Palestinian Queer Activists Talk Politics

On February 16th, 2011 I attended a public forum entitled “Palestinian Queer Activists Talk Politics” in San Francisco’s Mission District. More than 20 groups including the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace and the Middle East Children’s Alliance sponsored the forum, moderated by lesbian Chicana activist and writer Cherríe Moraga. The discussion featured three speakers:

• Abeer Mansour works for Aswat, a feminist queer Palestinian women’s group dedicating to “generat[ing] social change in order to meet the needs of one of the most silenced and oppressed communities in Israel."
• Sami Shamali, who resides in the West Bank, represents Al Qaws, which aims to develop a “Palestinian civil society that respects and adheres to human and civil rights and allows individuals to live openly and equally, regardless of their sexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity.” 
• Haneen Maikey, based in Jerusalem, is Al Qaws’ director.

I found the panel particularly compelling in light of its location, just outside of Dolores Park –a popular go-to spot for queer women in the Bay Area, in one of the most gay-friendly cities in the entire world. Because of San Francisco’s internationally known gay community, it has been a primary target of Israel’s re-branding campaign aimed at improving the country’s image through the use of “Pinkwashing.” Pinkwashing is the attempt to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine by portraying it as a progressive and democratic haven for LGBT individuals in direct contrast with the rest of the Middle East. It plays into a larger effort that aims to disparage Israel’s neighbors in order to justify the country’s existence as necessary by any means, relying on the image of a lone democracy barely surviving surrounded by violent, intolerant, women-hating, and generally backward societies.

Active within the Bay Area LGBT community, I have personally witnessed attempted pinkwashes. In one particular instance, a protest erupted after the California Supreme Court issued its ruling that Proposition 8 (the initiative defining marriage as between one man and one woman) was constitutional despite its prior decision legalizing same-sex unions. Within hours thousands of people took to the streets in protest. After a procession of speakers demanding equal rights for gay and lesbian couples, the rally closed with a rabbi who took the microphone in order to emphasize Israel’s commitment to gay rights and opposition to Prop 8, and to ask us to support the Jewish State because of it. A few activists including myself were disgusted and immediately left. However the majority stayed, and later that year I found myself hearing these same sentiments repeated.

Queer Palestinians, like Afghan and Iraqi women, have consistently found their discourse co-opted by neo-conservative hawks and progressives alike in order to justify war and occupation under the assumption that such actions will ‘liberate’ the oppressed. It is this cynical manipulation that the forum’s speakers work to disparage. Claiming their own voices and movement, queer Palestinian activists are clamoring to be heard and wish for their American brothers and sisters to spread their message. So what is it they have to say?

The clearest message resounding from all three speakers was that if one actually cares about LGBT rights within Palestine, one should be working to end the occupation. That Israel has cultivated a vibrant and open gay enclave is laudable, yet such accomplishments do not give the ‘Jewish State’ a free pass to violate human rights, including the rights of the gay Palestinians they allegedly care for. As Haneen dryly explained, “It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the Soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not. What matters is that he’s there at all.” Sami echoed the same sentiment, jibing that “the apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.”

When pressed by an audience member as to which situation they would prefer, a perfectly egalitarian, queer-friendly society still under occupation or a free Palestine that still suffers from sexism, patriarchy and homophobia, the three became visibly angry. Abeer looked to the audience and asked, “Please raise your hand if you’d like to live one day under occupation,” before saying that occupied people cannot adequately address civil rights issues as they struggle for their very means of survival. Sami went on to contend that freedom transforms the mind, giving people the best opportunity to examine their previously held attitudes. Drawing on recent events in Egypt, he related that while sexual harassment is rampant within the country, in Tahrir square women remarked an utter absence of abuse during the mass protests. At the same time, if one does not wish to see the correlation between the unacceptably slow pace of social change and the increasing weight of the occupation, one cannot honestly contend that Israel's actions do anything to help the plight of Palestinian women/LGBT individials.

Each had their own story to tell about the intersection of queer identity and Palestinian identity, agreeing that Palestinian homosexuality had its own unique experiences. Yet for all three, the liberation of their country reigned supreme in their minds. The meeting ended with a standing ovation as the moderator boomed, “Clap if you understand that queers will never be free until Palestine is free.”

While their discussion did not focus solely on Israel’s abuse of LGBT liberation struggles in perpetuating conflict, I took away from it a deepened understanding of just how much more the West unfairly expects of Palestinians than anyone else. We expect Palestinians to not throw stones at the IDF jeeps who come to teargas their protestations against the illegal confiscation of their entire villages while we wouldn’t bat an eyelash at a man who shot a robber attempting to take his television set; We expect them to not elect representatives that reflect their religious sentiments though no one is surprised when the Christian Right attempts to influence our political system and we ally ourselves with the likes of Saudi Arabia; and we expect Palestinian society to wholly unshackle itself from the bonds of misogyny, racism and bigotry before we acknowledge their entitlement to basic human rights, despite our own shortcomings, including the reality that the realization of LGBT equality within the United States itself is relatively new and still imperfect. In all of the struggles for liberation many Americans support, including civil rights for African Americans, we have never required such a high standard of “goodness” before acknowledging a group’s basic humanity.

Abeer, Haneen and Sami represent a growing coalition of brave Palestinian youth focused on transforming entrenched attitudes from within while simultaneously undermining the imposed constraints of colonialism. Their work is an invaluable contribution to ending the occupation and transforming our understanding of Palestinian society. The message of these activists and their organizations deserves to be heard widely. Please do your part in spreading it to those who claim to care about gay rights. If you would like to attend one of their panels, you can find information for the remaining tour dates here.

Jennifer Peto: Jews, Zionism and Holocaust Education

Jenny Peto

Currently, a controversy has arisen regarding University of Toronto graduate Jennifer Peto’s thesis, “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education.” According to certain members of the Canadian government as well as Holocaust educators, Peto (a queer anti-Zionist Jew, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor) has produced a “shoddy” piece full of “unsupported” theories which constitute an outrageous form of “anti-Semitism.”

That critics would attempt to silence Peto under the banner of self-hating anti-Semitism is altogether unsurprising. Very few have even bothered to read the work before dismissing it wholesale, else they make superficial criticisms such as the contention that Peto did not defer to mainstream texts on Holocaust education or that regardless of her supporting arguments, questioning Holocaust education in any context is unacceptable.

Beware of sensationalism. Peto does not suggest that all Holocaust education must be done away with, or that all Jews are racists or anything else of the sort. Outside of the apparently controversial idea that Jews possess the capacity for racism, she focuses her thesis on the contention that as a result of various factors (which she discusses at length) Ashkenazi Jews have surpassed the mantle of victimhood in Western society. In the same vein as Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, using empirically demonstrative data, Peto argues that rampant, entrenched anti-Semitism is all but gone. She then criticizes specific methods of what she terms "hegemonic" Holocaust education  which seek to not only obfuscate this fact, but use invocations of perennial victimhood to excuse various Israeli policies. An example: the March of the Living takes Jewish youths on a week-long tour of Polish concentration camps, and has them "march" down the same path as their murdered ancestors draped in Israeli flags. Peto argues that the march is purposefully constructed this way in order to implicitly suggest that the state of Israel is the only thing standing in the way of another Holocaust, and thus must be shielded from any criticism. She also takes issue with various manifestations of ethno/eurocentricism embedded within particular Holocaust education centers. 

Because the controversy has stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of Peto's arguments and supporting evidence, before judging their merits I encourage you to read the entire work for yourself.
It is my sincere hope that the landslide of negative attention will do more to expose Peto’s ideas to a wider audience, magnifying the impact of her work than it will to tarnish her reputation, thereby mitigating her extremely powerful words.

Again, I encourage you to read Peto's thesis on your own. Nevertheless, I have copied her conclusion below; Judge it for yourself.

__________________________________________

On December 27, 2008 I sat down to finish my thesis. As is my usual habit of  procrastination, I decided to check my email before getting started. My inbox was flooded with messages informing me that Israel had begun a full-scale military strike on Gaza that had killed over 300 people in the first few hours of bombings. Any thoughts of writing my thesis immediately disappeared. I am an organizer with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto and we immediately began planning our response. Within 24 hours, we organized a rally outside the Israeli consulate that had over 1000 people in attendance. By the next week, the demonstration had grown to over 10,000 protesters. The Jewish Defense League, an extremist, right-wing Zionist group organized small counter-demonstrations at each of our rallies. The media coverage of our demonstrations chose to focus on tensions between pro-Palestinian and Jewish groups, often skewing the numbers of protestors on both sides to make the demonstrations appear even in size. The Canadian government ignored demands to call for sanctions against Israel. Instead, they expressed unconditional support for Israel and repeatedly spoke of Israel’s right to self-defense. Although the mainstream Zionist community was late to enter into the public debates over the war on Gaza, they eventually mounted a campaign against Palestinian activists and their allies. The Canadian Jewish Congress held a press conference, alleging anti-Semitic hate crimes had taken place at many of the demonstrations across the country. Their evidence of these claims was merely video footage of protestors chanting in Arabic and burning Israeli flags – activities that are in no way anti-Semitic.

During the first week of the war, I attended an informal meeting of people looking to engage in direct action to bring attention to the war crimes being committed in Gaza. At that meeting, a group of Jewish activists, myself included, decided to occupy the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Our goal was to disrupt the dominant media message that this is an inter-religious conflict and that all Jews support Israeli aggression and violence. We wanted to draw attention to the fact that many Jews oppose Israel’s actions, in order to help neutralize attempts by Zionists to characterize all criticism of the war as anti-Semitic. Our hope was that this action would allow others – both Jewish and non-Jewish – to feel more empowered to voice their criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians without fearing accusations of anti-Semitism. On January 7, 2009, eight of us occupied the Israeli consulate for about two hours before being arrested. We were held in the back of a police wagon for about an hour before being released without charges. All the major news networks were at the consulate and many of us were interviewed, but the story never aired on the evening news. Some articles were published in local newspapers, but for the most part, the media in Canada kept the story quiet. Word of the action spread around the world and we received messages of support from across the globe. In the following days there were similar actions in Montreal, Los Angeles and San Francisco. One success of the action was that after the occupation, there has been noticeably more acknowledgement in the media that there is dissent within the Jewish community and that there are Jewish people who oppose Israeli Apartheid. 

In the weeks that followed the occupation of the consulate, I became one of two main spokespeople for the group that was involved. I was asked to speak at rallies, teach-ins and other events about Gaza and Israeli Apartheid. I received a great deal of attention and recognition for having been part of the action, as well as an outpouring of gratitude from my friends and comrades in the Palestinian community. It was an overwhelming experience and it was difficult to maintain perspective given the pseudo-celebrity status that often comes with direct action. Given the magnitude of suffering in Gaza, alongside the on-going brutality of Israeli Apartheid in the West Bank, Israel and for Palestinian refugees worldwide, it felt inappropriate to be receiving so many accolades for having been arrested and held for just over an hour in a police wagon. The whole experience, especially the attention and praise, only made my privilege that much more evident. I began asking myself a lot of questions about the role of allies in solidarity movements and the place of Jewish anti-Zionist activists in Palestine solidarity work. 

This questioning continued after Israel stopped bombing Gaza as I worked with other activists to finalize preparation for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). In March 2009, the fifth annual IAW was held in over 40 cities worldwide. Here in Canada, we faced a tremendous backlash for organizing this week of lectures. Members of Parliament, including Liberal leader Michael Ignatief and Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, issued statements condemning IAW as a ‘hatefest’. Several Zionist organizations, including B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress called on universities to ban IAW from their campuses. The poster for the event was banned at Carleton and the University of Ottawa. Here in Toronto, our posters were vandalized and torn down as quickly as we could put them up. The Jewish Defense League protested outside our events and on at least three separate occasions, their members assaulted our organizers and guests. University security and police forces at Ryerson University, York University and the University of Toronto did little to protect organizers and participants from this violence. 

It was during IAW and the intense protests leveled against us, that I once again saw the importance of anti-Zionist Jewish participation in Palestine solidarity activism. I remain convinced that it is not our role to speak for or about Palestinians and will openly criticize other anti-Zionist Jewish activists when they cross that line. Our role is a supporting one – where possible and appropriate, we can help to open up spaces to talk about Palestine and Israeli Apartheid. We can work to counter the false accusations of anti-Semitism and hate crimes that are being increasingly aimed at events like IAW and other Palestine solidarity activism. As Jews we can use our privilege to put forward the argument that criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, but is actually part of a broader movement towards social justice. We need to fight for and defend the rights of Palestinians and their allies to speak without fear of spurious accusations of hatred and anti-Semitism. It is vital that we constantly recognize our privilege and find ways of being allies without falling into the narcissism that so often comes with white privilege, narcissism that would make us mistakenly believe that this is somehow our movement to lead. All Jewish anti-Zionist activism must start with an understanding that there would be no movement without Palestinian resistance and we must always remember that this is a Palestinian-led struggle, in which we can and should play a supporting role. 

Jewish anti-Zionism must be rooted in genuine solidarity and the desire to fight for justice, but to be sincere in these efforts we need to admit that we as individuals, and the Ashkenazi Jewish community as a whole, have much to gain from the ending of Zionism. I personally come to this work out of a strong commitment to fighting racism and imperialism, but I also have a stake in reclaiming Holocaust memory and taking back the history of my ancestors from the Zionist hegemony that has co-opted it. I believe that we need to find ways of honouring the Holocaust that are focused on healing the Ashkenazi Jewish community and that challenge Zionism and Jewish racism, as well as the oppression and violence that exists within the Jewish community. To do so, we need to express our rage and sadness about the abuse of Holocaust memory for Zionist and racist purposes. We need to openly challenge hegemonic Holocaust memorial institutions, which have become sacrosanct within Jewish and non-Jewish communities. We must demand a drastic change in the ways in which we engage with the violence of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It is time to end memorials that are meant to traumatize and re-traumatize by forcing generations of Jewish people to try to recreate and relive the horrors. We must force the Ashkenazi Jewish community to face the trauma of our past and admit to the ways in which we have chosen to align ourselves with power in an attempt to ensure that we are not victimized again. We must focus on healing from the trauma of the past so that we can move forward because this morbid focus on victimization and the Holocaust prevents us from understanding the wrongs we commit within the community and against others that are less powerful than we are. 

I am well aware of the controversy that comes with challenging Zionism and the even more intense controversy that can happen when doing so involves criticizing Holocaust memorials and education. I chose to take up these issues because it is my hope that my academic work can be useful in exposing the ways in which Holocaust education and Jewish claims to victimhood are being used obscure Jewish racism, and to garner support for Israeli Apartheid. If my thesis can contribute, even in some small way, to normalizing criticism of Israel and Jewish racism, and if it can open up conversations about the damaging effects of hegemonic Holocaust education I will be satisfied with this academic endeavour.

Israel First, America's National Security Second

In one of the United States Congress’ most recent displays of “Israel First” policy, 39 Representatives, all democrats, have requested that President Obama pardon Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying for the State of Israel in 1987. Pollard is currently serving a life sentence for his crimes.

According to American Muslims for Palestine:

Jonathan Pollard

Pollard, who was a civilian research analyst with high security clearance for the U.S. Navy, had agreed to spy for Israel for 10 years in exchange for more than $500,000. According to a January 1999 article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh, Pollard “betrayed elements of four major American intelligence systems.” Pollard caused extensive damage to U.S. intelligence and U.S. national security because of the nature of the highly sensitive documents he sold to Israel.

In many cases, Israel bartered top-secret U.S. intelligence documents it received from Pollard with the Soviet Union, in exchange for Soviet Jewish colonial emigration to historic Palestine, Hersh wrote. ^[1]

During sentencing the prosecutor, in compliance with an agreement in which Pollard pled guilty, asked for "only a substantial number of years in prison"; Judge Aubrey Robinson, Jr., not being obligated to follow the recommendation of the prosecutor, and after hearing a "damage-assessment memorandum" from the Secretary of Defense, imposed a life sentence. ^[2]

In the letter sent to President Obama, the Representatives explain that “such an exercise of the clemency power would not in any way imply doubt about [Pollard’s] guilt, nor cast any aspersions on the process by which he was convicted.”

This seems paradoxical. According these representatives, Pollard is indeed guilty of the charges against him. What’s more, they find nothing to disparage about the proceedings which resulted in his sentence. So why must Obama set him free?

Because, you see, pardoning him would correct the disparity “between the amount of time Mr. Pollard has served and the time that has been served -- or not served at all -- by many others who were found guilty of similar activity on behalf of nations that, like Israel, are not adversarial to us.”

It is true that Pollard is the only American serving a life sentence for spying on behalf of a neutral country (only 15% of all convicted spies are attempting to transmit information to a neutral country). However, according to a recent study which examined every espionage conviction in the United States from 1947-2001, at least 13% of all spies convicted were sentenced to life in prison, while another 22% were sentenced to between 20 and 40 years. ^[3] Could it perhaps be that the damage that resulted from his crimes was severe enough to render the judge’s harsh decision? For the answer, we must look at the methodology judges use to determine sentencing.

The study’s authors reveal:  “Prison sentences for espionage or attempted espionage varied depending on factors such as the importance of information lost, the length of time of the spying, the venue of the trial, the then-current policies of the federal government on espionage prosecution, the context of the time (e.g. wartime or peace, chilly Cold War or detente) and the then-current relationship of the United States with the country that received the information.”

Thus, the relationship between Israel and the United States was only one component determining Pollard’s sentence. With the information at hand, namely the fact that as stated above, Israel was at the time handing Pollard’s stolen documents off to the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, and having just heard the damage-assessment memorandum by the Secretary of Defense, Judge Robinson issued his sentence. This sentence was the result of the evidence brought against Pollard as well as his own confession. He was convicted based on the severity of his crime and in the midst of one of the largest resurgences of espionage in American history (see Keeping the Nation’s Secrets by the Stilwell Commission, published in 1985).

In this way, seeking “clemency for Mr. Pollard as an act of compassion justified by the way others have been treated by our justice system” is ridiculous. While the United States is not at war with Israel, Pollard’s sentencing in relation to the severity of his crime per the Secretary of Defense’s testimony rendered him the same sentence as at least 16 other spies.

Do these Representatives offer any evidence, other than comparisons to (what must be) lesser crimes by other individuals, to justify commuting Pollard’s sentence? Do they take issue with the denials of appeal made by appellate courts in the case or the merits thereof? Do they contend that Pollard was harshly sentenced because of some prejudice harbored by the presiding judge? No. They simply think that his incarceration, which has only strengthened his ties to Israel (he became a citizen while in prison), will somehow serve as a deterrent. 

Where is the logic in such a stance? In the name of security, the US government will eavesdrop on its own citizens. In the name of security, the US government will torture foreigners, holding them without charge or trial and bomb Pakistani civilians with drones. In the name of security, the US government will grope and prod passengers as they board airplanes if they refuse to be seen naked through scanners. And yet, in the same breath, elected representatives who quietly reauthorized provisions of the PATRIOT act in February 2010 would argue for the rights of a confessed, convicted spy passing intelligence secrets, and do so in the name of justice and compassion!

Do these Representatives know anything about justice at all? If they do, why do they feel compelled to stand up to perceived injustice in the name of an avowed Israeli spy and yet remain utterly mute when it comes to the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, at least 55% of whom do not have sufficient evidence against them to determine that they have committed any hostile acts against the United States, at least 40% of whom have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda and least 18% of whom have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda or Taliban? ^[4]

Is it because they only care about Americans? Then why haven’t any of them stepped up to defend Rachel Corrie, murdered by an IDF bulldozer as she non-violently attempted to block it from destroying a Palestinian home? Why haven’t they petitioned Obama to seek justice for Furkan Doğan, a Turkish American who was shot by the IDF at point blank range while lying on his back? Why hasn’t congress properly investigated the death of 37 American Citizens aboard the USS Liberty which was attacked by Israel in 1967?

Such a request by House democrats is an insult to our justice system, and one that should not be tolerated.  The truth of the matter is that Pollard, if granted clemency, will be a benefactor of the United States’ “special relationship” with Israel, a relationship that apparently knows no bounds.

Yet this request is altogether unsurprising in light of Israel’s consistent method of portraying itself in a completely sympathetic light. Israelis are not aggressors, but victims of aggression. They are not bigoted, but victims of anti-semetism. They are not lawbreakers, but victims of the justice system.

Americans suffer every day at the hands of abstract, fleeting “threats to national security” and yet when our national security has been conclusively violated…this is what our congressmen come up with. To buy into such a subversion of moral decency is utterly treacherous.  

[1] American Muslims for Palestine, 39 Congressmen advocating for release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, November 2010 (Accessed 11/23/10)

[2] Best, Jr., Richard A.; Clyde Mark, Jonathan Pollard: Background and Considerations for Presidential Clemency" Congressional Research Service Report for Congress., January 2001 (Accessed 11/23/10)

[3] PERSEREC, Espionage Against the United States by American Citizens 1947-2001, July 2002 (Accessed 11/23/10)

[4] Amnesty International, Guantanamo Bay Fact Sheet (Accessed 11/23/10)

Hasbara Lie Exposed: "Staged" Settler Violence is Actually Tree Pruning

In a recent Ynet News story, a news group operating within West Bank settlements witnessed “Arabs and Leftists” staging an event in which their olive trees were vandalized, so as to further demonize settlers. According to the piece:

The photos, taken by members of the Tazpit Unit, were shot on Palestinian land Friday, near the Neveh Tzuf settlement. The images allegedly show Palestinians and left-wing activists cutting down Palestinian olive trees using an electric saw. 

Many so-called ‘Price Tag' acts targeting Palestinians were recorded in the last few weeks, and the settlers now claim they were staged by the Palestinians themselves and intended to harm the settlers' image.

Tazpit photographer Ehud Amiton, who documented the vandalism act on Friday, says that this is exactly what can be seen in his images.

The article offers the following images to attest to the accusation:

From this evidence we are expected to deduce that these men could possibly be “leftists” (is it that they carry their saws in an apologetic, bleeding-heart liberal sort of way?), and that they attempted to perpetrate this ruse in broad daylight, with no apparent interest in hiding their activity. We are expected to conclude that, while staging the crime, they thought it best to place the branches they cleanly sawed from their olive trees in neat piles, perhaps as a way of implicitly commending settlers for their organizational skills.

We are also expected to suspend our knowledge of the recent culmination of the olive harvest, and of the proper procedures for the maintenance of post-harvest trees.

Here is another example of staged settler violence:

Okay, I lied. It is actually a picture of pruned olive branches from an Italian grove immediately after the harvest season. You can find it here, in a blog dedicated to olive oil and wine from the Sabine Hills in Italy. The post explains:

Pruning olive trees can take place anytime from the Autumn to early spring, depending on factors such as the type of olive, the yield of the previous year and the condition of the tree.

The pruned branches are then collected into piles between the trees. The leaves are then either burnt, or used to produce cosmetics or complimentary health remedies.

 As readers, we are also expected to disregard this video, posted by the creator of Olive Abacus, a “permanent online olive information repository” dedicated to “shedding light on all issues related to olives.”

In the video’s first seconds our narrator “Olive Branche” illuminates:

Each year, immediately after the olive harvest in Andalucía, Spain, the trees are pruned of their older branches making way for the younger, more productive ones. As an olive branch ages, it becomes less productive, requiring pruning. Pruning allows more sunlight into more areas of the tree. It also increases the quality and quantity of fruit the tree produces.

The video then cuts to an image of a masked man with a chainsaw, cutting olive branches and placing them to the side. At 2:56 we are shown neat piles of branches (where have we seen this before?), which will then be disposed of.

In essence, we are expected to be utterly devoid of critical thought in order to believe such a wild story. We are supposed to ignore the fact that settler violence against Palestinians is well documented by human rights organizations. We are called upon, instead, to believe that Palestinians are actually victimizing themselves, despite the fact that they reap nothing from such action. No arrests are made in connection with violence against Palestinian property. Police rarely even go through the motions of investigation, and if they do so, perpetrators are never brought to justice.

For most families, they are lucky if they even have access to their farm land, considering blockage by ever-encroaching settlements and the security apparatus they bring along. When they are allowed onto their own land, these olives can be the only source of income they have. If no one compensates them for their losses, if no one but a few human rights organizations and activists even care to notice this long history of abuse, and if abusers are systematically absolved of responsibility, what, exactly, do those who “staged” this vandalism stand to gain? As readers, we must stifle these questions. We wouldn’t want to be construed as “leftists” now would we?

West Bank Olive Groves Become Battleground

(The Guardian) Eighty-year-old Rasmia Awase had left the best olive trees until last. She and her family had already harvested most of their crop when they went to a small plot near their home in Luban a-Sharqiya on Saturday morning.

Here were 40 trees that Awase had planted and tended herself, and they were now, two decades later, at their peak – the most productive of all the trees, which support 37 members of the extended family. But Awase found that someone had got there before them and had chopped down the trees, leaving stumps in the ground and branches scattered about the plot. The family blame hardline Jewish settlers from the nearby Eli settlement.

"I was in shock, I lost my mind," she said. "I planted these trees with my bare hands, I gave them 20 years of hard work – and they are all gone." Each day of her long life was worse than the one before, she said with her eyes watering.

The Awase family are not alone in their experience. Among the tactics used by Jewish settlers this harvesting season are cutting down and torching trees, stealing fruit and attacking farmers trying to pick their crops, according to human rights organisations.

"It has reached a crescendo," said a spokeswoman for Yesh Din, one Israeli group monitoring incidents in the West Bank. "What might look like ad hoc violence is actually a tool the settlers are using to push back Palestinian farmers from their own land."

The upsurge in violence this year is attributed to a rise in settler militancy following the 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank and uncertainty about the outcome of the current, although stalled, peace negotiations.

According to Oxfam, which is trying to help Palestinian olive farmers realise the economic potential of their crops, some families are too frightened to pick the fruit. "We have seen a lot of olive groves burning and trees which have been chopped down," said the charity's Catherine Weibel. "People are clearly very stressed and worried, always afraid the settlers are coming."

Olives have been cultivated in the rocky hills of what is now the West Bank for thousands of years. Around 95% of the harvest is used to make olive oil, worth up to 364m shekels (£64m) a year to the Palestinian economy. Most farmers are small scale, growing trees on land that has been in the families for generations.

In recent weeks, there have been numerous reports of trees being stripped of their fruit overnight. Rabbis for Human Rights claimed that the olives from about 600 trees near the settlement of Havat Gilad were stolen before their Palestinian owners could harvest them. Police confirmed they were investigating the alleged theft.

The police had received 27 official complaints about sabotage since the beginning of this year's harvest, said a spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Sixteen Israelis had been questioned. "There are a number of ongoing investigations into damage caused in the past few weeks," he said. "We are working to prevent incidents on the ground. This is an ongoing problem that we have to deal with."

Damage had also been caused to Israeli property, added Rosenfeld.

Akram Awase, Rasmia's son, was sceptical about the protection offered by the Israeli police and military. "In the old days the resistance used to stop them [settlers]," he said. "Now there is no resistance, all of them are in jail. You can't do anything. Who do you complain to? The soldiers protect the settlers. They have raped our land and they will never leave it."

Related Posts:
Settler Violence in the Occupied West Bank 

Settler Violence in the Occupied West Bank

Settlements are illegal under international law. This is an indisputable fact. But the  act of settlement itself, confiscating Palestinian land and transferring Israeli citizens onto it, is not the only problem. In reality, settlement of the West Bank brings along with it an axis of control over Palestinian livelihood, hindering construction in Palestinian villages to accommodate their natural growth, monopolizing resources, poisoning the environment and strangling the economy with limits on movement and access to farmland among other injustices.

Most disturbing, yet hardly reported in the mainstream media, is the horrendous phenomenon of settler violence against the indigenous Palestinian population. Worse yet, settlers who attack Palestinians and their property act with utter impunity, rarely if ever being punished. When settlers are held accountable for their actions, punishments are usually laughable at best.

In a lecture (slideshow available here) given by the Executive Director of the Palestine Center, Yousef Munayyer on September 15^th, he revealed that between 2009 and 2010 settlers committed at least 1,000 separate acts of violence against individuals or their property. This destruction originated in at least two-thirds of settlements, the majority of which coming from the most religious, and predominantly in the form of stone throwing, trespassing, assault, destruction of property and arson.  90% of these attacks took place in areas where Israel has security jurisdiction under the Oslo Accords.

As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem explains in “The Nature of the Violence:” 

From the beginning of the [Al Aqsa] Intifada, in late September 2000, to the end of 2004, Israeli civilians have killed thirty-four Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In some of these cases, the Israelis acted in life-threatening situations, such as when armed Palestinians infiltrated Israeli settlements. In many cases, however, the Israeli civilians did not act in self-defense. This occurred, for example, in those instance in which Israelis chased stone-throwers and fired at them as a form of “punishment.” Acts of this kind violate the penal law and the open-fire regulations applying to civilians. 

Israelis, individually or in organized groups, carry out the attacks on Palestinians and Palestinian property to frighten, deter, or punish them, using weapons and ammunition they received from the IDF. The settlers sometimes act in retaliation for violence committed by Palestinians, and sometimes not.

The actions against Palestinians include blocking roadways, so as to impede Palestinian life and commerce. The settlers also shoot solar panels on roofs of buildings, torch automobiles, shatter windowpanes and windshields, destroy crops, uproot trees, abuse merchants and owners of stalls in the market. Some of these actions are intended to force Palestinians to leave their homes and farmland, and thereby enable the settlers to gain control of them.

During the olive-picking season, when many Palestinians are at work in the orchards, settler violence increases. The violence takes the form of gunfire, which sometimes results in casualties among the Palestinian olive-pickers, destruction of trees, and theft of Palestinian crops.

A study conducted by the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din on offenses between 2005 and 2006 indicates that of those reported to the Judea and Samaria (Israel’s renaming of the West Bank) District of the Israel Police:

• More than 90% of the complaints and files in which the investigation was completed here closed without indictments being submitted.
• 96% of the files on trespassing (including all the cases of harming trees) in which the investigation was completed were closed without indictments being submitted.
• 100% of the property offenses in which the investigation was completed were closed without indictments being submitted.
• 79% of the assault files in which the investigation was completed were closed without indictments being submitted.
• About 5% of the complaints filed were lost and apparently were never investigated.

B’Tselem elucidates:

This policy is in total contrast to the rigid policy of law enforcement and punishment where Palestinians harm Israelis. Towns and villages in the area of the incident are routinely placed under curfew, which has at times lasted for many days, and intensive searches and arrests are made. In many cases, Israel demolished or sealed the suspect's home. Palestinians who are tried and convicted for offenses against Israelis are given maximum punishment.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights does its best to document all incidents of settler violence, which can be found in its weekly reports on Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Since the “moratorium” on settlement construction has ended, even more will be built and expanded to accommodate the ever-growing settler population, at least 40% of which will be from Jewish immigrants from abroad rather than natural growth, and one can expect the violence to only escalate. As recently as Tuesday, two new incidents were reported to the International Middle East Media Center. In the village of Qaryut, south of Nablus, settlers broke the home of Najla'a Abdelfattah and threatened to kill her. They were only forced to leave when a group of youths came to her defense. The report goes on to say, “Near the northern city of Nablus, another group of settlers trespassed into the olive orchards in the village of Awarta, and stole olives. The villagers told media the settlers came form the nearby settlement of Yitzahar, adding that this is not the first time they invade the fields and steal the olives.”

These are the consequences of the policy the European Union subsidizes, the consequences of the policy countless US citizens endorse with the government’s help, that the US Senate has deemed immaterial to peace negotiations and that the international community has done nothing to stop (excluding the occasional hollow condemnation, followed up by...nothing). Who will hold Israel, its army and its settlers accountable? Who will come to the aid of the defenseless population of the Occupied West Bank? If Abbas doesn’t walk away from peace negotiations after consulting with the Arab League this week, the unfortunate answer will most likely be no one.