Bi-Weekly Brief for Dec. 13
Bi-Weekly Brief for Dec.13, 2021
A one page digest of Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinian land and livelihoods, and Palestinian resistance.
Dehumanization of Gazans intensifies as Israel encloses the open air prison with ‘a terrifying barrier’
On Nov. 29, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights issued a damning report, The Gaza Bantustan – Israeli Apartheid in the Gaza Strip. Eight days later Defense Minister Benny Gantz inaugurated Israel’s latest menacing achievement: a 40-mile-long wall looming 18 to 20 feet high that encircles the Gaza Strip with 140,000 tons of iron and steel bristling with sensors, radar and cameras. It extends out to sea and deep underground and cost $1.1 billion to construct. Beneath it are command and control centers. Gantz celebrated the ‘iron wall’ as “a technological and creative project of supreme importance.” In Gideon Levy’s words, “This is what the fence of a ghetto looks like, of a prison, of a concentration camp. Only in Israel do they celebrate the building of a concentration camp. Only the skies of the ghetto are somehow still open, and that is in a limited fashion too. Coming soon, the next devilish invention of the defense establishment, a huge ceiling over the skies of Gaza.”
Bennett seeks to appease Blinken but there is no sign that Israel’s expansionist agenda is changed
On Dec. 2, after Israel appeared to have gone back on its Nov. 25th promise to shelve plans to build 9,000 settlement units in the Atarot airport site which would cut off Ramallah from East Jerusalem, US Secretary of State Blinken initiated an ‘intense’ phone call with Prime Minister Bennett. On Dec. 6, Israel agreed to put the units on hold for a year pending the results of an environmental study. There has meanwhile been no end to plans for settlement units in Sheikh Jarrah and in and around East Jerusalem, land confiscation, and the demolition of homes, commercial facilities and water wells, with demolition orders hitting a 5-year record. Settler violence, attacks on Palestinian cars, the destruction of hundreds of olive trees, attacks on Gaza’s farmers and fishermen and mass arrests are a near daily occurrence. On Dec. 10, Jamil Abu Ayyash from Beita became the 9th Palestinian killed since May during the weekly march against the Evyatar outpost near Nablus. Injuries in the protests now top 700. On Dec. 8, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called the situation in the Palestinian territories “disastrous, with severe infringements on the rights of over 4 million people.”
Prolonged hunger strikes can win release of administrative detainees but take heavy physical toll
On Dec. 5, Israel released from prison one of 6 current long-term hunger strikers: 32-year-old Kayed Fasfous, who had gone for 131 days without food to protest his indefinite administrative detention without charges or trial. Another hunger striker is Hisham Abu Hawash, aged 40, who launched his hunger strike on August 17 after receiving a second administrative detention order. There are around 500 administrative detainees in Israel’s jails, who are never told why they are there and how long they will be imprisoned. Many who have engaged in hunger strikes suffer severe life-long physical problems.
Water Fact
Over the years, soldiers and settlers from 21 Israeli agricultural settlements in the Northern Jordan Valley have been steadily confiscating water sources and subjecting Palestinians to violent attacks. On Nov. 28, soldiers destroyed an irrigation water line in the Northern Jordan Valley east of Tubas and on Dec. 1, a large contingent of vehicles and 4 mounted crane trucks moved into the area and confiscated private vehicles, tractors, trucks and 4 water tanks, with the aim of displacing farmers. On Dec. 10, on the pretext of undertaking ‘restoration works,’ Israeli settlers accompanied by construction equipment took over a water spring and structures belonging to a Khirbet Al-Farisiya resident. The spring is a vital water source for dozens of Palestinian farmers and shepherds in the area. In October, Housing Minister Ze’ev Elkin vowed to double the number of settler homes in the Jordan Valley and Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, traveled to Washington to drum up opposition in Congress to any attempt by the Biden administration to impose a settlement freeze.
Compiled by The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Banner design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press
Why Gaza's are dying at sea to be free
“The pain and anguish in Yahia's voice resonated deeply with Gaza's beleaguered population. Giant crowds showed up at Anas's funeral because most young Gazans can easily relate to his tragic story. They are intimately familiar with the despair that compelled those 11 asylum seekers to risk their lives on an unseaworthy dinghy to escape the mouth of a shark that Israel's blockade has turned Gaza into.”
Escaping one hell for another: Why Gazans are dying at sea to be free
Caption for photo below: Palestinians fishermen on their small boat to fish during sunset off the coast of Gaza City, on 24 November 2021. [Getty]
Should MA taxpayers fund urgent needs at home – or Israel’s human rights violations?
Should MA taxpayers fund urgent needs at home –
or Israel’s human rights violations?
On Nov. 29, nearly 70 people defied the cold to mark the UN-declared International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People at Boston's Downtown Crossing. 'No More Billions for Israel's Crimes - Fund OUR Needs in These Harsh Times' was the theme of the rally organized by the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Jewish Voice for Peace – Boston, with the co-sponsorship of the Democratic Socialists of America - Boston and the Boston Palestine Solidarity Network.
The event highlighted the nearly $130 million that Massachusetts taxpayers give Israel annually as the Commonwealth's share of the $3.8 billion in yearly US military aid to Israel. What would taxpayers prefer - to give $130 million to Israel for weapons purchases from the bloated US arms industry that are used to oppress and kill Palestinians, or to fund health care and other urgent needs at home that have been intensified by the pandemic?
Speaking to this issue were MAPA’s Amar Ahmad, an organizer with the Raytheon Anti-War Coalition, retired registered nurse Rosemary Kean, MAPA’s co-chair and member of its Fund Healthcare Not Warfare working group, Nidal Al-Azraq, the executive director of 1for3.org who had recently returned from the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem where he grew up, environmental activist Claire Miller, the Movement Building Director for Unitarian Universalist Mass Action, and Khury Peterson-Smith, Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies where he researches the impact of the ‘war on terror’, US support for Israeli apartheid and the Palestinian freedom struggle.
After the speeches the crowd accompanied by the band BABAM engaged in a spirited march to the JFK Building in Government Center, where representatives from the offices of Senators Warren and Markey received a letter which had been endorsed by 28 MA-based organizations. Among other demands, the letter urges Congress to condition aid to Israel on its human rights record.
Why Congress must stop giving Israel a blank check
Two decades of ruinous wars in the Middle East have killed up to a million people and extracted more than $6 trillion from US taxpayers, while military contractors have reaped colossal profits. The end of the Afghanistan war did not stop the Senate Appropriations Committee from proposing a $29 billion increase to the Pentagon’s budget, bringing it to some $726 billion. Included in this amount is $1 billion to replenish missile interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome, which is now attached to the National Defense Appropriations Act FY22.
Israel’s supporters argue that the Raytheon-produced Iron Dome is ‘purely defensive’, but this ignores the extent to which it serves as a shield enabling Israel to carry out massive assaults with the most advanced military technology on what is essentially a captive and defenseless population in the Gaza Strip.
Once it is passed, this additional $1 billion will bring to nearly $5 billion the amount of military aid the US gives to a country that ranks in the world’s top 20 economies, with a per capita GDP well above that of the UK, Japan and France. If Israel considers the purchase of Iron Dome receptors from Raytheon to be an urgent matter, Israeli taxpayers can pay for it instead of making a further demand on the hard-pressed US treasury.
It is difficult to imagine that taxpayers in the Commonwealth would want to add to their yearly $130 million an additional $41 million for Israel that will end up in the pockets of Massachusetts-based Raytheon – whose head reaped $19,397,106 in total compensation in 2020 – at a time when so many of the state’s residents are struggling to feed themselves and their families, to avoid eviction, to find affordable child care and cope with rising health care costs. Hit the hardest are communities of color that have played such crucial ‘front line’ roles since the pandemic began.
Indeed, the more Americans know about how the military aid given Israel is used against Palestinians, the more likely they are to want to restrict it, as over 60% of Democratic Party voters now do according to recent polls.
US aid sustains a discriminatory apartheid system, as detailed by the Israel human rights group B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa, Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, among many others. Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, stated in a 2017 interview, “what we have experienced in South Africa is a fraction of what the Palestinians are experiencing. We were oppressed in order to serve the white minority. The Palestinians are being eliminated off their land…and this is a total human-rights violation. I think it is a total disgrace that the world is able to sit back while such atrocities are being carried out by Apartheid Israel.”
In the years since Mandla Mandela’s comments, Israel has accelerated its building of illegal settlements. Growing numbers of Palestinians have lost their land, livelihoods and homes while the Palestinian civil society organizations that report on Israel’s human rights abuses are being silenced. The open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip, blockaded from the world for 14 years, has yet again this year served as lab to try out advanced US weapons.
On May 13, 2021, as US-made weapons were being deployed in the Gaza Strip, Rep. Ayanna Pressley spoke words from the floor of the House which the entire Massachusetts Congressional delegation should take to heart:
“The question at hand is should our taxpayer dollars create conditions for justice, healing and repair, or should those dollars create conditions for oppression and apartheid?”
Please make your voice heard if you want elected officials to fund domestic needs, and not human rights violations thousands of miles away. Tell your Members of Congress that aid to Israel should be tied to its human rights record, and that its colonizing occupation and lethal siege of the Gaza Strip must be brought to an end.
Nancy Murray
Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine.
