[WCUSP] Fwd: [Anna in Palestine] From Sharpsville to Nablus: Tragedies of Ethnic Apartheid

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: travelinganna <anna.baltzer at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:22:42 -0000
Subject: [Anna in Palestine] From Sharpsville to Nablus: Tragedies of
Ethnic Apartheid
To: annas_peacework_palestine at yahoogroups.com

(This update was written on March 21st, 2007.)

Almost two weeks ago, my friend Dawud, a high school English teacher
from Kufr 'Ain, called me nearly in tears to report the checkpoint
hold-up that had cost him his six-month-old son. Shortly after
midnight on March 8th, my friend's baby began having trouble
breathing. His parents quickly got a taxi to take him to the nearest
hospital in Ramallah, where they hoped to secure an oxygen tent, which
had helped him recover from difficult respiratory episodes in the
past. As the family was rushing from their Palestinian town in the
West Bank to their Palestinian hospital in the West Bank, they were
stopped at Atara checkpoint, where an Israeli soldier asked for the
father's, mother's, and driver's IDs. Dawud explained to the soldier
that his son needed urgent medical care, but the soldier insisted on
checking the three IDs first, a process that usually takes a few
minutes. Dawud's was the only car at the checkpoint in the middle of
the night, yet the soldier held the three IDs for more than twenty
minutes, even as Dawud and his wife began to cry, begging to be
allowed through. After fifteen minutes, Dawud's baby's mouth began to
overflow with liquid and my friend wailed at the soldier to allow them
through, that his baby was dying. Instead, the soldier demanded to
search the car, even after the IDs had been cleared. At 1:05am,
six-month-old Khalid Dawud Fakaah died at Atara Checkpoint. As the
soldier checked the car, he shined his flashlight on the dead child's
face and, realizing what had happened, finally returned the three ID
cards and allowed the grieving family to pass.

Checkpoints and ID cards. Mention these words and any victim or
witness of Apartheid can produce dozens of horror stories like
Dawud's. South Africa employed a similar system with its former
Apartheid "Pass Laws," which the South African Government used to
monitor the movement of Black South Africans. Blacks had to carry
personal ID documents, which required permission stamps from the
government before holders could move around within their country.
Similarly, Palestinians in the West Bank are required to carry
Israeli-issued ID cards that indicate which areas, roads, and holy
sites they are or are not allowed access to. According to the "Final
Call" Newspaper Online Edition
(http://www.finalcall.com/perspectives/sharpsville04-02-2002.htm),
"the Pass Law system in South Africa gave the police unlimited
authority in arresting people at will." Similarly, Israeli Occupation
forces use ID cards not only to monitor Palestinian movement, but also
to justify frequent arbitrary detention and arrest with general
impunity. Jewish inhabitants of the West Bank (like all Jewish
Israelis) have different ID cards, proclaiming their "Jewish"
nationality, granting them automatic permission to access the modern
roads and almost all holy sites that most Palestinians are restricted
from.

Forty-seven years ago today, on March 21, 1960, hundreds of Black
South Africans gathered in Sharpsville, South Africa and marched
together in protest of the racist and dehumanizing Apartheid Pass Law
system. At their destination the Sharpsville police station, according
to the above article, "the White police fired on the defenseless men,
women, and children. Sixty Africans were killed on the spot and 178
were wounded. More than 80 percent of those shot where shot in the
back as they fled."

Almost fifty years after the Sharpsville Massacre, pass laws still
plague the lives of the oppressed. Everyday I meet West Bank
Palestinians living without permits and ID cards, either because
Israel never granted them residency on their land, or because soldiers
or police confiscated their IDs as punishment or just harassment. I
recently interviewed the family of Ibrahim, a twenty-year-old
veterinary student who was arrested three years ago for the crime of
not having an Israeli-issued ID card. Ibrahim's parents were born and
raised in the West Bank and own land in their small village of
Fara'ata, where I interviewed them. In 1966, as newlyweds, the couple
moved to Kuwait where they began working abroad. The year after,
Israel occupied the West Bank and shortly after took a census. Any
Palestinians who were not recorded due to absence—whether studying
abroad, visiting family, or anything else—became refugees. Israel, the
new occupier, stripped Ibrahim's parents and hundred of thousands of
other Palestinians of their right to return to their homes and land,
and effectively opened up the West Bank to colonization by any Jews
who were willing to come.

Israel's census strategy of 1967 bears a striking resemblance to the
Absentee Property Law that Israel employed after the 1948 expulsions.
According to Passia (www.passia.org), the law "defines an 'absentee'
as a person who 'at any time' in the period between 29 November 1947
and 1 Sept 1948, 'was in any part of the Land of Israel that is
outside the territory of Israel (meaning the West Bank or the Gaza
Strip) or in other Arab states'. The law stipulates that the property
of such an absentee would be transferred to the Custodian of Absentee
Property, with no possibility of appeal or compensation. From there,
by means of another law, the property was transferred, so that
effectively the property that was left behind by Palestinian refugees
in 1948 (and also some of the property of Palestinians who are now
citizens of Israel) was transferred to the State of Israel." To this
day, the Jewish National Fund, which inherited much of the refugees'
land, combined with the Israeli state owns about 93% of the land of
Israel. This land is exclusively reserved for the Jewish people and
almost impossible to obtain for Palestinian citizens of Israel or the
owners of the land themselves: the 1947-1948 refugees.

When I say 93% of "the land of Israel," I am implying land within the
internationally recognized 1967 borders of Israel, unlike the text of
the 1950 Absentee Property Law itself, which defines "the Land of
Israel" as all of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip together.
This was long before 1967, but makes the territories' occupation less
than two decades later either a tremendous coincidence or entirely
unsurprising.

To this day, Palestinians like Ibrahim's parents who were in the wrong
place during the 1967 occupation and census—and their children—must
apply for what is called "family reunification" from the Ministry of
the Interior in order to legally reside in their own homes and
villages. Passia writes, "the decision to grant or deny these
applications is, according to Israeli Law, ultimately at the
discretion of the Interior Minister, who is not required to justify
refusal. In May 2002, Israel suspended the processing of family
reunification claims between Palestinian citizens of Israel and
Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to prevent the latter from
acquiring Israeli citizenship, arguing that the growth in the
non-Jewish population of Israel due to family reunification was a
threat to the 'Jewish character' of the state."

Family reunification applications not involving citizens of Israel
were also frozen last year after the Hamas election, including the
claims of Ibrahim and his family. The family returned legally to the
West Bank in 1998 when Oslo dictated Palestinians would have their own
state, but when Israel's occupation and settlement only accelerated,
Ibrahim and his parents and five siblings were left with even fewer
rights than the Palestinians with West Bank residency. Although the
Palestinian Authority and DCO agreed that Ibrahim's family could live
in their village (and even provided them free education and health
care), they still needed permission from Israel.

Ibrahim began veterinary school at Al-Najaa University in 2000, but
had to commute over the Nablus hills since soldiers manning the
checkpoints would never allow him to enter the city without an ID
card. On March 23, 2004, during Ibrahim's last semester before
graduation, the Israeli Army caught him walking to school inside
Nablus and put him in prison. This Friday marks three years exactly
that Ibrahim—now 23—has been in jail, his only crime that he has no
Israeli-issued ID card. The first year Israel imprisoned Ibrahim
within the West Bank, but the past two years he was held within
Israel, a violation of International Law—occupiers cannot hold
prisoners and detainees from the occupied population in the occupying
power's land, because of how severely it limits prisoners' rights.
Indeed, Israel's policy of generally imprisoning Palestinians in
Israel means that their families often cannot visit them without
permits to enter Israel, and they cannot even have a Palestinian
lawyer since the lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza don't have
permits to practice law in Israel. Ibrahim's father, for example, is a
lawyer but can do nothing to help his son without an ID, let alone an
Israeli license to practice law. Since he returned from Kuwait he has
worked as a shepherd, since he can't safely go anywhere outside his
village without an ID.

Ibrahim's situation is worse than most. Since his family has no ID
cards they cannot even apply to enter Israel to visit him. Even
Ibrahim's sister, who obtained an ID via her husband back when Israel
sometimes granted residency through marriage, cannot visit her brother
since it is impossible to prove to Israel her relation to a person
with no official name or identity.

"Nobody from the family has seen Ibrahim in two years," his mother
Hanan told me with my hand in hers after the report interview ended.
"I send him gifts and receive news via the mother of another West Bank
inmate in the same jail, a friend who occasionally gets permission
from Israel to visit her son. Ibrahim is not even allowed the use the
phone." Hanan began to cry. "He's the first thing I think about when I
wake up and the last thing before I go to sleep. I cannot bear to
imagine him there in prison, perhaps for the rest of his life, knowing
how much he must be suffering, knowing that I can do nothing to help
him. He did nothing wrong. His only crime is that he was born a
Palestinian."

Hanan has six children total, three of whom decided to settle in
Jordan, where they could enjoy citizenship (Palestinians in the West
Bank before 1967 had Jordanian ID cards), and Hanan hasn't seen them
in nine years. She wept again as she told me she has grandchildren and
sons and daughters-in-law that she's never met. Even if she wanted
Jordanian citizenship now, she's lost her chance having stayed outside
Jordan for so long. And the family members who returned to claim their
land and rights in the West Bank are now stateless, like so many
millions of other Palestinian refugees in the diaspora.

In recognition of the tragic events of the 1960 Sharpsville Massacre,
the UN declared May 21st the International Day for the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination, pushing states around the world to redouble
their efforts to combat all types of ethnic discrimination. Yet within
Israel, a member of the United Nations, ethnicity still determines
nationality (there is no Israeli nationality: Palestinians are
"Arabs," Jews are "Jewish"), resource allocation, and rights to own
JNF and state land. There are discriminatory laws separating
Palestinian families in Israel and threatening to revoke Palestinians'
Israeli citizenship (these are discussed in an excellent recent
interview with Israeli Knesset member Jamal Zahalka, called "A State
of all its Citizens":
www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12238 —highly
recommended). Tel Aviv University Medical School just announced a rule
that defacto targets Palestinian prospective students (see
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/837932.html for article, and
www.adalah.org/eng/index.php or www.mossawacenter.org/ for more
general information about minority rights in Israel).

In the rest of the so-called "Land of Israel," the ethnic
discrimination is much worse, from segregated roads to separate legal
systems. I know what Israel will say: this is only self-defense. On
some level this is correct: if Israel desires control the territory
that it has for more than two-thirds of its history, and to remain the
state exclusively of the Jewish people, and to be democratic as well,
it must find a way to create a Jewish majority on a strip of land in
which the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish. There are only so
many possible solutions: there's mass transfer (as was tried
successfully in 1948, and is currently advocated by Israeli Deputy
Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman), there's mass imprisonment (10,000+
Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails as I write), there's
genocide... or there is apartheid. The more humane alternatives of
Israel withdrawing to the 1967 borders or becoming a state of its
citizens are not even on the bargaining table.

Apartheid and segregation failed in South Africa and the United States
and they will fail in Israel and Palestine. Ethnocentric nationalism
failed in Nazi Germany and it will fail in Zionist Israel. But until
they do, the Ibrahims and baby Khalids of Palestine are counting on
you and me to do something, to say something, since they themselves
cannot. Silence is complicity. We cannot wait for things to get worse.
The ethnic cleansing and apartheid have gone on long enough.