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Face to Face with Israeli Colonialism
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by Fouzi Slisli
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| The sacred heritage of humanity is being ransacked, the debris mingled with the bones and the flesh of the gentle inhabitants who guarded it for centuries. Those who survive the onslaught are still gasping for air and reaching for safety. |
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Although it has been weeks since I came back, the impact of my visit to Occupied Palestine is still strongly with me. We traveled across the West Bank and visited with prominent human-rights organizations, met activists, politicians, and families of martyrs and prisoners, and enjoyed the generous hospitality of the Palestinians. In spite of the fact that I was intimately familiar with the colonization of Palestine and its history, nothing prepared me for what I saw there and which can only be described as a form of organized Israeli vandalism.
The scars and fresh debris of this vandalism that crushes a human heritage with the bones and the flesh of the inhabitants are shockingly evident everywhere in Palestine: from the hundreds of villages, like Deir Yassine, that were destroyed only so the Palestinians could not return to them, to refugee camps like Jenin that were gouged out with bulldozers the size of multi-story buildings. In the camp of Jenin, we visited two families. The first welcomed us in their living room where the shape of a massive hole, the size of a cruise missile fired at them during the invasion of 2002, is still clearly visible as a threatening reminder to this gentle family. The second family we visited witnessed Israeli soldiers incinerate Dr. Khalil Suleiman with a rocket-propelled grenade outside their front door during the same invasion. The rocket hit Dr. Suleiman, head of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society Emergency Service, in the front seat of his ambulance. He was taking a detour to reach badly-wounded residents. The Israelis had warned him to stay away, but he was not someone who could hear his friends and neighbors scream for help and not do something about it. Dr. Suleiman is remembered fondly in the camp and the hospital is now named after him.
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A Palestinian farmer in the village of Dora, with centuries-old olive trees, his livelihood, destroyed by Israel. Photo by Fouzi Slisli. |
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In al-Ain refugee camp in Nablus, we saw a four-story house shockingly gouged out, the marks of the giant bulldozer teeth still visible in what is left standing of the structure, iron bars with big blocks still dangling over the camp’s busy alleyways. The residents of al-Ain camp are prohibited from cleaning up or rebuilding this vandalized building. One of the families who had lived in it welcomed us in an apartment they now rent on the other side of the camp. Even here, the walls and the front door were riddled with bullet holes.
In Shaykh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, we found families who had been thrown out of their homes in West Jerusalem or inside Israel in 1948. The U.N. and the Jordanian authorities gave them homes, at the time, in Shaykh Jarrah, and in return the families gave up their refugee status. Over the last 12 months, 27 of these families have been thrown in the street again by the Israeli authorities. An organization representing the Sephardic community has been submitting bogus titles to these homes. Israeli courts are rubber-stamping the expulsion orders, and swat teams in full combat gear come at 4 a.m. to drag the Palestinians from their beds and throw them in the street. The settlers’ van usually comes behind the army’s convoy, and they immediately move in under state protection. The morning we were there, the Hanoun family had just been evicted. We found them sitting in chairs across the street from their house watching the settlers making themselves at home in it. They decided to camp there in the street in protest, their mattresses and belongings piled up against the wall. Outside the house the pavement was cordoned off and an Israeli army jeep was parked there to protect the thieves and their loot.
Lawyers and activists actually managed to locate the ownership documents of these properties in Ottoman archives in Turkey. They prove unequivocally that the properties are Palestinian owned, but the Israeli courts refuse to reopen the case. These families also have genuine ownership documents to their homes in West Jerusalem and inside Israel, but the courts of Israel were obviously not made to enforce genuine ownership rights.
In the village of Bil’in where the Israeli Supreme Court ruled—in one of its rare moments of fairness—that the Apartheid Wall was built illegally on Palestinian land, no order of demolition was ever issued. For four years, the residents of Bil’in and their international supporters stage a peaceful demonstration every Friday after prayers. Every week, their non-violent protest is met with Israeli tear gas, stench bombs, beatings and mass arrests. We tasted the Israeli gas ourselves when we visited Bil’in and took part in the demonstration. As the weekly protest became better organized and more imaginative, Occupation Forces started terrorizing the residents with frightening nightly raids.
We witnessed similar war crimes in a small village outside al-Khalil (Hebron), where two settlement blocks and the Wall, reduced this village’s land from 56 000 dunams to 7, 000. While the settlements are surrounded with lush agricultural fields, the Palestinians had no water or electricity. And just behind the village, one settler simply parked an RV on these people’s land and started living there cultivating it. He shoots at any one who gets close to the area he appropriated for himself.
In the Old City of Hebron, we found a clearly traumatized community subjected to the whimsical cruelty of 400 settlers, half of who don’t even live there, they just commute there every day. To protect the settlers, between 3 and 10 000 Israeli soldiers are deployed throughout the city. The ancient market of Hebron, a vibrant place for thousands of years, is almost dead today. The small section of shops that is still open has settlers living in the apartments above it. From there, the settlers cruelly torment the Palestinians, throwing on them rocks, urine, excrements, firebombs, food leftovers and trash. Every street corner has a camera, but they are all pointed at the Palestinians, not the colonists. On top of confiscated Palestinian homes, ugly and threatening military posts in a state of combat readiness enforce this cruel and ugly Apartheid. The landscape of this peaceful ancient town looks deformed and its gentle residents are clearly traumatized but they remain admirably dignified and incredibly generous, but also defiant.
In Selwan and al-Bustan neighborhoods, which stretch outside the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem in the shadow of al-Aqsa Mosque, we saw another illustration of Israeli vandalism and fraud. Here, 88 buildings housing 1500 residents are at this very moment under threats of demolition. Occupation authorities say the neighborhood sits on a park of King David that is described in the Bible. “The King’s valley,” a statement of the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem pompously said, should not be a residential area. It should be “an open public space.” A settler organization called Elad, the Jerusalem Municipality, Israel’s National Parks Authority, the Israel Land Administration, and the Jerusalem Police are all in on this fraud. Selwan is already dotted with a dozen settler homes whose Palestinian owners have been thrown out. You can spot these looted homes from a distance with their visible watchtowers, wall-size Israeli flags and armed guards. Occupation authorities are also digging a tunnel from Selwan to al-Aqsa compound.
The media gives you the impression that there are some unruly fanatic settlers that Israel is finding it difficult to control. The reality is different. As Israeli activist Orly Noy puts it, “the state and municipal authorities, the government ministries, the officials, the jurists, the police, are all directly and actively involved in a ceaseless campaign to get as many houses and as much land out of Palestinian hands, to let settlers become established by all kinds of shady legal tricks, to let them keep possession, protected by police and a private army of security guards paid by the state, to give into their hands enormous public properties such as the so-called “City of David National Park” in Silwan village. It is not private enterprise, it is very much a state enterprise run by the government of Israel.” (in Gush Shalom, “Jerusalem of Gold—and of Human Rights,” (09/10/09)
If targeting civilian centers with indiscriminate violence and destruction is a war crime, what does one call the crime of preventing the survivors from rebuilding their shattered lives and their vandalized homes? What does one call the crime of preventing victims of trauma from ever finding a safe ground? For over sixty years, the victims of Israeli vandalism have seen no respite. The land of Palestine is being turned upside down in an arrogant orgy of destruction. The sacred heritage of humanity is being ransacked, the debris mingled up with the bones and the flesh of the gentle inhabitants who guarded it for centuries. Those who survive the onslaught are still gasping for air and reaching for safety. Imagine for a moment if survivors of Auschwitz or Buchenwald were still being chased and tormented today by their Nazi oppressors? How much more criminal and genocidal would that be?
Some might wobble in trying to answer these questions, but Israel’s intentions and record are clear. I came convinced from this trip that Israel has no intentions of allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state or allowing the Palestinians to exist as equal citizens on their land. From Ben Gurion to Netanyahu, Zionist leaders openly say they will take the land “house by house and goat by goat.” They might pace the killing and destruction to lessen the impact on international public opinion, but they are clearly aiming for total control of all Palestine and the direct or indirect expulsion of the majority of the Palestinians. It is time for all those who believe in the equality of all people to move beyond the stage of condemnation into the stage of action. This is especially true for those of us in the United States because we fund this horrible genocide with our tax dollars. The Palestinian society has appealed to all peace loving people around the world to endorse their campaign of divestment, boycott and sanctions on Israel. Let us heed the call and boycott Israeli products and all companies who invest in the Israeli colonial machine directly or indirectly. More information online.
Fouzi Slisli is an Assistant Professor at St Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota. His writings on the Islamic world appeared in Race and Class, Critique, and Journal of North African Studies. He can be reached at: fslisli@stcloudstate.edu. |
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© 2009 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete November 2009 Index - click here
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