[WCUSP] Fwd: [Anna in Palestine] The Forgotten Torture Chambers, Walls, and Economics of the Occupation

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: travelinganna <anna.baltzer at gmail.com>
Date: May 15, 2007 12:21 PM
Subject: [Anna in Palestine] The Forgotten Torture Chambers, Walls,
and Economics of the Occupation
To: annas_peacework_palestine at yahoogroups.com








A few weeks ago I attended an event commemorating Palestinian
 Prisoner's Day at Al Far'a Refugee Camp in the Tubas area. To enter
 the theatrical and cultural spectacle we had to pass through a
 makeshift checkpoint with soldiers pointing their guns in our faces
 and screaming in Hebrew for us to get back. Although I knew these were
 Palestinian actors role-playing the harassment they experience daily,
 it was very frightening to have men with guns yell at me in a foreign
 language and stick killing machines in my face. I realized immediately
 that although I witness harassment at checkpoints constantly, as a
 white Jewish American woman of extreme privilege I can never really
 know what it feels like to go through one as a Palestinian. I
 suspected the actors had been instructed to especially focus on
 Western attendees to illustrate some of the abusive behavior we remain
 so shielded from. It was very effective.

 Inside the spectacle, hundreds of locals and visitors were watching
 performers depict typical scenes of interrogation, abuse, and torture
 of Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention centers. Some of the
 actors wore blindfolds, handcuffs, and chains and gave moving
 monologues about the injustice of abuse and imprisonment without trial
 in an occupier's land. Others played Israeli soldiers and guards.
 After the play as a finale, young Palestinian boys danced Debka to
 signify cultural pride and continuity in spite of monstrous hardships
 and injustices.

 The event took place in a former prison/torture center and afterwards
 spectators toured the old holding rooms, haunted by past inmates and
 painted over with graffiti and prisoner shadows. There I met a mother
 holding a framed picture of her son, currently held in Israeli jail
 along with more than 9,000 other Palestinians, including many women
 and children. (For more specific information and statistics about
 Palestinian political prisoners, see my previous articles:
 http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2003/11/conversation-with-omar-in-balata.html,
 http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2005/04/jewish-emancipation-palestinian.html,
 http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2007/03/from-sharpsville-to-nablus-tragedies-of.html.)
 Near the old torture chambers was a holding center converted into an
 art studio, where I met Morshid Graib, an artist whose many stunning
 images depicted the suffering of the Palestinian people. His paintings
 and the performances reminded me once again of the extraordinary
 creativity of the Palestinians in their nonviolent resistance to the
 Occupation.

 The next day I was going on a tour of the Northern Jordan Valley,
 about 10 km (6 miles) from Tubas the way a crow flies. By road it's
 more like 22 km (13 miles), via Tayseer checkpoint, which only Israeli
 settlers and Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley are permitted
 to cross. Tayseer excludes most Palestinians and internationals, so I
 was forced to reach my destination the long way around, via Ramallah
 in the center of the West Bank. It's hard to comprehend the absurdity
 of such a detour without looking at a map. Rather than a 10 minute
 ride, I traveled 6 hours southeast through 3 checkpoints the first
 day, and then 4 hours back up through 2 checkpoints the next to reach
 the other side of Tubas' eastern mountains. 10 hours instead of 10
 minutes.

 I was cranky from the long ride when I got to Ramallah, but a kind
 shop-owner noticed my malaise and took me into his store for tea and
 fresh bread. His name was Ali, and he spoke perfect English. An East
 Jerusalemite, Ali lived in the United States for 19 years. He studied
 civil engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology and was one of
 the top engineers behind a new Chicago Metro Terminal. For 19 years,
 Ali flew back to Israel every 3 months to renew his Jerusalem ID,
 which wasn't automatically renewed - although he and his family were
 born and raised in the city - because he is not Jewish. After Ali
 acquired US citizenship, he continued returning every three months
 until one day Israel revoked all Jerusalem IDs of Palestinians with
 another citizenship. This was the first Ali had heard of such a law,
 but suddenly his ID was confiscated and he was barred from ever
 returning to the city where his home and family remain (of course, all
 the American Jews who "make aliyah" and become Israelis never suffer
 penalties for dual citizenship). An extremely successful and
 well-educated engineer, Ali now works at a souvenir shop selling
 trinkets in Ramallah. He cannot get normal work because he doesn't
 have a West Bank ID either.

 Meeting Ali was a good prelude to my tour through the Jordan Valley
 where, like East Jerusalem, most Palestinians are not even allowed to
 enter, and those who live there are constantly threatened by house
 demolitions, ID-confiscation, and other actions that encourage or
 require them to relocate. According to our tour guide Fathi from the
 area, before 1967 there were 350,000 Palestinians living in the Jordan
 Valley. Now there are 52,000 - less than 15%.

 Much of the Jordan Valley indigenous population's flight occurred
 after violent expulsions in the first five years of the Occupation,
 but the ethnic cleansing continues today as more and more Israeli Jews
 move in and Palestinians move out. Israel no longer accepts
 applications from Palestinians to move into the Jordan Valley, only
 out of it. (A similar one-way transfer is occurring out of the West
 Bank: "since the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel 'has not
 approved a single change of address from Gaza to the West Bank'" but
 Palestinians have been forcedly transferred in the other direction
 [www.alhaq.org/pdfs/Deportations%20and%20Forcible%20Transfers.pdf].)
 Jordan Valley Palestinians who spend too long outside of the region
 also lose their residence permits, just like Ali did. And as in East
 Jerusalem, Israel's annexation is so advanced that many Israelis don't
 even know the area is occupied. Israelis come to the valley on
 vacation to enjoy the bountiful fruit orchards, the desert mountains,
 and the Dead Sea. The modern highways are lined with palm trees and
 nicely-groomed settlements, no Palestinians in sight.

 At one point our tour bus stopped at a juice stand and we could just
 barely hear Fathi's voice over the zoom of settler and vacationer cars
 speeding by: "I am 40 years old and from the Jordan Valley, but I have
 only seen the Jordan River twice in my life, on my way to and from
 Jordan. They say it's about resistance, but Israel controlled this
 area strictly with checkpoints decades before suicide bombs or the
 intifadas began. As a Palestinian, I'm not allowed to go to the river,
 or even to the Dead Sea - that precious natural wonder which
 scientists now say will be gone in 12 years due to overuse... The
 valley is reserved for Jews and tourists. But it's owned by
 Palestinians as far west as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and beyond."

 Traditionally, Palestinian families used to live in the Jordan Valley
 during the wintertime because of the mild climate and fertile land.
 But now, of the 2400 square kilometers - 30% of the West Bank - half
 is controlled by Israeli settlements, and almost all the rest is split
 between military closed areas, border closed areas, and environmental
 "green" closed areas. The closed area strategy is familiar to anyone
 who has studied urban development in East Jerusalem: Israel declares
 large "closed" or "green areas," bulldozes all the Palestinian homes
 and institutions within them, and after they've remained empty for a
 few years the state begins to settle Jewish Israelis inside.

 Some of these "closed areas" in the Jordan Valley are villages where
 Palestinians have been living for generations. We visited Fasayel, a
 Palestinian village that Israel has refused to recognize for forty
 years since the Occupation began. Because Fasayel is unrecognized,
 villagers aren't allowed to build or even repair their own homes. They
 have no water infrastructure for the same reason. The village recently
 got electricity but the electric poles are under demolition order
 since they were built without a permit. In nearby Al Jiflik village,
 Israel has refused permits to build a school, insisting that families
 should either move or bus their children more than an hour each way to
 Tubas town. In peaceful response, the teachers of Al Jiflik started
 holding classes in a large village tent. Last year, Al Jiflik finally
 constructed a real schoolhouse, which students will use until it is
 demolished by Israel for being illegal.

 About 4,500 Palestinians live in Fasayel and Al Jiflik combined. Just
 1,800 more make up the total settler population in the Jordan Valley:
 6,300 Israelis living in 36 settlements. The tiny population controls
 the land of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Some settlements are
 just a family or two, but have taken over huge expanses of Palestinian
 farmland. Naama settlement replaced Ne'ama Palestinian refugee camp
 and is home to 172 Israelis controlling more than 10,000 dunums. Of
 the land-rich third of the West Bank, just 4% is left for the
 remaining 52,000 Palestinian inhabitants. That includes the city of
 Jericho and a few built-up Palestinian villages, but leaves next to 0%
 for agricultural use. This has been devastating for the
 agriculture-based society and explains the mass exodus of Palestinians
 even after Israel's overtly violent expulsion tactics ceased. Having
 lost their livelihoods, Jordan Valley farmers can either move west, or
 stay and work as settlement laborers on their own land.

 In Fasayel we met a young man named Zafar who works full-time packing
 grapes into boxes at Beit Sayel settlement because his family has lost
 all their land. Zafar said workers are paid between 30 and 50 NIS
 (US$7.50 - $12.50) for an 8-hour workday, depending on their age: 50
 for adults, 30 for child laborers, sometimes 10 years old or younger.
 He said there's no contract, no insurance, no holiday or sick pay, but
 they work like slaves because it's the only alternative to leaving. We
 asked Zafar if he supported the boycott of Israeli products even
 though that could indirectly affect his job and he answered
 unhesitatingly: "Yes. I hope everyone will boycott. I only work for
 the settlement because I have nowhere else to work - they took all our
 land."

 Along our tour we met a farmer named Abu Hashem who used to be one of
 the richest landowners in Palestine. Of his 8,000 original dunums,
 only 70 are left after Israel built what Fathi calls, "the Forgotten
 Wall." East of the major settler highway is a barrier similar in shape
 and effect to Israel's better-known Apartheid Wall, this one built
 back in 1971 and reinforced in 1999. From his modest house, Abu Hashem
 can see past the Wall across the thousands of his dunums that he can
 never return to, spanning all the way to the Jordan River.

 Abu Hashem's sons alternate years going to university and working on
 the farm to support the family. Abu Hashem would hire Palestinian
 laborers so his sons could study full-time, but Israel prohibits
 Palestinians from bringing in outside workers. Another farmer we met
 said he needs 50 farmers to cultivate his land, but he only has 10,
 since so many locals have left. Settlements, on the other hand, are
 free to bring in as much cheap labor from the rest of the West Bank as
 they like, so long as the Palestinians head back west when they're
 done so as not to throw off the Judaizing demographic trend.

 Much of the produce harvested by cheap Palestinian laborers in Israeli
 settlements is then exported by the company Carmel-Agrexco, which is
 50% owned by the Israeli state and brought in three-quarters of a
 billion dollars last year alone
 (http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/1386.shtml). Anyone who
 claims that Israel is not profiting off of the Occupation need only
 take a tour of the Jordan Valley to see truck after truck of local
 goods being sent off to the European market. Carmel-Agrexco boasts
 about getting produce from the Jordan Valley (which they often refer
 to as "Israel) to the United Kingdom in 24 hours, when it takes
 Palestinians three times as long just to get it through checkpoints.
 Israel has consistently prevented Palestinians from exporting their
 own produce, so it rots on its way from one village to another, while
 Europeans enjoy fresh "Israeli" citrus and avocados and the Israeli
 state's stocks rise.

 As always, Palestinians have explored nonviolent resistance to the
 monopolization of their land. We visited an agricultural cooperative
 where local farmers have pooled their dwindling resources to try and
 grow food to feed their communities so that they don't have to rely on
 settlement products. Two representatives of the cooperative said that
 Israel - which controls all water in the Jordan Valley, as in the rest
 of the West Bank - only allows the farmers to use running water once a
 week, not nearly enough to sustain their crops in the desert heat
 (meanwhile, several settlements enjoy swimming pools to cool off from
 the desert heat). In addition, when the farmers produce enough to sell
 outside their communities, Carmel Agrexco and other Israeli companies
 lower their prices until the Palestinians are run out of the market.
 Then, secure in their monopoly, the companies raise their prices back
 up.

 Politicians and analysts have called Jordan Valley the second priority
 after Jerusalem, but the most convincing reason is not border control.
 Carmel Agrexco is just one of many companies making a killing off of
 the Occupation, in the Jordan Valley and beyond. The electric, gas,
 water, and other governmental and private monopolies have greatly
 prospered since the Palestinian economy became a captive one in which
 Palestinians either have to buy directly from Israel or pay taxes to
 Israel for foreign goods. The latter isn't always an option anymore,
 so millions go straight from Palestinians' pockets into Israel's.
 Outside financial support for Palestinians eventually feeds into the
 Israeli economy on top of the billions in aid Israel already receives
 from the United States, enough to offset most of the Occupation's
 costs. Coupled with tax collection, a captive cheap unprotected labor
 source, and often unchecked industrial expansion using stolen land and
 resources, the Israeli economy as a whole has been profiting off the
 Occupation for many, many years.

 Surprisingly - or perhaps not so surprisingly - it's difficult to find
 this information all in one place, but a women's coalition in Israel
 is working to do just that (Right now the best you can find are the
 first few bulletins at
 http://www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/the-economy-of-the-occupation/).
 Meanwhile, people continue to shrug off the near annexation of almost
 a third of the West Bank to "security," never stopping to question who
 the real winners and losers are. Is the United States in Iraq for
 security? Or is it about big industries and private contractors? As in
 America's war on Iraq, the driving force behind Israel's policies in
 the Jordan Valley and all the Occupied Territories is not security;
 it's power, control, and, money. The winners include the Israeli
 state, private sectors, the economic settlers and the ideological
 fundamentalists. The losers are too numerous to name: They are the
 millions of Palestinians living under brutal military occupation, each
 of whose stories is in some way as tragic as those of Ali and Zafar.
 They are the Israelis who live in fear, and who mourn the victims of
 Palestinian armed resistance. And they are us, the American people,
 who continue to foot the bill for so much of the carnage, many of us
 never knowing the difference.

 ----------------------------------------------------------

 Check Electronic Intifada Diaries in a couple days for the above
 report with photos. Here are my last three, in case you haven't read
 them yet, or seen images:

 Paralysis, Prophets, and Forgiveness:
 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6869.shtml

 Deir Yassin Continues:
 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6854.shtml

 Prelude to the Third Intifada?:
 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6849.shtml

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