cj#1067> MER: “Ethnic Cleansing” Israeli style

2000-02-27

Richard Moore

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To: •••@••.•••
Subject: What's, up
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 05:46:03 EST
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Hi Richard.

You must be very busy but please don't disappear altogether.
How is the sunset there? Write something.

Vadim.

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Dear Vadim & cj,

I've been back in Wexford for a week and have nearly completed the
re-entry process.  There are three deadlines coming up for software
projects and for an article for Whole Earth Review.  Haven't been able
to create any space for writing and thinking as yet... sorry.

Meanwhile many things have been sent in which I'd like to share.  For
now, here's a story you won't see the candidates debating... part of
the reality going on in the world while the 'democratic process' campaign
proceeds in its imaginary matrix world.

rkm


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From: "MiD-EasT RealitieS" <•••@••.•••>
To: "MER" <•••@••.•••>
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 09:05:17 -0500
Subject: MER FlashBack - 'Ethnic Cleansing' Israeli Style
Reply-To: •••@••.•••
Organization: MiD-EasT RealitieS
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Priority: 3

   M I D - E A S T   R E A L I T I E S - "Ethnic Cleansing" Israeli style
         News, Information & Analysis They Don't Want You to Know!
                         http://www.MiddleEast.Org
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               Please forward to friends & concerned individuals
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MER FLASHBACK:
MORE REALITIES OF THE "PEACE PROCESS":

        "If this is not 'ethnic cleansing', I have no
        concept what that term implies.  Americans should
        feel shame: this is our tax dollars at work and
        our foreign policy serving backup as a sort of
        unindicted co-conspirator. 'Peace' has a hollow
        sound without justice"

                John Worrell
                Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), Hebron


        ETHNIC CLEANSING - ISRAELI-STYLE

MER - Washington - 2/12/97 - In an area occupied in the 1967
war, the Israelis have built a major settlement, Maalai
Adunim, which they are continually expanding and which they
consider linked to Jerusalem. It is one more way of
destroying the continuity of Palestinian areas and defying
the world community. The Jahalin Bedouin have peacefully
lived in this area for some 40 years, having been expelled
by Israel at that time from other areas. Under cover of the
Oslo and subsequent agreements with the Arafat Regime -
i.e., "the Palestinian Authority" - the Jahalin Bedouin have
once again been forceably evicted, this time to what is
essentially a garbage dump. It is another story of the
mighty against the weak, injustice triumping over justice,
American money and support being used for outrageous
purposes. Read on...


        ISRAEL COMPLETES EVICTION OF JAHALIN BEDOUIN COMMUNITY

[2/11/97 - CPT, Hebron] After forcibly evicting 14 Jahalin
Bedouin families this morning from the land on which they
have lived for more than 40 years, Israeli forces continued
the evictions into the afternoon, bulldozing tents/homes and
expelling the last 17 Jahalin families. The land from which
the entire Jahalin community was expelled will be used for
future Jewish development of the Ma'ale Adumim settlement
which is located in the West Bank.

Foreign laborers from Africa were hired by the Israeli
government to remove the Jahalin belongings from their tents
while Israeli police and soldiers looked on. The belongings
were loaded into metal shipping containers which will likely
be moved to the "alternative" living site and serve as
substitute shelters after the demolition of the Jahalin
tents.

The entire operation was highly organized and carried out
while most of the world's attention was focused on the
release of Palestinian women prisoners from Israeli jails.
The eviction of the entire Jahalin community is part of a
systematic policy to "cleanse" areas of the West Bank that
the Israeli government hopes to annex to Israel.

     * * * Additional information previously from MER * * *

[MER - 1/30/97 - On the occupied West Bank the Jahalin
Bedouin have lived for decades. In the 1970s the Israelis
began to build a large settlement near the Jahalin -- a
settlement that is meant to expand Jewish Jerusalem far into
the desert. In the past few days -- under cover of the
Hebron "agreement" the Jahalin have been forceably
'expelled' from their homes in what Linda Brayer
courageously points out is the on-going Israeli version of
"ethnic cleansing". This eye-witness report from Linda
Brayer]

                EYE-WITNESS  REPORT  FROM  THE  WEST BANK

                            By LINDA BRAYER
        Executive Legal Director, Society of St. Ives, Jerusalem

(1/29/97) On a misty Monday morning, the air wet from the
continuing drizzle, the Israeli Military High Command
decided to swoop on to a scattered Bedouin community whose
presence has been hindering the expansion of the Jewish
colony of Ma'ale Adumim in the Occupied Palestinian
territory of the West Bank. Ma'ale Adumim is situated to the
south east of the villages of Abu-Dis and el-Azzariah (the
latter being the home town of Lazarus who was raised from
the dead.) beyond the expanded Israeli borders of Jerusalem,
but it will be annexed into Jerusalem very soon. Both the
building of this colony and its subsequent annexation are
illegal in international law, and in contravention of the
agreement with the Palestinians.

The Israeli forces carried out a military operation against
the Jahalin Bedouin who are unarmed civilians. The police,
most of whom carry standard army automatic rifles, set up
road blocks preventing people entering the site of the
military operation. Foreign delegations , press
representatives, peace activists and Palestinian
representatives, such as Mr. Faisal Husseini, were all
prevented from approaching the sites where the operation was
taking place In order to pass one road block I had to give
an explanation of what I was doing there: I just told them
that I was a lawyer and seeing as I speak a fluent Hebrew I
had no trouble entering the "forbidden site."

Tens of policemen swooped down on to the first encampment
chosen for destruction; a wall of policemen's bodies was set
up to prevented any and all civilians from approaching the
tents and shacks up for destruction, and the area was
declared a "closed military area" -an interesting
designation for a police action! The owner of the structures
of the first encampment tried to prevent his long-standing
shelters from being destroyed but the police surrounded and
arrested him. The young Bedouin men who witnessed the
violence and humiliation of the man tried to help him and
attempted to pull the police off him but they were thrown
back up the hill away from the encampment and were pushed
against a fence set up against a 3 meter high ledge. The
police and soldiers then began shoving the young men down
the hill to get them away from the site where they would be
held under control in a confined area by police and army
forces. They kicked and pushed the Jahalin youngsters,
pulled their hair and their clothes, and at times, struck
them with their truncheons. At the lower end of the hillock
they pushed them down a one meter ledge on to the ground,
with many of them being injured in the process. The army did
not see fit to have an ambulance on hand, nor did they call
one. They also had not brought any stretchers to deal with
possible injuries. Here more police, soldiers and secret
service people waited to surround and to control them. A
member of the "mohabarat" - secret services - was filming
all the action. Everyone at the site was filmed: the local
bedouin, the local and foreign press and myself, their
lawyer.

Meanwhile, down the hill on the other side, the bulldozers
had a free run of the encampment. Moving trucks had been
brought in to gather up the most meagre of belongings which
did not include the building material for new shelters -
neither the traditional woven cloth nor the iron sheets.
Shacks and tents had been smashed with no thought of saving
anything for the alternative site and the inhabitants had
been far removed and had no say in what they wanted brought
over. I came in time to watch and photograph the destruction
of the central tent/tin shack which had formed the heart of
the compound that I had visited on several occasions.

This was an army action in all its details although the
police carried it out. The Israelis wanted the forced
expulsion to look like an ordinary civil action taken by
ordinary civilian authorities against civilian "lawbreakers"
- rather than as a violent illegal military action. It was
so pathetic. Ordinary human beings, unarmed and unprotected,
whose only crime was that they were not Jewish and who had
lived in one place for many years, had all traces of their
habitation removed within a matter of less than one hour.

After expediting this expulsion and destruction quite
efficiently, the troops moved on to the second encampment
located further south and trapped between buildings under
construction. Here, there was only one tiny, elderly couple,
each of whom was more than eighty years old, who lived
together with about twenty to twenty five sheep and goats.
The animals were in a pen and the couple had three or four
tents and shacks which held their belongings and the food of
the sheep.

This second entire operation did not last more than one
hour. The elderly couple had been removed, the tent shacks
were run down and destroyed, the foreign workers from
Rumania carried the sheep and goats into a container on a
truck, and the pen was destroyed. Within about ten minutes,
the couple and their goats and sheep had been transferred to
the alternative site where the wind was howling and the
couple looked completely dazed. Udi, from the co-ordinating
office said that he would give the old couple a tin shack
but that the other five families evicted from the first
encampment would receive nothing. The partiality of the
generosity is indicative of an outlook which refuses to
regard all human beings as human and as equal.

On the alternative site the people were left stranded.
Despite all claims to the contrary, the Israeli authorities
did precisely what we have been predicting for years. They
threw the expelled Jahalin bedouin families on to a rocky
hill with no provisions made for their new life. It proves
the point that the Israeli authorities have never had any
intention of providing the Jahalin with anything except
sweet words. As Paul says in the New Testament, "by their
fruit ye shall know them." There is no Israeli fruit: only a
sterile, uninhabitable rocky protuberance whose outer
perimeter road serves 800 garbage trucks daily on their way
to the Greater Jerusalem garbage dump five hundred meters
away...

...the new site will be an instant favello or barios or
squatter township as in South America or apartheid South
Africa. These are the dwelling places for the less than
human. In the Jahalin case, their crime is that they are not
Jewish and as such, they are not fully human from the
position of the Jewish authorities. The way we know this is
the way the Jewish authorities treat them. The Jewish
authorities do not think that the Jahalin need the kind of
housing that Jews need. This reminds me of a Supreme Court
Justice who commented on a demand for the restoration of
drinking water for Palestinians in a particular village in
the amount that the Jews received in the neighbouring Jewish
illegal settlement. "I am not interested in what Jews
receive! What did they [i.e. the Palestinians] receive
before the water was cut off? That is what they must get.
You cannot compare Jewish and Palestinian consumption!

He is right of course. You cannot compare consumption
because you may not compare consumption. In the same manner,
you cannot compare Palestinian dwelling conditions with
Jewish housing conditions, because you may not compare them.
The High Court says you cannot!! Therefore one may not
compare the ultra-modern, well watered, flowered and treed
colony of Ma'ale Adumim with the "alternative site" or the
new Ma'ale Adumim Township!

...The forced eviction has been on the cards since the High
Court ratified the State of Israel's claim that the land in
the occupied territories is "state land" and therefore
forbidden for use to the native population - and all this
despite there being no documents to prove this claim as the
state had destroyed the files on its own admission.

The destruction of the Jahalin of Ma'ale Adumim is part of
continuing Zionist policy. I predict that this "alternative
site" will be re-classified as Area B unilaterally by the
Israelis in the very near future as part of the ethnic
cleansing of Area C, towards the final solution of the
Palestinian problem.

I also want to point out a further point which no one seems
to have picked up. When Palestinians claim to own land, they
have to prove this ownership according to Israeli standards.
When the land is conveniently expropriated in a myriad of
legal methods, it becomes a market commodity which can be
traded. At that point, it can no longer be obtained by
Palestinians.

The land of Ma'ale Adumim was stolen - whether one
recognises the Israeli designation of "state land" or not.
The land was removed from Palestinian ownership either
actual or potential. It is now in Jewish hands, and as we
know, Ma'ale Adumim is about to be officially annexed to
Jerusalem.

The Jahalin were expelled yesterday, two weeks ago, and will
be expelled within the next several days or maybe at the end
of Ramadan, because the Jewish contractors cannot fulfil
their contractual obligations to their Jewish clients.
Jewish Israelis and new immigrants have bought these
apartments and they should have moved into them months ago.
The contractors are either being sued or are about to be
sued for damages.

The economics of the Jewish colonies/settlement are the crux
of the matter and not security. When will the Israeli
government be held accountable for this theft?

Further house demolition took place in Ramallah today,
Tuesday, 28th January as well as the destruction of tents in
the Jordan valley. Area C is being ethnically cleansed of
its "foreign subjects" according to Israeli jargon and the
land in these areas will become the market commodity of
property. How long will the Palestinians and the world have
to put up with this gross violation of private property
rights and the violation of basic inviolable human rights of
Palestinian non-Jews?





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Richard K Moore
Wexford, Irleand
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
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