Israel-Palestine | ukwatch.net

From Triumph to Torture

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:43:17 +0000

Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Awarded in memory of the great US war correspondent, the prize goes to journalists who expose establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Gellhorn called it. Mohammed shares the prize of £5,000 with Dahr Jamail. At 24, he is the youngest winner. His citation reads: “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.” The eldest of eight, Mohammed has seen most of his siblings killed or wounded or maimed. An Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while the family were inside, seriously injuring his mother. And yet, says a former Dutch ambassador, Jan Wijenberg, “he is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel”.

Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out. Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel’s infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. “Where’s the money?” he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. “Where is the English pound you have?”

“I realised,” said Mohammed, “he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn prize. I told him I didn’t have it with me. ‘You are lying’, he said. I was now surrounded by eight Shin Bet officers, all armed. The man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: ‘Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.’ He said, ‘This is nothing compared with what you will see now.’ He took his gun out, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said, ‘Why are you bringing perfumes?’ I replied, ‘They are gifts for the people I love’. He said, ‘Oh, do you have love in your culture?’

“As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror.”

An ambulance was called and told to take Mohammed to a hospital, but only after he had signed a statement indemnifying the Israelis from his suffering in their custody. The Palestinian medic refused, courageously, and said he would contact the Dutch embassy escort. Alarmed, the Israelis let the ambulance go. The Israeli response has been the familiar line that Mohammed was “suspected” of smuggling and “lost his balance” during a “fair” interrogation, Reuters reported yesterday.

Israeli human rights groups have documented the routine torture of Palestinians by Shin Bet agents with “beatings, painful binding, back bending, body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation”. Amnesty has long reported the widespread use of torture by Israel, whose victims emerge as mere shadows of their former selves. Some never return. Israel is high in an international league table for its murder of journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, who receive barely a fraction of the kind of coverage given to the BBC’s Alan Johnston.

The Dutch government says it is shocked by Mohammed Omer’s treatment. The former ambassador Jan Wijenberg said: “This is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a long-term strategy to demolish Palestinian social, economic and cultural life … I am aware of the possibility that Mohammed Omer might be murdered by Israeli snipers or bomb attack in the near future.”

While Mohammed was receiving his prize in London, the new Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Proser, was publicly complaining that many Britons no longer appreciated the uniqueness of Israel’s democracy. Perhaps they do now.

johnpilger.com

BBC's Pro-Israeli Bias

Ellie Keen — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:50:19 +0000

In its near 86 year history, BBC has a long, unbroken and dubious distinction. Today it’s little different from its corporate-run counterparts in America, Britain and throughout the world. In fact, on its tailored for a US BBC America audience, what passes for news matches stride for stride what people here see every day – mind-numbing commercialism, shoddy reporting, pseudo-journalism, celebrity and sports features, and other diverting and distracting non-news that should embarrass correspondents and presenters delivering it. It offends viewers and treats them like mushrooms – well-watered, in the dark, and uninformed about the most important world and national issues affecting their lives and welfare.

That’s the idea, of course, and has been since BBC’s inception. John Reith was its founder and first general manager. Reassuring the powerful, he set the standard adhered to thereafter: “(You) know (you) can trust us not to be really impartial.” BBC never was and never is.

Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about “honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure.” How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task

- to function as a “propaganda system for elite interests.” On all vital issues – war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East’s longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is “reliable” – pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever.

This article covers one example among many – BBC’s distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it’s fully in step with its American and European counterparts – Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don’t; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC’s coverage exacerbates it.

Key BBC Terms In Its Israeli – Palestinian Coverage

In October 2006, Electronic Intifada.net listed BBC’s “key terms” in its conflict coverage – to “find a balance” that, in fact, tilts strongly toward Israel.

For example:

— pre-meditated assassinations are called “killings” or occasionally “targeted killings” if Israeli sources say it;

— the separation or apartheid wall is called a “barrier, separation barrier, West Bank barrier, (or simply) this wall;” sometimes “fence” is used as well; no hint of its real purpose or that the World Court ruled it illegal; no mention either that it’s unrelated to security and simply a land-grab scheme and effort to heighten Palestinian isolation;

— East Jerusalem – BBC recognizes West Jerusalem as part of Israel; East Jerusalem is considered occupied with its status “still to be determined in permanent status negotiations between the parties….We recognize no sovereignty over the city;” The phrase “Arab East Jerusalem” is avoided; so is any mention that Israeli settlements encroach on it and aim to annex it entirely; Palestinians want the city for their capital; it belongs to them; Israel won’t allow it; BBC won’t explain it;

— Gaza – Israel nominally disengaged in summer 2005; in fact, it never did; it merely redeployed its forces, and maintains rigid control over the territory’s land, coast and airspace; it invades and attacks at will and maintains a brutish mediaeval siege; all movement in and out of Gaza is restricted; so are Gazans’ access to food, water, health care, fuel, electricity and other life essentials; the result is a deep humanitarian crisis; BBC ignores it; instead it merely refers to an “end to Israel’s permanent military presence,” not an end to its occupation, repression, continued incursions, mass killings, targeted assassinations, and systemic use of torture;

— The Green Line – it separates Israel from the West Bank, but BBC reporting blurs it; it doesn’t call it a border because that implies internationally recognized status; instead it fudges by calling it “the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank;”

— Intifada – more fudging when referring to causes; value judgments are avoided; so is truth; don’t say Ariel Sharon’s September 29, 2000 Haram al-Sharif provocation incited a popular uprising; package his visit with Palestinian frustration over a failed peace process and say it “sparked the (second) intifada (rather than it) led (to it or) started (it);”

— Jewish – distinguish between “Israeli” or “Jewish” to avoid religious or racial connotations; stress political ones instead; ignore how Israelis stress Jewishness by relating to “the promised land,” one “without people for a people without a land,” a Jewish homeland, Israel’s biblical connection, and raising the issue of anti-semitism against harsh Israeli critics; when they’re Jewish call them self-hating;

— Occupied Territories or Occupation – BBC refers to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, not the Golan Heights; after Israel “disengaged,” Gaza is in political limbo; BBC distinguishes between the “occupied territories” and Palestinian Land or Palestinian Territories; calling Gaza and the West Bank “disputed territories” is preferred; in fact, there’s no dispute; they’re both Israeli occupied Palestinian land;

— settlements and outposts – BBC distinguishes between them when, in fact, they vary only in size; BBC avoids calling them illegal; they’re all illegal but adjectives aren’t used unless they’re vital to a story; in all reports, BBC is one-sided; it stresses that Israel disputes international law; anti-Israeli value judgments aren’t made; the rule of law is dismissed; Palestinian rights are ignored; the growing number of Israeli settlers is fudged, downplayed and generally not mentioned;

— Palestine – BBC acknowledges that no independent state exists but the “peace process” aims to create one; unmentioned is that negotiations are fake and their reports try to hide it; so do deceptive words to appease pro-Israel critics; BBC obliges them;

— “relative calm” or “quiet” periods – it refers to quiescent Palestinian resistance, no Israeli deaths, but not ongoing Israeli attacks and killings;

— right of return – BBC ignores international law and UN Resolution 194; it promotes the Israeli position instead; and

— “terrorists” – a loaded term applying only to Palestinians; never Israelis; most often other words are used like “bomber, attacker, gunman, kidnapper, insurgent (or) militant;” Palestinian self-defense is never called resistance, and Israeli incursions aren’t ever called aggression.

Media “Rules of Engagement” in Covering the Middle East

In June 2002, Robin Miller listed “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement.” BBC’s Israeli-Palestinian coverage adheres to them rigidly:

Rule 1 – “View the Middle East (ME) through Israeli eyes;” Palestinians are terrorists and aggressors; Israelis are victims who retaliate; self-defense is their motive; so is avoiding the truth;

Rule 2 – “Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as (truthful) hard news;” avoid any information that contradicts them;

Rule 3 – “Ignore the historical context;” avoid mentioning six decades of dispossession, occupation, and hundreds of preceding years during which Palestine was the Palestinian homeland; also suppress the idea that a Jewish homeland first originated with Zionism’s late 19th century’s founding and didn’t exist prior to that;

Rule 4 – “Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation;” say nothing about Geneva, UN Resolution 194, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and all other recognized international human rights laws;

Rule 5 – “Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis;” this rule is ironclad and unforgiving; open debate isn’t tolerated; facts are suppressed; aggressors are called victims; self-defense is called terrorism; news is carefully “filtered,” minds manipulated, and truth conspicuously absent; BBC excels at it and lets Israel get away with murder;

Rule 6 – “Muddy the waters when necessary;” major US media do it; so do human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; they tread lightly on Israeli-Palestinian issues and slant their views accordingly; so does BBC;

Rule 7 – “Credit all Israeli claims (as fact), even if wholly unfounded;” if Israelis say it, it’s true; BBC approves;

Rule 8 – “Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident;” if Palestinians say it, it’s false or at best an unsubstantiated claim; most often ignore, downplay or fudge it;

Rule 9 – “Condemn only Palestinian violence;” treat it as a crime against innocent Israeli victims; ignore any reference to self-defense against Israeli aggression and rule of law violations; and

Rule 10 – “Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights;” better still – ignore it or condemn it as biased or anti-semitic.

Add one more rule for good measure. Repeat any lie often enough and most people will believe it. It’s foolproof and works every time.

Independent Analysis of BBC’s Israel – Palestine Coverage

In 2005, the BBC commissioned a study to review the impartiality of its Israeli – Palestinian coverage. It consisted of an independent panel, the Communications Research Centre at Loughborough University, and British – Israeli international lawyer Noam Lubell.

Their published April 2006 findings weren’t what the broadcaster wished. Highlights from them showed BBC coverage:

— rarely covered daily Palestinian hardships and repression under occupation;

— was incomplete, misleading, and failed to consistently provide a full and fair account of the conflict;

— overlooked important themes; in the study period it most notably ignored Israeli annexation of land in and around East Jerusalem;

— omitted a substantial amount of important news vital to Palestinian concerns;

— failed to convey the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience; specifically that one side is dominant and the other under occupation and forced to endure dependence indignities and hard line repression;

— seldom used the term occupation; mentioned military occupation only once during the study period;

— reported nothing about nearly four decades of occupation and repression;

— misportrayed Israel’s Gaza disengagement as a positive step; failed to clarify it as a ruse and that Gaza remains occupied, invaded and attacked at will;

— failed to report Israeli assertions that relocating Gaza settlers would strengthen Israel’s control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem;

— never clarified that Gaza settlements were illegal; that Gazans face ongoing hardships and stressed instead the “controversy” of withdrawing among Israelis;

— misused or misportrayed the term “terrorism” and only applied it to Palestinians;

— omitted any reference to historical background and failed to put stories in proper context;

— provided inadequate analysis and interpretation of key events and issues;

— failed to explain the meaning of Zionism;

— failed to provide background of the 1967 and 1973 wars;

— consistently misportrayed Hamas; described it as formally committed to Israel’s destruction; ignored Hamas’ acceptance of the Arab peace proposal and its willingness to recognize Israel in return for an end to the occupation;

— mischaracterized the Oslo Accords as positive; ignored its deficiencies and betrayal;

— mentioned the Intifada with no explanation of cause or justification;

— failed to cite international law and UN resolutions; their call for an end to Israel’s occupation; and the fact that Israel ignores international rulings contrary to its interests;

— ignored Palestinians’ legal right to return or restitution if they choose not to;

— ignored humanitarian and human rights laws;

— failed to explain extrajudicial executions are illegal;

— mischaracterized the Separation Wall that the World Court ruled illegal;

— misrepresented the status of Jerusalem;

— gave unequal access to Israeli officials and spokespersons; stations none of its correspondents in Occupied Palestine; has them all inside Israel; results in a huge disparity in reports favoring Israel while disparaging Palestinians;

— misportrayed Israelis as peace-seeking and Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims as aggressors;

— stressed Israeli victimhood, the importance of Israeli deaths and injuries, and relative unimportance of a disproportionate number of Palestinian ones;

— responded to criticism defensively; continued to repeat past errors cited; showed deference to Israeli issues and the pro-Israeli Lobby;

— ignored its own established editorial standards, including on terminology; as a result, consistently showed bias, a lack of clarity and precision and did little to improve comprehension and understanding;

— overall – BBC falls far short of fair and impartial reporting and has done little to redress pointed out deficiencies; one positive note – the analysis found no evidence linking anti-Semitic behavior to BBC reports; it also found none dispelling it.

Glasgow University Media Group Study of Middle East News Coverage – It’s “Bad News from Israel” and BBC

Researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry conducted the study between 2000 and 2002, and their above quoted 2004 book title discusses it. Little has changed from then to now, BBC’s reporting highlights it, and it’s “bad news” for kept-in-the-dark viewers of major UK news and current affairs coverage.

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn agrees and explained in his unsparing comments about his former employer. He called it “dishonest – in concept, approach and execution….(it) favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa.” It depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “as a battle of two (equal) forces (with equally) right and wrong responsibility. It is the tyranny of spurious equivalence.” As the UK and world’s leading broadcaster, BBC is justifiably blamed.

“Bad News from Israel” explains how – by consistently showing pro-Israel bias in virtually all its reporting and at times in the extreme. Beyond the book’s timeline, correspondent Chris Morris’ January 2004 “Lost hope in Mid-East conflict” report is a case in point. It’s about an expectant Palestinian woman confronted at a checkpoint. Prevented from passing, she gives birth and miscarries.

Morris is sympathetic but sides with the soldiers.

“You can’t blame (them, he says) for being jumpy at checkpoints….because there are Israeli victims too, children among them, killed by snipers and suicide bombers from the West Bank. What would you have done?

Would you have taken the risk? Or would you have played it safe, fearful of a trap? And so it goes on – another week in the Middle East.”

Even worse, the greater issue is ignored – an instance reflecting daily life in Occupied Palestine plus regular killings and abuse. Morris turns a blind eye.

He highlights suicide bombings instead – “A Palestinian mother in her early 20s blows herself to bits and takes the lives of four young Israelis, after tricking them into believing she was ill.” He continues – “A Jewish settler is killed on the West Bank, leaving five children without a father, including triplets just three months old.” Reports like his are commonplace on BBC. Israeli lives matter.

Palestinian ones don’t. Philo and Berry document the evidence.

Their study covers what media should report, a content analysis of their coverage, and how focus group interviews show how viewers are ill-served and left uninformed. Below are some results that apply to today:

— little or no historical context was provided; origins of the conflict were omitted; in the 2000 timeframe covered, BBC (and ITN) devoted 3500 lines of text to the Intifada, but a scant 17 to context or history;

— reporting consistently was pro-Israel and justified the most extreme actions and lawlessness; at the same time, Palestinian resistance was highlighted and condemned as terrorism;

— in the authors’ words: “There (was) no evidence from our analysis to suggest that Palestinian views were given preferential treatment on the BBC. The opposite (was) in reality the case;”

— BBC justified Israeli violence as “response” or “retaliation;” in contrast, Palestinian resistance was called “horrific,” an “atrocity,” “terrorism,” or even “mass murder;”

— some BBC reports were rife with errors whether intentionally or from ignorance;

— reports focused on Israeli security and right to exist; comparable Palestinian rights got little mention; nor did their impoverishment, deplorable daily existence, or a brutish four-decade military occupation;

— Israeli deaths were highlighted; Palestinian ones played down or ignored; regular Israeli incursions got little mention or weren’t reported;

— as a result, only 4% of focus group respondents knew Palestinians were driven from their homeland; only 10% that Israel occupied Palestine; some believed Palestinians were the occupiers; some viewed the conflict as a border dispute; 80% didn’t know the origin of Palestinian refugees or that they were dispossessed; two-thirds didn’t know Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli ones; more knowledgeable respondents had access to books and other material that dispel BBC bias and inaccuracies;

— senior BBC journalists interviewed told researchers that they were instructed not to give explanations; to dumb-down the news for easy listening and do it in “20-second attention span” segments; researchers believe BBC has it backwards; this type reporting alienates viewers; accuracy and more context enhances viewership; under heavy Israeli Lobby pressure, BBC and other major media report propaganda; truth is the first casualty, and viewers remain uninformed; today it’s worse than ever.

BBC’s Coverage of Gaza Under Siege

BBC reports little about Gaza under siege and the humanitarian crisis it caused. Instead, accounts like its January 2008 one are common. It’s headlined “Gaza’s rocket threat to Israel” and highlights homemade Qassams “fired by Hamas and other Palestinian militants at Israeli population centres near the Gaza Strip.” They’ve “killed 13 people inside Israel, including three children. In some months, more than 100 launches have been recorded by the Israelis.”

No mention is made of Israeli incursions, their frequency, the use of F-16 air-to-surface missiles, their accuracy and destructive power, high-tech battle tanks in civilian neighborhoods, and other sophisticated weapons freely used, including illegal ones. Nor is there mention of hundreds of Palestinian deaths, injuries, inflicted Israeli destruction, and use of Palestinians as human shields. Instead, the Israeli town of Sderot is highlighted because it’s “the only large Israeli population centre within the original Qassam’s range.” BBC describes them in detail to over-hype their destructive potential. In fact, they’re crude, inaccurate and limited in range. They hardly compare to Israel’s high-tech weapons that when unleashed against a civilian population are devastating.

Later in BBC’s report, it admits “Qassams are very primitive missiles and their main effect on Israelis in the area is psychological torment (and that) Israeli casualties have been relatively light.” In contrast, Israeli attacks on Palestinians kill and injure many hundreds and inflict immense psychological terror against a civilian population. It’s gone on for six decades, shows no signs of ebbing, but BBC won’t explain it.

Nor does it report on Gaza under siege, the collective punishment of its people, the humanitarian crisis it caused, and Israel’s lawless act that BBC should expose and denounce. Instead it features reports like a May 10 one about a “Gaza mortar attack kill(ing an) Israeli.” Israeli air strikes followed, five Hamas members were killed and four others injured. BBC featured an Israeli government spokesperson saying “We hold (Hamas) accountable for today’s attack and the murder of civilians.” No Palestinian response was aired, and BBC merely ended saying that “The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas since last June when they ousted their rivals from the Fatah movement.” No context, no background, no fair and impartial reporting, no truth, and no possible way for viewers to understand.

BBC suggests that Palestinians are responsible for their own condition, that a humanitarian catastrophe is their fault, and that Israel has every right to terrorize and starve them to submission for its own security and self-interest. By BBC’s standards, Israel may rightfully lock down 1.5 million people, collectively punish them, continue a repressive occupation, and refuse to negotiate in good faith, or at all. BBC is dismissive. Palestinian suffering is inconsequential, yet consider its outrage from a single Israeli death. It’s also contemptuous of Hamas, ignored its months-long unilateral ceasefire, and refuses to report its willingness to recognize Israel in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders.

BBC views the conflict from an Israeli perspective. It features government officials to explain it, and reports whatever they say as fact. This turns reality on its head, makes lawless actions justifiable, results in double standard journalism, and lets Palestinians suffer the consequences. Why not and who cares. They’re just Arab Muslims in the land of Israel where Jews alone matter and not a hint of even-handed reporting exists. Now more than ever in the conflict’s seventh decade, and BBC’s reporting exacerbates it.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com

Israel, the Holocaust and the Nakba

Ellie Keen — Mon, 19 May 2008 23:47:36 +0000

Very few matrixes can be as sensitive as that of the Holocaust, Israel and the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 (known as the Nakba). It is no wonder that very few people in the past have attempted to comment on the nexus between the Holocaust, the Nakba and a solution for the Palestine question. To all intents and purposes, researchers, journalists and essayists who were, and still are, interested in the Palestine question preferred to deal with each of the subject matters separately – as if there is no connection whatsoever between them. But the connection is there and is highly important both for students of the Israel/Palestine question and for the future of this torn country. Sixty years after the dispossession of the Palestinians, the event that shaped the present Middle Eastern political crisis, it is high time also to involve the Holocaust and its memory in our overall attempt to understand the “conflict” and contribute towards its solution.

Various factors contributed to the demise of the Palestinians in 1948. The most important of them was Zionist ideology and later on Israeli policy. The Zionist movement wished ever since its appearance on Palestine’s soil in the late 19th century to take over as much of the country as possible and create on it a Jewish state. The effort to achieve it began in earnest with the onset of British rule in Palestine in 1917. Judaising Palestine meant de-Arabising it. So an important part of the vision was an effort to have as few Palestinians as possible within the future Jewish state.

The vision became a plan and reality when Britain, after 30 years of rule, decided to leave Palestine in February 1947. About a year later, at the beginning of 1948, the Zionist leaders decided that the best means of making the vision of a Jewish Palestine possible was by forcefully dispossessing the Palestinians from their homeland. Within less than a year, between February and October 1948, the Israeli army systematically uprooted and destroyed more than 500 villages and 11 towns. Half of Palestine’s native population was ethnically cleansed in those months. Their material and cultural possessions were taken over by the Israelis and their presence on the land was nearly wiped out.

British legacy

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, however, could not have been executed had it not been for some additional factors. The British mandatory government was responsible, since it did not interfere, when it could, in the early stages of the dispossession. The expulsions were carried out while its officials and soldiers watched. Indirectly, Britain was also made culpable by its destruction of the Palestinian leadership during the 1936-1939 revolt. The British exiled and killed many of the Palestinian leaders in those years. The absence of an able political leadership and the disappearance of capable military men left the Palestinians literally defenceless in the face of the Jewish forces in 1948.

The Arab world also played a negative part. The impotence of its armies and the lack of commitment of its leaders turned the hope of a pan-Arab solidarity movement into a farce. The Palestinians surrendered their affairs in the hands of the Arab League, a move that proved to be a colossal mistake. The League did not represent their aspirations nor could it protect them.

But the most important factor, quite often overlooked, was the international complacency in the face of the ethnic cleansing. This Israeli policy could not have been contemplated, let alone implemented, had it not been tolerated by the international community. The Zionist and later Israeli leaders knew they could rely on the passivity and silence of the international community.

On the face of it, this should not have been an obvious assumption. After the Second World War when the Cold War period had just begun, the main powers competing for world hegemony needed the goodwill of the Arab world. Moreover, the more conscientious sections of Western society were increasingly supporting the anti-colonialist emotions and movements throughout the Arab world. True, the two leading ailing colonialist powers of the day, Britain and France, were still trying to maintain their presence and influence in the Arab world, but at least for the sake of appearances they too had to adhere to the notion that all the Arab peoples in all the Arab countries were entitled to be independent and sovereign. And when France was particularly reluctant to grant even this symbolic independence to Algeria – preferring the interests of its settler community there – public opinion in Europe, and beyond, rallied behind the Algerian liberation movement.

The people of Palestine and their national movement should not have been an exceptional case study, had it not been for the Zionist movement’s interest in their country. They easily passed the test of being recognised as a modern day “nation” or “people”. But they were already exempted, towards the end of the First World War, from the international promise to allow the Arab nations or peoples to become independent. Strategic considerations, Christian Zionism among Britain’s leaders and a fair share of anti-Semitism led London to support the settlement of European Jews away from Europe in the midst of the Arab world. Although the British declared famously in 1917 that this would be done without prejudicing the rights and aspirations of the indigenous population, of course it did. It impinged upon their basic rights for nationhood, self-determination and independence – rights granted to everyone else in the Arab world. This was done against staggering statistics: 90 percent of the population were Palestinians, and out of the 10 percent Jews, quite a few were Orthodox Jews who regarded Zionism as an aberration and interference with God’s will.

It did not work, though. The Palestinians rejected the imposition of a colonialist project on them, despite the full European support for it. Up to 1939 Europe, and in particular Britain, developed second thoughts about Palestine. International public opinion had to make a new decision in 1947, when Britain, in despair at its entanglement there, passed the question to others.

In 1947 the statistics were still very much in the Palestinians’ favour. Objectively, they had what was needed to be regarded by the international community as a legitimate nation demanding its right for self determination and independence. They were two thirds of the population and owned more than 90 percent of the land. The Jews were mostly newcomers from the previous three years and had managed to buy only 7 percent of the land. Compared to 1917, the Palestinians had an even more distinct national identity and a clearer vision.

But this was all ignored by the international community that used the United Nations (UN) to pass a decision on Palestine’s future on 29 November 1947, the famous partition resolution. Instead of granting the Palestinians independence in Palestine, the UN suggested allocating them less than half of the country and proposed they would share the economy and currency with the Jewish settlers who were allocated a larger part of it. Their capital, Jerusalem, was expropriated as an international enclave. Only one factor led the UN special commission on Palestine, and all those powers behind it, to abandon every conventional principle of statehood and independence for the sake of satisfying the Zionist movement: the Holocaust.

One can read again and again the arguments put forward by everyone involved in proposing the partition resolution and later on the admittance of Israel as a full member of the UN, while Palestine was erased from the international public agenda, and see clearly that the Holocaust was the sole argument.

The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the UN solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine. What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à-vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.

The most bewildering arithmetic done by the UN, in the name of the international community, towards achieving this formula was to include the number of Jews in Europe in the overall demographic calculation of the balance in Palestine. Hence, Palestine was now the land of the Jews of Europe, including those who had not yet arrived there and those who never intended to arrive there. As such they were a majority in Palestine.

The Zionist movement had the military power to both ethnically cleanse Palestine of its original population and to face a military confrontation with troops from various Arab armies sent to try and prevent the creation of a Jewish state. However, it needed the Holocaust memory to silence any criticism of its ethnic cleansing operation and to prevent any international pressure on it to allow the return of all those expelled from the land after the 1948 war. Europe’s guilt at allowing Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews of Europe was to be cured by the dispossession of the Palestinians.

This created what the late Edward Said called a chain of victimisation. The Palestinians became the victims’ victim. This concept was never accepted by Israel and its allies; nor was it ever endorsed by the European political elite that felt very comfortable with the formula of Israel being the only and exclusive victim of the Holocaust and the only victim in Palestine.

The Israelis went the other way in two directions that complemented each other. On the one hand, they felt secure from any Western pressure and continued the dispossession of the Palestinians – until today. The limits to their actions in the past, and quite probably in the future, were well defined by the late Israeli journalist Aryeh Caspi: as long as the Israelis do not do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, they are within the legitimate and moral boundaries of civilised behaviour. The repertoire of actions within those limits was, and still is, quite horrendous, as the latest Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip testify. The other direction was to Nazify the Palestinians so as to justify further the actions against them.

Justice

The European political elite seems still to suffer from the same timidity as it did in the past. This fear, rooted so clearly in Europe’s tragic Jewish history, hinders severely any chance for a comprehensive and lasting peace in Israel and Palestine. It is true that the main block for any effective pressure on Israel is the US. But any chance of balancing it or causing it to redirect its course depends very much on Europe.

One of the main stumbling blocks in the way of such a change is Germany, for obvious reasons. However, Germany as a society and government has an obligation not only to the Jewish people, but also to the Palestinians. It was right and just that the first decades after the Holocaust were devoted to reconciliation with the Jewish world. Germany as a whole did face its past boldly and did not deny the horror of the Holocaust. Now the time has come for the Germans to pay attention to the victims’ victim – Germany is not that far a link in the chain of victimisation and cannot spurn responsibility.

There are other strategic reasons for trying a new approach to the Palestine issue than the one that puts all the blame on the Palestinians and disregards their legitimate rights such as the right of the refugees to return and the right of the rest of the Palestinian people to live without occupation, oppression and discrimination. The continued violence in Israel and Palestine has the potential of dragging not only the Middle East into endless wars but also Europe – as is very clear from the events of the last decade.

But this naive article is about morality and justice – justice, something which I found is very important to a younger German generation; a generation that knows that as a nation they faced head-on their own past evils and expect the Israelis to do the same. You can meet them as volunteers in the occupied territories and in the various European solidarity campaigns for Palestine. These young men and women should be a source of pride for Germany, as were the young Germans who volunteered in Israel as part of the reconciliation.

We will all need them, because history teaches us that evil, occupation and dispossession do eventually come to an end. There is always a danger of revenge and retribution on such a day. Maybe a group of people who were brought up boldly facing the Nazi genocide, and became aware at first hand of the Israeli occupation and its horrors, would facilitate a restitutive justice for all – like the one we had in post Apartheid South Africa and not a retributive one – such as the one we witnessed in Rwanda.

Judging by the speech recently given by the chancellor, Angela Merkel, in the Israeli Knesset, Germany is not likely to play any constructive role in bringing peace to Israel and Palestine. Merkel presented an embarrassingly biased and one sided pro-Israeli position. In her address the chancellor did not mention the occupation, even in passing, and only praised Israel as a paragon of justice, democracy and civilisation. This will only strengthen the more aggressive and violent aspects of Israeli policy and actions. It also left the Palestinians with no hope for a different future, and without hope despair sets in which in turn produces violence.

We all need closure from the 20th century – not in order to forget and not even to forgive, but for the sake of building a normal and healthy life. This is true about victims and victimisers alike. Germany can play a very positive role in bringing that about in Palestine. Now is the time, before it is too late.

Ilan Pappe’s latest book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. His new book The Bureaucracy of Evil will be published later this year. Pappe will also be talking at Marxism 2008

National demonstration: Free Palestine

Ellie Keen — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:34:31 +0000

from the Stop the War website

Assemble 1pm Temple Underground station / Victoria Embankment, rally in Trafalgar Square.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe which saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced from their homes and turned into refugees.

On 10 May the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have called a demonstration to commemorate the Nakba and calling for an end to the siege of Gaza and the right to return.

Organised by: British Muslim Initiative, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestinian Forum in Britain.

Supported by: UNISON, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), Unite the Union, Communication Workers Union, GMB, TSSA, RMT, Fire Brigades Union, National Union of Miners, Association of Palestinian Community UK, Amos Trust, Friends of Al Aqsa UK, Palestinian Return Centre, War on Want, Jewish Socialist Group, Pax Christi, Stop the War Coalition, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Britain Palestine Twinning Network, ICAHDUK, Friends of Lebanon, Federation of Student Islamic Societies, Midlands Palestinian Community Association.

Please make sure to put this date in your diary right now and start booking transport to London.

Contact the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for coaches and to find out how you can help.

Covering Israel-Palestine

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:37:09 +0000

The BBC’s Double Standards

An Exchange With The BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen

The media reported last week that at least 22 people, including five Palestinian children, had been killed during Israeli ‘incursions’ into Gaza. The Israeli military ‘operations’ were ‘sparked’ by a Hamas ambush that had left three Israeli soldiers dead. Reporting followed the usual script that Israel’s state-of-the-art weaponry is deployed as ‘retaliation’ for ‘militant’ Palestinian attacks.

The latest deaths followed the killing in early March of over 120 Palestinians under a massive Israeli assault on Gaza. (See our Media Alerts: ‘Israeli Deaths Matter More’, March 11, 2008)

One of last week’s dead was a Reuters cameraman, a 23-year-old Palestinian, killed by a shell fired from an Israeli tank he was filming. Few details emerged of the other numerous victims of Israeli violence.

Media Lens emailed Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor:

“In the BBC’s recent reports about the violence in Gaza, the only victim of Israeli firepower that I can recall the BBC naming is Fadel Shana, the Reuters cameraman.

“As you know, 22 people were killed, 5 of whom were children. Why are their names not provided by the BBC? Where are the further details that tell us something about them as individuals? Where are the interviews with their grieving families?

“If logistical problems make it difficult to do this, shouldn’t you explain this clearly and prominently to your audience?

“Surely if 5 Israeli children had been killed, the BBC’s news coverage would have been significantly different.” (Email, April 17, 2008)

Bowen responded on the same day:

“You imply that we have double standards in marking the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children. I can assure you that we do not.

“After twenty years of reporting wars I believe strongly that it is important to humanise the victims. But we cannot broadcast long roll calls of the dead. News is often about death. If we read out the name of everyone whose death we covered, we would have no room for anything else, including a proper explanation of how and why they died.

“Our coverage yesterday did that I thought excellently. Paul Wood’s piece on the Ten O’Clock news was particularly strong, though the work of all the staff in our Jerusalem bureau, supported by our Palestinian staff in Gaza stood out.

“There were no interviews yesterday with grieving families because as the death of the Reuters cameraman showed, it was very dangerous to move around. They may well surface in the next few days. Very little video came out of Gaza yesterday. In a piece I did the night before last I interviewed the father of an 11 year old boy, Riad al Uwasi from al Burej camp, who was killed last week. When he was killed it was impossible to get to al Burej, which is where the Reuters cameraman died. When things were calmer, it became possible, until the next incursion.” (Email, April 17, 2008)

We replied the following day:

“Many thanks for responding. I appreciate your remark that ‘it is important to humanise the victims.’ Your response, however, tacitly acknowledges that you cannot do this so readily for Palestinian victims of deadly Israeli force.

“Justifiable concerns for the safety of BBC staff severely constrain timely and extensive coverage from the scene of Israeli attacks, or their aftermath. And so we hear too little from bystanders and grieving families, or Palestinian spokespeople. Compare and contrast with the headline BBC coverage of attacks on Israelis, such as the recent shooting at the Merkaz Herav Yeshiva in Jerusalem [See our March 11 Media Alert]. Your Middle East webpages are full of reports, analyses and commentaries on that single event alone.

“Five Palestinian children in Gaza have just been killed by Israeli forces. How has the BBC’s recent coverage ‘humanised’ these young victims? Where are the interviews with those on the receiving end of overwhelming Israeli firepower? You say such interviews ‘may well surface in the next few days.’ I hope so. But sadly, the record shows that this is not the norm in BBC reporting.

“Instead, the record shows that the BBC does a poor job of reflecting the huge disproportionality of killings, violence and force under Israel’s military occupation. As of March 13, 2008, 1,033 Israelis and at least 4,604 Palestinians [had] been killed since September 29, 2000. The ratio of more than 4 Palestinians killed for every Israeli is even more stark when we look at the number of children killed: more than 9 Palestinian children for every Israeli child (http://www.ifamericansknew.org/)

“The extent of relative media coverage to both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ does not have to reflect exactly these tragic statistics. Nor does the BBC viewer require endless reminders of the vast US financial, military, diplomatic and other aid to Israel. Nor do we need to hear again and again the array of UN resolutions targeted at Israel over 60 years [since its founding in 1948], and routinely ignored by that state. But, certainly, the BBC audience would have a hard time finding such salient facts in your reporting. And yet, you promise ‘a proper explanation of how and why they [the victims] died’.”

We then quoted Glasgow University media analysts Greg Philo and Mike Berry who noted, on the basis of extensive research of media coverage of Israel-Palestine:

“The emphasis here is on ‘hot’ live action and the immediacy of the report rather than any explanation of the underlying causes of the events. One BBC journalist who had reported on this conflict told us that his own editor had said to him that they did not want ‘explainers’ – as he put it: ‘It’s all bang bang stuff.’ The driving force behind such news is to hold the attention of as many viewers as possible, but in practice, as we will see, it simply leaves very many people confused.” (Philo and Berry, ‘Bad News From Israel’, Pluto Books, London, 2004, p. 102)

Israeli Perspective Routinely Highlighted

We invited Professor Philo to comment directly on our exchange with Jeremy Bowen; in particular, on Bowen’s assertion that the BBC is even-handed in its coverage of Israeli and Palestinian victims. In response, Philo pointed to the findings of ‘Bad News From Israel’:

“[T]he focus on Israeli victims, both in terms of the quantity of coverage and the language used to describe them, led some viewers to believe wrongly that the Israelis had the most casualties and these beliefs were attributed directly to what they had seen on television.” (Email, April 18, 2008)

In fact, as we saw above, there have been over four times as many Palestinian as Israeli deaths between September 2000 and March 2008. And the ratio is as high as nine when it comes to children’s deaths. It is highly doubtful whether ‘consumers’ of corporate news media, the BBC included, are aware of this.

The Glasgow University study also cited an unnamed “very experienced” Middle East BBC correspondent who noted “the difficulties of movement applied to media teams trying to reach Palestinian areas.” This is an important point implicitly conceded by Bowen in his reply to us above. This limitation is bound to affect media coverage. As Philo and Berry warned:

“This cannot be an acceptable situation for a publicly accountable broadcasting corporation that is committed to impartiality. Broadcasters cannot absolve themselves from the requirement for balance by accepting a status quo in which one side can ensure that it receives more favourable treatment by imposing restrictions on the other. The broadcasters really have to devote the necessary resources to make sure that both sides are properly represented.” (Philo and Berry, op. cit., p. 137)

Their careful research concluded that news headlines “highlight Israeli statements, actions or perspectives.” Palestinian views do appear in the media “but tend to be buried deep in the text of news bulletins. [...] it is hard to avoid the conclusion that one view of the conflict is being prioritised.” (Ibid., p. 144)

Put more explicitly, it is “the Israeli perspective [which] is highlighted in terms of causes, motives and preferred outcomes.” (Ibid., p. 166). Moreover, Philo and Berry point to “a continued emphasis on Israeli deaths and injuries, both in terms of the amount of coverage which they receive and the consistently detailed accounts which are given of them.” (Ibid., p. 184). This is a pattern that persists to the present day.

Jonathan Cook, an independent journalist (www.jkcook.net) whose honest and incisive reporting from Israel puts the corporate media to shame, told us:

“It is a terrible irony that, precisely because Israel has created an environment in the occupied territories in which it can unleash so much violence so unpredictably, journalists are increasingly fearful of venturing there to tell the human stories of the Palestinian casualties behind the simple numbers. It is, of course, equally ironic that, because life inside Israel is relatively safe, journalists can easily humanise the stories of the far smaller number of Israeli casualties. Unfortunately, Bowen and most other journalists fail to appreciate this irony or to act in useful ways to counter its effects on their reporting.

“When Bowen tells us that ‘we cannot broadcast long roll calls of the dead’, he’s implicitly accepting a set of news priorities that mean the more Palestinians killed the less importance their deaths have to news organisations like his. Conversely, the fewer Israelis killed the more seriousness their deaths are accorded.” (Email to Media Lens, April 21, 2008)

Israelis Are ‘People Like Us’

We contacted Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, for his view. He praised Jeremy Bowen‘s impact on the BBC‘s performance:

“My view of the BBC’s Israel/Palestine coverage has changed a little, and mainly because Jeremy Bowen’s presence on the ground and in London has brought some sense and balance to the operation. The standard of reporting from Palestine has also improved in the past couple of years or so, since Jeremy took over and especially since the departure of James Reynolds.”

He added:

“Jeremy has some licence from the BBC, and its trillion on-line producers, managers and editors, because of his knowledge, authority and status, which he has built up as both a Middle East afficionado and broadcasting professional over the past twenty years. He has taken the trouble to do his homework and get into the region.”

Llewellyn, however, pointed to the deep constraints that preclude fair and balanced reporting:

“The problem [of bias] is not with him and cannot be dealt with within his aegis.”

Llewellyn explained:

“Editors, producers, presenters, and their immediate bosses, live in the heated climate of London and very much still within their own cultural heritage: the politics of the day plus the memories of an English education. [...] the story ‘concept’ in London is still, I am afraid, that Israelis are ‘people like us’, who should not be shelled every day while they drive their Polos to recognisable branches of Asda or whatever; while Arabs are ‘tricky’ and ‘emotional’ and if they weren’t all firing rockets and hating Jews in the first place none of this would be happening. This is still the platform off which most Western journalists in London jump. To take a different tack is to run into that wall of ‘anti-semitic’ or ‘unbalanced’ reportage that any of us who tries to explain the facts on the ground in the region runs into.”

John Pilger is one journalist has been on the receiving end of such flak in his extensive reporting on Palestine over several decades. His award-winning 2002 television documentary, ‘Palestine is Still the Issue’, is one of his most powerful, and most watched, films on the crisis.

We sent Pilger our exchange with the BBC’s Middle East editor, highlighting Bowen’s assertion that “You imply that we have double standards in marking the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children. I can assure you that we do not.” Pilger replied:

“Jeremy Bowen’s quote is indefensible. One only has to read the acclaimed study, ‘Bad News from Israel’, to understand the difference in the reporting of the humanity of Israelis and Palestinians. However, Bowen himself has been an able and brave reporter — I acknowledged this in ‘Hidden Agendas’ (pages 47 & 50).”

Pilger then recounted an example of the BBC’s institutional bias that systematically suppresses uncomfortably honest perspectives:

“A few years ago, [Bowen] invited me to take part in a BBC special about war correspondents, and we spent an enjoyable hour or so ‘in conversation’. Although it was clear that tales of derring-do would have been preferred, I raised the unwelcome subject that the BBC was an extension and voice of the established order in Britain and its reporting on the Middle East and elsewhere reflected the prevailing wisdom — with honourable exceptions from time to time. My contribution was cut entirely from the programme. I emailed Bowen and someetime later received an unsatisafactory response that there wasn’t ‘time or space’ in the film — something unsurprising like that. Censorship by omission is standard, if undeclared practice.” (Email, April 18, 2008)

Regular readers of our alerts will be familiar with the corporate media claim that lack of ‘time’ or ‘space’ somehow ‘explains’ the regular omission of honest reporting and critical analysis.

As a result of this undeclared media censorship, public understanding of the Middle East remains limited; and challenges to Western support of brutal Israeli policy are easily diffused and minimised. Sadly, the net effect is that the BBC provides cover for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. This is a tragedy that stretches back to the ‘Nakba’: the ‘catastrophe’ of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians which was the prerequisite for the founding of the Israeli state in 1948. Now seems as good a time as any to exert pressure on this publicly-funded institution to report painful truths.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to: Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East news editor
Email: jeremy.bowen@bbc.co.uk

Write to Helen Boaden, BBC news director
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org

The Great Catastrophe

Ellie Keen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:53:56 +0000

In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions.

May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh (the Queen’s husband), a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester.

Remembering a tragedy

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of State support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba — catastrophe in Arabic — that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947, there were 12,93,000 Arabs and 6,08,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the U.N. partition plan assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new State and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish State had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 1,80,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish State. 7,00,000 to 9,00,000 had been made refugees.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 1,00,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah — the mainstream Zionist defence force — systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab State, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest — 40,000 — at gunpoint.

In 1948, 500 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. More than 70,000 Palestinian houses were demolished. In the Jaffa area, 96 per cent of the villages were totally destroyed. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the U.N.-allotted borders of the Jewish State, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

Expansionist State

At the onset of the conflict, Jews owned 1,159 sq. km. of land (6 per cent of the total). By July 1949, thanks to the Absentee Property laws passed in haste by the new Israeli parliament, they owned more than 20,000 sq. km. In 1954, more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.

For many years, Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily at the behest of Arab leaders. That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground. On April 6, for example, Ben Gurion told a Zionist meeting: “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way…. I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is resisted because it undermines the moral foundations of the Israeli State. It’s a handicap in the Israelis’ global propaganda battle with the Palestinians, and a challenge to their own self-definitions, a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is no mere historical controversy. It’s an unresolved issue. The Palestinian refugee population — descendants of those driven out in 1948 — now numbers more than 4 million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain Stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. Each year since December 1948, the U.N. General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right of return. Any peace treaty that leaves these people out would be neither just nor lasting.

Shocking perversion

As if experiencing a Nakba wasn’t enough, the Palestinians are now being threatened with a Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. In a shocking perversion of a historical legacy, the word was used by an Israeli defence minister to describe the punishment that would be meted out to the people of Gaza — who are there because they were driven there in 1948 — in response to the Qassam rocket attacks. Already, as I write, in the past four days alone, more than 100 Palestinians, including 49 unarmed civilians, among them 25 children, have been killed. Another 250 have been injured. As the furious assault on Gaza continues, Israel’s 60th birthday celebrations look increasingly unpalatable.

Commemoration and Denial

Tim Holmes — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:17:42 +0000

In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions.

May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32% of the population, the UN partition plan assigned them 55% of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78% of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 700,000 to 900,000 had been made refugees.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest – 40,000 – at gunpoint.

In 1948, 500 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. More than 70,000 Palestinian houses were demolished. In the Jaffa area, 96% of the villages were totally destroyed. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

At the onset of the conflict, Jews owned 1,159 square kilometers of land (6% of the total). By July 1949, thanks to the Absentee Property laws passed in haste by the new Israeli parliament, they owned more than 20,000 square km. In 1954, more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is resisted because it undermines the moral foundations of the Israeli state. It’s a handicap in the Israelis’ global propaganda battle with the Palestinians, and a challenge to their own self-definitions, a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is no mere historical controversy. It’s an unresolved issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than 4 million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right of return. Any peace treaty that leaves these people out would be neither just nor lasting.

As if experiencing a Nakba wasn’t enough, the Palestinians are now being threatened with a Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. In a shocking perversion of an historical legacy, the word was used by an Israeli defence minister to describe the punishment that would be meted out to the people of Gaza – who are there because they were driven there in 1948 – in response to the Qassam rocket attacks. Already, as I write, in the past four days alone, more than 100 Palestinians, including 49 unarmed civilians, among them 25 children, have been killed. Another 250 have been injured. As the furious assault on Gaza continues, Israel’s 60th birthday celebrations look increasingly unpalatable.

Balfour’s Deceit

Ellie Keen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:28:47 +0000

Michael Makovsky’s study of Churchill’s views on Palestine is a work of immense labour. Its documentation reveals a lot. Consistency was not Churchill’s strong point. He advocated a Jewish homeland as far back as in 1906. If in 1915 Lloyd George advocated grabbing Palestine “owing to the prestige it would give us”, Churchill scribbled to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey “Palestine must be given to Christian, liberal and now noble Belgium”.

Makovsky’s researches fully establish Balfour’s deceit: “The definition of ‘national home’ was left intentionally ambiguous. The Zionists purposely used the term ‘home’ in Basle in 1897, so as not to provoke the Gentiles, but had made conflicting statements since then about whether they intended a state or not. Weizmann considered development of a state a slow process, which certainly would have been necessary for the Jews to become a majority in Palestine. (At the time of the Declaration, there were estimated to be 50,000-65,000 Jews out of a total population of 700,000). Balfour told the War Cabinet on October 31, 1917, that ‘national home’ meant an entity under British or American protectorate which permitted the Jews to ‘build up… a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution’. With ‘centre’, he borrowed the vague term which Herbert Samuel employed in 1915. Balfour did not commit to a definition in public, but privately confided in 1918. ‘My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state.’ The British press mostly understood the Declaration as promising a Jewish state.” Curzon was right after all. But, as Balfour minuted on August 6, 1919, “I am an ardent Zionist.” (Documents, page 330).

The Documents confirm the evidence of deceit. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, a pro-Zionist political officer in the British military administration in Palestine, warned Curzon on September 26, 1919: “The people of Palestine are not at present in a fit state to be told openly that the establishment of Zionism in Palestine is the policy to which H.M.G., America and France are committed. They certainly do not realise this fact.” (Documents, page 472).
Balfour himself was more candid in a talk with Justice Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Felix Frankfurter, who became a judge in the court later. Both were Zionist activists. They met in Paris on June 24, 1919, when Balfour referred to the King-Crane Commission of Inquiry set up by President Woodrow Wilson in order to ascertain what “the people [of the region] really wanted”. Frankfurter pressed the view that “Palestine should be the Jewish homeland and not merely that there be a Jewish homeland” there. Balfour replied that he had tried unsuccessfully to exclude Palestine from the Commission’s remit, “because the powers had committed themselves to the Zionist programme, which inevitably excluded numerical self-determination. Palestine presented a unique situation. We are dealing not with the wishes of an existing community but are consciously seeking to re-constitute a new community and definitely building for a numerical majority in the future.” (Emphasis added, throughout.) That was not what he said in public.
Frankfurter remarked: “No statesman could have been more sympathetic than Mr. Balfour was with the underlying philosophy and aims of Zionism… nor more eager that they should be realised.” (Documents, pages 1277-1278).

Short shrift to Zionists

The King-Crane Commission’s Report gave short shrift to Zionist aims after a thorough probe into the people’s view: “We recommend, in the fifth place, serious modification of the extreme Zionist programme for Palestine of unlimited immigration of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish state.

The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made. …The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase [of land].”

It cited Wilson’s emphasis on the democratic principle and said: “If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist programme… there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people’s rights, though it kept within the forms of law… the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.”

But Henry King, President of the Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, an industrialist from Chicago, could not weaken the British Cabinet’s resolve despite the fact that they were appointed on the Commission by President Wilson. President Wilson’s fortunes were already in decline. Significantly, an ardent Zionist, Herbert Samuel, was appointed as the first British High Commissioner for Palestine. When they fell out later, Lloyd George taunted him: “I made him the first Procurator of Judea since Pontius Pilate.”

Tom Segev rightly holds that “there is no basis for the frequent assertion that the State [of Israel] was established as a result of the Holocaust… That sympathy helped the Zionists advance their diplomatic campaign and their propaganda”. Prof. Peter Clarke agrees. “The escalating crisis for European Jewry under the Nazis had not created the case for Zionist immigration. It simply reinforced it.” (The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, page 86). He recalls Churchill’s evidence to the Peel Commission in 1937 – the British government had all along envisaged “a great Jewish state there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country”. Labour was as pro-Zionist. “Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews come in,” Hugh Dalton wrote.

Imperial concerns were not absent. The Jewish state, alien to its environment, would be the West’s outpost in West Asia. A reader of the Documents on British Policy is struck by the Arabs’ ardour for unity. The barter of Palestine was of a piece with the disruption of Arab unity. The General Syrian Congress declared on July 2, 1919: “We reject the claims of the Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of Southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish immigration into any part of the country… We desire that there should be no dismemberment of Syria, and no separation of Palestine or the coastal regions in the West or the Lebanon from the mother country; and we ask that the unity of the country be maintained under any circumstances.” If Nasser moved “the Arab street”, it was because he spoke as an Arab, rather than an Egyptian, nationalist. Dismemberment created separate and vested interests.

The sell-out

However, the tragic truth is that not only were Arab leaders of the times inept, but they were also corrupt. Sherif Hussein’s sons, Abdullah and Feisal, were foremost among them. Abdullah took £5,000 to accept the deal by which he was given Transjordan. Among those who sold lands to the Jews were “leaders of the Arab national movement – patriots on the outside, traitors on the inside”, Tom Segev records. Zionist officials prepared a list of their names. Musa Kazim al-Husseini, former mayor of Jerusalem and a recognised leader of the movement, was on the list as were eight other Arab mayors.

“The Arab leaders’ willingness to sell land to the Jews heightened the contempt Zionist figures felt for the Arab national movement. After a meeting with Arab dignitaries, Chaim Weizmann concluded, ‘They are ready to sell their souls to the highest bidder.’ The compact Weizmann reached with Prince Faisal in 1918 had also been based on the assumption that the prince would make money off his peace with the Zionists. One of Faisal’s aides had received a down payment of £1,000 and then demanded more. This experience contributed to the Jews’ conclusion that the national consciousness of the Palestinian Arabs could be bought. Indeed, politicians and petty thieves, dignitaries as well as hoodlums – all offered the Zionists their services in espionage and sabotage, in rumour-mongering, defamation, extortion, and all kinds of intimidation; the supply often outstripped the demand.” The British kept company with the Jewish agency in paying bribes. President Roosevelt told Chaim Weizmann that, in his opinion, the Arabs could be bought. The word “baksheesh” (tip) appears in the minutes of their talks.

Land transfers alone could not have achieved Jewish aims. Recourse to terror was inescapable to drive out the Arabs from their homes. This should not have caused any surprise. The Central Intelligence Agency prepared a paper, “The consequences of the Partition of Palestine”, dated November 28, 1947 (“The View from 1947” by Thomas W. Lippman; Middle East Journal; Vol. 61, No. 1; Winter 2007). It predicted the outbreak of war if a Jewish state was created. In 1943, Roosevelt’s special envoy Col. Harold Hoskins reported that “only by military force can a Zionist State be imposed upon the Arabs”. The CIA’s paper noted the Zionists’ capacity as well as their ambitions. Their fighting forces would consist of 70,000 to 90,000 members of Hagana, the “Zionist army”; the 6,000 to 8,000 members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, an underground organisation that “employs sabotage and terrorism” as its preferred tactics in its campaign for independence; and the “extreme fanatics” known as the Stern Gang or Lehi, about 500 men who, the CIA said, “do not hesitate to assassinate government officials and police officers or to obtain funds by acts of violence against Jews as well as others”.

Its prediction of the Arabs’ victory was proved wrong. The only army worth the name was the Arab Legion of Transjordan led by Sir John Glubb. But King Abdullah, true to form, had secretly agreed with the Jews that he would not go beyond capturing the West Bank. According to the CIA, Arab fears of Jewish expansionism was justified: “In the long run no Zionists in Palestine will be satisfied with the territorial arrangements of the partition settlement,” though it allocated about 50% of Palestine to the Jews and called for Jerusalem to be a neutral, international city.”

Prof. Ilan Pappe has rendered high service by documenting the Jews’ ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Plan Dalet was formulated by “the Consultancy” on March 10, 1948. “That same evening military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued with its own list of villages and neighbourhoods as the targets of this master plan. Codenamed Plan D [Dalet in Hebrew], this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population. The previous three schemes had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.” He bases his summary on the records of the caucus’ meetings. Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon were its members.

Ethnic cleansing is recognised in international law as “a crime against humanity”. The International Criminal Court has been created to punish its perpetrators, not to forget the special ICCs for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Plan D of 1948 was a revised version of previous ones, Plan A, B and C. A was drafted in 1937; B in 1946.

They were meshed into C in 1948 which spelt out the actions to be taken. “Killing the Palestinian political leadership. Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters. Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews. Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials (in the Mandatory system). Damaging Palestinian transportation. Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods; water wells, mills, etc. Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks. Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc. Plan C added that all data required for the performance of these actions could be found in the village files; lists of leaders, activists, ‘potential human targets’, the precise layout of villages, and so on.”

A passage from Plan D read: “These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Pappe notes that “the ideology that enabled the depopulation of half of Palestine’s native people in 1948 is still alive, and continues to drive the inexorable, sometimes discernable, cleansing of those Palestinians who live there today”.

It is to this Israel that, on January 11, 2008, President George W. Bush asked the Arab States to “reach out”. He has done nothing to prevent Israel from building new settlements or from violating basic human rights. Israel’s policies are inspired by the ideology that led to its creation. “Neither Palestinians nor Jews will be saved, from one another or from themselves, if the ideology that still drives the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not correctly identified. The problem with Israel was never its Jewishness – Judaism has many faces and many of them provide a solid basis for peace and cohabitation; it is the ethnic Zionist character. Zionism does not have the same margins of pluralism that Judaism offers, especially not for the Palestinians. They can never be part of the Zionist state and space, and will continue to fight – and hopefully their struggle will be peaceful and successful. If not, it will be desperate and vengeful and, like a whirlwind, will suck all up in a huge perpetual sandstorm that will rage not only through the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also within Britain and the United States, the powers which, each in their turn, feed the tempest that threatens to ruin us all.”

Can a state established by deceit and forcible ouster of the people of the land expect them to accept its legitimacy by mere efflux of time? What are 60 years to an ancient people, the Arabs? International recognition of Israel as a state cannot wipe out the facts of history or erase from the memories of the people it has wronged the brutalities it has perpetrated. International law is based on the states quo. For long it legitimised colonial rule. In law the colony was part of the territory of its overlord. It has nothing to do with morality. Israel simply lacks moral legitimacy. Itself a product of terror, it cannot complain if the people under occupation take to arms.

But will that be of any avail to them? Human blood, whether Jewish or Arab, is priceless. Violence has not accomplished and will not accomplish anything. Fortunately, there is growing acceptance within and outside Israel of the facts of history. The Arabs in Palestine can stir the Israelis’ and the world’s conscience by recourse to a non-violent campaign of revolt till justice is done to them in the light of the realities of today, however painful they are.

More cannot be demanded of the Palestinians. As Thycidides said, “It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?”

Europe Should Put Its Mouth Where Its Money Is

Tim Holmes — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:27:18 +0000

It has been instructive in Germany this week, talking to Europeans involved in Middle East issues during the run-up to the Paris conference on Palestinian aid — where Monday $7.4 billion was pledged, over three years, to the Palestinian half-government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas. Europeans seem again to respond to the challenges of engaging in the Arab-Israeli conflict with their usual financial generosity and political wishful thinking.

The European Union’s 27 members and other states can and should respond to the new post-Annapolis situation by carving out a decisive policy that enhances their strengths rather than institutionalizes their weaknesses. It would be collective stupidity for Europe once again to provide billions of euros in aid to Palestinians that are wasted, physically destroyed, or totally negated by Israeli militarism, American bias, Palestinian divisions, or Arab passivity.

Europeans will provide around $2 billion of the money pledged in Paris, making them the single biggest donor to Palestine, while their political role seems to be moving in the other direction. Europe should redress this balance, and play a political-diplomatic role that is commensurate with its economic prowess. Europeans should explore how to return to their role as the guardians of the rule of law, international legitimacy, political morality and the international peace-making consensus that is enshrined in UN resolutions and global conventions — grandiose aims, I admit, but shouldn’t someone stand up for these things if the Americans, Israelis, and Arabs do not?

A German diplomat in Berlin deeply involved in these issues explained that Europeans working behind the scene, while increasing their peace-keeping and economic involvement on the ground, “are developing the tools that allow Europe to influence events,” especially by constructively prodding US policy. But I see little hard evidence for this view, however sincerely it is held. Europeans seem to ignore the reality that economic, political, and diplomatic conditions are steadily worsening, not improving, as indicated by several developments this past week.

In an unusual political statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has called for immediate political action to contain the “deep crisis” in the West Bank and Gaza. It charged that Israeli policies in the occupied territories have denied the Palestinians the right to live a normal and dignified life. The ICRC director of operations for the Middle East said: “In Gaza the whole Strip is being strangled, economically speaking, life there has become a nightmare,” adding that humanitarian aid will not solve this problem.

The Red Cross also issued a report, Dignity Denied, which depicts harrowing everyday conditions for Palestinians who find it increasingly difficult to access jobs, medical care, and even food. It says that only “prompt, innovative and courageous political action can change the harsh reality of this long-standing occupation, restore normal social and economic life to the Palestinian people, and allow them to live their lives in dignity.”

The World Bank last week also said that a combination of new aid pledges and Palestinian government reforms will have little impact if Israel maintains its harsh restrictions on travel and trade.

Also this past week, results of a new public opinion poll by the respected Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research suggest that supporting the Abbas-Fateh government financially is unlikely to pummel Hamas into political submission. And it discloses that a total lack of confidence in the Annapolis process is keeping Hamas’ and Fateh’s popularity stable — 31 percent support for Hamas and 49 percent for Fateh — almost identical to their respective shares last September.

These developments would suggest that throwing more money into a situation of continued occupation and resistance is not a sensible policy, but rather must be matched by political action to resolve the root causes of the conflict. Europe would do better to combine its fiscal generosity with parallel political gumption and backbone. It may not have the power to prod Arabs and Israelis into a successful negotiation, but it does have the moral force to say clearly what such a negotiated peace requires, what are the dictates of accepted law and legitimacy, and how all sides are falling short in their commitments to pursue these routes towards peace and security for Arabs and Israelis alike.

Europe should pause for a moment as it starts writing billions of euros of new aid checks for development and security projects that American-supplied Israeli fighter jets are likely to bomb into smithereens again next year — as they have in recent years.

Europe would do well to reflect on its dilemma, which the respected German think tank director Dr. Volker Perthes articulated last week: “Europe has steadily become more involved in the Middle East and Arab-Israeli issues in the arenas of economy, diplomacy, politics, security and peace-keeping, but seems less able to translate engagement into influence to change things.”

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Bethlehem: Media Coverage & Deception

Tim Holmes — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:52:54 +0000

Every now and then, particularly around Christmas, the odd commentator in the British press attempts to deny Israel’s responsibility for the demise of Bethlehem and the suffering of its residents, blaming the Palestinians themselves and the media’s supposedly inherent desire to demonise Israel. This year, one such person is Michael Gove, a columnist for The Times, writing in the newspaper on 11 December 2007 under the headline “Bethlehem and bigtory.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/michael_gove/article…

“The truth is very different,” claims Gove, adding that the “parlous position of Palestinian Christians…is a consequence not of Israeli aggression,” and that “Israel goes out of its way to honour sites and traditions sacred to other faiths.”

He is either woefully ignorant of the situation, or wilfully deceiving his readers. Either way, it is evident that he has neither the knowledge nor authority to speak for Bethlehem’s residents or Palestinian Christians, who would vehemently disagree with him. As such, AMW recommends that Gove and his ilk visit Bethlehem, speak to Palestinian Christians, and brush up on relevant, authoritative human rights reports.

One such report, entitled “Costs of Conflict: The Changing Face of Bethlehem,” was published in December 2004 by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and the Office of the Special Coordinator for the Peace Process in the Middle East (UNSCO).

http://domino.un.org/pdfs/Beth_Rep_Dec04.pdf

Following are extracts from the report:

“Surrounded by Israel’s Barrier on two sides and restricted roads and roadblocks on the other, urban Bethlehem has become isolated from the rest of the West Bank and most importantly, from Jerusalem.”

Straining Links Between Bethlehem and Jerusalem

“A number of Israeli settlements have been built around Bethlehem.”

Barriers, Restricted Roads and Settlements

“Urban Bethlehem is surrounded by a combination of nine Israeli settlements, a stretch of the Barrier, roads restricted to Israelis and a multitude of checkpoints, earth mounds and roadblocks.”

“Bethlehem residents wishing to reach Jerusalem require a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration that can be obtained from the Etzion District Coordination Office (DCO) after a security review by the Israeli intelligence services. Even with a permit, access to Jerusalem may be denied at the discretion of the Israeli Border Police at Gilo checkpoint.”

Reduced Access to Holy Sites

“In accordance with Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Israel is bound to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law to ensure access to Christian, Jewish and Muslim holy places that are under its control. Since 1993, the measures taken by the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces]…have restricted Bethlehem’s Christian and Muslim worshippers from accessing their holy sites in Jerusalem – either Friday prayer at the Al Aqsa Mosque or Sunday mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

Rachel’s Tomb

“Located on Bethlehem’s main road in the northern part of the city, Rachel’s Tomb is stated to be the burial site of the Biblical matriarch Rachel. Both Jewish and Muslim communities have worshipped at this site erecting prayer areas around the Tomb. Under the Interim Agreement in 1995, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed to allow Jewish worshippers access to the site, while guaranteeing unimpeded movement for Palestinians on the main road. In 1997, the Israeli army built a wall across the main access road in Bethlehem where the tomb is located…cutting the ancient biblical route and main transport artery between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Hebron. The Israeli planned route for the Barrier effectively removes Rachel’s Tomb and the surrounding neighborhood from Bethlehem into Jerusalem’s expanded boundaries. The number of Israeli visitors to Rachel’s Tomb has increased. Recently, Israeli settlers have attempted to move into an apartment that has been connected to the Tomb. Meanwhile, a Muslim religious site inside Rachel’s Tomb, Bilal Mosque, is inaccessible to Muslim worshippers.”

Conclusion

“The age-old link between Jerusalem and Bethlehem is nearly severed as a result of Israeli policies including settlements, a host of physical barriers and roads restricted to Israelis. Without a political settlement that can remove the host of physical obstacles, including the Barrier, and the influence of Israeli settlements, the future for Bethlehem residents looks bleak.”

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