According to Israeli law, it seems, Palestinians must obtain an official building permit to live in a cave. Yes, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
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Published on Tuesday, August 14, 2001 in the Madison Capital Times
Brutal Israeli Terrorism Subsidized by US
by Kathryn Kingsbury
The morning after I returned from a two-week trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, I awoke to appalling news.
A suicide bombing by a member of Hamas, a Palestinian liberation group, killed at least 15 people, including several children, last Thursday during lunch hour at a crowded pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem. The bombing came in retaliation for an Israeli attack July 31 that killed eight people, including two Hamas members, in the West Bank city of Nablus. Hamas is one of several Palestinian groups seeking to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through political and military means.
I had just come back from a two-week trip with Christian Peacemaker Teams, a pacifist group that documents human rights abuses and works with Israelis and Palestinians to promote peaceful and just means for ending the ongoing warfare.
Before I left, several well-intentioned acquaintances politely informed me I was crazy. "Palestinians don't know any way other than violence," they said. "They kill Jews left and right, after all that the Israelis have done for them. Pacifism won't work in the Middle East."
This perception is understandable. As Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres so astutely pointed out after Thursday's atrocity in Jerusalem, the world has allowed rogue militants to speak for all of Palestine. "If we say we won't talk under fire, it means every mad gunman can decide there will be no dialogue."
At the same time, we ignore Palestine's lively peace movement - you, dear reader, have likely never heard of it, even though it works at a grass-roots level in every Palestinian community throughout the occupied territories.
And by our silence, we condone Israel's own atrocities against the Palestinian people. The Israeli death toll from the current 10-month conflict is around 140. In the same period, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed. As with the Israeli deaths, many of the dead Palestinians were civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That's right. Middle East terrorism goes both ways.
A week ago Monday, I visited a desert community of about 75 cave-dwelling shepherds near the West Bank town of Yatta. Only two weeks before, the Israeli Defense Forces had bulldozed every one of the community's centuries-old caves, burying clothing, cars and even live sheep under tons of rock. When the Red Cross supplied emergency tents to the families, the Israelis returned with their heavy machinery and buried those as well.
An elderly shepherd named Jaber led me from crumbled cave to crumbled cave. It was early in the afternoon, a time when most Middle Easterners stay indoors or under a canopy. But Jaber and I had no choice. The entrances to the caves were blocked by jagged stones, crumpled cars and torn tents. His face glowed a deep pink from days on end of living under the desert sun with almost no access to shade.
He led me past his surviving goats and sheep, several of whom were gnawing on a fallen tree, to the cave where he had kept them at night and during the harsher parts of day. Through a gap in the stones, we could see buried containers of feed. "Everything is in there," he said in Arabic. "I have no food to give them." The Israeli government has justified the cave demolitions, saying that they were built without the required construction permits. Israel has used this process to block virtually all Palestinian construction - schools, homes, you name it - on these lands.
And it regularly demolishes structures that predate the 1967 permit law in order to make way for Israeli colonies in the West Bank that are illegal under international law. In its occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel continuously violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which outlaws attacks against civilians and forbids permanent settlements by any nation outside of its boundaries, even though Israel itself pushed for this convention and signed onto it.
These home demolitions are only one part of Israel's ongoing policy of harassing, impoverishing, torturing and killing Palestinian civilians in an effort to force them to flee their homeland.
Take the two children and several bystanders who were killed as "collateral damage" during the Israeli attack two weeks ago in Nablus. Or the Palestinian pacifist, Isaac Saada, who was murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces last month in Bethlehem. Or my Palestinian friend who was stopped by an Israeli security officer as he drove on an ostensibly Palestinian-controlled road, ordered out of his car, beaten and threatened with death. Or my encounter early last week with a group of Israeli soldiers who surrounded my group's Palestinian taxi drivers and calmly discussed kidnapping and torturing them, forgetting that the Israeli peace activists among us would understand Hebrew.
The policy of terror is working. Jacob, a Palestinian friend of mine who lives in Beit Jala, a village just outside of Bethlehem, recently told me of his plans to move to Bolivia. The tourist-dependent Bethlehem economy has crashed since the beginning of this intifada.
"There's no work," he told me. "And I'm sick of this shooting." He waved his hand in the direction of Gilo, a walled Israeli settlement that stands like a fortress on a nearby hill. Besides housing Israelis, Gilo holds a military outpost that regularly barrages Bethlehem and its surrounding villages with shells and machine gun fire.
The night before, Jacob and I had huddled in a corner room of the house with several other friends as Israeli bullets zipped through the hallway and burst holes in the gas and water tanks on the roof.
Israel claimed that the shelling was in response to Palestinian gunfire. If so, why did the Israeli Defense Forces blanket residential areas with bombs and bullets, rather than targeting the handful of gunmen who were acting in opposition to the majority will of Beit Jala residents?
The Israeli government is as guilty as Palestinian military groups of waging war against civilians. But unlike Hamas or Islamic Jihad, it is using U.S. taxpayers' money to do so - to the tune of $2.23 billion in military aid a year.
It is time for the United States to wake up and hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.
Kathryn Kingsbury is a reporter for The Capital Times.
Copyright 2001 The Capital Times |
