IDF Arrests/Detains Thirteen Children in Beit Ommar

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Demonstration in Beit Ommar 1/19/11

To continue from my last post regarding the arrest and detention of Palestinian children on the West Bank, please read the press release below that was sent out yesterday by the Palestine Solidarity Project.  I will soon be posting a piece from my friend Father Cotton Fite, who is currently in Israel/Palestine and has dear friends in Beit Ommar.

Here is an excerpt from a post Cotton wrote about the family during his visit to the area last year:

Jamal told us the story of his 15 year old nephew, Ibrahim, who was recently awakened in his bed at home at 2 AM by Israeli soldiers and taken for questioning. While in prison he was severely beaten and had electrodes attached to his genitals with the threat he would “become like his sister” and never marry. Jamal and his brother finally gained Ibrahim’s release with a fine of 500 shekels and their signature on an agreement that Ibrahim would be returned for questioning within an hour of notification by the IDF.

It is profoundly painful to read about Israel’s state abuse of children. The pain is all the more when you consider that none of us in the Jewish community seem ready to say anything about it.

13 Boys Arrested From Playground after Army Represses Beit Ommar Demonstration

On Saturday the 19th of February at 1 pm, the Beit Ommar National Committee held a large demonstration to protest the Israeli government’s decision to expand settlements, with support from the United States. They were joined by Palestinian Popular Committees from Hebron, Al-Masar’a, Beit Ola, Tuwani, Surif, and Wadi Rahal, as well as members from the Beit Ommar municipality. The gathered Palestinian activists were also supported by a large number of Israeli and International solidarity activists.

The army arrived in several jeeps from Karmei Tsur settlement and immediately began shooting tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. Israeli Forces also threw sound bombs at the crowd, hitting a few people directly. A minister from the Beit Ommar municipality was injured in his leg, and a member of the National Committee was injured after a sound bomb exploded on his back. The army continued their attacks, while a group of settlers gathered behind the Karmei Tsur fence to watch the repression. After an hour and half, the demonstrators successfully delivered their message to the soldiers and media and returned to the village with no arrests.

At around 3pm, half an hour after the demonstration had ended, an undercover military vehicle came into the village near Karmei Tsur and soldiers attacked the residence of Husni Za’qiq. Soldiers occupied the house and prevented anyone from leaving. Other soldiers, accompanied by special units, invaded a park full of children between the ages of 12 and 15 years. The Israeli Forces attacked and shot rubber bullets and sound bombs at the children so they could not run away, and then proceeded to arrest 13 of them. Several army vehicles came into the area for support, attacking houses and cars to frighten people so they could not come to the children’s defense. The army shot tear gas and sound bombs toward women who attempted to rescue the youth, and then beat the group of women, including Mona Abu Maria. The army succeeded in taking the arrested children, all of whom are under the age of 18, out of the village. Their families do not yet know where they are being held.

Children are Disappearing in Nabi Saleh

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http://vimeo.com/19782878

Over the past month, Israeli activist Joseph Dana has been chronicling Israel’s practice of arrest and detention of Palestinian children in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. I don’t know what to say except that his reports have left me numb:

“They come for our woman and our children,” Bassem Tamimi, the leader of the Popular Committee of Nabi Saleh recently told me, “they [the Israeli army] know that woman are half our population and half our strength and so they target them along with the children.” Tamimi, a gentle man with a warm smile spoke to me about the repression of his village as we sat in his home overlooking the settlement of Halamish. “They know where to apply pressure on our resistance. It has become really difficult since the last wave of arrests.”

Israel is devoting maximum effort to the repression of Nabi Saleh’s determination to demonstrate against the Occupation. The specific method of repression has been in development for the past eight years and is not only designed to break the demonstrations but to leave permanent psychological scars on the next generation of Nabi Saleh villagers. In short, children are used to implicate the leaders of the Popular Committee for incitement in demonstrations, providing evidence for their long term incarceration. In the last month, six children have been arrested or detained in Nabi Saleh by the army.

The video above shows the capture of eleven year old Kareem Tamimi who is chased down and grabbed by Israeli border police before he is shoved into a police van. The voice you hear screaming in the background is his mother.

Other videos on Dana’s site are no less disturbing. Two clips document late night home raids by the IDF, who go from from house to house photographing children and recording their names and ID numbers. As Dana explains:

14 year old Islam Tamimi, one of the children seen being photographed in a night raid, has been in jail for the past three weeks. Days after the video was shot he was arrested and detained for a number of hours at the Halamish military base. Two days after he was detained, the army raided his home at 02h00 and arrested him. He was left in the cold, blindfolded and bound for the rest of the night and then taken imminently to interrogation without lawyer or parents present. The interrogation lasted eight hours. Incidentally, the day that Tamimi was arrested the IDF Spokespersons office tweeted that ‘a wanted suspect was arrested overnight and taken for security questioning.’

In another post, Dana reported that fourteen year old Islam had a hearing on February 14 (in which he was brought before a judge while wearing an over sized adult prison uniform). While he originally was held in a cell with his 24 year old brother (who was jailed on stone throwing charges), he was subsequently moved away to another prison.  His trial is scheduled to take place next week.

This is not only an issue for Nabi Saleh. According to the Middle East Children’s Alliance, thirty two Palestinian children were arrested by Israeli authorities in the first two weeks of February alone. A recent report by Defense for Children International (Palestine Section) has concluded:

Each year approximately 700 Palestinian children are arrested, interrogated and detained in the Israeli military court system, and reports of torture and ill-treatment are common.

My friend Father Cotton Fite, who is currently visiting Israel/Palestine, has dear friends in the village of Beit Ommar. Shortly before he left, he heard from them that the IDF had come to their home and was targeting one of their young sons. The family was understandably terrified.

Cotton is visiting the family now and is also meeting with B’tselem field workers to find out exactly what is happening on the ground. He promised to send in a post about his experiences. (In the meantime, you can read this report from last summer that claims that over a dozen youth from Beit Ommar were arrested in less than a month’s time.)

Nelson Mandela is famously quoted as saying,

There can be no keener revelation about a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

Bear these words in mind as you watch the film clip above…

Kafka Would Love This: US to Block UN from Supporting US Policy

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I recently expressed the hope that the US would support the upcoming UN resolution condemning Israeli settlement on the West Bank. Now this just in from US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg:

We have made very clear that we do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues…We have had some success, at least for the moment, in not having that arise there.  And we will continue to employ the tools that we have to make sure that continues to not happen.

Sad, but all too predictable. Let’s let MJ Rosenberg explain the wrong-headedness of it all:

Opposition to Israeli settlements is perhaps the only issue on which the entire Arab and Muslim world is united. Iraqis and Afghanis, Syrians and Egyptians, Indonesians and Pakistanis don’t agree on much, but they do agree on that. They also agree that the U.S. policy on settlements demonstrates flagrant disregard for human rights in the Muslim world (at least when Israel is the human rights violator).

Accordingly, a U.S. decision to support the condemnation of settlements would send a clear message to the Arab and Muslim world that we understand what is happening in the Middle East and that we share at least some of its peoples’ concerns.

And on the point that the UN is “not the right place to engage on these issues?”

Very impressive. The United States has had no success whatsoever in getting the Netanyahu government to stop expanding settlements — to stop evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for ultra-Orthodox settlers — and no success in getting Israel to crack down on settler violence, but we have had “some success” in keeping the issue out of the United Nations.

Queasy about using the UN to try and stop the Israeli settlement juggernaut? It’s time to get over it. A long list of former US officials, prominent policy writers academics and religious figures have already written a letter to Obama urging him not to block the resolution. J Street has also stated it “cannot support a U.S. veto of a Resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy.”

To join these voices of sanity, please click here.

UPDATE (2/17/11): The US is now trying to avoid a showdown by putting forward its tepid own resolution. The Palestinians have rejected the American offer and said it is planning to press for a vote on its resolution on Friday.

It’s looking more and more like the Obama adminstration will soon cast its first ever veto in the UN Security Council.

The Irvine 11: A Tale of Two Protests

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Remember the group of young Jewish Voice for Peace activists who protested Israeli policy during Netanyahu’s speech in NOLA last November? You might recall that the young protesters were forcibly removed from the auditorium but faced no legal sanctions. (You may also recall that they were hailed as heroes by many Jewish editorial writers.)

As it turns out, eleven young Muslim students who staged a similar protest at UC Irvine during a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren last February are facing possible prison sentences. The Orange County DA announced today it is charging the students with “conspiring to disrupt a meeting” and “disrupting a meeting.”  If convicted they face a sentence ranging from community service/fine to up to six months in jail.

From a Jewish Voice for Peace press release:

(JVP) notes that our own members have engaged in similar protests in the past without being charged, and stand by it as a form of legitimate expression in an open and democratic society. The targeting of a group of Muslim American students, who were already sanctioned and whose organization was already suspended by their university as punishment,  is unacceptable and will only strengthen Islamophobia and attempts to stifle political speech in this country.

Whether you believe these students’ actions constituted civil disobedience or simple obnoxiousness, you can’t deny the egregious double standard. JVP will be hand-delivering a letter of protest to the Orange County DA this Wednesday and I’m proud to be a co-signer. If you’d like to contact the office yourself, click here.

Al-Jazeera Unleashes The Palestine Papers

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From Al Jazeera:

Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are nearly 1,700 files, thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. These documents – memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations – date from 1999 to 2010.

The material is voluminous and detailed; it provides an unprecedented look inside the continuing negotiations involving high-level American, Israeli, and Palestinian Authority officials.

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Celebrate and Take Action This Tu B’shvat!

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It’s utterly frigid here in Chicago. As I lose feeling in my toes, however, the Jewish calendar tells me it’s Tu B’shvat: the Birthday of the Trees, and the first harbinger of Spring.

And so my Tu B’shvat offerings for you:

– An email I wrote on behalf of Jewish Voice for Peace: this Tu B’shvat, please take action to save trees and uprooted communities in Israel/Palestine;

– From the Velveteen Rabbi: a lovely two-page Tu B’shvat Haggadah that covers all the bases quite gracefully. (Mazel Tov to the Velveteen Rabbi, who recently received her smicha and is now, as she puts it, “running and playing with the real rabbis.” Rabbi Rachel: don’t you know you’ve been a “real” rabbi to many of us for quite some time now…)

– For Tu B’shvat reading material, I encourage you to read this inspiring piece on “Spiritual Environmentalism” by Wangari Maathai, Kenyan tree-planter extraordinaire:

Human beings have a consciousness by which we can appreciate love, beauty, creativity, and innovation or mourn the lack thereof. To the extent that we can go beyond ourselves and ordinary biological instincts, we can experience what it means to be human and therefore different from other animals. We can appreciate the delicacy of dew or a flower in bloom, water as it runs over the pebbles or the majesty of an elephant, the fragility of the butterfly or a field of wheat or leaves blowing in the wind. Such aesthetic responses are valid in their own right, and as reactions to the natural world they can inspire in us a sense of wonder and beauty that in turn encourages a sense of the divine.

That consciousness acknowledges that while a certain tree, forest, or mountain itself may not be holy, the life-sustaining services it provides — the oxygen we breathe, the water we drink — are what make existence possible, and so deserve our respect and veneration. From this point of view, the environment becomes sacred, because to destroy what is essential to life is to destroy life itself.

I feel my toes warming up already…

The Latest UN Resolution: Will Obama Do the Right Thing?

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Will the Obama administration ever be ready to act as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Another test seems to be looming.

The following resolution, introduced by 120 co-sponsors, is currently pending the UN Security Council:

Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.

On its face its not a particularly controversial claim. It more or less echoes long-held US policy on Israeli settlements. But of course when it comes to the UN, nothing is ever that simple.

What makes this situation a bit more interesting is that it is not only the usual suspects who are urging Obama to support the resolution. A letter signed by former US officials, prominent policy writers, academics and religious figures has just been released, calling upon the US to cast a yes vote.

An excerpt:

At this critical juncture, how the US chooses to cast its vote on a settlements resolution will have a defining effect on our standing as a broker in Middle East peace. But the impact of this vote will be felt well beyond the arena of Israeli-Palestinian deal-making – our seriousness as a guarantor of international law and international legitimacy is at stake.

America’s credibility in a crucial region of the world is on the line – a region in which hundreds of thousands of our troops are deployed and where we face the greatest threats and challenges to our security. This vote is an American national security interest vote par excellence. We urge you to do the right thing.

To be sure, the signators are not easily dismissible: they include former US Trade Representative and Council on Foreign Relations Chair Carla Hills, journalist and former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering, former Assistant Secretary of State James Dobbins, former Assistant Secretary of State Robert Pastor, former US Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci and former US Ambassador to Israel Edward “Ned” Walker, among others.

It’s easy to be cynical about the UN, but it will still be interesting to see how this saga plays out. As Alex Spillius recently pointed out in The Telegraph, it may be Obama’s last chance to present himself as a fair dealer in this region.

If history is any indication, the final vote on this resolution will not be forthcoming any time soon. We can surely expect months of wordsmithing and back room dealing, and public posturing. Still, it certainly seems that there’s a bit more riding on this particular UN resolution than usual.

Stay tuned on this one.

Illinois Senate Abolishes the Death Penalty!

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Amidst all of the talk of our nation’s violent political rhetoric, here’s a ray of light:  the Illinois senate voted yesterday to abolish the death penalty in our state!  In other words, they took a stand against “state-sponsored” violence.

The bill now goes to Governor Pat Quinn, who has not indicated yet whether or not he intends to sign. Illinois residents: contact Governor Quinn now and let him know you want Illinois to be the 16th state to strike down the death penalty!

JRC Israel-Palestine Trip Featured on Chicago Public Radio

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Our JRC Israel/Palestine Study Tour was featured today on the Chicago Public Radio program, “Worldview.” I was interviewed along with trip participants Marge Frank and Michael Deheeger for an extensive and quite wide-ranging conversation about our experiences.

The first half of the program featured an powerful interview with Israeli Palestinian solidarity activist Joseph Dana, whose important work I’ve cited on this blog on several occasions. All told, a pretty important hour of radio.

Click here to give a listen. I strongly encourage you to tune in for the entire program; if you choose to listen to our interview alone, click here.

Lessons In Humility – A Guest Post From Palestine

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Photo by Mike Okrent

Here’s a guest post by Lynn Pollack, another participant from our JRC trip to Israel/Palestine:

I was one of the people on the recent JRC trip to the West Bank and Israel, but having visited three times before in the last few years I didn’t think I had that much to learn.  After all, I had devoted much of the last decade to advocating for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians – a peace that includes an end to occupation and a beginning of real equality.  What could possibly move me on another visit?   Arrogant, huh?  Well, yes, and on this trip I was humbled many times.

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