The People’s Voice, TN
June 2 2007
Bush and Hillary: "Willing Collaborators"
by eileen fleming
"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country
run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements
but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in
control…It is apartheid and Bush and Hillary are both willing
collaborators."- Jeff Halper, American Israeli, Founder and
Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and
a Noble Peace Prize Nominee for 2006.
During one of my three interviews with Jeff at his ICAHD office on
Ben Yehuda Street, West Jerusalem, he informed this reporter that the
reason he moved to Israel from Hibbing, Minnesota in 1973 was because
there was something about Israel that spoke to him, and why in 1997,
he founded ICAHD,
"It was at the time when the Oslo peace plan collapsed and the
occupation reasserted itself. Many Israeli peace activists began
asking Palestinians what the best way to engage with each other was
and the answer was blowing in the wind: ‘STOP the home demolitions!’
In the 40 years of occupation, 18,000 Palestinian homes have been
demolished.
Jeff informed this reporter that, "95% of the cases have nothing to
do with security. All these homes are on Palestinian private
property. The Israeli government will not grant permits for them to
build on their own land, and in reality are quietly transferring the
Palestinians administratively from the land. They make conditions so
intolerable that the Palestinians give up and leave and this is
exactly what they are after. Not only do the Palestinians receive no
warning when their homes are to be destroyed they are fined $1,
500.00!
"I’ll get a call at 5 AM from a Palestinian telling me the bulldozers
have arrived and we activists go out and engage in civil disobedience
by standing up to the bulldozers. We also raise funds to rebuild
these homes right where they had been before. The reasons for the
demolitions are: for The Wall, to establish illegal settlements,
build roads and because the Israeli government wants to keep
Palestinians confined to the islands [areas A and B] in the West
Bank, and so Palestinian land remain under the control of the Israeli
government."
Jeff can no longer count how many times he had been arrested and
sentenced to community service. His eyes sparkled as he told me,
"When I tell the judge I am serving the community they just don’t get
it! The Israeli government simply does not want to take
responsibility and the USA government ignores the situation. Do you
know why Israel does not want to become America’s 51st state? Because
then they would only have two senators!
"Israel has no constitution but has a Declaration of Independence
which promised that Israel would abide by conditions and UN
resolutions. They have not fulfilled the agreement which was the
basis of their independence…One out of three Israeli children lives
below the poverty line. It’s probably about 80% for Palestinians.
Jews are like everyone else, those who have been abused grow up to be
abusers. Things here have been turned on their head: its victim
mentality and denial about the occupation. Once Israelis accept the
fact that they are occupiers they will have to admit their State
Terrorism."
Prior to 1948, 70% of West Jerusalem was Palestinian. From ’48 to
’67, Jerusalem was divided into Israeli West Jerusalem and
Palestinian East under Jordan’s control. When Israel captured and
occupied the West Bank in 1967, the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem
were also redefined. Israel annexed the greater Jerusalem area but
did not ‘adopt’ the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as
Israeli citizens.
Today, Palestinians living in Jerusalem are classified differently
from those in the West Bank. They are called permanent residents,
they can vote in local elections but not in Israeli national
elections. Most do not bother to vote as a statement against the
occupation.
West Jerusalem in nearly 100% Jewish. The Palestinians in East
Jerusalem pay the same taxes as those on the West side, but receive
only 8% of the total municipal budget. Orthodox Jews pay no taxes.
Palestinians make up 1/3 of the total Jerusalem population, but pay
over 40% of the taxes. One is immediately aware when one walks from
the East to the West that one is truly in two different worlds. On
the West side of town there are many parks, the roads and streets are
well maintained and sanitation pick up is predictable. Twenty-six of
the thirty-one City Council members of Jerusalem are Orthodox Jews.
The East side of Jerusalem is more like the lower east side of New
York.
While the Israeli government considers Jerusalem the capitol of
Israel no foreign country does. There are no international embassies
in Jerusalem, except for the fundamentalist International Christian
Zionist one, which espouses an inherently anti-Semitic theology and
neo-con political ideology.
On March 17, 2006, the 7th day of my third journey to Israel
Palestine, Jeff Halper, greeted my group of nearly one hundred
Internationals attending a Sabeel [Arabic for THE WAY] reality tour
through the West Bank, in the East Jerusalem YMCA conference room
with, "I don’t want to depress you too much but the issue of the
occupation is a global issue that transcends boundaries and Israel
Palestine impacts all global realities…We have a country created by
the UN and supported by the USA that has a brutal occupation while
International Law defines occupation as a temporary situation.
"The USA is complicit in starving the Palestinians and it is going to
get worse. We have a situation in which America and Israeli actions
are illegal. Three weeks ago in the USA the Pentagon issued the QDR:
Quadrennial Defense Review which is a twenty year plan to contain
China and commit to a long war with the Islamic Empire. The USA sees
Iran as the center of its war against Islam and wants to make the
entire world safe for the USA and wants to contain any power who will
rise and challenge America…The USA will shield itself so it can
continue to extract 35% of the earths resources. The American
lifestyle is not sustainable.
"When you incorporate occupied territories, highways, settlements and
use resources it is all illegal according to the Fourth Geneva
Convention which states the status quo must be retained so that
negotiations can happen. Unilateral actions are illegal. The
occupying power is responsible for those under its control.
"Tony Blair said 70% of all the conflicts in the world can be traced
back to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. What gives us hope is that
as this conflict worsens maybe Europe will figure out that American
policies are against their interests and intervene…This conflict
impacts the global community and especially everyone in the USA.
"If we do fix this conflict it would be a tremendous step forward in
global reconciliation…This whole issue is based on Human Rights and
it is a global issue requiring global intervention. …Israel is not a
democracy, it is an ethnocracy: full rights to Jews, but not
Palestinians."
There are currently forty-two illegal settlements in the Muslim,
Christian and Armenian quarters of Jerusalem. The only green area for
children to play will soon have a high rise for the settlers which
will be 7 meters taller than the walls of the Old City.
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, Action Advocacy Officer for Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions informed this reporter, "Out of
site of most Israelis is the Hebronization of east Jerusalem. The
Wall has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice
but America continues to allow it to grow. The wall is way over the
Green Line proving it is not about security but about grabbing
Palestinian land. Israel’s policy of Quiet Transfer: getting rid of
the Palestinians is a huge humanitarian crisis.
"There is an advertisement that runs in the USA that reads: "Have a
Holiday Home in Jerusalem." The ad does not mention this home is 100%
ILLEGAL! It is clear how the wall zig zags that it is not about
security but about grabbing the maximum land with minimal Palestinian
occupation. The settlers have taken over the Holy Basin."
When I returned to Israel Palestine in October 2006, during an ICAHD
tour Jeff acknowledged, "It has been said that the Israeli’s do not
love this land, they just want to possess it. There have been three
stages to make this occupation permanent. The first was to establish
the facts on the ground; the settlements. There are ½ million
Israeli’s and four million Palestinians here. They have been forced
into Bantustan; truncated mini states; prison states. It is apartheid
and Bush and Hillary are both willing collaborators."
Yesterday, I receive an email from Jeff, from which I excerpt:
The very first act of the Israeli Occupation in 1967 was home
demolitions.
On June 11th, as the Six Day War was drawing to its close, more than
135 Palestinian families in the historic Muslim Mughrabi Quarter of
Jerusalem’s Old City – the vast majority refugees from 1948 – were
roused from their beds in the dead of night to watch in horror as
Israeli bulldozers summarily destroyed their homes and the quarter’s
two mosques, all in order to create an open plaza in front of the
Western (Wailing) Wall. It was an operation that had nothing to do
with either the war or security, but to create the first of thousands
of "facts on the ground" intended to make Israel’s control of the
Occupied Territories permanent.
This June 11th, ICAHD will return to this site where the Occupation
began in order to announce its rebuilding campaign.
The Campaign to Rebuild All Palestinian Homes Demolished Over the
Next Year, a partnership with ICAHD-USA and ICAHD-UK, will rebuild
each and every Palestinian home demolished by Israel in the Occupied
Territories in the coming year – about 300 homes, batei sumud,
"houses of steadfastness" against policies of transfer and
dispossession. With funding coming mainly from Jewish donors appalled
by the Israeli governments house demolition policy, ICAHD is able to
mount this major challenge to the legality, morality and even
self-interest of the monstrosity that is the Israeli Occupation. This
represents a timely and appropriate intensification of ICAHD’s ten
year struggle against the Occupation and its most cruel expression,
the demolition of Palestinian homes – 18,000 since 1967.
ICAHD will launch the campaign with help from you, our supporters in
Israel and abroad. But monitoring its progress is equally important.
This opposition to Israeli government policy will not go unanswered.
We will only succeed in challenging the Occupation if public
attention is focused on our nonviolent resistance and, at every turn,
our supporters throughout the world mobilize public opinion and their
governments. Together we can cause the unjust structure of Occupation
to collapse, thereby releasing the Israeli and Palestinian peoples to
find a just and sustainable resolution to their more than century-old
conflict – and the world as a whole to move on to address the
grievances of the wider Middle East, thus bringing a measure of hope,
stability and reconciliation.
In Solidarity,
Jeff Halper (ICAHD Coordinator) and Lucia Pizarro (International
Coordinator)
Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
PO Box Jerusalem , Israel
Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world
again" Tom Paine
-###-
June 2, 2007 © Copyright Eileen Fleming, Reporter and Editor
Author Keep Hope Alive and Memoirs of
a Nice Irish American Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory Permission
is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media if this
credit is attached and the title remains unchanged.
ices.php/2007/06/02/p17247
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
