Stephen Lendman

The WE!

Imagine the following:

You're ruthlessly oppressed in an occupied country under a system of institutionalized racism, affording rights solely to Jews. You have no recognized nation, no right of citizenship, no democratic freedoms or civil liberties, including no power over your daily life.

You live in constant fear, collectively punished, politically denied, and economically strangled in a continuing cycle of violence. Military orders deny free expression and movement, enclose population centers, close borders, and impose curfews, checkpoints, roadblocks, separation walls, electric fences, dispossessions, land seizures, and domination over all aspects of life under draconian military orders like the following:

● No. 92 giving Israel control of all West Bank and Gaza water;

● No. 158 stipulating that Palestinians can't construct water installations without (nearly impossible to get) permit permission and those built will be confiscated or demolished;

● No. 1015 requiring Palestinians get permission to plant trees on their own land;

● No 128 authorizing the IDF to take over any Palestinian business not open during regular business hours;

● No. 107 prohibiting Arabic grammar, Crusades history and Arab nationalist publications;

● No. 101 banning gatherings of more than 10 people without advance notice with names of participants;

● Nos. 811 and 847 letting Jews buy land from Palestinian owners with or without their consent;

● No. 998 requiring Palestinians get permission to withdraw funds from their bank accounts;

● No. 818 authorizing how Palestinians can plant decorative flowers;

●- No. 329 preventing the right of return; and

● Nos. 1649 and 1650 turning all West Bank residents (including native born ones) potentially into "infiltrators," making them vulnerable to deportation, fines or imprisonment without IDF-issued permits.

Overall, your land is occupied, communities isolated, homes invaded, friends and relatives arrested, neighborhoods attacked, homes bulldozed, land stolen, fields uprooted and burned, businesses closed, and livelihoods denied. You're impoverished, unemployed, starved, tortured, murdered, punitively taxed and fined, and demonized for being Muslims in a Jewish state. You endure it daily on your own unaided, yet you go on, hoping others later will do better.

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Jerrold Kessel & Pierre Klochendler
IPS

A family looks on as Israeli forces raze al-Araqib village, 27 July 2010.
(ActiveStills)

"We are not invaders, nor squatters," said Sheikh Sayyah. "It is the state that has invaded us."

JERUSALEM, Aug 18, 2010 (IPS) - On the eve of the start of Ramadan last week, Israeli police demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Negev desert. It was the third time within two weeks that the village had been razed.

Unfazed, the Bedouin villagers immediately began rebuilding.

"We have already put back up some 20 of our huts, and we're putting up more every day -- despite the fast," village leader Sheikh Sayyah Abu Drim told IPS when reached by telephone a week after the last police action.

"We have nowhere else to go," said the Sheikh. More than 40 families live in al-Araqib.

At dawn last Tuesday, Israel Land Administration (ILA) officials, accompanied by a large police detail including over 100 border guards and mounted police, began their operation with the support of two bulldozers.

The police removed water tanks and the remains of several dozen makeshift structures that had been erected since the previous demolition only last week. Dozens of families including infants and elderly people were forcibly removed. In a non-violent protest, a score of Israeli Jewish activists who had slept in the village in solidarity tried unsuccessfully to stay the police action.

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Jonny Abo & Abdul Jalil Mustafa

Surviving 17 gunshot wounds was a feat in itself, but enduring life as a refugee was a second battle for al- Mortaji Abdel-Moneim al-Kaabi, a displaced Iraqi in Syria.

'I still suffer from a lot of diseases, but thank God I'm alive, although I feel like I am psychologically bleeding because I cannot forget the painful memories,' said al-Kaabi, an Arabic language teacher.

The violent incident in 2007 was never solved by police. It came after the slaying of his brother the previous year, prompting al- Kaabi and his wife and flee their homeland - like so many other refugees - for a long journey and clandestine entry into Syria.

The trip saw the two go far south to Basra , along the Gulf, then north-west to Amman in Jordan and further north to Damascus, where they found shelter in one of the teeming refugee neighbourhoods of the Syrian capital.

Ill with breast cancer, his wife requires treatments that cost about 24,000 dollars, of which the United Nations has agreed to pay about 40 per cent. The rest al-Kaabi must conjure from thin air, as his status as a refugee does not grant him the right to work.

'We are still advocating for refugees to have access to employment and livelihood,' said Andrew Harper of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) programme in Iraq.

Millions of Iraqis have been uprooted in seven years of war as they fled sectarian violence and an insurgency that at its 2006-07 height claimed 3,000 civilian lives a month. Leaving behind property, homes, businesses and most of their personal belongings, many also suffered the loss of family members.

An estimated 2.2 million Iraqis have been displaced within their native land, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have to fled to Syria, a similar number to Jordan, and 40,000-50,000 to Lebanon. The UNHCR website says there are 1.8 million Iraqi refugees in the Mideast, but UN officials have recently down-pedalled on that number.

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Franklin Lamb
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut

SHATTERED LIVES: Families live among ruins, with little
hope of ever leaving. Photograph for Time: Kate Brooks.
From: Palestinians in Lebanon: A Forgotten People

Part XI of a series on securing civil rights for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon

“Palestinian guests in Lebanon are working with total freedom. First of all we do not refer to them as “refugees”. They are our brothers who are suffering and in a very difficult situation that they did not cause and they have lost their country. They sought our help in Lebanon as brothers. You Americans really need to understand that in our Arab, Muslim, and Christian culture, you help your brother. You share with him your loaf of bread. You split it in half and give half to your brother. So out of this sacred tradition, out of the long history that binds us with our Palestinian brothers we host them in Lebanon temporarily until they can go back to their country. But while they are here, of course Lebanon is living through a difficult situation ourselves but our Palestinian brothers are enjoying everything.”

(Lebanese Member of Parliament on August 4th explaining why Parliament must not “precipitously rush into the unchartered waters of civil rights for Palestinian Refugees”.)

At 3:02 p.m. on 8/17/10 Lebanon’s Parliament began to deliberate on granting basic civil rights to its Palestinian refugees and within four minutes agreed to alter Article 50 Lebanon’s 1964 Labor Law to theoretically make it easier for Palestinian refugees to obtain a work permit and a job.

There was no discussion of other draft bills to grant Palestinian refugees elementary civil rights, and fifteen minutes later, by 3:17 p.m. Parliament had agreed on the next bill involving excavating for oil, which may bring millions to some well placed members. Many MP’s hadn’t studied either bill.

Thus did the bell ring on Round One of the fight in Lebanon for elementary civil rights for Palestinians refugees.

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Jeff Halper

Shocking footage of the abuse of Palestinian residents, by settlers
and Israeli soldiers, has been exposed by these cameras. (Intifada
-Voice of Palestine)

On the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” For all that, and despite (proper) Israeli outrage when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated anywhere in the world, the dismantlement of the Mamilla cemetery has been systematic. In the 1960s “Independence Park” was built over a portion of it; subsequently an urban road was built through it, major electrical cables were laid over graves and a parking lot constructed over yet another piece. Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for…..a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (Ironically, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center’s Director, appeared on Fox News to express his opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, because the site of the 9/11 attack “is a cemetery.”)

The month-long period between Netanyahu’s July 6th visit to Washington and the start of Ramadan has provided Israel with a window to “clear the table” after a frustrating hiatus on home demolitions imposed by the “old,” mildly critical Obama Administration – although there is no guarantee that Israel will not demolish during Ramadan, especially if it wants to exploit the period until the November elections, knowing that until then Obama will not overtly oppose anything it does in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the process of demolishing Palestinian homes never ceased. On June 6th, for example, a year after the demolition of more than 65 structures and the forced displacement of more than 120 people, including 66 children, nine families of Khirbet Ar Ras Ahmar in the Jordan Valley, totaling 70 people, received a new round of “evacuation orders.” A week later the Israeli High Court ordered the Civil Administration to “step up enforcement against illegal Palestinian structures” in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control.

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