Water Fact: April 3, 2023
What ‘Israeli democracy’ looks like in the West Bank and seas off Gaza
While the international media has been transfixed by the huge crowds in Israel protesting Netanyahu’s attempt to gut the role of the High Court, largely absent from the streets and press has been an acknowledgement of what ‘Israeli democracy’ means for Palestinians who have been living without rights under a tyrannical military occupation for 56 years.
You can peruse the headlines of articles in The International Middle East Media Center to get a glimpse of what Palestinians are forced to endure even as Israeli and western commentators lament the threat which Netanyahu’s now ‘paused’ plan presents to Israel’s ‘democratic’ status quo.
Look no further than the last two weeks and you will find a harrowing list of killings and injuries, including of children; mass arrests; the destruction of Palestinian homes, vehicles, olive trees, and farmland; settler rampages in towns (including – repeatedly – in Huwwara, the town Finance Minister Smotrich vowed to wipe out); the assault on the Church of Gethsemane and Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque; attacks on demonstrators, farmers, ambulances, hospitals and a stadium while a soccer match was taking place; the erection of new settler outposts and the government’s plans to repopulate previously evacuated settlements and to build nearly a thousand new units in the settlements of Efrat and Beitar Illit.
Israel’s war on Palestinian fishermen has been equally unrelenting. While the Oslo process accorded Palestinians a fishing zone extending 20 nautical miles from Gaza’s coast, fishing boats are routinely attacked by Israeli naval ships when they try to fish beyond the fluctuating maritime limit arbitrarily imposed by Israel. Sometimes fishermen are confined to six to 15 nautical miles, and sometimes to only three. Often they are injured and arrested and their boats confiscated. The Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan recorded 474 encounters with Israeli patrol boats in 2022 – more than one a day - and 23 seized vessels.
Now, reportedly for the first time, a 55-year-old Gaza fisherman, Jihad al-Hissi, is in a Haifa court to try to stop Israel from permanently confiscating his boat.
Al-Hissi, a refugee whose family was forced to flee from Jaffa in 1948, says that on February 14, 2022, he and his brother were in search of shrimp 100 meters outside Israel’s imposed maritime zone when they were attacked by commandos in three patrol boats who arrested them and seized their vessel after damaging it with water cannon and rubber bullets. The Israel human rights group Gisha challenged the confiscation and got the boat back.
Israel recently demanded that the court “permanently confiscate” the boat, saying that Al-Hissi “threatened” soldiers and has been “repeatedly violating the security restrictions imposed by the Israeli army in the sea area bordering Gaza.” Al-Hissi is being defended by Gisha in a case that that is “closely watched by thousands of fishermen in Gaza” and could further imperil their already precarious livelihoods.
