With World Attention on Iraq, Israel Seized Opportunity To Demolish Record Number of Palestinian Homes

By Maureen Meehan

While the eyes of the world were riveted on developments in the recent U.S.-Iraqi standoff, the Israeli government seized the opportunity to demolish a record number of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Between Feb. 3 and March 4, 21 Palestinian houses were demolished, as well as a 50-family traditional Bedouin encampment that was bulldozed for the purpose of expanding the sprawling Jewish settlement of nearby Ma’ale Edumim.

Of the 21 Palestinian houses demolished, two were in East Jerusalem while the rest were in the West Bank.

As a result of the first month of this demolition onslaught, which is still underway, 225 Palestinians were made homeless and another 75 lost homes they were waiting to move into. These demolitions have driven the total number of house demolitions to upwards of 560 since the September, 1993 signing of the Oslo accords. According to informed observers, the bulldozers will continue their work because the Israeli government has promised to step up destruction of Palestinian homes.

“Israel is attempting to reduce the Palestinian presence in the West Bank,” said Khalil Suleiman, whose home and the homes of his three brothers and their families were destroyed, making 32 people homeless. “House demolitions are one of their many sinister methods.”

Also in early March, soldiers and armed bulldozers leveled the five-year-old home of Yussef Mohamad al-Atrash and his wife, Zuhur, without warning or explanation. Al-Atrash said his family has lived on the land since Turkish times and has papers to prove ownership.

Zuhur al-Atrash, mother of 10 children, said she heard voices outside her home at about 8 a.m., just after she’d gotten her kids off to school. She locked the doors but the soldiers broke the windows with rifle butts to get in. She said there were about 30 soldiers and a bulldozer.

The soldiers pointed their guns at the head of her pre-school son and began pushing her and the child out of the house. They then pushed her down into a ditch about 20 yards from the house and began tossing their household items out of the house onto the ground.

The bulldozer then proceeded to level the house. Despite Zuhur’s begging, the soldiers also smashed the precious water cistern to eliminate any possibility of the family remaining on the land.

Despite the lack of water, the al-Atrash family opted to remain on their land in Red Cross tents, and appealed to the international community to help them to rebuild their home. Pitching tents on the land near the remains of the demolished home is the only alternative to homelessness for many people. It also is the only possible visible protest of their situation.

Five days after the demolition, however, some 100 Jewish settlers and soldiers approached them and warned they would bomb any equipment brought in to rebuild the house.

“They brought a bulldozer to take away the stones we’d collected to rebuild our cistern,” said Yussef al-Atrash. “They said we must remove the tents we and our 10 children have been living in since our home was destroyed.”

He appealed for Israeli and foreign volunteers to remain with them as they work on their house. “Our family is afraid that the settlers and soldiers will take revenge on us for rebuilding our home,” he explained.

The other house demolitions carried out over the 30-day period were similar to the destruction visited on the al-Atrash family, with the exception of the furor that resulted when Yussef al-Atrash attempted to rebuild his house. What all the demolitions, including the violent displacement of the Bedouin encampment, have in common is that they were essentially ignored by the Israeli and international press. That is why many Israelis and Palestinians believe demolitions increased dramatically during the U.S.-Iraqi crisis.

PNA Cracks Down on Palestinian Protesters

Alarmed by public protests against possible U.S. bombing in Iraq, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) issued several new orders brought on by the Gulf crisis. When street demonstrations in support of the Iraqi people and against U.S. military threats broke out on a regular basis, Palestinian Police Chief Ghazi Jibali issued instructions to the numerous private local Palestinian television stations not to cover news related to the situation, especially the growing street demonstrations.

Several local TV station owners were forced to sign documents pledging to curb their coverage and analysis of the crisis. In the wake of the warning, on Feb. 9 the PNA summarily closed down nine radio and TV stations, stating that they lacked operating permits. Many of the stations indeed were operating without proper licensing. However, they had been doing this for a long time with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Information.

The PNA closure orders state that the radio and TV stations were closed down in order for them to get organized “and put an end to the anarchy resulting from a non-ordered growth and lack of professional conditions that harms the superior national interest of security.”

Mahmoud Hourani, director of the now closed Hebron Radio, says that local TV and radio, despite its lack of slick professionalism, is essential in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem where nearly three million Palestinians “are isolated from each another in all ways.”

“Our transmissions didn’t always reach all over the West Bank, but we generally communicated to people in villages around the cities—something no one bothers to do,” Hourani said. “Local radio is one of the few sources of pleasure, news and entertainment for most Palestinians.”

“Besides, during the Iraqi crisis Palestinians had as much interest in the events and outcome as the Israelis. It was a total capitulation to Israel to ask our people not to talk about the crisis and not to criticize what the U.S. intended and may still do to Iraq,” he added.

Polls taken in the West Bank and Gaza during the crisis showed that 94 percent of Palestinians questioned were not pro-Saddam Hussain, but rather expressed sympathy for the people of Iraq.

As if to assure there would be no more reporting on the demonstrations, the Palestinian police commander banned peaceful assembly and any kind of demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The order specifically states that flag-burning, which was covered copiously by the U.S. and Israeli press, is inflammatory and could exacerbate tension in the region. The order came in the wake of Israeli statements that Palestinian support for Iraq would impede the already stalled peace process.

Many Palestinians regarded this order as a pretext for permanently depriving Palestinians of their right to peaceful assembly. One woman suggested that the PNA in fact is preparing for popular protests against the PNA itself.

“How long will it be before we start throwing stones at our own police?” asked the 65-year-old Bethlehem woman upon hearing the news that Palestinian police used tear gas to disperse crowds demonstrating in the West Bank town of Nablus in mid-March.

In fact, demonstrations raged over much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the March 10 shooting death of three Palestinian workers by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Hebron. The three victims, day workers in Israel, were in a van that was cutting in front of other cars to cross a checkpoint when soldiers, nervous over the quick moves made by the van to cut in line, opened fire at the vehicle, killing the three men and injuring nine others.

Anger among Palestinians over the shooting deaths quickly spread and was aggravated by news that Israel released the three soldiers involved in the incident, which many Palestinians came to regard as a ruthless massacre.

In protests following the murders of the workers, at least 100 Palestinians were injured. On March 13, 13-year-old Samer Karama of Hebron was declared clinically dead after being shot in the head by an Israeli soldier during clashes in the volatile city where 450 Jewish settlers live in the middle of a town populated by 130,000 Palestinians.

Despite Netanyahu’s condolence message to the bereaved Palestinian families as well as a commitment to the peace process, and despite Yasser Arafat’s call for calm followed by orders to quell protests against Israeli soldiers, it appears that many citizens on both sides of the conflict have little faith in their leaders and less hope they can defuse the situation and ultimately summon the wisdom and leadership necessary to achieve a just peace.

To wrap up a deadly week of violence and disappointing month of house demolitions and police brutality, in East Jerusalem a bomb exploded near the Old City, wounding three Palestinian high school girls; an Israeli “serial stabber” attacked three Palestinian men in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood; and in Hebron, the Karama family await the death of their teenage son.

“The gap is widening and leaving a dangerous vacuum which, once filled by the extremists—and it will be filled—will draw us back into the vicious cycle of violence that we seem damned to exist in,” said a Palestinian woman who was visiting her injured son at a Hebron hospital.

Maureen Meehan is a free-lance journalist who covers Jerusalem and the West Bank.

SIDEBAR 1

An-Nakba Alert

Do you personally remember an-Nakba, “the Catastrophe” of 1948, when an estimated 726,000 Palestinians, the great majority of the Muslim and Christian population, fled or were driven at gunpoint out of their homes and villages in Palestine? In our book Seeing the Light, we’ve published one first-hand account from that time. It is that of Farah Munayyer and his wife, Hanan, both of whom were children in 1948. Their families, through lucky flukes, were able to stay on in Haifa after being forced out of their homes. But what about all the others who survived but were barred by the Israelis from returning? We would like to print some first-hand accounts, even if you were only children and remember mostly from what your parents have told you, in our May/June issue, with an April 17 writers’ deadline for double-spaced submissions. Even if your true story doesn’t make it in that issue, we’ll still seek to print one such article in every issue from now until there’s real peace or until we have enough for a book. Don’t worry if your story has been previously published. We’ll get reprint rights. These are memoirs that must be told and retold until justice is done.

SIDEBAR 2

Palestinian and Israeli Actions in Breaking Up Hamas Cell in Tsurif Reopen Issue of Israeli Torture of Prisoners

A Hamas cell in Tsurif—an historically militant West Bank village near Hebron—has been broken up after a series of events that appear to have involved high-level intelligence and security cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli security services.

Last November, two members of the Tsurif cell whom Palestinian authorities had detained for questioning were “captured” from the Palestinian police by their Israeli counterparts as they approached a West Bank checkpoint. Palestinian authorities deny they handed the two men over to Israel but their lawyer, Allegra Pacheco, says events leading up to the prisoners’ transfer, as well as the prisoners’ own statements, indicate that it was well planned.

Many West Bank Palestinians, especially residents of Tsurif, regard the PA transfer of Gamal al-Hur and Abed al-Rahman Ghanimat from Palestinian to Israeli custody as an unacceptable breach of confidence, while Israeli authorities hail it as the biggest catch of the decade. The two prisoners thought they were being transferred to another jail in the West Bank when the van they traveled in was stopped by Israeli soldiers, who called out their names and took them without a struggle. The two members of the Izzadeen al-Kassam brigade, the military wing of Hamas, said that waiting Shabak (Israeli internal security service) agents cheered when they were brought into custody.

During their nearly four-month interrogation period, they were held in small, windowless cells with open toilets from which they never left except to see their lawyer or to go to court. They saw no daylight and had no exercise; they were allowed no reading material except for the Qur’an and they were not permitted facilities to shave, cut their hair or change their underwear. Neither of the men were allowed visits from their families and they were given very little food to eat.

After 108 days of interrogation, they were charged with many offenses, including planning a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in March 1997, drive-by shootings of Jewish settlers and kidnapping and killing an Israeli soldier.

Once the indictment was issued, which officially ends the interrogation during which torture is routinely and extensively used, the Shabak refused to transfer them to a normal prison—in violation of Israeli law—and instead continued the daily regiment of interrogation and torture. In protest, Ghanimat and Al-Hur undertook a 10-day hunger strike which, along with mounting pressure from Pacheco, succeeded in getting the two men transferred.

Pacheco says the list of illegal moves made by the Shabak in this case and regularly condoned by Israeli judges has been shocking. At one point when she attempted to secure an injunction to get the Shabak to stop torturing her clients, her petition met with such resistance in the judiciary, where it is still pending, that it has, in fact, become the seminal case on torture in Israel. At one point, a nine-judge panel voted 5 to 4 basically to allow the torture of her clients, and many others, to continue. Israel is one of the only countries in the world where physical torture is sanctioned by law.

“Throughout my representation in this case, I have seen such egregious violations of Israeli law,” said Pacheco. “The excesses committed by the Shabak in this case have been unprecedented…they have stood before judges as high up as the Supreme Court and gotten away with it.” —M.M.