An Israeli American explains why she will be among many boat passengers trying to break through Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

By Hagit Borer* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Hagit Borer

I am an Israeli Jewish American. I was born in Israel, and I grew up in a very different Jerusalem from the one today. The Jerusalem of my childhood was a smallish city of white-stone neighborhoods nestled in the elbows of hills. Near the center, next to the central post office, the road swerved sharply to the left because straight ahead stood a big wall, and on the other side of it was "them."

And then, on June 9, 1967, the wall came down. Elsewhere, Israeli troops were still fighting what came to be known as the Six-Day War, but on June 9, as a small crowd stood and watched, demolition crews brought down the barrier wall, and after it, all other buildings that had stood between my Jerusalem and the walls of the Old City, their Jerusalem. A few weeks later a wide road would lead from my Jerusalem to theirs, bearing the victors' name: Paratroopers Way.

A soldier helped me sneak into the Old City. Snipers were still at large and the city was closed to Israeli civilians. By the Western Wall, a myth to me until then, the Israeli army was already evicting Palestinian residents in the dead of night and demolishing all houses within 1,000 feet. Eventually, the area would turn into the huge open paved space it is today, a place where only last month, on Jerusalem Day, masses of Israeli youths chanted "Muhammad is dead" and "May your villages burn."

It is a different Jerusalem now. It is not their Jerusalem, for it has been taken from them. Every day the Palestinians of Jerusalem are further strangled by more incursions, by more "housing developments" to cut them off from other Palestinians. In Sheik Jarrah, a neighborhood built by Jordan in the 1950s to house refugees, Palestinian families recently have been evicted from their homes at gunpoint based on court-sanctioned documents purporting to show Jewish land ownership in the area dating back some 100 years. But no Palestinian proof of ownership within West Jerusalem has ever prevailed in Israeli courts. Talbieh, Katamon, Baca, until 1948 affluent Palestinian neighborhoods, are today almost exclusively Jewish, with no legal recourse for the Palestinians who recently raised families and lived their lives there.

In his speech on Jerusalem Day, Yitzhak Pindrus, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, assured a cheering crowd of the ongoing commitment to expanding the Jewish neighborhood of Shimon Hatzadik, as Sheik Jarrah has been renamed.

This is not my Jerusalem. The tens of thousands of jeering youths that swarmed through its streets on Jerusalem Day have taken the city from me as well. That they speak my native tongue is almost impossible for me to believe, for there is nothing about them or about the society that gave birth to them that I recognize.

Did we know in 1967, in 1948, that it would come to this? Some did. Some knew even then that a society built on conquest and dispossession would have to dehumanize the conquered in order to continue to dispossess and oppress them. A 1948 letter to the New York Times signed by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among others, foretells much of the future. Martin Buber did not spare David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, his perspective on the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948-49.

But too many others, including members of the U.S. Congress who recently cheered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are determined to not hold the Israeli government responsible or the Israeli-Jewish society culpable.

Let us note that some Israeli Jews do stand up and protest. There are soldiers who refuse to serve, journalists who highlight injustice, and human rights organizations, activist groups, information centers. In a sense, all of us seeking justice have been on a virtual boat to Gaza all these decades. We have been trying to break through the Israeli blockade, in its many incarnations. We wish to say to the Palestinians that, yes, there are people in Israel who know that any viable future for the Middle East must be based on a just peace - not the forced imposition spelled out by Netanyahu to Congress - or else we are all doomed. We want it known that the soldier is not the only face of Israeli Jews. There are those who say to the government of Israel, "You do not represent us." We say to the people of the United States in general and to American Jews in particular that yes, you do have an alternative. You can support peace. A true peace.

Hagit Borer moved from Israel to the United States to study in 1977. She became an American citizen in 1992 and is currently a professor of linguistics at USC.

This wall, adjacent to Abu Yassir's shelter is used by Shatila refugee camp tykes for playing ball and other games, unaware that some of their relatives and families' friends were among the hundreds butchered against 11 such "walls of death" 28 years ago, on September 16-18, 1982. Photo courtesy of the author

By Franklin Lamb* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The untreated psychic wounds are still open. Accountability, justice and basic civil rights for the survivors are still denied.

Scores of horror testimonies have been shared over the past nearly three decades by survivors of the September 1982 Sabra- Shatila massacre. More come to light only through circumstantial evidence because would be affiants perished during the slaughter. Other eyewitness are just beginning to emerge from deep trauma or self imposed silence.

Some testimonies will be shared this month by massacre survivors at Shatila camp. They will sit with the every growing numbers of international visitors who annually come to commemorate one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century.

There are no average massacre testimonies.

Zeina, a handsome bronzed-faced middle-aged woman, an acquaintance of Munir Mohammad's family, asked a foreigner the other day: "How can it be 28 years? I think it was just last fall that my husband Hussam and our two daughters, Maya, 8 years old, and Sirham, 9 years old, left our two room home to search for food because the Israeli army had sealed Shatila camp nearly two days before and few inside Shatila Camp had any. I still pray and wait for them to return."

In Shatila Palestinian refugee camp and outside Abu Yassir's shelter, the bullet marks still cover the lower half of the 11 "walls of death" where some of the dried blood is mixed and feathered in with the thin mortar. An elderly gentleman named Abu Samer still has some souvenirs of the event: three American automatic pistols fitted with silencers, a couple of knives and axes that were strapped to some of the killers belts as they quickly and silently shot, carved and chopped whoever they came upon starting at around 6 pm on Thursday September 16, 1982. Plus a couple of whisky bottles. These weapons were gifted to Israel by the US Congress and subsequently issued along with drugs and alcohol and other "policing equipment" to the killers in his "most moral army" by Ariel Sharon.

Earlier this year, one of the murderers from the Numour al-Ahrar (Tigers of the Liberals) militia, the armed wing of Lebanon's right-wing National Liberal Party founded by former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, nonchalantly confessed, "we sometimes used these implements in order to advance silently through the alleys of Shatila so as not to cause unnecessary panic during our work." The Tigers militia, one of five Christian killer units, was assisted inside Shatila by more than two dozen Israeli Mossad agents, and led in this blitz by none other than Dani Chamoun, son of the former President.

No plaque or sign notes what happened here.

The world learned of the slaughter at Sabra-Shatila on the morning of Sunday September 19, 1982. Photos, many now available on the Internet, taken by witnesses such as Ralph Shoneman, Mya Shone, Ryuichi Hirokawa, Ali Hasan Salman, Ramzi Hardar, Gunther Altenburg, and Gaza and Akka Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) Hospital staff, preserve the gruesome images deeply etched in the survivors memory. The Israeli Kahan Commission, five months later in its February 7, 1983 Report, substantially whitewashed Israeli responsibility referring more than once to the massacre as "a war."

Zeina ushered me down a narrow alley from her house arriving at the 3 by 8 meter wall outside her sister's home, spraying here and there with an aerosol can as we walked. She apologized for the spray but insisted that she and her neighbors could even now smell the slaughter that happened there three decades earlier.

For readers unfamiliar with the location of Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Beirut, this particular "wall of death" is located across from the PRCS Akka Hospital, such as it is, after years without adequate financial or NGO support. Locating the 11 "walls of death" requires help from the few older Palestinians who still live in this quarter. They are among those still living at the scene and who still vividly recall the details of the massacre. Some provide personal history of some of the butchered, seemingly urging the dead to return by making them seem so alive, often describing a personality trait and the name of their family village in Palestine.

"A sweet boy who adored his older brothers Mutid and Bilal."

Zeina recalls that Munir Mohammad was 12 years old on September 16, 1982, a pupil at the Shatila camp school, named Jalil (Galilee). Virtually all of the 75 remaining UNRWA schools in Lebanon, like other Palestinian institutions, are named after villages, towns or cities in occupied Palestine. Often they are named after villages that no longer actually exist, being among the 531 villages the Zionists colonizers obliterated during and after the 1947-48 Nakba (Catastrophe).

Zeina recalls that it was late on a Thursday afternoon, September 16, that the Israeli shelling had grown intense. Designed to drive the camp residents into the shelters, almost all of which Israeli intelligence, arriving the previous day in three white vehicles and posing as "concerned NGO staff" had identified and noted the coordinates on their maps. Some residents, thinking aid workers had come to help the refugees, actually revealed their secret sanctuaries. Other refugees, based on their experience in the crowded shelters during the preceding 75 days of indiscriminate, "Peace for Galilee" Israeli bombing of Shatila, suggested to the "aid workers" that the shelters needed better ventilation and perhaps the visitors would help provide it.

According to Zeina the Israeli agents quickly sketched the shelter locations, marked them with a red circle and returned to their HQ which was located less than 70 meters on the raised terrain at the SE corner of Shatila camp still known as Turf Club Yards. Today, this sandy area still contains three death pits which according to the late American journalist Janet Stevens is where some of the hundreds of still missing bodies of the more than 3,000 slaughtered are likely buried. Janet had theorized that there was a second Sabra-Shatila Massacre that occurred on Sunday morning, September 19th, which piggybacked the first and was conducted on the west side of Shatila inside the second Israeli-Phalange HQ, known as the Cite Sportiff athletic complex. As the Israeli soldiers took custody from the Phalange militia of the surviving refugees, trucks entered Cite Sportiff loaded with hundreds of camp residents on the back to be taken to "holding centers". Family members forced to wait outside heard volleys of gunfire and screams from inside the complex. Hours later the same flat beds drove away to unknown locations, tarps covering the unseen mounded cargo.

Camp resident, Mrs. Sana Mahmoud Sersawi, one of the 23 complainants in the Belgium case filed against Ariel Sharon on June 16, 2001, (currently but not fatally sidetracked) explained:

"The Israelis who were posted in front of the Kuwaiti embassy and at the Rihab benzene station at the entrance to Shatila demanded through loudspeakers that we come to them. That's how we found ourselves in their hands. They took us to the Cite Sportiff, and the men were marched behind us. But they took the men's shirts off and started blindfolding them. The Israelis interrogated the young people and the Phalange delivered about 200 more people to the Israelis. And that's how neither my husband nor my sister's husband ever came back."

Journalist Robert Fisk and others who studied these events, concur that more slaughter was done during the 24 hour period after 8 a.m. Saturday, the hour the Israeli Kahan Commission, which declined to interview any Palestinians, ruled that the Israelis had stopped all the killing.

Eyewitness testimony also established that the "aid workers" described by Zeina passed the shelter descriptions and locations to Lebanese Forces operatives Elie Hobeika and Fadi Frem, and their ally, Major Saad Haddad of the Israeli-allied South Lebanese Army. Thursday evening, Hobeika, de facto commander since the assassination the week previously of Phalange leader and President-elect Bachir Gemayel, led one of the death squads inside the killing field of the Horst Tabet area near Abu Yassir's shelter.

It was in 8 of the 11 Israeli-located and marked shelters that the first of the massacre victims were quickly and methodically slaughtered. There being few perfect crimes, even in massacres, the killers failed to find 3 of the shelters. One of the overlooked shelters was just 25 meters from Abu Yassir's shelter. Apart from these three undiscovered hiding places there were practically no Shatila shelter survivors.

American journalist David Lamb wrote about this first night of butchery and the "walls of death":

"Entire families were slain. Groups consisting of 10-20 people were lined up against walls and sprayed with bullets. Mothers died while clutching their babies. All men appeared to be shot in the back. Five youths of fighting age were tied to a pickup truck and dragged through the streets before being shot."

At around about 8 p.m. on September 18 Munir Mohammad entered the crowded Abu Yassir shelter with his mother Aida and his sisters and brothers Iman, Fadya, Mufid and Mu'in. Keeping the relatively few camp shelters for the woman and children while the men took their chances outside was a common practice as the massacre unfolded. But a few men did enter to help calm their young children.

"If any of you are injured, we'll take you to the hospital."

Munir later recalled events that night: "The killers arrived at the door of the shelter and yelled for everyone to come out. Men who they found were lined up against the wall outside. They were immediately machine gunned." As Munir watched, the killers left to kill other groups and then suddenly returned and opened fire on everyone, and all fell to the ground. Munir lay quietly not knowing if his mother and sisters were dead. Then he heard the killers yelling: "If any of you are injured, we'll take you to the hospital. Don't worry. Get up and you'll see." A few did try to get up or moaned and they were instantly shot in the head.

Munir remembered: "Even though it was light out due to the Israeli flares over Shatila, the killers used bright flash lights to search the darkened corners. The killers were looking in the shadows". Suddenly Munir's mother's body seemed to shift in the mound of corpses next to him. Munir thought she might be going to get up since the killers promised to take anyone still alive to the hospital. Munir whispered to her: "Don't get up mother, they're lying". And Munir stayed motionless all night barely daring to breath, pretending to be dead.

Munir could not block out the killers words. Years later he would repeat to this interviewer as we passed the Shatila Burial ground known as Martyrs Square:

"After they shot us, we were all down on the ground, and they were going back and forth, and they were saying: 'If any of you are still alive, we'll have mercy and pity and take them to the hospital. Come on, you can tell us.' If anyone moaned, or believed them and said they needed an ambulance, they would be rescued with shots and finished off there and then...What really disturbed me wasn't just the death all around me. I...didn't know whether my mother and sisters and brother had died. I knew most of the people around me had died. And it's true I was afraid of dying myself. But what disturbed me so very much was that they were laughing, getting drunk and enjoying themselves all night long. They threw blankets on us and left us there till morning. All night long [Thursday the 16th) I could hear the voices of the girls crying and screaming, 'For god's sake, leave us alone.' I mean...I can't remember how many girls they raped. The girl' voice, with their fear and pain, I can't ever forget them."

The same kind of dégagé is displayed by the half dozen confessed militia murderers featured in German director Monika Borgmann's 2005 film Massaker, one of whom opined: "With hanging or shooting you just die, but this is double," explaining how he took an old Palestinian man and held him back against a wall, slicing him open in the shape of a cross. "You die twice since you also die from the fear," he said nonchalantly describing white flesh and bone as if in a charcuterie waiting to be served.

The killers also explained how they began a frantic rush to dispose of as many bodies as possible before the media entered Shatila. One testified how the Israeli army gave them large plastic trash bags to dispose of bodies. Another confessed that they forced people into army trucks to ferry them to Cite Sportiff where they were killed. And that they used chemicals to destroy many of the corpses. Several mentioned that Israeli army officers conferred with the militia's leaders in Beirut on the eve of the massacres.

The venomous hatred persists to this day.

To this day, the Hurras al-Arz (Guardians of the Cedars) boasts of its role in the carnage. Less than two weeks before the massacre the party issued a call for the confiscation of all Palestinian property in Lebanon, the outlawing of home ownership and the destruction of all refugee camps.

The party statement of September 1, 1982 declared: "Action must be taken to reduce the numbers of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, until the day comes when no single Palestinian remains on our soil."

In 1982 certain political parties referred to Palestinians as "a bacillus which must be exterminated" and graffiti on walls read: "The duty of every Lebanese is to kill a Palestinian"--the same hatred commonly expressed today in occupied Palestine among colonists, extremist Rabbis and politicians.

The 'Guardians' call for outlawing Palestinian refugee property ownership was indeed achieved in 2001 by a law drafted by current Minister of Labor, who pledged on September 1, 2010 that "Parliament will never allow Palestinian refugees the right to own property."

The mentality that allowed the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila 1982 is largely unchanged in 2010, as Lebanon still resists the call of the international community to grant the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila massacre basic civil rights. Some who have studied the Arabic websites and observed gatherings of the political parties represented at the 1982 massacre, claim the hate language is actually worse today and is being used to stir up Parliamentary opposition Palestinian civil rights.

During the month following the 1982 Massacre, British Dr. Paul Morris treated Munir at Gaza Hospital approximately one kilometer north of Abu Yassir's shelter, and kept the youngster under observation. Dr. Morris reported to researcher Bayan Nuwayhed al Hout (Sabra and Shatila: September 1982, Pluto Press, London, 2004) that Munir "Will smile once in a while, but he doesn't react spontaneously like others of this age, except just occasionally." Then the doctor banged on the table, and said: 'The lad has to be saved. He has to leave the camp, if only for a while, to recover himself."

When Munir was asked by al Hout if one day when he grew up and would be able to carry a weapon would he consider revenge. The pre-teen replied, replied: "No, No. I'd never think of revenge by killing children. The way they killed us. What did the children do wrong?"

Munir's 15 year old brother Mufid was among the first to enter Abu Yassir's shelter, but he left and later appeared at Akka Hoppital with a gunshot wound. After being bandaged he left the hospital to seek safety and his family. No one has seen him since and for a long time Munir could not even mention him.

According to camp residents, Munir's older brother, Nabil, then 19 years old, being of fighting age would have been shot on sight by the killers. Aware of this, Nabil's cousin and his cousin's wife fled with him as the Israeli shelling increased and camp residents reported indiscriminate killing. The trio dodged sniper bullets to seek refuge in a nursing home where his aunt worked. Like Munir, Nabil soon learned that his mother and siblings were all dead.

Postscript

Now in America, both Munir and Nabil are leading relatively 'normal lives' considering the horror and lost family they experienced while escaping death at Sabra-Shatila. Munir and Nabil have become a credit to Shatila camp, to Palestine and to their adopted country. Residing in the Washington DC area, Munir is married and busy with his career. Nabil is devoting his life to advocacy for peace and justice in the Middle East, working with an NGO. Both brothers return to Shatila camp regularly.

Also apparently living 'normal lives' are the six "Christian" militia killers featured in Borgmann's film Massaker. "They are all living ordinary lives. One of them is a taxi driver," Borgmann explains.

As is well known, the massacres at Sabra-Shatila were undeniable war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Each killing was a violation of international laws enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention, International Customary Law and jus cogens. Similar massive crimes have seen charges brought against Rwandan officials, Chile's ex-president, General Augusto Pinochet, Chad's former president, Hissein Habre, former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Liberia's Taylor and Sudan's Bachir.

No one has been punished or even investigated for the Sabra-Shatila massacre. On March 28, 1991 Lebanon's Parliament retroactively exempted the killers from criminal responsibility. However, this law has no standing in international law and the international community remains legally obligated to punish those responsible. The victims and their families of the Sabra-Shatila massacre as well as virtually all human rights organizations including but not limited to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Humanitarian Law Project, strenuously oppose blanket amnesty for the killers. They argue that the 1991 violates Lebanon's constitution, as well as international law and promotes impunity for heinous crimes.

It was precisely to achieve justice for the victims of crimes such as Sabra-Shatila that the International Criminal Court was established. The ICC must begin its work without further delay and all people of goodwill must encourage Lebanon to grant the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre basic civil rights.

* Franklin Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Beirut-Washington DC, Board Member of The Sabra Shatila Foundation, and a volunteer with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Lebanon. He is the author of The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel's Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon and is doing research in Lebanon for his next book. He can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com

By Stephen Lendman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Each year, PCHR publishes its annual report on Occupied Palestine, this year's a detailed 250 page (PDF file) review of the past year, including the first days of Israel's war on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, "the major issue in the record of human rights and international humanitarian law violations in the Occupied Palestinian Terrority (OPT) in 2009," the bloodiest since the 1948 Nakba that stole a nation from its people.

Today, 1.5 million Gazans struggle to rebuild their lives, "in spite of sustaining permanent disabilities, losing loved ones or becoming homeless" after war under siege - collective punishment in violation of international law, and fundamental human rights, including free movement of persons and goods, proper shelter, adequate health care and education, and the right to rebuild homes and other structures destroyed by the war's onslaught.

Israel's settlement expansion, Separation Wall, and control matrix exacerbates West Bank conditions, "turning Palestinian communities into (isolated) Bantustans." In addition, efforts continue to consolidate and illegally annex East Jerusalem by dispossessing its residents, en route to making the entire city exclusively Jewish, unheard of in the modern era, especially by a so-called civilized state, in fact, barbarian and brutish while touting its democratic credentials and victimhood, more evidence of a scoundrel caught red-handed.

PCHR stresses the horrific human rights violations and deterioration throughout the year, intensified since Hamas' January 2006 election, including:

• willful killings and violations of the right to life;
• collective punishment policies represented by a tightened closure and severe restrictions on the right to freedom of movement;
• detention and torture of Palestinians (official Israeli policy);
• continued settlement activities and attacks by Israeli settlers; and
• continued construction of the Annexation Wall inside the West Bank territory," on 12% of stolen Palestinian land.

Nonetheless, the international community doesn't enforce their international law obligation to stop human rights violations and hold those responsible accountable. As such, they're complicit, guilty through silence and failure to act.

Worse still, the West and colluding Arab states participate in Gaza's isolation by financially boycotting, and bogusly criminalizing, its legitimate government, democratically elected, in support of Mahmoud Abbas' coup d'etat regime, Fatah in the West Bank, soundly defeated in the January 2006 election.

Innocent victims are punished, reeling under 43 years of occupation, an unprecedented international betrayal.

Occupation Force Crimes

Numerous ones occur daily, explained in weekly PCHR updates, like its June 17 - 23 one covering:

• peaceful Gaza and West Bank protestors attacked, injuring three civilians (including a child) in Bal'ein village, west of Ramallah;
• dozens more harmed by tear gas inhalation;
• three journalists assaulted in Beit Jala;
• 10 civilians, including three human rights workers, a journalist and five medical volunteers arrested;
• four Gazan farmers and workers, including two children, shot and wounded in their fields;
• 43 civilians, including five children, arrested in 16 West Bank incursions and three others in Gaza;
• the suffocating Gaza siege continues unabated;
• the West Bank and East Jerusalem remain locked down by a control matrix of about 630 checkpoints and 60 - 80 "flying" ones, including in and around Jerusalem, severely restricting access to and throughout the city; and
• ruthless ethnic cleansing continues, stealing land and bulldozing homes for settlement expansions and other Jews only projects.

When completed, the Separation Wall (half finished) will stretch 724 kilometers (on 12% of stolen Palestinian land), encircling the West Bank, further isolating the population. Civilians protesting against it nonviolently are systematically assaulted, tear gassed, fired on, injured and arrested.

In addition, two-thirds of the main roads are closed or controlled by security forces. Further, one-third of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is inaccessible to anyone without a (very hard to get) permit, that if obtained takes months and must be renewed - measures to make life in Occupied Palestine oppressive, punishing, and impossible, including random searches on streets and in private homes, some followed by arrests and imprisonment.

Numbers of Dead and Wounded in 2009

Forty-three years of occupation have taken an unprecedented toll. In 2009 alone, it included:

• 1,092 killed, including 831 civilians, the others resistance fighters;
• civilian victims included 305 children and 101 women, targeted the same as men; civilians attacked like freedom fighters;
• 1,066 were killed in Gaza, 97% of the total;
• the war's toll killed 1,419 Palestinians and wounded another 5,200, many severely from loss of limbs, brain damage, or other extreme injuries;
• from September 2000 (the start of the second Intifada) through December 2009, 6,520 Palestinians were killed, including 4,955 civilians, tens of thousands more wounded;
• after the January 18, 2010 ceasefire, the IDF killed 47 Palestinians, including 26 civilians, seven of them children; 12 civilians were killed by Israeli snipers in Gaza buffer zones, gunned down in cold blood; five others died when tunnels were bombed;
• in the West Bank, Israeli forces killed 18 Palestinians, including 15 civilians, six of them children; Israeli settlers killed three more, including two children;
• all of them posed no threat, including participants in nonviolent protests against the Separation Wall, land confiscations or home demolitions; nonetheless, Israeli forces murdered them in cold blood, claiming self-defense, the usual bogus pretext.

PCHR investigations confirmed that Israel "used excessive and disproportionate force against Palestinian civilians, who are recognized as protected persons under international humanitarian law" - what Israel doesn't acknowldege or the principles of distinction and proportionality.

Evidence clearly shows that Israeli forces repeatedly used (and continue to use) excessive and disproportionate force against nonviolent Palestinian civilians, in violation of international law.

They posed no threat, yet were killed when their homes, other buildings, factories, or vehicles were bombed. Some were extrajudicially executed, others when their communities were invaded - in all cases, crimes of war and against humanity.

Throughout 2009, Israel tightened closure on the West Bank, and imprisoned Gazans under siege, denying them enough food, medicines, fuel, electricity, and other common essentials - exacerbating a worsening humanitarian crisis, suffocating 1.5 million people, and paralyzing the economy.

"The members of the international community, especially the High Contracting Parties to (Fourth Geneva) have shamefully failed to take the action necessary to ensure" this stops and to hold Israel accountable. Instead, they've been complicit in the worst of its crimes, and share equal guilt, especially America, Israel's paymaster/partner.

Israeli forces also prevent Palestinian civilians from entering Israel or going abroad for medical care, other emergencies, education, or their right of free movement - denied throughout Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians are imprisoned on their own land in their own country by a hostile occupier, there illegally.

Throughout 2009, the humanitarian crisis worsened, the result of:

• 40% unemployment, over 55% in Gaza where poverty exceeds 80%, affecting 1.2 million people;
• since September 2000, incomes have steadily decreased, down 45% at yearend 2009; and
• national output dropped sharply in all sectors, especially in Gaza.

Other Imposed Harshness

In December 2009, at least 9,381 Palestinians were imprisoned, including 310 children and 34 women, mostly inside Israel - a clear international law violation under Fourth Geneva's Article 76 stating:

"Protected persons accused of offences (sic) shall be detained in the occupied country, and if convicted they shall serve their sentences therein."

They must also be afforded proper food, hygiene, medical, and other essentials, including spiritual assistance. In addition, minors must be given special care, and women must be confined in separate quarters under female supervision. Israel, however, has male guards in women's prisons and treats children the same as adults, besides violating other international laws regarding the treatment of prisoners.

Israeli forces disregard them as well commit regular assaults, other incursions, and arrests during house raids, especially in West Bank villages and refugee camps. Also at checkpoints, roadblocks and during nonviolent demonstrations.

Throughout 2009, security forces arrested about 5,000 Palestinians, including 1,000 in Gaza, mostly civilian men, women and children, all treated horrifically, included elected officials, imprisoned for belonging to the wrong parties and wanting Palestine to be free.

At yearend 2009, 26 PLC members were incarcerated, most from the Change and Reform bloc, affiliated with Hamas. Another was speaker Dr. 'Aziz al-Dweik, now released. However, civil activists are detained for defending human rights, they like others treated harshly, most of them tortured like other Palestinian prisoners. Others are kept in solitary confinement for prolonged periods.

Testimonies confirm prison horror stories, including physical and mental torture, exposure to extreme heat or cold, starvation, sleep deprivation, beatings, pressure to collaborate in exchange for release, (in some cases, threatened harm to family members if refuse), and/or forced confessions in Hebrew, not Arabic, for crimes they didn't commit.

During Cast Lead, Israel "wantonly and extensively destroyed Palestinian civilian property, including homes, agricultural lands, as well as health, educational, religious and economic facilities," all in violation of international law. As a result, about 450,000 Gazans evacuated their homes for safer locations, "causing many to recall scenes of the forced mass migration" during 1948, what those who endured it can't forget, nor their children who know the toll on their parents, why the event is called the Nakba, the catastrophe, affecting the entire population.

Cast Lead's toll was horrific by any standard, PCHR documenting:

• 2,116 totally destroyed homes, containing 2,881 housing units for 3,253 families and 18,750 individuals;
• another 3,277 houses with 4,925 housing units for 5,483 families and 32,703 individuals rendered uninhabitable, their damage so extensive;
• 16,000 others were partly damaged;
• in total, 51,453 civilians lost their homes, victimized by illegal bombings or shellings; and
• in the West Bank, Israel demolished 134 houses, including 83 in East Jerusalem; another 23 Palestinian civilians were forced to destroy their own homes and pay the cost.

Today under the extremist Netanyahu government, conditions are worse than ever. Besides daily repression, settlement construction continues, the Municipality of Jerusalem and Israeli ministries taking bids for 3,400 housing units on occupied Palestinian land, ordering homes demolished and thousands of donums of land confiscated for them.

Complicit with Israeli security forces, the judiciary legitimizes occupation policies, Israel's High Court, for example, rejecting Palestinian petitions against the expropriation of their land for settlement construction and the Separation Wall. Rarely ever does the court order its route changed. Even then, it seldom happens.

Illegal construction imposed new hardships, including farmers denied access to their land beyond the Wall without hard to obtain permits to reach it. Yet to get them, they must be registered owners, nearly impossible due to land registry complications because earlier ownership was under deceased persons' names. In addition, registries haven't been updated, and some heirs don't live in the West Bank.

Other hardships include:

• new movement restrictions for Palestinians living near the Wall's route, not just affecting farmers; and
• access to medical care, education, and relatives is impacted, plus restricted hours to move through gates at the Wall, "operated under a strict security system," often closing for no apparent reason, and even when open, onerous to pass through.

A Nation and Occupation Repressively Persecuting Non-Jews

For Palestinians, Israel's legal system is nightmarish, the chance for impartial investigations impossible, in violation of international standards. They require those responsible for crimes be punished, victims afforded redress, and justice to be blind to race, religion or ethnicity.

Under military occupation and for Israeli Arabs, the system is fundamentally flawed and unfair, under laws affording justice solely to Jews. As a result, PCHR and other human rights organizations pursue universal jurisdiction (UJ) remedies, a legal principle empowering courts in other countries to indict, prosecute and convict persons guilty of international crimes, no matter where they occurred.

Nonetheless, winning judgments against Israeli officials is daunting, not accomplished so far, politics and national alliances superseding the rule of law - what no longer can be tolerated at the expense of victims' rights.

The UN Fact Finding Mission conducted extensive investigations into Israel's Gaza war, as well as West Bank and East Jerusalem attacks, confirming gross international law violations - crimes of war and against humanity.

Yet over Q 4 2009, "persistent efforts were made to undermine" reports from the UN Human Rights Council, General Assembly and Security Council, again, Palestinians denied their rights.

As a result, on October 16, 2009, at the urging of the Palestinian leadership, the UN Human Rights Council (at its 12th Special Session) issued a Resolution condemning illegal Israeli acts, especially annexing East Jerusalem lands. It also endorsed the Goldstone Commission's conclusions and recommendations - a first step toward justice, so far not achieved.

Israel's harshness continues. A subservient Mahmound Abbas issues presidential decrees without presenting them to the PLC or involving the legitimate Hamas government.

Though released from detention in June 2009, PLC Speaker, Dr. 'Aziz al-Dwaik, is prevented from even entering his Ramallah office by presidential decree, an illegitimate act by a coup d'etat president.

The split between West Bank and Gaza is untenable, the result of Israel targeting Hamas, bogusly calling it a terrorist organization, Abbas its servile tool obeying orders and being rewarded with White House visits and photo-ops, the benefits for betraying his people, including remaining president long after his term expired and not calling new elections.

Life in Occupied Palestine remains grim, Israeli imposed viciousness creating enormous hardships for millions of victimized Palestinians, ongoing for 62 years, 43 under occupation brutishness - illegal, unjustifiable, and unconscionable by a so-called civilized state, in fact, run by hooligans, war criminals, respecting might alone over right, what grassroots activism no longer can tolerate nor should anyone of conscience anywhere.

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

Illustration by David Dees

By Mohamed Khodr* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
--Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize Speech, 1986

Dear Mr. President Barack Obama:

Again, congratulations on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Hundreds of Millions of people around the world hoped and prayed that this prize will give you the courage, motivation, and strong will to bring peace to the world, most especially in Palestine.

But Israel in its humiliating defiant "slap and insult" to you and your government's stated policy to freeze settlement construction, even temporarily, continues unabated to build more illegal settlements, demolishing more Palestinian homes, expelling Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, continuing its inhumane siege of Gaza, now for 3 years, continuing to build the Apartheid Wall that annexes more Palestinian land; steals water from Palestinians, and allowing daily settler violence against Palestinian civilians including children; all with total impunity knowing that our government always "caves" in to the assault by Israel's powerful lobbies such as AIPAC with support from an AIPAC compliant Congress and a media that portrays Israel as infallible. Former Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) upon leaving the Senate noted: "You can't have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here."

Your wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing daily civilian deaths with no end in sight. Iraq is still occupied by our military and mercenaries and when we allegedly leave we would've established permanent military bases to ensure oil and contain Iran. You're blind adoption of Israel's demand to bomb Iran is a repeat of the same lies and media hysteria that pushed us into devastating Iraq.

But first I feel compelled for the record to inform you that I am a SEMITE while Elie Wiesel and the rest of the American Jewish community are not.

It is you Mr. President who's been disrespectfully called an "Anti Semite" by Hagai Ben-Artzi, Netanyahu's brother in law.

Sir, If the U.S., the most powerful nation on earth can easily be "slapped" and "insulted" and still remain politically paralyzed to respond and deal with a small nation who's very founding and support is due to this nation, do you then expect the Palestinians to have any say in their future or for that matter Arab leaders who's regimes are dependent on our protection?

What conceivable concessions can the Palestinians offer Israel except to voluntarily leave their remaining land, a mere 12% of their previous homeland.

You began your presidency with some chutzpah in dealing with Israel but like all previous Presidents you've retracted any semblance of courage in dealing with the Israeli Palestinian issue or facing down Israel, the little nation that could.

You've gone out of your way to appease the Jewish community, having lunch with Elie Wiesel (imagine a U.S. President meeting with one Jew to comfort his concern about Jerusalem, ignoring Christian and Muslim concerns), sending Clinton to comfort the American Jewish Community on Israel while joining the Zionist call of the wild to attack Iran, forcing General Petreus to withdraw his remarks that link the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a direct threat to the lives of our military men and women in the Muslim world, and your repetitive reassurance to Israel that their "security" is sacrosanct while it is the brutal military aggressor, occupier and dictator of millions of Palestinians. Mr. President, what about the security of Palestinians who are killed on a daily basis either by Israeli troops or terrorist settlers? You've been unable to convince Israel to even allow meager food, water, and medicines into besieged Gaza.

On May 10 you announced your nomination of Elena Kagan as the third Jewish American to the Supreme Court, if confirmed, making the Jewish constitution of the Supreme Court to be one third although they only make up 1.7% of the U.S. population. The Supreme Court has no Protestant Justice despite their constituting the largest percentage of the U.S. population. I am confident that this appointment of a lawyer with no judicial experience is just another appeasement to the Jewish community to comfort their concern about your Israeli policy and to keep their money flowing to the Democratic Party. They needn't worry. No politician at any level in America dares to speak out against Israel if he/she seeks office. It's a death sentence.

The entire world wants Israel to end its illegal Occupation as per hundreds of U.N. Resolutions but your administration is adopting the hypocritical position that it's Iran, not Israel, that is in violation of Security Council Resolutions.

Israel and its supporters have brilliantly succeeded in inflaming one Arab/Muslim nation after another to divert the world's attention from its murderous regime in the Occupied Territories. First it was Egypt, then Libya, Lebanon, Syria, then Iraq, Darfur, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Does anyone remember Darfur after years of hysterical obsession by our politicians and media? The media has passed on to Israel's diversion du jour, Iran, deliberately not reporting that a peace agreement has been reached between the Sudanese government and the militias in Darfur.

As Ariel Sharon said: "The Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches."

What incredible manifestation of Jewish power exists then that one Jew, Elie Wiesel, is able to convene a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, accompanied by the hapless George Clooney, to discuss the situation in Darfur. No other ethnic American could convene the Security Council on any other issue.

Our government has been Israel's poodle and patsy since 1948. Pity the American people whose consumer obsession and disinterest in governmental affairs, except along party or single issue lines, has created a void in Washington D.C. that is filled by powerful Corporate and foreign interests.

Mr. President, your Cairo words now run hollow, your courage is wanting, thus peace in the Holy Land is once again dead until the next President picks up the mantle of a "peace process" knowing he too shall fail.

Again in our capitol Wall Street comes before Main Street and our national interest is subservient to Israel's interest. Our citizens continue to pay hundreds of billions of dollars of their hard earned tax dollars during periods of ballooning deficits to a rich nation, Israel, while our young men and women in the military die for a forced "passionate attachment" to a foreign nation.

With all due respect Mr. President, the love and enthusiasm you received in Denver upon your election is slipping wide and fast. How ironic, how tragic, that a black President ignores what it means to be enslaved by white European colonial powers.

The persecuted Jews of Europe are now the brutal persecutors in Palestine with our money, weapons, and vetoes.

For 62 years Israel has foiled and sabotaged every American, U.N., and International peace initiative as it strives for a "Greater Israel", an Israel without Arab Christians and Muslims. The followers of Jesus Christ have been intimidated into silence about the brutality and ethnic cleansing of their Christian brethren in the Holy Land

Mr. President, under Jewish influence, you and Congress immediately rejected the much respected and accepted Goldstone report on Israel's "war crimes" in Gaza without even reading its content and evidence. That's power that no American person or group can ever dream of achieving.

How hypocritical and ironic that Netanyahu at the U.N. General Assembly chastised the world for its "silence" on Iran's nuclear program with these words: "Have you no shame, have you no decency?" Where is Israel's shame and decency in its commission of "war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide" against millions of Palestinians made refugees in their own homeland.

"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country ... There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it is simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army"
--David Ben Gurion, in Nahum Goldman, 'The Jewish Paradox', translated by Steve Cox, 1978

How will your conscience, Mr. President, answer God when your held accountable for failing to use America's power and might to bring peace to the Holy Land choosing instead to appease a small minority of Jewish Americans whose policies run counter to the majority of Jewish Americans who want a two state solution, simply to keep your power, rain in Jewish millions, and through shameful appeasement seek their support for a second term. Like every American politician you've sold your soul to kosher dollars and thus the legacy of your memory and soul will join the tragic dustbin of failed men in the annals of humanity. .

I am confident that your administration's feigned work for peace will again be blown in the wind of history.

With due respect, I remain

* Mohamed Khodr is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

Message by Desmond Tutu on behalf of The Elders On the Occasion of the Fifth Annual Bil'in Conference on Popular Resistance.

Dear Friends,

On behalf of the Elders, I send warm greetings to all of you attending the Bil'in Fifth Annual Conference on Popular Resistance. We are sorry that we could not be with you in person but we want you to know that we are very much with you in spirit.

During our visit to Bil'in last August, many of the Elders saw first-hand the incredible actions the residents of Bil'in - together with committed Israeli and international activists- are taking to resist the Wall and settlements. For five years now, you have continued your struggle against the de-facto annexation of more than 50 per cent of Bil'in's farmlands and the construction of the Wall that separates the village from the burgeoning Modi'in Illit settlement. The weekly non-violent demonstrations in Bil'in have become an international symbol of the Palestinian popular struggle against occupation and separation. And rightly so. Together with the progressive political actions employed in other villages in the West Bank, you are showing the world that ordinary people can help bring about positive change through non-violent resistance.

The Elders join you in celebrating the victory achieved at the Israeli High Court of Justice which has now resulted in the beginning stages of the Wall moving to its new location – a move that will return over 600,000 square metres to the village. While we welcome this important success, we recognize that the new wall will, however, continue to cut the village off from approximately 25 per cent of its land, on which the illegal Israeli settlement Modi'in Illit stands. Bil'in's popular struggle must continue until ALL of the village's land and its olive trees are returned to its people.

Efforts to stifle the demonstrations will not serve the cause of peace. The recent Israeli military order declaring a large area around the Wall in Bil'in a closed military zone every Friday for the coming six months is clearly a blatant attempt to prevent Israelis and internationals from standing in solidarity with their Palestinian partners for peace. It is also a direct attack on freedom of speech, the right to demonstrate, and every person's right to resist policies that violate international law and common notions of morality. We urge the Israeli authorities to cancel this order and to allow the protests to continue peacefully.

When we were in Bil'in we were able to visit the memorial site of Bassem Abu Rahma who was killed while peacefully demonstrating at the Wall. Despite the demands of his family, his supporters and his lawyers, the Israeli Military Advocate General has decided not to open a military investigation into the possibility that his death was caused by the illegal use of a high velocity tear gas canister. We are deeply troubled by this recent decision and call on the Israeli military authorities to reconsider this verdict and investigate the circumstances of Bassem's death.

We continue to also be deeply concerned about the ongoing detention of Adib Abu Rahma and Abdullah Abu Rahma. These two Bil'in residents, who regularly attended the demonstrations and consistently practiced non-violence, remain in custody awaiting trial, after nearly 10 and 4 months, respectively. We call on the Israeli authorities to release them until such time as a fair trial is held, considering all the evidence.

We want to tell you that we are with you. Don't give up. The spirit of those that fight for freedom and justice cannot be broken. Peace is possible. We look forward to the day when we will celebrate freedom and security for Palestinians and Israelis and there are no longer any walls.

God bless you.

By Jamal Dajani* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Israeli government's recent announcement of Army order No. 1,650 was just the latest act of provocation in a series of calculated measures to derail any possible resumption of peace negotiations. Under this new draconian measure, anyone who doesn't have a "permit" to be in the West Bank is to be considered an "infiltrator" and subject to expulsion or risk up to seven years in jail.

Expulsions and deportations are not something new for the Israeli military administrative system which was established in 1969, shortly after the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War. At the time, the Israeli military was given the legal power to expel "infiltrators" without trial for various unspecified "security reasons."

Two particular Palestinian communities will be impacted by order No. 1,650: Palestinians with Gaza residencies and Palestinians with East Jerusalem residencies, as well as foreign-born residents of the West Bank. But many Palestinian and Israeli experts believe that it's the foreigners living amongst Palestinians who are the real target of the Netanyahu government. Many believe that this is part of an ongoing Israeli effort to silence dissent and crack down on international solidarity members and activists who travel to Palestinian areas to support protests and rallies, often bringing with them the eyes of the outside world.

Now that Israel has almost completed its "Separation Wall", it wants to build a "Wall of Silence" and control the flow of information and limit the presence of foreign-born eyewitnesses on the ground. The question is, why now?

A "White Intifada" has begun to take hold in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Every Thursday and Friday, Palestinian peace activists, accompanied by members of the Israeli Peace Now movement and B'Tselem, as well as international supporters, gather to demonstrate against what they term as Israel's "Apartheid Wall" and land and home confiscations in the villages of Bil'in, Naalin, and the Sheikh Jarah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

Two months ago, I witnessed a Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarah where settlers tried to provoke peaceful demonstrators by harassing and spitting on them while Israeli Police and border patrol units watched from across the street. I was impressed by the demonstrators' calm and unfazed demeanor. Similarly, at the villages of Bil'in and Naalin, peaceful demonstrators have been brutally beaten and arrested by the Israeli army. Nevertheless, more keep coming back every week.

In February a Czech volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement was taken in the night from her house in Ramallah and deported by Israeli forces. This new order will give a blanket legal cover to the Israeli police and army to instantly deport foreign activists and aid workers spotted at demonstrations. Last December, at another demonstration I covered at Erez (Gaza-Israel Crossing), Israeli police did not engage the peaceful demonstrators who gathered calling for an end of the siege on Gaza. Instead, policemen were busy videotaping those who showed up, especially foreign nationals. Interestingly enough my Israeli Press Card was indefinitely delayed for renewal after my coverage of that story, but that's another subject on its own.

For years I've been hearing the popular question usually posed by Americans, "Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?"

During the past two trips that I've made to the Palestinian territories and Israel, I think that I discovered him/her in the eyes of the many peaceful demonstrators against the Israeli occupation. Nonviolent resistance could be the biggest threat to Israel's ability to justify it's continued military aggression and occupation of Palestinian lands. Order No. 1,650 is to neutralize the movement by deporting Gandhi.

Watch the Mosaic Intelligence Report!

* Jamal Dajani VP of International News, Series Producer of Mosaic News, Link TV

Source: Huffington Post

Friday, 17 April 2009: Basem Abu Rahme, 29 years of age, was shot by IOF in the stomach with a high-velocity tear gas projectile.

To date, twenty Palestinians, ten of them minors, were killed while protesting the Wall.

20. 5 June 2009:
Yousef 'Akil' Tsadik Srour, 36
Shot in the chest with 0.22 calibre live ammunition during a demonstration against the Wall in Ni'lin.

19.  April 17, 2009:
Basem Abu Rahme, age 29
Shot in the chest with a high-velocity tear gas projectile during a demonstration against the Wall in Bil'in.

18. December 28, 2008:
Mohammad Khawaja, age 20
Shot in the head with live ammunition during a demonstration in Ni'lin against Israel's assault on Gaza. Mohammad died in the hospital on December 31, 2009.

17. December 28, 2008:
Arafat Khawaja, age 22
Shot in the back with live ammunition in Ni'lin during a demonstration against Israel's assault on Gaza.

16. July 30, 2008:
Youssef Ahmed Younes Amirah, age 17
Shot in the head with rubber coated bullets during a demonstration against the Wall in Ni'lin. Youssef died of his wounds on August 4, 2008.

15. July 29, 2008:
Ahmed Husan Youssef Mousa, age 10
Shot dead while he and several friends tried to remove coils of razor wire from land belonging to the village in Ni'lin.

14. March 2, 2008:
Mahmoud Muhammad Ahmad Masalmeh, age 15
Shot dead when trying to cut the razor wire portion of the Wall in Beit Awwa.

13. March 28, 2007:
Muhammad Elias Mahmoud 'Aweideh, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Um a-Sharayet - Samiramis.

12. February 2, 2007:
Taha Muhammad Subhi al-Quljawi, age 16
Shot dead when he and two friends tried to cut the razor wire portion of the Wall in the Qalandiya Refugee Camp. He was wounded in the thigh and died from blood loss after remaining in the field for a long time without treatment.

11. March 15, 2006:
Khaled 'Issa Khaled 'Attiyah, age 18
Killed by gunfire while hiding with three friends, waiting to throw stones at passing army jeeps during a demonstration in the village of Karbatha al-Misbah.

10. May 4, 2005:
Jamal Jaber Ibrahim 'Asi, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.

9. May 4, 2005:
U'dai Mufid Mahmoud 'Asi, age 14
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.

8. February 15, 2005:
'Alaa' Muhammad 'Abd a-Rahman Khalil, age 14
Shot dead while throwing stones at an Israeli vehicle driven by private security guards near the Wall in Betunya.

7. April 18, 2004:
Islam Hashem Rizik Zhahran, age 14
Shot during a demonstration against the Wall in Deir Abu Mash'al. Islam died of his wounds April 28, 2004.

6. April 18, 2004:
Diaa' A-Din 'Abd al-Karim Ibrahim Abu 'Eid, age 23
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.

5. April 16, 2004:
Hussein Mahmoud 'Awad 'Alian, age 17
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Betunya.

4. February 26, 2004:
Muhammad Da'ud Saleh Badwan, age 21
Shot during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu. Muhammad died of his wounds on March 3, 2004.

3. February 26, 2004:
Abdal Rahman Abu 'Eid, age 17
Died of a heart attack after teargas projectiles were shot into his home during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.

2. February 26, 2004:
Muhammad Fadel Hashem Rian, age 25
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.

1. February 26, 2004:
Zakaria Mahmoud 'Eid Salem, age 28
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.

Three others, all minors or mentally disabled were killed just for being in proximity of the Wall:

December 19, 2006:
Du'aa Naser Saleh 'Abd al-Qader, age 14
Killed by gunfire in Far'un when she approached the Wall with her friend.

July 8, 2005:
Mahyoub Ahmad Nemer 'Asi, age 15
Was shot by a private security guard while he was in his family's plot, about 200 meters away from the path of the Wall.

January 22, 2005:
Fatah a-Deen Muhammad 'Ali al-Khuli, age 20
Killed by gunfire near Habla (Qalqilya district) when he approached the Wall. al-Khuli was mentally disabled.

Source: ISM

By Richard Falk* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917 gave the formal approval of the British government to the establishment of 'a Jewish homeland' profound issues of legitimacy were present in the conflict recently known as the Israel/Palestine Conflict. This original colonialist endorsement of the Zionist project has produced a steady erosion of the position of the Palestinian people on historic Palestine, which dramatically worsened over the course of the past 43 years of occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. It has worsened due to an oppressive military occupation by Israel that involves fundamental denials of rights and pervasive violations of international humanitarian law, and because Israel has been allowed to establish 'facts on the ground,' which are more properly viewed as violations of Palestinian rights, especially the establishment of extensive settlements and a separation wall constructed on occupied Palestinian territories in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. These developments have been flagrantly unlawful, and made the whole treatment of the Palestinian people illegitimate, as well as the occasion of continuous intense and pervasive suffering. For decades, the Palestinian political forces have exercised their right of resistance in various ways, including the extraordinary nonviolent Intifada of 1987, but also engaging in armed resistance in defense of their territory. The Palestinians definitely enjoy a right of resistance, although subject to the limits of international humanitarian law, which rules out deliberate targeting of civilians and non-military targets. Such tactics of resistance challenge Israel at its point of maximum comparative advantage due both to its total military dominance, achieved in part by large subsidies from the United States, and to its ruthless disregard for civilian innocence.

In recent years, especially beginning with the brutal experience of the Lebanon War of 2006 and even more dramatically in the aftermath of the Israeli Invasion of Gaza in 2008-09 (Dec. 27, 2008-Jan. 18, 2009), there has been a notable change of emphasis in Palestinian strategy. The new strategy has been to initiate what might be described as a second war, 'a legitimacy war,' that is essentially based on the reliance on a variety of nonviolent tactics of resistance. Armed resistance has not been renounced by the Palestinians, but it has been displaced by this emphasis on nonviolent tactics. The essence of this legitimacy war is to cast doubt on several dimensions of Israeli legitimacy: its status as a moral and law abiding actor, as an occupying power in relation to the Palestinian people, and with respect to its willingness to respect the United Nations and abide by international law. Those that wage such a legitimacy war seek to seize the high moral ground in relation to the underlying conflict, and on this basis, gain support for a variety of coercive, but nonviolent, initiatives designed to put pressure on Israel, on governments throughout the world, and on the United Nations, to deny normal participatory rights to Israel as a member of international society. These tactics also aim to mobilize global civil society to exhibit solidarity with the Palestinian struggle to achieve legitimate rights, taking the principal form of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign (BDS) that operates throughout the entire world, which serves as a symbolic battlefield. But there are other forms of action, as well, including the Free Gaza Movement and Viva Palestina that aim specifically at symbolically breaking the blockade of food, medecine, and fuel imposed in mid-2007, a form of collective punishment that has caused great suffering for the entire 1.5 million population of the Gaza Strip, damaging the physical and mental health of all those living under occupation.

Although the UN has been a failure so far as offering protection (beyond its essential role in providing humanitarian relief in Gaza) to the Palestinians under occupations or even in relation to the implementation of Palestinian rights under international law, it is a vital site of struggle in the legitimacy war. The whole storm unleashed by the Goldstone Report involves challenging the UN to impose accountability on the Israeli political and military leadership for their alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity associated with the Gaza attacks at the end of 2008. Even if the United States shields Israelis from accountability pursuant to the procedures of the UN, including the International Criminal Court, the confirmation of allegations of criminality by the Goldstone Report is a major victory for the Palestinians in the legitimacy war, and lends credibility to calls for nonviolent initiatives throughout the world. The Goldstone Report also endorses 'Universal Jurisdiction' as a means to gain accountability, encouraging national criminal courts of any country to make use of their legal authority to hold Israeli political and military leaders criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Tzipi Livni, the current Kadima opposition leader in Israel, who had been Foreign Minister during the Gaza attacks, canceled a visit to Britain after she received word that a warrant for her arrest upon arrival had been issued. Even if Israeli impunity is not overcome, the authoritativeness of the Goldstone Report lends weight to calls around the world to disrupt normal relations with Israel by boycotting cultural and academic activities, by disrupting trade relations through divestment moves or through refusals to load and unload ships and planes carrying cargo to or from Israel, and by pressuring governments to impose economic sanctions.

The historic inspiration for this legitimacy war is the anti-apartheid campaign waged with such success against the racist regime that ruled South Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Undoubtedly the Palestinian political motivation to focus their energies on waging a legitimacy war came from a variety of sources: disillusionment with efforts by the UN and the United States to find a just solution for the conflict; realization that armed resistance could not produce a Palestinian victory and played into the hands of Israeli diversionary tactics by making 'terrorism' the issue; recognizing that the events in Lebanon and Gaza generated throughout the world widespread anger against Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians, which is gradually weakening earlier European and North American deference to Israel due to Jewish victimization in the Holocaust; and a growing sense that the worldwide Palestinian diaspora communities and their allies could be enlisted to join in the struggle if its essential nature was that of a legitimacy war.

Israeli official and unofficial support groups have recently recognized the threat posed to their expansionist settler colonial grand strategy by this recourse by Palestinians to a legitimacy war. Israeli think tanks have described 'the global justice movement' associated with these tactics as a greater threat to Israel than Palestinian violence, and have even castigated reliance on international law as a dangerous form of 'lawfare.' The Israeli Government and Zionist organizations around the world have joined in the battle through a massive investment in public relations activities that include propaganda efforts to discredit what is sometimes called 'the Durban approach.' As with other Israeli tactics, in their defensive approach to the legitimacy war, there is an absence of self-criticism involving an assessment of Palestinian substantive claims under international law. For Israel a legitimacy war is a public relations issue pure and simple, a matter of discrediting the adversary and proclaiming national innocence and virtue. Despite its huge advantage in resources devoted to this campaign, Israel is definitely losing the legitimacy war.

Even if the Palestinians win the legitimacy war there is no guaranty that this victory will produce the desired political results. It requires Palestinian patience, resolve, leadership, and vision, as well as sufficient pressure to force a change of heart in Israel, and probably in Washington as well. In this instance, it would seem to require an Israeli willingness to abandon the core Zionist project to establish a Jewish state, and that does not appear likely from the vantage point of the present. But always the goals of a legitimacy war appear to be beyond reach until mysteriously attained by the abrupt and totally unexpected surrender by the losing side. Until it collapses the losing side pretends to be unmovable and invincible, a claim that is usually reinforced by police and military dominance. This is what happened in the Soviet Union and South Africa, earlier to French colonial rule in Indochina and Algeria, and to the United States in Vietnam. It is up to all of us dedicated to peace and justice to do all we can to help the Palestinians prevail in the legitimacy war and bring their long ordeal to an end.

*Prof. Richard Falk - is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, writer (the author or co-author of 20 books),[1] speaker, activist on world affairs, and an appointee to two United Nations positions on the Palestinian territories.

By Antoine Raffoul* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

In an Opinion submitted to the Electronic Intifada on 4 March 2010 entitled: Moment of Truth, Rifat Kassis rightly asks: what does ‘boycott’ mean, how far does it go, and what does it call for?

We, at 1948: Lest We Forget, wish to respond to any call for a selective boycott of Israel, and to defy those voices which warn us Palestinians (and many international activists, for that matter) who criticise Israel for fear of being labelled 'anti-semites' (although we are Semites). We also wish to challenge politicians who call for yet another round of talks (proximity or otherwise) on the Palestine/Israel question as we lost count of how many of these talks have we had in the last 62 years? All to no avail. In fact, with each set of talks, Palestine seems to be shrinking and it people squeezed within dozens of Bantustans.

A boycott cannot be selective anymore. As Mr Kassis wrote: "The occupation is not a random onslaught of power, and it isn't conducted on some remote soil: it is a complete matrix of control, a strategic, consistent, deliberate, historically constructed, externally condoned..." and, lest we forget, perpetrated on Palestinian land.

The point being missed by many calling for a selective boycott is that the decisions being made inside Israel, inside the OPT and throughout historic Palestine, are made by the Zionist leadership (and its collaborators), whose aim is the total annexation, occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories, not just post UNRES 181, not just post the Armistice Lines of 1949, not just post the 1967 conquests, but throughout historic Palestine. The recent tug of war of words between the US Administration and Israel on the settlement question proves that this most rightwing of Israeli administrations under B Netanyahu is adamant in its drive to build more settlements throughout annexed East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.

The last 62 years of illegal Zionist conquest and occupation, cannot be swept aside by simply agreeing to a temporary status-quo pending final status agreements. These painful 62 years cannot be parcelled into some kind of colonial areas called A, B, C, Gaza or Jerusalem. They cannot be relegated to the dustbin of history by a ceasefire, a checkpoint or an Apartheid Wall. As the occupation is total and internationally illegal, then the boycott must also be total and considered legal.

We should not just boycott the olive oil produced in the 'West Bank' because it is produced in an illegal settlement on the West Bank, but must also boycott all products produced in all illegal settlements. We should not just boycott an academic institution involved in state financed military projects, but must also boycott others involved in state financed cultural, scientific and academic activities. We should not just boycott an Israeli sports teams playing internationally under the Israeli banner, but must also boycott an Israeli dance or theatre company sent abroad to whitewash the fascist image of a cruel fascist State. We should not only boycott Caterpillar for demolishing homes and uprooting Palestinian olive groves, but must also boycott other contracting companies which supply the sand and cement that build the Apartheid Wall.

We challenge those who call for a mild and selective boycott to identify any Israeli institution, whether large or small, which is not part of this 'matrix of control' that suffocates our Palestinian nation.

As this occupation is total and unmerciful, so must our universal approach to fighting it and ending it be. As Israel's cruel occupation covers all of historic Palestine, so must our call be for the reversal of the processes which lead to that occupation and replacing them with the instruments of democracy and justice to include all of historic Palestine. A Palestine for all its people: Jews, Muslims, Christians, Coptic, Atheists, and non-Conformists.

In order to achieve this goal, we need a total boycott of the Zionist State. In order to achieve this aim, we need to identify that State. In order to identify that State, we need to untangle the politics of intrigue which produced the 181 UNRES which paved the way for the creation of that State. In order to untangle the tangled politics of that Resolution, we need to sit down, dust-off and read the official archives that go back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. We need to dig deep into the dark politics and personalities that gave the nation of one people to the people of many nations. And to do this against the will of the over 1 million indigenous Palestinians simply adds insult to injury.

We have come full circle now and so our boycott must be a full boycott.

Therefore, let us not read the pages of only one chapter of this saga and leave others unturned simply because it is easy to 'let bygones be bygones'. Israel has never compromised on its aims, its goals or its determined aggression against the Palestinian people. It has never compromised its defiance of international law. It has never compromised its arrogance towards its most powerful ally, the United States.

Why should we compromise the boycott battle. The initial cure to all this is a total boycott.

Total boycott against a total occupation. Nothing less will do.

* Antoine Raffoul, is a Palestinian architect working in London, and the coordinator of 1948.Lest.We.Forget, a campaign group aiming at the roots of the Palestinian/Israeli problem. 1948: LEST WE FORGET

Roger Waters

My name is Roger Waters. I am an English musician living in the USA. I am writing to express my great admiration for and solidarity with the 1360 men and women from 42 different countries around the World who are gathering in Egypt, preparing for The Gaza Freedom March. We all watched, aghast, the vicious attack made a year ago on the people of Gaza by Israeli armed forces and the ongoing illegal siege.

The suffering wrought on the population of Gaza by both the invasion and the siege is unimaginable to us outside the walls. The aim of The Freedom March is to focus world attention on the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza in the hope that the scales will fall from the eyes of all, ordinary, decent people round the world, that they may see the enormity of the crimes that have been committed, and demand that their governments bring all possible pressure to bear on Israel to lift the siege.

I use the word crimes advisedly, as both the siege and the invasion have been declared unlawful by United Nations bodies and leading human rights organizations. If we do not all observe international law, if some governments think themselves above it, it is but a few short, dark, steps to barbarism and anarchy.

The Gaza Freedom March is a beacon to all those of us who believe that under the skin, we are all brothers and sisters, who must stand shoulder to shoulder, if we are to make a future where all have recourse to law and universal human rights. Where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not just the preserve of the few. All the oil in The Middle East is not worth one childs life. So to those of you who march, I tip my hat. It is a brave and noble thing you do, and when you reach your goal please tell our Palestinian brothers and sisters, that out here, beyond the Walls of their Prison, stand hundreds of thousands of us in solidarity with them.

Today, hundreds of thousands, tomorrow, millions, soon, hundreds of millions.
We Shall Overcome.

Roger Waters

Here are few new photos from "Rafah Iron Wall" project, which is being built by the Egyptian authorities on their side of Gaza borders.

Egyptian government first denied such project and Americans said they have no part in it. More and more on-ground evidences are confirming that the project is in progress despite all calls to stop the construction due to its direct fatal impact on Gazans sensitive supplies such as medicines, food and some basic elements that keeps Gaza alive.

Rafah Iron Wall

[Hat tip: Iman B.]

Making an American 'Impenetrable Underground Wall' the Laughing Stock of the World-Leave It to the People of Gaza

Illustration By Carlos Latuff

By Ann Wright* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

No doubt at the instigation of the Israeli government, the Obama administration has authorized the United States Army Corps of Engineers to design a vertical underground wall under the border between Egypt and Gaza.

In March, 2009 the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32 million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza. Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7 miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.

The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It will be "impenetrable," and reportedly will take 18 months to construct.

The steel wall is intended to cut the tunnels that go between Gaza and Egypt.

The tunnels are the lifelines for Gaza since the international community agreed to a blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the citizens of Gaza for their having elected in Parliamentary elections in 2006 sufficient Hamas Parliamentarians that Hamas became the government of Gaza. The United States and other western countries have placed Hamas on the list of terrorist organizations.

The underground steel wall is intended to strengthen international governmental efforts to imprison and starve the people of Gaza into submission so they will throw out the Hamas government.

Just as the steel walls of the US Army Corps of Engineers at the base of the levees of New Orleans were unable to contain Hurricane Katrina, the US Army Corps of Engineers' underground steel walls that will attempt to build an underground cage of Gaza will not be able to contain the survival spirit of the people of Gaza.

America's super technology will again be laughed at by the world, as young men dedicated to the survival of their people, will again outwit technology by digging deeper, and most likely penetrating the "impenetrable" in some novel, simple, low-tech way.

I have been to Gaza 3 times this year following the 22-day Israeli military attack on Gaza that killed 1,440, wounded 5,000, left 50,000 homeless and destroyed much of the infrastructure of Gaza. The disproportionate use of force and targeting of the civilian population by the Israeli military is considered by international law and human rights experts as as violations of the Geneva conventions.

When our governments participate in illegal actions, it is up to the citizens of the world to take action. On December 31, 2009, 1,400 international citizens from 42 countries will march in Gaza with 50,000 Gazans in the Gaza Freedom March to end the siege of Gaza. They will take back to their countries the stories of spirit and survival of the pople of Gaza and will return home committed to force their governments to stop these inhuman actions against the people of Gaza.

Just as American smart bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq have not conquered the spirit of Aghans and Iraqis, America's underground walls in Gaza will never conquer the courage of those who are fighting for the survival of their families.

One more time, the American government and the Obama administration has been an active participant in the continued inhumane treatment of the people of Gaza and should be held accountable, along with Israel and Egypt for violations of human rights of the people of Gaza.

* Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserve Colonel and a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in as a US diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience" . Her March 19, 2003 letter of resignation can be read here.

Israeli newspaper claims that Egypt is building an underground steel fence along its border with Gaza have been denied by the governor of Northern Sinai.

Haaretz had claimed metal sheets were being installed underground to block tunnels used to bring essential goods and medicines into Gaza.

But tunnel workers say Egypt has been enacting a far simpler plan - drilling holes into tunnels in order flood them with water.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzhUcShtkSk

A Portrait of Nonviolent Resistance in One Palestinian Village

By Ellen Cantarow* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel's seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of "the wall," begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the wall illegal, but Israel ignored the ruling. Now, it undulates through the West Bank for over 280 kilometers, clasping Israel's major colonies and some minor ones in its embrace. The completed wall will incorporate more than 85% of the West Bank's settler population, a de facto annexation by Israel of significant chunks of the territory it first occupied in 1967. This is the dream of Greater Israel rapidly turned into architecture. For the Palestinians, however, the wall means theft, separating many Palestinian cities and villages from their land and water.

Jayyous, with a population of 3,500, is one of those villages. It lies nestled in a mountainous northern West Bank landscape with the Palestinian city of Qalqilya just to its west. The scenery here remains one of the Mediterranean's loveliest, a cross, let's say, between Tuscany and parts of Yugoslavia. Greek and Roman ruins mark the village's great age. This was one of the West Bank's most fertile areas. Farming involving a lively variety of nut, citrus, and olive trees, as well as vegetables, flourished around Jayyous, drawing life from abundant underground wells. The aquifers beneath Jayyous and Qalqilya, in fact, constitute a West Bank treasure. Lands belonging to both the city and the village abut Israel's pre-1967 border -- the "Green Line."

Before the wall's advent, Qalqilya's merchants and Israelis did regular business on either side of the border, while Jayyous's farmers worked their land all the way up to the Green Line. Now, the monstrous, concrete version of the wall surrounds Qalqilya entirely, bringing to mind high-security prisons or ghettoes from other eras. Jayyous is segregated from most of its former land by the wall in what one could call its "barrier" form -- a system of steel fences, razor wire, and patrol roads manned by Israeli soldiers.

Four thousand of the village's olive and citrus trees were uprooted to make way for the wall. All the village's wells and over 75% percent of the land are now sequestered behind the wall, isolated on its west -- that is, "Israeli" -- side. A small Israeli settler colony called Zufim sits amid Jayyous's former wealth. Israeli plans are on the books to build up to 1,500 new housing units on the bounty confiscated from the village. The new units will destroy the only road over which Jayyous's farmers can now travel to and from their land: there used to be six of these roads. Israel has already blocked five of them.

Sixty-five year-old Sharif Omar Khalid, known more familiarly as Abu Azzam, has spent half his life struggling to preserve Jayyous's land. In 1980, with other farmers representing villages throughout the West Bank, he founded the Land Defense Committee, one of 18 organizations that now make up the Stop the Wall campaign. Gifted with stubborn optimism, he counts as victory an Israeli Supreme Court decision in April 2006, which pushed the path of the wall back from the south side of the village. The decision returned 11% of Jayyous's former land -- 750 dunams of the 8,600 blocked by the barrier. (A dunam is a little over a quarter of an acre.)

The wall remains, as does one of its most essential parts: the "agricultural gate." There are two of these on Jayyous's land -- one to the north; another to the south. Almost all of the village's farmers are forced to use the north gate. Opened by Israeli soldiers for two 45-minute intervals at dawn and dusk, the gate blocks a patrol road manned by the Israelis.

But to get beyond the gate, across the patrol road, and from there to their farmland, Jayyous's farmers need "visitors' permits." Since 2003, Israel has decreed that the villagers are only "visitors" on land they have worked for generations. Obtaining the permits is an excruciating obstacle course that only begins with proof of land ownership. Abu Azzam is one of the village's major landowners; his title goes back several generations to the time when Jordan occupied the West Bank. Being a known activist, he was periodically denied his permit until the Israeli Supreme Court finally granted him a permanent permit noting that its bearer is a "security problem." This produces extra problems for him in his daily odyssey to his fields and back.

The Gate from Hell

The first time I saw an "agricultural gate" was in 2004 outside the northern Palestinian village of Mas'ha. It was terrible to behold. Immense steel jaws painted a bright ochre-yellow creaked open, thanks to the Israeli Occupation Forces' finest, for about 30 minutes at dawn and again at dusk. Between those two moments, it remained locked, leaving the local farmers with no possibility of returning home for lunch or emergencies, nor even for crop-irrigation at the appropriate time (after sundown).

Each opening of the Mas'ha gate permitted a lone farmer, Hani Amer -- his home locked in on three sides by the wall and on the fourth by an Israeli settlement -- to make sporadic trips to his fields. At both sides of the gate lay coils of razor wire snarled in front of a barrier ditch which stretched into the distance as far as we could see. Beyond this ditch, more razor wire. Then a "military road" meant for Israeli soldiers patrolling the boundaries of an Arab world considered burdensome to the Greater Israel.

Across the military road lay yet more razor wire and another ditch before Hani Amer could finally reach his fields.

To grasp what the gate really means, though, you'd have to stay, as I did, at least a night with a farmer in Jayyous at harvest time. You'd awaken with his wife and him at 5:30 A.M., drink a cup of strong Arabic coffee, eat bread spread with jam made from fruit he grows on the land remaining to him, and then go jolting down the white, rutted, stony road on his tractor. Finally, of course, you would wait with him in a gathering line of farmers at the gate.

Now watch, in the dawn of another day in the forty-second year of occupation, in front of this steel raptor out of some mad film-maker's imagination, as they all arrive: one on his tractor, another on a donkey laden with sacks and harvest tools, until finally a long line stands waiting. Note those ubiquitous coils of razor wire, and the ditches, and that military road, just one form of the endless wall that imprisons Palestine's people. Watch as the soldiers turn languidly and unlock the gate, swinging its jaws wide to transform it, and the military road it bars, into a checkpoint for the brief morning opening.

As I waited and watched from Abu Azzam's tractor this past October, I imagined the hillside on the other side of the road as it must have been decades ago, when I still reported regularly from the West Bank. The region's steep hills were then punctuated by lines of dry-wall terracing that enclosed olive trees whose leaves billowed silver in the wind, and the darker greens of fruit trees and grapevines. The Greater Israel's new, California-style urban sprawl, its cities that now ooze through the West Bank, were still part of an expansionist dream, not a burgeoning reality, and of course there was no wall, nor a "military road," nor, of course, an agricultural gate.

Watch now, as each farmer with his donkey, his tractor, his work-tools, approaches the passage between the gaping steel jaws. Watch each as he moves into the military road, brings his donkey to a halt, dismounts, and offers his ID card to a stout, impassive Israeli soldier. Flanked by two other soldiers, he, in turn, calls a control tower rising in the distance and in Hebrew recites each bearer's name and ID numbers. Take in the stoicism, the resignation, the endurance of these farmers as they accept the indignity of all this because there is no other choice. Think that they are trying to do one simple thing: harvest their olives.

But first each must move into the road, stand with head bowed or eyes averted as his fate is determined for this day, and then, if he's approved, move forward. Beyond lie more ditches at the other side of the road, more razor wire and -- at last -- something that masquerades as freedom but isn't. The farmer is now permitted to climb the hill in his vehicle. Beyond its crest he may reach his fields, for whose sake he has endured this daily torment.

And now, consider the Israeli settlers and soldiers, whose absolute rule, running the gamut from control over this gate through vigilantism against villagers like those in Jayyous, make a nightmare of this simple thing, the olive harvest. Settlers from Zufim actually uprooted olive trees in Jayyous in 2004. (Some were carted away for sale in Israel); sewage from the colony has destroyed others.

A week after my stay, according to the Israeli paper Haaretz, Jewish settlers elsewhere in the northern West Bank "clashed with Palestinians picking olives." The settlers called the farmers trying to bring in their crops a "security" threat because they "could gather intelligence and launch attacks from the olive groves."

Elsewhere in the area that same week, Israeli security forces stood by as settlers entered a Palestinian village "to hold a brief rally" against the harvest. (Israel's army is now dominated from top to bottom by ultra-religious-expansionist settlers, which makes a mockery of the "settler-soldier" distinction.) Meanwhile, near an Israeli "outpost" settlement called Adi Ad, settlers "uprooted dozens of olive trees." As I write, similar alarums reach me by e-mail daily.

Several times since October the Israeli Army has imposed curfews on Jayyous -- collective punishment for the weekly anti-wall demonstrations staged by village youth here. Most of the time the curfews have been levied after the farmers were already in their fields and haven't interrupted the harvest. But they have punished the rest of Jayyous. Collective punishment -- reprisals against all for the actions of a few -- is illegal under the 1949 Fourth Geneva convention.

Keeping Going

"A state gone mad," observed Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh when, a day after visiting Jayyous, I described the scene at the gate. This particular barrier of steel, these particular patient farmers, those particular soldiers enforcing Israel's banality of evil -- they offer but a taste of the insane ingenuity that is the still-developing Greater Israel. A Dutch filmmaker who had interviewed some West Bank Jewish settlers, related this little exchange to Shehadeh: "What is your dream?" she asked one of the settlers. "My dream," he replied, "is that my grandchildren will say someday, 'Here, they say that once upon a time there were Arabs.'"

The evening before we all arose to go to the gate, Abu Azzam took a German visitor and me to see the local olive press where he and other farmers unload each day's harvest. The sight of Jayyous's olives moving up a conveyor belt and into the press, finally to emerge as a stream of oil bottled in large plastic containers, was joyous. Children ran and slid about on the slick floor, laughing; their parents dipped bread for them in the delicious, freshly-pressed oil. What human madness would inflict constant torment on such peaceful labor?

Later, Abu Azzam told me stories about his life as an activist, his marriage, and his children. Jailed by Jordan for belonging to the Communist Party and later by Israel for his attempts to preserve the village land, he says he can't imagine anything but keeping going. "I have no other choice" is the way he puts it, with a shrug and a smile.

He recalled the moment back in October 2003 as the wall was being built, when an Israeli official tried to buy off the Jayyous activists by offering them 650 permits which would have allowed that many farmers to access their land. But the Land Defense Committee made "a team decision" not to use them. Accepting the permits would have meant recognizing the validity of the wall and the whole system of dispossession that went with it. Israeli soldiers closed the gate; it was the height of the olive, guava, and clementine harvests. Abu Azzam and other farmers cut gaps in the barrier and crept through to work their fields "without a tractor, without horses, without carriages, without anything. Only our bodies."

More arrests followed. The farmers made a decision to stay on their land and not return to the village. "My wife was very angry," Abu Azzam recalls. "She called me on October 21 asking me, 'Are we divorced? Are we separated?' I said 'I'm resisting.' 'Resisting? Can you see one box of guavas, cucumbers, or tomatoes? 'Enough, to be on the land is resistance.' I said."

Since 2003 Abu Azzam and other Jayyous farmers have continued their obdurate odyssey to their lands. This determination to keep farming on the 3,250 dunams -- of an original 8,050 -- that the villagers still have, rather than live elsewhere in the West Bank or abroad is itself resistance. In Palestine, this "just staying" is called samid. It means "the steadfast," "the persevering," and eloquently expresses the oldest form of Palestinian nonviolent resistance.

"You have so many problems," I said to Abu Azzam. "Would you ever leave?" He smiled at me indulgently. "All our life is a problem. I don't want to be a new refugee. I am against the emigration that took place through the Israelis."

Since 2008, Jayyous's young people have staged weekly demonstrations against the wall. One of their leaders -- Mohammed Othman -- was arrested by Israeli authorities this past fall when he returned from a speaking tour in Norway. He is still in jail under indefinite administrative detention.

Jayyousi leaders have also written to high officials in Norway and Dubai imploring them to divest from companies owned by the Uzbekistan-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. In doing so, Jayyous joins growing international revulsion at, and refusal to deal with, Leviev's companies. Their reach is vast and diverse, extending to Angola's diamond mines, New York real estate, and Israeli settlements in whose planning and building (including Zufim) they are heavily involved. Last March, Haaretz's Barak Ravid reported that the British Embassy in Tel Aviv "stopped negotiations to lease a floor in Africa-Israel's Kirya Tower because of the [Leviev-owned] company's involvement in settlement construction." Oxfam has severed ties with him for the same reason.

On September 9, 2009, a month before my arrival, the Israeli Supreme Court handed down a new ruling moving the route of the wall again and returning an additional 2,448 dunams to Jayyous. "Because of your efforts?" I asked Azzam.

"It is because of Jayyous," he replied. "It is a group struggle."

* Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. More recently, her writing has appeared at Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternet. This essay is part of a series on Palestinian non-violent resistance, "Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape."

[Note: Another of Cantarow's Palestinian portraits can be read by clicking here. A comprehensive U.N. account of Israel's wall can be found by clicking here (PDF file).]