UNITED NATIONS/RABAT (Reuters) - The United States has proposed that the U.N. peace-keeping mission in the disputed territory of Western Sahara help monitor human rights there, U.N. diplomats said on Tuesday, an idea that has prompted an expression of regret from Morocco.
The UN has been in the Western Sahara for ages now, but has never been given a mandate to monitor human rights abuses (mainly because it didn’t have enough money to).
This would be great!
Palestine: Same game, different rules
So. In the last few days in Hebron, there have been a few minor inconsistencies in the Israeli authorities reaction to events and treatment of perpetrators of alleged crimes. And by minor I actually mean fucking massive.
I have drawn a beautiful flowchart to demonstrate the apparent decision making process in one particular scenario.
The number of child arrests in Hebron has massively increased over the last week or so. First I blogged about two children who were arrested at a demonstration…that wasn’t enough for the Israeli army in Hebron. A few days later, another kid was arrested and held inside an even smaller checkpoint box, along with one soldier, with the door locked.
A day later, the soldiers laid traps around a school, while children were on their way in to school. The children were aged 7-15. Thirty of them were arrested, all on charges of throwing stones. (yeah, I’m sure they definitely recognised all thirty specific children. Hah.) See a B’tselem video of the kids being arrested. They were beaten. As of last night, 10 are still in the police station.
On the very same day, settlers were accused of throwing rubbish onto Palestinian property (the rubbish in question was a whole load of manure-covered hay from their farm, not just a snotty tissue or a coke can or sommat.) When the Palestinians arrived to see this rubbish and complained, they had stones thrown at them by settler children, so they called the Israeli authorities, who have civil and military control of this part of Hebron. The soldiers arrived and immediately confiscated all of the ID cards of the Palestinians present for several hours, hassling and intimidating them whilst laughing and joking with the settlers. Nothing was done about the rubbish, nor the allegations of stone throwing
Now I’m certainly not saying that I want the settler children arrested in the same brutal way that the Palestinian children were. I don’t think anyone should be treated that way. But the Palestinians have no recourse to justice - the Israeli army will never be on their side, so they have nowhere to turn.
Next example of totally fair decisions: Shuhada Street has been blocked to Palestinians since the year 2000, when it was decided that for the “protection” of the 500 settlers living in illegal settlements in the centre of Hebron, the whole of the main Palestinian market street should be shut down. Shops were closed by military order, people were driven out of their homes.
On Wednesday, there was a demonstration on Shuhada Street. Activists wearing Obama (he’s visiting currently) and Martin Luther King masks walked down the road, calling for civil rights and an end to apartheid. They were chanting “WE HAVE A DREAM” when settlers attacked the demonstration and the army arrived.
This post was inspired by Adalah’s new database of discriminatory laws. They’ve compiled more than 50 laws which discriminate between Israelis and Palestinians, so really this is just a tiny glimpse of the bigger picture.
The playing field needs to be levelled, so that all the schoolchildren can get to play on it together, rather than half of them being arrested.
Israeli “defence” army arrests a bunch of school children in Hebron, Palestine
even more fucking disgraceful than norma. thank fuck for international activists and badass Palestinian adults!
— HRW: Israeli Attacks on Gaza Media Were Unlawful, Democracy Now!, 21 Dec
Good article on the Western Sahara, if you ignore the over-emphasis on the importance of Moroccan-Sahrawi relationships and coalitions - which are often just tools for normalisation of conflict rather than anything liberatory for the people living under occupation.
But in this summer of 2012 when our attention is focused on Syria, Egypt, Iran and the financial crisis — we are creating by this distraction from Palestine another lull in the never ending ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A dire situation helped also by the paralysis of Palestinian politics and the apathy of the international community.
The target of the new ethnic cleansing is, among others, the Bedouins of the Naqab. Next month, the Israeli authorities are going to begin to implement the Prawer plan for the dispossession of the Bedouins of the Naqab (named after Ehud Prawer, the deputy head of the Israeli National Security Council and head of the team of experts preparing it).
Until it was finalized and authorized in September last year by the government, the Israeli strategy to dislocate the 70,000 Palestinians from the south of the country was through strangulation: denying them electricity, water, education and access to any elementary infrastructure. A policy that by itself, had it been committed anywhere else in the world would have been condemned as a crime against humanity. But it has failed so far and did not deter or break the spirit and steadfastness of the Bedouins.
Hence the Prawer plan’s more active approach: it aims to destroy physically and by force the 35 villages in which these 70,000 people live. The early stages of this plan were already executed between last September and today: already 1,000 houses were demolished. The next stage would be far more comprehensive and deadly as a special police force has been established for its execution.
This is a test for a far more important Israeli master plan devised back in 2001 by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and perfected by a successor, Ehud Olmert, in 2007.
A unilateral — and if possible with at least a tacit Palestinian Authority agreement — scheme for the final demarcation of the 21st century state of Israel. The components of this strategy are a ghettoized Gaza Strip, annexation of Area C of the West Bank (a zone defined by the Oslo agreements, comprising more than 60 percent of the West Bank) to Israel, and the creation of a Palestinian Bantustan in the rest.
"—
Ilan Pappe, Israel coined the term “Nakba” and is still implementing it, on The Electronic Intifada
Campaign Against the Prawer Plan: Learn and Take Action on Jadaliyya
Despite complete rejection of the plan by the Arab Bedouin, and strong disapproval from the international community, Prawer is happening now. Media reports indicate that on 1 August 2012, a special police force will begin work to implement Prawer and demolish homes. More than one thousand houses were demolished in 2011 alone, and civil society is seeing the same practices in 2012. Since Prawer was announced, the government announced plans that will displace over ten thousand people and plant forests, build military centers, and establish new Jewish settlements in their place.
In March 2012, the UN Committee on the Elimination for Racial Discrimination called on Israel to withdraw the proposed implementing legislation of the Prawer Plan, on the grounds that it was discriminatory. If Israel applied the same criteria for planning and development that exist in the Jewish rural sector, all thirty-five unrecognized villages would be recognized where they are.
In July 2012, the European Parliament passed a historic resolution calling on Israel to stop the Prawer Plan and its policies of displacement, eviction, and dispossession.
Adalah Calls on the Israeli Government to:
- Cancel the Prawer Plan
- Recognize the “unrecognized villages” and the land claims of the indigenous Arab Bedouin community
- Halt home demolitions and forced evictions
- Engage in meaningful dialogue with the Arab Bedouin community and the Arab political leadership to justly resolve the land claims
- Invest in greater health, education, and employment opportunities for Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel
Please sign our petition and visit our website and campaign page to find out what you can do to Stop the Prawer Plan!
(via arielnietzsche)
Shaddad Attili, the head of the Palestinian Water Authority, reported today that Palestinians receive 105 million cubic meters of water, less than the amount allocated in the 1995 Oslo Accords and around a quarter of the 400 million cubic meters needed according to international standards. The average settler gets 70 times what the average West Bank Palestinian gets.
Israel has for decades controlled the finite water in the West Bank, keeping the amount Palestinians get low. This means they have to buy water from Israel, putting the Palestinian Water Authority into billions of shekels of debt.
In Gaza, the situation’s even worse, with 95% of the water not fit for human consumption. Sea water (contaminated with sewage) leaks into the over-extracted coastal basin, threatening long-term problems of kidney disease. Within two years there may be no drinking water left in Gaza, Attili said.
A group of Newham Monitoring Project Community Legal Observer volunteers were today “banned” from entering Stratford Park, a site open to the general public who wish to watch the free Olympic livescreens, by security on the ground who apparently accused them of “making it easy for criminals and giving them tips” when giving out Stop and Search rights-information cards to members of the public.
Olympics Anti-Freedom Update #4, I guess
Amazing win for women’s/patients’ rights in Namibia - the high court agreed with the case that three women were sterilised without their informed consent.
[The judge] said the three women in the case, who were sterilised in Namibian state hospitals between 2005 and 2007, had dealt with health staff who could not speak their language, Oshiwambo. They were handed consent forms containing unintelligible acronyms. The forms were produced while the women were in labour, minutes before they were wheeled into the operating theatre. In at least one case, the woman had been in labour for four days and was made to believe she would only be eligible for her caesarean if she signed the form. In all three cases, the women only realised the meaning of “BTL” – bilateral tubal ligation – after the surgery.
Win!
My Internet Brain
This is where things I want to write go. They're often about feminism, or science and fancy data visualisations, or punk music, or the internet, or the Western Sahara, or things in the news that make me angry.
I also run a less scatter-shot blog about radical theory, strategy and useful tools at Tips for Radicals.
If I ever say anything that you think is shitty or prejudiced, please call me on it — I try to be a decent human being, but sometimes I fuck up, and it's good to learn. Unless you're calling me out because you're a bigot and you don't like what I say, because then I just won't care.
I rarely talk about things that need trigger warnings, but I'm trying to get better at posting them when I need to.
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