um estudo da Africa do Sul: Israel pratica apartheid e colonialismo

fonte:EI




South African study: Israel practicing apartheid and colonialism
Report, Human Sciences Research Council, 9 June 2009

A South African study has found that Israel is practicing apartheid and colonialism in the OPT. (MaanImages)

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a report confirming that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

The HSRC commissioned an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel and the West Bank to conduct this study. The resulting 300-page report, titled "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law," represents 15 months of research and constitutes an exhaustive review of Israel's practices in the OPT according to definitions of colonialism and apartheid provided by international law. The project was suggested originally by the January 2007 report by eminent South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council, when he indicated that Israeli practices had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid.

Regarding colonialism, the team found that Israel's policy and practices violate the prohibition on colonialism which the international community developed in the 1960s in response to the great decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia. Israel's policy is demonstrably to fragment the West Bank and annex part of it permanently to Israel, which is the hallmark of colonialism. Israel has appropriated land and water in the OPT, merged the Palestinian economy with Israel's economy, and imposed a system of domination over Palestinians to ensure their subjugation to these measures. Through these measures, Israel has denied the indigenous population the right to self-determination and indicated clear intention to assume sovereignty over portions of its land and natural resources. Permanent annexation of territory in this fashion is the hallmark of colonialism.

Regarding apartheid, the team found that Israel's laws and policies in the OPT fit the definition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Israeli law conveys privileges to Jewish settlers and disadvantages Palestinians in the same territory on the basis of their respective identities, which function in this case as racialized identities in the sense provided by international law. Israel's practices are corollary to five of the six "inhuman acts" listed by the Convention. A policy of apartheid is especially indicated by Israel's demarcation of geographic "reserves" in the West Bank, to which Palestinian residence is confined and which Palestinians cannot leave without a permit. The system is very similar to the policy of "Grand Apartheid" in Apartheid South Africa, in which black South Africans were confined to black Homelands delineated by the South African government, while white South Africans enjoyed freedom of movement and full civil rights in the rest of the country.

Quoting from the Executive Summary of the report, project leader Dr. Virginia Tilley explained that the three pillars of apartheid in South Africa are all practiced by Israel in the OPT. In South Africa, the first pillar was to demarcate the population of South Africa into racial groups, and to accord superior rights, privileges and services to the white racial group. The second pillar was to segregate the population into different geographic areas, which were allocated by law to different racial groups, and restrict passage by members of any group into the area allocated to other groups. And the third pillar was "a matrix of draconian 'security' laws and policies that were employed to suppress any opposition to the regime and to reinforce the system of racial domination, by providing for administrative detention, torture, censorship, banning, and assassination."

The Report finds that Israeli practices in the OPT exhibit the same three "pillars" of apartheid:

The first pillar "derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews."

The second pillar is reflected in "Israel's 'grand' policy to fragment the OPT [and] ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory. This policy is evidenced by Israel's extensive appropriation of Palestinian land, which continues to shrink the territorial space available to Palestinians; the hermetic closure and isolation of the Gaza Strip from the rest of the OPT; the deliberate severing of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; and the appropriation and construction policies serving to carve up the West Bank into an intricate and well-serviced network of connected settlements for Jewish-Israelis and an archipelago of besieged and non-contiguous enclaves for Palestinians."

The third pillar is "Israel's invocation of 'security' to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of opinion, expression, assembly, association and movement [to] mask a true underlying intent to suppress dissent to its system of domination and thereby maintain control over Palestinians as a group."

The research team included scholars and international lawyers based at the HSRC, the School for Oriental and African Studies (London), the British Institute for International and Comparative Law, the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (Durban), the Adalah/Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and al-Haq/West Bank Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. Consultation on the study's theory and method was provided by eminent jurists from South Africa, Israel and Europe.

The HSRC serves as the national social science council for South Africa. The Middle East Project of the HSRC is an independent two-year project to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly resource for the South African government and civil society and the concerned international community.

Download the full report [PDF - 3 MB]

Os falcoes israelitas nao desejam a paz

fonte:Palestine Chronicle




Israeli Hawks Desire No Peace




Obama offered to talk to the Islamic Republic of Iran without any pre-conditions.

By Iqbal Jassat – Pretoria

Israel is in the throes of an intense debate about its identity and future. Failure by the Olmert regime to dislodge Hamas from the Gaza and itself being replaced by rightwing zealots under Benjamin Netanyahu are recent symptoms of deep-seated malaise in the body politic of the Zionist regime.

New emerging trends reveal that all is not kosher in the Jewish state. Craving for recognition and acceptance from its former foes in the so-called “moderate” Arab world, yet ironically, Israel seems hell bent on continuing to commit major blunders in conflict with its desire to “normalize” ties.

Two such flaws have evidently become global talking points: the refusal by Netanyahu to endorse a “two-state” solution and stubbornly continuing expansionist settlements.

These have not only earned Israel a public rebuke from Barack Obama when he addressed a global audience from Cairo in a landmark speech to reach out to the Muslim world, they have potentially placed the Zionist state on a collision course with America.

Latest reports indicate that the European Union is seriously considering using its trade clout with Israel to bolster US pressure. An option it has is to crack down on fruit, vegetables, olive oil and other produce grown by Jewish settlers on stolen Palestinian land. It is well known, though usually ignored, that such products are entering the EU at low import tariffs reserved for output labeled as coming from what is described as Israel “proper”.

As the row begins to grow between Israel and its erstwhile allies in Europe and America, the discredited legacy of the Bush administration still haunts the current narrative. Reuters reports that in Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hit back hard at comments by a senior Israeli negotiator who said Obama’s predecessor, George Bush, had privately agreed to the expansion of settlements.

Israeli dilemma flows from a calculated determination to alert the world to the so-called existential threat it believes Iran poses, while refusing to accept that preserving the occupation dooms its existence.

MJ Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum observes that the two options available to Israel are to either grant the Occupied Palestinians the ballot or to deny the vote. Both scenarios entail the end of the Zionist enterprise.

A third alternative being advocated by neoconservatives and some leading right-wing Israelis is known as the “three-state solution” or the “Jordanian option”. It seems to have been pulled out of Verwoerd’s files on “Bantustans: A Grand Scheme to render Blacks Invisible”. Not surprisingly, the Heritage Foundation, arguably Washington’s most prominent conservative think tank, hosted a conference devoted to alternatives to the two-state solution.

According to Daniel Luban the Heritage event, which was sponsored by right-wing US casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, came two weeks after right-of-center Israeli parties hosted a similar conference in Jerusalem. Senator Sam Brownback, a prominent Kansas Republican who ran for president in 2008, was the keynote speaker.

This scheme involves that Palestinians be made citizens of Jordan, allowing Israel to keep the occupied land but not the people. Despite sounding Verwoerdian or in the words of George Washington University’s Marc Lynch a “zombie idea”, the sudden flood of events and discussions suggests that variations on the three-state approach are becoming more, not less, popular on the US right, according to Luban.

Obama’s speech delivered in Cairo, a day after the Heritage conference, contained an affirmation of the two-state solution and firm resolve not to accept the settlements. In addition, his offer to talk to the Islamic Republic of Iran – without any pre-conditions – signals yet another rebuttal of the Israeli government’s insistence that Iran is an “existential threat”.

Deep internal divisions alongside growing despair within America’s powerful pro-Israeli lobbies are characteristic of the ideological bankruptcy of the apartheid state. Its refusal to accept that the change of guard at the White House is desirous of remaining in step with a world tired of carrying colonial baggage, will lead to isolation.

- Iqbal Jassat is chairperson of the Media Review Network (MRN), an advocacy group based in Pretoria, South Africa. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.mediareviewnet.com.

Salvadores e Sobreviventes: o Darfur, Politica e a Guerra contra o Terror

fonte:EI



The Darfur diversion: "Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror"
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The Electronic Intifada, 8 June 2009

In Errol Morris's 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that "if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as "counterinsurgency," "pacification" and "war on terror," while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani's explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

Like the Middle East, parts of Africa have been engulfed in conflict for much of the post-colonial period. While the media coverage in both cases is perfunctory, in the case of Africa it is also sporadic. To the extent that there is coverage, the emphasis is on the dramatic or the grotesque. When the subject is not war, it is usually famine, disease or poverty -- or sometimes all three -- and invariably the coverage lacks context. The wars are between "tribes" led by "warlords" that take place in "failed states" ruled by "corrupt dictators." Driven by primal motives, they rarely involve discernible issues. The gallery of rogues gives way only to a tableau of victims, inevitably in need of White saviors. A headline like "Can Bono save Africa?" is as illustrative of Western attitudes towards the continent as the comments of Richard Littlejohn, Britain's highest-paid columnist, who wrote at the peak of the Rwandan genocide, "Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them."

Darfur is the conspicuous exception to this trend, though Rwanda did enter Western vocabulary after the 1994 genocide. This, Mamdani argues, is primarily due to the efforts of one organization -- the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) -- whose advocacy has been central to turning this into the biggest mass movement in the United States since the anti-Vietnam mobilization, bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. While the mobilization did have the salutary effect of raising awareness about an issue otherwise unknown to the majority of US citizens, its privileging of acting over knowing renders this less meaningful. Indeed, the campaign's shunning of complexity, its substituting of moral certainty for knowledge, and its preference for military solutions, precludes the very end that it purports to strive for. Invoking what it claims are lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, it combines slogans such as "never again" with the battle cries of a new "good war," "boots on the ground" and "out of Iraq and into Darfur," to call for military intervention in Sudan. Mamdani contends that SDC is not a peace movement, it is a war movement. If the signature activity of the anti-Vietnam war movement was the teach-in, for the SDC it is the advertising campaign; the expert has been replaced by the celebrity.

The SDC was established in July 2004 through the combined efforts of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. It has since been joined by a broad spectrum of political and religious organizations, a gaggle of celebrities and prominent intellectuals. It has spawned student chapters all across the country that range from the high school to university levels. Led by an advertising executive, it is the only organization capable of bringing together such unlikely partners as the Reverend Al Sharpton and author Elie Wiesel, actor George Clooney and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. However, the apparent diversity of its affiliates obscures the fact that its agenda is driven mostly by Zionists and the Christian Right. However, Mamdani pays scant attention to the composition of the SDC even though he devotes a whole chapter to its politics and methods. As The Jerusalem Post reported ahead of the SDC's rally in Washington on 30 April 2006, it is "[l]ittle known ... that the coalition, which has presented itself as 'an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations' was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community." It noted that even in 2006 that coalition was "heavily weighted" with a "diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups." Many have used Darfur as a strategic distraction from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, as Ned Goldstein has argued in his investigation of the Zionist interests behind the SDC (most recently at the United Nations Durban II conference against racism). The salient feature of the propaganda is to paint the conflict as war between "Arabs" and "Africans" and to label the violence "genocide."

The genocide debate hinges on two factors: numbers and identity. For mass violence to qualify as genocide the killing has to be on a large enough scale, and the intent to eliminate a discrete ethnic or racial group has to be established. Mamdani argues that in order to sustain its claim of genocide, the SDC has inflated casualty figures and racialized the conflict.

The mortality figure of 400,000 has become a staple of SDC propaganda even though it has been repeatedly discredited. In 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority chided the SDC (and the Aegis Trust) for breaching "standards of truthfulness" in its use of the figure for its UK advertising campaign. The number had already been challenged when a panel convened by the US Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences concluded that of the six estimates they studied, the figures presented by the SDC were the least reliable. The most reliable estimate was the study carried out by the World Heath Organization-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) that had recorded 131,000 excess deaths at the peak of the conflict of which only 30 percent were due to violence. The violence had dropped sharply after January 2005; this, Mamdani avers, was due mainly to the intervention of African Union peacekeepers. By 2008, the total deaths for the whole year had dropped to 1,500. These numbers are far lower than what constitutes an emergency according to the UN, let alone genocide.

The conflict began as a civil war in 1987-89, driven less by race or ethnic rivalries than by a struggle for land and resources -- it pitted the mostly nomadic landless Arabs against the mostly sedentary Fur peasants. Compounded by Khartoum's botched attempt at land reform during the 1990s, turning it into a party to the civil war, the simmering conflict erupted into a full-scale insurgency in 2003. This eventually led to the government's brutal counterinsurgency campaign where it turned to nomadic tribes from Darfur and Chad to serve as proxies.

Mamdani identifies three causes as having contributed to the conflict. First, is the history of colonial rule wherein the British went about a project of retribalizing Darfur through a system of native administration that created tribal homelands and introduced a principle of discrimination that privileged "natives" over "settlers." This led to the dispossession of nomadic tribes, especially the camel nomads of the north. The tribal identities were further solidified through a census that required each registrant to choose a "race;" a written history that presented Arabs as "settlers" from the Middle East; and laws that gave preferential treatment to whoever was deemed a "native." This narrative also allowed the British colonizers to present themselves as merely following the precedent of an earlier Arab colonization.

Drought and desertification was the second contributing factor. The Sahara's southern rim expanded by 100 kilometers, forcing nomadic tribes further south and eventually to encroach on the lands of the sedentary Fur tribes.

Finally, the civil war in neighboring Chad where opposition groups armed by Cold War rivals -- the US, France and Israel on one side, and Libya and the Soviet Union on the other -- had frequently taken refuge in Darfur, leading to a proliferation of weapons and militias. Mamdani explains that the Western powers were involved in the conflict long before the Sudanese government was; and Omar al-Bashir's Islamist regime wasn't even in power at the time.

The Arab-versus-African narrative obscures the fact that since at least the British colonial era, Arabs have been Darfur's most deprived constituency. "If Darfur was marginal in Sudan," writes Mamdani, "the Arabs of Darfur were marginal in Darfur." Contrary to the British historiography -- whose assumptions have since been reproduced in 20th century nationalist writings -- most Arabs arrived in Sudan as refugees fleeing persecution in Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, the diffusion of Arab culture was more a consequence of commerce than of conquest. Mamdani demonstrates that "Arab" is not a racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. It is an assumed political identity that is more a reflection of preference and power than of genealogy. For example, former slaves once freed would become Fur in Darfur, and Arab in Funj, the Sultanate in riverine Sudan where Arabs dominated. To be an Arab in Darfur therefore signifies nothing so much as weakness. The conflict in Darfur today is as much between Arabs (the Abbala camel nomads against the Baggara cattle nomads) as it is against the relatively privileged Fur and Massalit, and the less privileged Zaghawa. The SDC however emphasizes the north-south axis of the conflict that pits Arab against Fur and ignores the south-south axis which pits Arab against Arab.

The Darfuri rebels likewise defy easy classification. When the insurgency began in 2003, there were two major groups -- the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) -- they have now split into 26. JEM, which is the largest rebel organization, has an Islamist orientation and draws its inspiration from Hassan al-Turabi, the influential Sudanese Islamist and onetime ally of Omar al-Bashir. In contrast, the SLA is secular-Africanist with ties to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south (led by the late John Garang). Before the split between the Islamists in Khartoum, the government had employed Darfuri Islamists led by future JEM founder Khalil Ibrahim for its counterinsurgency in the south. (Ibrahim opposed the power-sharing agreement that ended the war in the south.) However, according to Sudan scholar Alex de Waal, both organizations learned "to characterize their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the south: they were the 'African' victims of an 'Arab' regime." The government's response to the insurgency was at first a half-hearted attempt at reconciliation, followed by the arming of a proxy force comprising nomadic militias, many of them from Chad, who have come to be known as the Janjawid. The consequences were devastating, with large-scale bloodletting and the displacement of 2.5 million people.

Khartoum's use of proxies to quell an insurgency and the resulting death and displacement parallel US policies in Iraq, where ethnic-sectarian militias have been deployed against the mostly-Sunni insurgency. Yet, unlike Iraq, where in excess of a million have died according to the latest Opinion Research Business poll, and five million displaced, the violence in Darfur has been labeled a genocide. Darfur has also spawned domestic mobilization in the US on a scale for which there is no parallel in the case of Iraq. Mamdani argues that this is due to the fact that Iraq requires Americans to act as citizens, with all the responsibility and complicated political choices it entails, whereas Darfur only requires them to act as humans where they choose to take responsibility out of a sense of philanthropy. He notes that "In Darfur, Americans can feel themselves to be what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors." As the Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala observed, "It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption." In adopting the language of good and evil, Mamdani observes, the SDC has acted as "the great depoliticizer" in precluding political reconciliation in favor of a moral (read military) solution.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mamdani emphasizes regional over international solutions. Western modes of conflict resolution in Africa resemble nothing so much as the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Programs: "Those who made decisions did not have to live with their consequences, nor pay for them." The Western emphasis on the humanitarian crisis in lieu of a political solution merely prolongs the conflict. By contrast, the AU's approach is both humanitarian and political. The African Union's (AU) intervention in Darfur had been largely successful in reducing the violence, yet its operation was undermined by Western powers that failed to deliver the support they had pledged when the AU brokered the N'DJamena ceasefire agreement in April 2004. It was also vilified in SDC propaganda. Mamdani asserts that much of the foot-dragging was to discredit the AU so that the notion of an African solution for an African problem could be discredited. The aim was to "blue hat" the AU forces and bring them under Western command. In a Washington Post op-ed pointedly titled "Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa," Iweala asked, "How is it that a former mid-level US diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?"

The recent International Criminal Court case has further entrenched the Khartoum government in its defiant stance. Criminal prosecutions during an ongoing conflict merely exacerbate matters, Mamdani argues. More so when the adjudicating body has a demonstrable record of bias. The model for justice must be the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than Nuremberg -- survivors' justice rather than victors' justice. The well-being of surviving multitudes must not be subordinated to the imperative of punishing individual perpetrators. Mamdani offers a trenchant critique of what he calls the "New Humanitarian Order," which has supplanted traditional colonialism and turned human rights into the new pretext for intervention. The "international community," which Mamdani argues is nothing more than a "post-Cold War nom de guerre for the Western powers," has created "a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East," reducing citizens to wards in "an open-ended international rescue operation."

The Obama Administration already appears to be making a break with its predecessor's approach and has ordered a review of its Sudan policy. Scott Gration, the new envoy, has already visited Khartoum and Darfur, as has John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the case of the Bush Administration, the SDC was able to mobilize Congress against the State Department that was seeking a political resolution modeled on the power-sharing agreement that ended the longstanding conflict in the south. It remains to be seen how much the Obama Administration is able to resist the formidable lobbying power of the SDC. While Mamdani maintains that the aim of the SDC is to induce the US government to intervene militarily in Sudan, it appears that the real interest of its core organizations is to perpetuate the conflict so as to continue using the image of the Arab as the perpetrator to distract from the regional reality of the Arab as the victim.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is the co-founder of PULSE. He can be reached at m.idrees A T gmail D O T com.

Os agricultores de Gaza debaixo de fogo israelita

fonte:EI



Gaza farmers brave Israeli bullets
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 8 June 2009

Mustafa al-Buhairi's family are unable to work their land because of Israeli army threats. (Rami Almeghari)

For more than six decades, the al-Buhairi has family lived on and farmed their land near the boundary with Israel, to the east of Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Last week Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets warning individuals not to set foot in a 300-meter-wide (1,000 foot) strip of land on the Gaza side of the border.

"We have been here for many years planting peppers, watermelon and wheat," said Mustafa al-Buhairi, 38, standing amidst pepper plants near his home. But "after the last Israeli war against this region in January," he said, "we began to see new Israeli restrictions against our area."

In the last month, Israeli warplanes dropped thousands of similar leaflets on borderline communities from Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip all the way to Beit Hanoun in the north.

"Suddenly, Israeli F-16 fighter jets made a loud noise then dropped a box that exploded in the sky spreading papers all over our farmland," al-Buhairi recalled.

Al-Buhairi voiced his anger over the Israeli measure explaining that his entire family, including his six children and two brothers, have been badly affected because they are unable to safely work their land.

Despite the risk, al-Buhairi said the family has to continue trying to farm the land because their livelihood depends on it "Yet we are working under risk," he said.

"Four days ago I was irrigating some olive trees which are located beyond the designated limit of 300 meters. Three bullets were shot from that military post on the hilltop," al-Buhairi said, indicating the direction. "One went to the left of me, one to the right and the third over my head."

The leaflets are accompanied by Israeli soldiers patrolling the border area with tanks and jeeps and surveilling the area from watchtowers.

The soldiers have shot at al-Buhairi and his family members with increasing frequency despite the fact that the family's house and land are about 700 meters (2,300 feet) from the border.

Al-Buhairi said the soldiers shoot even up to one kilometer from the border which has made it extremely difficult to harvest produce. He asserted that since the leaflets were dropped, production has fallen sharply.

Nevertheless, al-Buhairi and other farmers harvest their wheat, even under fire: "When they open fire we disappear, and when they stop, we come back."

The al-Buhairi family already lost half of its livestock as Israeli tanks shelled the area near the family home during last winter's invasion of Gaza.

"You see that rubble," al-Buhairi said, pointing to the remains of a building. "That used to be our livestock pen with more than 50 sheep. A tank shell destroyed it, killing 25 of them."

Al-Buhairi and his 80-year-old father echoed a similar sentiment: they had nowhere else to go during the Israeli attack. "We have no other choice, either we live here or we die here."

According to international organizations, the amount of damage on the border area in eastern Gaza Strip could not be properly assessed. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that the area is too dangerous due to continued Israeli army actions and indiscriminate fire against such rural areas.

More than a decade ago, when Israeli occupation forces were present inside Gaza, rather than on the perimeter, Israel declared a one-kilometer buffer zone in an attempt to prevent attacks by resistance forces targeting border patrols.

The current 300-meter limit swallows more than 30 percent of Gaza's arable land, according to the FAO.

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

Algumas cidades israelitas implementam 'juramentos de lealdade' para impedir o acesso de arabes israelitas

fonte:EI



Israeli towns adopt "loyalty oaths" to bar Arab residents
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 8 June 2009

A community in northern Israel has changed its bylaws to demand that new residents pledge support for "Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land" in a thinly-veiled attempt to block Arab applicants from gaining admission.

Critics are calling the bylaw, adopted by Manof, home to 170 Jewish families in the Galilee, a local "loyalty oath" similar to a national scheme recently proposed by the far-right party of the government minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Other Jewish communities in the central Galilee -- falling under the umbrella of a regional council known as Misgav -- are preparing similar bylaws in response to a court petition filed by an Arab couple hoping to build a home in Misgav.

"It looks very much like this is being coordinated by the Misgav council in an attempt to pre-empt the court ruling," said Ronin Ben Ari, resident of another Misgav community, Mikhmanim, and an opponent of the bylaw change.

Manof's move comes in the wake of efforts by Ahmed and Fatina Zbeidat, who live in the neighboring Arab town of Sakhnin, to win admission to the Misgav community of Rakafet.

Traditionally some 700 rural communities in Israel, including 30 in Misgav, have weeded out Arab applicants by issuing automatic rejections through special vetting committees. Arab citizens make up one-fifth of the country's population.

According to a legal rights group, rural communities, which are home to only five percent of the population but have control over four-fifths of the countryside, are seen by the state as a bulwark against Arabs gaining access to what are called "national lands."

However, the vetting system has been under threat since a court ruling in 2000 that required the committees to consider Arab applicants and justify their decisions.

In line with the ruling, the Zbeidats demanded the right to take a suitability test when their application was turned down in 2006. Examiners found Fatina too "individualistic" for life in a small community while her husband lacked "knowledge of sophisticated interpersonal relations."

The Zbeidats then petitioned the courts against the use of vetting committees, saying they enforced "blatant discrimination" against Arab applicants.

Earlier this year, in an indication that the court was preparing to back them, it demanded that the attorney-general explain why the vetting committees should continue.

"There is little doubt that many residents of Misgav are panicking about the court case," said Ben Ari, who heads a small dissident group called Alternative Voice in the Galilee.

He added that Ron Shani, who was elected Misgav's mayor late last year, made opposition to the Zbeidats' bid to live in Rakafet a major platform in his campaign.

Shani defended the bylaw change last week to the Israeli media. "The council's position is that it is appropriate to strengthen the character of the community -- a community in which Zionist values and Jewish heritage stand at the heart of its way of life. We don't see this as racism in any way."

Ben Ari said: "There is a widely-held feeling in Misgav that changing the bylaws is a legitimate way for the Jewish minority in the Galilee to defend itself against an Arab and Islamic danger.

"The residents here are not right-wing types like Lieberman. They see themselves as liberals and in fact are made very uncomfortable by the Lieberman comparison."

A bill proposed by Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party that conditioned citizenship on declaring loyalty to a Jewish state was rejected by a ministerial committee last week. Lieberman campaigned in February's general election on a platform of "No loyalty, no citizenship."

Such views are widely held, according to polls. One in 2006 found that 68 percent of Israeli Jews would refuse to live next to an Arab and 46 percent would not allow an Arab to visit their home.

The bylaw, accepted by an overwhelming majority in Manof, stipulates that applicants must share "the values of the Zionist movement, Jewish heritage, settlement of the Land of Israel ... and observance of Jewish holidays."

It also proposes that local children be encouraged to join the Zionist youth movement and the Israeli army.

A similarly-worded proposal will come before another Misgav community, Yuvalim, later this month.

One resident opposed to the change, Arik Kirschenbaum, told the liberal Haaretz newspaper last week: "It suddenly seems as if we adopted bylaws from the settlements."

Residents of Manof have been quoted in the Israeli media decrying accusations of racism.

"It's unpleasant and even offensive to wake up one morning and find that you've turned into Lieberman," said Alon Mayer, pointing out that Yisrael Beiteinu won only 2.5 percent of Manof's vote in the February general election.

Several residents were reported to fear that living alongside Arabs might lead to ethnic tensions and sectarian violence.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Adalah legal rights group who is representing the Zbeidats, said: "There is nothing unique or special about the way of life in these communities to justify this kind of restriction on admission.

"Rather, the purpose of the selection system is to make sure 80 percent of the territory inside Israel is not accessible to Arabs, that the control of public resources stays exclusively in Jewish hands."

The Zbeidats' application was submitted after they were unable to find a building plot in Sakhnin. The town's young couples face increasing difficulties building homes after much of Sakhnin's land was turned over to Misgav's jurisdiction.

Sakhnin officials point out that its 25,000 inhabitants have only one-twentieth of the land available to the 20,000 residents of Misgav's 30 communities. An appeal by Sakhnin that it be awarded some of Misgav's land was rejected by a boundary commission in 2005.

Misgav promotes itself, in the words of its website, as a model of "ethnic pluralism" because it includes 5,000 Bedouin.

However, critics note that Misgav's Bedouin live in a handful of separate communities deprived of the land available to the Jewish communities.

The Bedouin inhabitants are generally denied basic services such as water and electricity, as well as schools and medical clinics. In one, Arab al-Naim, the inhabitants are forced to live in tin shacks because permanent structures are demolished by the state.

Last week, three members of the Israeli parliament introduced a bill stipulating that vetting committees should assess candidates' "suitability to the community's way of life and social fabric." The legislators said the bill would help in "maintaining the Zionist vision."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.