partner. Arafat was not a partner. Abu Mazen was not a partner, and naturally Hamas is no partner................................................................................. There is somebody to talk to, and we ought to talk to them.

Over there, there is a democratically elected government. . . . . .

If the State of Israel wants peace, and I have my doubts as to whether it does, then it ought to know that there is someone to talk to, there among the Palestinians, and there’s a need, an urgent need, to talk to them.

Extract from speech by Shulamit Aloni (former Israeli Minister of Education and leader of the Israeli left) The Other Israel Sept-Oct 2006

Savagery Al-Ahram Weekly 19-25 October 2006

In Gaza, the Israeli army has been carrying out daily and nightly incursions across the Strip, bombing and bombarding civilian neighbourhoods, destroying homes and killing inhabitants indiscriminately. Palestinian medical sources reported that at least 23 Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, were killed in Gaza within 48 hours (an average of one Palestinian every two hours). Most of the killings occurred as a result of air strikes by F-16 fighter jets that bomb unprotected and undefended targets, particularly residential homes where innocent civilians are asleep.

Israel appears sure that increasing aggression against the Palestinians will lead them to internal collapse whereas it is more certain to lead to a new national uprising, reports Khaled Amayreh

While Western and even some Arab media continue referring to the daily killing by Israel of Palestinian civilians, activists and militants as "clashes", the Israeli occupation army has intensified its brutal onslaught against Palestinian population centres both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In less than five days, the occupation forces killed as many as 29 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom innocent civilians, including eight teenagers, five members of the same family, and a mother of five children. Dozens of other civilians were badly injured, many by new and lethal secret Israeli weapons that cut through flesh right to the bone.

Palestinian and international medical authorities have now proven beyond doubt that Israel is using new deadly weapons, including in densely populated areas, resulting in the killing and maiming of scores of peoples. Medical sources in Gaza have been speaking of more than 35 amputations in less than two months. By the time of Al-Ahram Weekly going to press, a large Israeli force, backed up by tanks and armoured personnel carriers, was rampaging in the small Palestinian town of Kabatya, just south of northernmost West Bank town of Jenin. So far, four Palestinians have been reported killed, including three teenagers the Israeli army claimed were hurling stones towards Israeli troops.

As always, Israeli troops share an implicit understanding that they are free to shoot and kill Palestinians, including children, seen throwing stones on army jeeps. In the course of the Al-Aqsa Intifada hundreds of Palestinian children and teenagers were extra- judicially executed for throwing stones, and not necessarily at, or on, but even towards Israeli tanks or jeeps.

In Gaza, the Israeli army has been carrying out daily and nightly incursions across the Strip, bombing and bombarding civilian neighbourhoods, destroying homes and killing inhabitants indiscriminately. Palestinian medical sources reported that at least 23 Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, were killed in Gaza within 48 hours (an average of one Palestinian every two hours). Most of the killings occurred as a result of air strikes by F-16 fighter jets that bomb unprotected and undefended targets, particularly residential homes where innocent civilians are asleep.

This week the Israeli air force bombed with air-to-ground missiles several residential homes in Gaza, including the home of Um Nidal Farhat, a Gaza lawmaker, who lost three sons during the last Intifada. The Israeli army gave no convincing justification for the bombing of the Farhat's home beyond alluding to the fact that she was a supporter of Hamas. The Israeli air force recently bombed and destroyed several family homes on no other grounds than the owners being supporters of Hamas.

This manifestly criminal policy -- destroying civilian homes is a war crime under international law -- is an extension of erstwhile Israeli practices against Palestinians when the homes and businesses of people linked to the armed resistance were bombed.

What explains this increase in Israeli savagery? First, Israeli officials say they want to apply the "lessons from the Lebanon war" in Gaza by making sure that Palestinians are not allowed to build up significant military defences that could harm the Israeli army during recurrent murderous incursions into Palestinian towns and villages. In other words, Israel wants to ensure that the wanton killing of Palestinians remains as cost- free as it has hitherto been. Figures from the last three months of Israeli violence in Gaza betray the policy: 270 persons killed and many more maimed and mutilated on the Palestinian side, with only one soldier killed on the Israeli side.

Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz, eager to compensate for the "shortcoming" in Lebanon by getting tough on the Palestinians was quoted this week by Ha’aretz newspaper as acknowledging that the Israeli government had already approved an intensification of "the war on terror", including the use of ground and air forces. "We will not approve the transformation of the Gaza Strip into South Lebanon. We will strike at everyone, and it doesn't matter what organisation they belong to," said Peretz, flaunting the principle that collective punishment and extra- judicial assassination are illegal under international law and the laws of occupation.

The second reason for increasing Israeli savagery, parroted unceasingly by Israeli spokespersons and media, is to halt the firing of homemade projectiles from Gaza into Israel. This rationale, while having some semblance of reasonability, is misleading. These mostly innocuous projectiles rarely cause death or damage and shouldn't be viewed as anything more than a desperate Palestinian response to unrelenting Israeli aggression. How many Israelis have been killing by these "missiles" during the past three years? No more than three, whereas over 1000 Palestinians were killed in the same period in "retaliatory" Israeli aggression.

A third ostensible reason for the present escalation is to try to locate the whereabouts of an Israeli soldier

captured by Palestinian resistance fighters nearly four months ago. Israel has been refusing to strike a prisoner swap deal with the Palestinians in the hope that the Israeli army would succeed in finding and freeing the soldier, which would also give a moral boost to the government of Ehud Olmert, significantly weakened by the recent war with Hizbullah. However, the equally determined refusal of the Palestinian resistance factions to release the soldier unconditionally, as Israel has been demanding, has given Israel a comfortable pretext to ramp up its killing.

Indeed, since the soldier was taken prisoner 25 June, the Israeli army has killed more than 250 Palestinians, the vast bulk innocent civilians. This is in addition to the wanton bombing and destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including bridges, schools, streets, government buildings, residential homes and Gaza's sole power station. The captured soldier notwithstanding, it is clear that the main driving force behind the escalating Israeli aggression is to destroy or at least seriously weaken the Hamas-led government that refuses to surrender to Israel.

By repeatedly bombing the Palestinian prime minister's headquarters, the Interior Ministry, and also by detaining en masse Palestinian government ministers and lawmakers in the West Bank, Israel has demonstrated that destroying or paralysing the Palestinian government is a top priority.

Now, there are reports that Israel is planning to assassinate government officials, including Interior Minister Said Siyam. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is defiant: "they used every conceivable act of inhumanity and cruelty, including starving our people and sowing divisiveness in our ranks, but have failed to bring this government down. Now they are stepping up their criminal aggression in order to topple this government and install another one that would bow to their political agenda."

Israel appears hopeful that in the case of failing to topple the Hamas- led government its policies would at least trigger civil war between Fatah and Hamas. It is a miscalculation. Indeed, it is ever more clear that escalated inter-Palestinian conflict would soon evolve into a new Intifada against Israel. Both Hamas and Fatah realise that they can retain their support bases only through fighting Israeli occupiers, the root cause of Palestinian misery and suffering.

Any intensification, henceforth, of Israeli aggression in Gaza and the West Bank might well lead to a renewal of the Al-Aqsa Intifada or even to the outbreak of a new type of Intifada characterised, at least in part, by Al-Qaeda-like violence. Even organisations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad would look moderate compared to what might then appear.

My father is unemployed; we are nine kids and we live in that miserable tent     - Ibrahim

What can you do when your kids ask you to buy them something and you are not able to do so? How can you look in to his eyes? what is your feeling when 13 family members are depending on you and you are jobless and hopeless?                             - Salah

I am not a registered refugee and I can talk on behalf of the families here - we need new tents without holes and we need mattresses. The month of Ramadan and winter are coming and life is becomimg more difficult.                     -

Yusef

comments from displaced residents of the Al-Shoka area, Gaza Strip(Return Review Oct 2006)