This is a small story, happens every day.  But still it needs to be told.

(Photo: Jonathan B Young)

First the basic news item, sent by Israeli activist Dorothy Naor, then a little more personal detail about Hani Amer, the Palestinian farmer mentioned in the story.  Dorothy took me to meet Hani, at the farm he is now about to lose.

Ma’an News agency, July 30, 2012:

“Israeli occupation authorities have started to install a fence around the southern side of Azzun Atma in Qalaqiliya in the northern West Bank.

A two-meter high spiral fence was installed on about 1,500 meters running from the settlement of Oranit to the crossroads of Kafr Qasim and route 505, according to Abdul-Karim Ayyoub, the secretary of the local council.  ‘With this fence, Israel is isolating the area known as Beer al-Shilla, the artesian well, and about 800-1000 dunams (over 8,000 square meters) of fruit and olive groves.’

Hani Amer, who is in charge of the artesian well, said that neither the well nor the groves could be accessed anymore, as the Israelis have not left openings or gates leading to the well or to the dirt roads.”

That’s the story.  A friend of Hani’s, Dorothy Naor sent it, along with her own comment: “Apparently Hani and family are losing their lands and their wells to the fence, which cuts them off from their land.  Hani lives in Mas’ha, but his family lands are in Azzun Atma — used to be a 5 minute drive, now it takes an hour or more due to the road having been taken over by Jewish colonists, with no Palestinians allowed.”

The Amer family have already endured a long series of assaults by settlers and soldiers.  On a day-trip into the occupied West Bank, Dorothy Naor introduced me to Hani.  I wrote of our encounter in Our Way to Fight, at the farm he is now about to lose:

We [Dorothy and I] clamber over the military barrier, continue on foot, then climb onto the roof of a small outbuilding surrounded by olive trees.  At midday the air is still and baking hot.  A sparse woody vine offers thin but welcome shade.  Among the silver-grey olive leaves I see the precious fruit, still green but tinged with blue, a month before harvest.  Then Hani arrives in a rusty Toyota that’s burning oil.

He’s broad and sturdy, walks heavily, supported by a stick.  Black hair under a white cotton cap, mustache on a sun-browned face deeply etched by weather and history.  Hard hands, a gentle grip.  We set out three plastic chairs on the roof.

I ask how long he has farmed.  “All my life,” he says, “like my father, my grandfather and before.  The Israelis make it harder all the time.  I’m only 51, but I’ve seen more destruction in my lifetime than you would in 1000 years living somewhere else.  The only thing that doesn’t change is the olive trees.  They are still here, thanks to Allah.”

What does he grow?  “Olives, figs, apples, grapes, avocadoes, lemons, clementines, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes.”  Where does he sell them?  “Nablus, Qalqilya.  It’s hard to get there – you need permits, and sometimes you get them, sometimes you don’t, so transport is very expensive.  With the fence it’s also difficult to get workers for the farm, often they can’t get here.”

An ancient farmer in a faded grey djellabah emerges from the olive grove, on a wagon pulled by a donkey.  Marhaba, he and Hani call to each other, hello.  He needs water.  Hani replies that he doesn’t have any, but he’s working on it.

I ask Hani if water is getting scarce here, as I’ve heard.  He nods.  “For the past ten years it’s drier than it used to be – last winter there was hardly any rain.  A few more years like this and there won’t be any water left to pump.”  [MR: He refers here to the artesian well that the Israelis are now preparing to steal.]

Here the weather is shared, but not the water.  According to a 2009 study by the World Bank, Israel controls all the water sources, but allocates to Palestinians only 20 percent of the water.  It is forbidden for Palestinians to drill new wells, forcing them to buy water if they can from the Israeli national water company, Mekorot, at highly inflated rates.  The World Health Organization reports that water consumption in many parts of the West Bank has fallen well below basic needs.

Dorothy tells Hani that we have to move on.  She wants to bring a group from Austria to meet him next week, would that be alright?  “Beseder,” he says, Hebrew for okay.  I ask him, does he get tired of telling his story to foreigners year after year?  “It’s easier for me,” he says.  “This way I get my pain out, instead of keeping it to myself.”

For more on the Amer family, this short video is a good place to start.

A small story, happens every day in occupied Palestine.  But still it needs to be told.  Please pass it on.

Vast clouds of propaganda obscure reality on the ground in Palestine-Israel.  But now and then, through accident or arrogance (as in the New York Times op-ed described below), the clouds part and, for a moment, stark reality can be seen.

Here is such a moment, a revelation vividly caught by Ilene Cohen, and published on the excellent Mondoweiss website:

Heartfelt thanks (truly) to the New York Times for doing a public service by publishing this op-ed by Dani Dayan, the essential manifesto of the current state of Israeli colonialism, stripped of any pretense: one state in all of Palestine, run by the Jews in perpetuity, with a basket of limited rights for the lucky subject people – if they behave themselves.

And forget about the “right of return of Palestinians to Palestine,” the sine qua non of the so-called homeland of the Palestinian people.  NB: I’m not speaking of Israel.  Dayan makes clear: Greater Israel (i.e., what others call the occupied territories) will not allow itself to be overrun by returning Palestinians).  That’s out of the question.  The bizarre Israeli concept of democracy rests on controlling the demographic threat such that there must never be a Palestinian majority in the one state.  So long as Jews are the majority, the thinking goes, they may in good conscience oppress the minority.  That is the meaning of majoritarian democracy (also known as ethnocracy) as understood by Israeli Jews; a bill of rights protecting all does not figure in to this system.

Author Dani Dayan is not a crank in the sense of being a wild-eyed outlier.  Rather, he is the chairman of the settler council [MR: he lives in Maale Shomron, an Israeli colony in the occupied West Bank] in the “Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria” — to the rest of us aka the occupied Palestinian territories.  He speaks truth to (1) the leadership of the Western world, too cowardly ever to challenge the voracious Israeli appetite for Lebensraum [MR: German for “living space,” the term was a central component of Nazi ideology, and served as justification  for Nazi Germany to remove other peoples, making way for a Greater Germany]; Dayan speaks truth to (2) all those Jewish organizations that supported Israeli aggression and colonialism through thick and thin in the name of a “two-state solution” that was being obviated by the very acts they supported; and he speaks truth to (3) all those individual Jews who have mouthed the two-state lies themselves while also denying the aggression and colonialism to critics.  I know plenty of the number 3’s myself, and I know that many of you do, too.

There are many in the Jewish world—the Adelson types, the Malcolm Hoenlein types, the Mort Klein (ZOA – Zionists of America) types, the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] types, most of the Orthodox Jewish world – who were already on board with the apartheid program.  But for the faux liberals—the JStreet types—this will be uncomfortable indeed, as playing pretend has been their stock in trade.

But the mask has been removed, revealing the ugly face of Israeli colonialism for all to see. The time for denial has ended, because this, then, is the dystopian vision of the single state of Greater Israel, in which the Palestinian population will live in its bantustans under the oppressive thumb of the Jewish overlords as Israeli Jewish colonists expand their illegal reach to every corner of Palestine, what the rest of the world considers the OPT (occupied Palestinian territories).  The solution (Lebensraum) to the Israeli housing crisis lies on stolen land.

This is the apartheid one-state solution of which Jimmy Carter warned in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006).  No doubt all recall that he was excoriated as an anti-Semite for daring to utter the words. Now we should welcome this bald, if grotesque, presentation by Dani Dayan because it is indeed the reality on the ground and it is time that everyone knew it.

Let the foolish Europeans sort this one out, for they know well that Dayan expresses the reality that comes out of Netanyahu’s government and yet, as we read not two days ago in the Guardian, the EU is piling up the presents it intends to heap on Israel—for bad behavior, apparently. Presumably President Obama, if re-elected, will not embarrass himself with any more talk of two states.  And presumably the Israelis advocating Israeli unilateralism to get toward a two-state solution (that is, of course, totally unfair to the Palestinians), e.g., Blue White Future, or Shaul Mofaz’s absurd 60 percent plan, will realize that they have been exposed as frauds by the settler movement and the government that backs it.

The question now is how the “world” – states, organizations, individuals – will choose to go forward.  Will they continue to support the one apartheid state?

One thing is for sure: the growing grass roots movement to end the occupation, including BDS, will continue to expand its push for justice and equality for all (in this case for Palestinians, who are the ones lacking justice and equality).  And that effort is looking more and more as if it must be in the context of the one-state reality created by the Jewish colonial project – only without the apartheid.

Dani Dayan pulls no punches: it’s there in blue and white for all to see.

A news story from The Guardian UK today confirms what I wrote yesterday about the toxic hypocrisy of power elites in Europe (and elsewhere) toward Israel and Palestine:

“The EU will offer Israel upgraded trade and diplomatic relations in more than 60 areas at a high-level meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, just weeks after European foreign ministers warned that Israeli policies in the West Bank ‘threaten to make a two-state solution impossible’…. One senior EU diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that despite private complaints of the inconsistency of chastising Israel with one hand while rewarding it with the other, not one minister was prepared to oppose Tuesday’s agreement.”

Private complaints, private deals.  There’s the whole rotten story.

By the way, these same ruling elites are busy, currently impoverishing millions of Europeans by the criminal transfer of public resources to their banker friends.

If you have the stomach for it, The Guardian story is here.

By way of antidote, the international grassroots BDS movement is here.  Another world, and story, are possible.

On July 21, bulldozers of the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) destroyed a water well near Khader village, in the southern West Bank.  Construction of the well was financed by the European Union (EU).

Ahmed Salah, coordinator of the popular committee in Khader, said that the EU-financed well was meant to help in reclaiming village land.  Water is life anywhere, but especially so in the Middle East.  Without it, crops wither, villages lose their means of survival, and eventually people have no choice but to leave.  Apparently Israeli authorities plan to clear the area for a park.

Salah added that the IOF bulldozers went on to vandalize vast tracts of cultivated land and crops recently harvested for market.

In nearby Khilat Um El-Fahm hamlet, the IOF destroyed a storage building filled with crops ready for sending to market, and at nearby Edhna village, they destroyed a water well and three greenhouses.

Crimes like these are routine throughout Palestine; they define the occupation.  (Here, for example, is a partial list from last week alone.)

The thing that caught my eye in the Khader report is the fact that the well was financed by ‘aid’ from the European Union.  The occupied West Bank is littered with such projects, some of which I saw on my travels for Our Way to Fight – wells, cisterns, roads, solar panels.  They are routinely destroyed by the Israeli army.   Complaints are lodged routinely by EU officials with their Israeli counterparts.  EU officials claim they’re doing their bit, another aid cheque is sent off, and so it goes.  Official criticism of Israel remains circumspect at best, and sanctions out of the question.

This is a bitter reminder of what a fantasy it is to imagine that, as things stand now, international ruling elites will force Israel to end its illegal occupation.   As long as it suits their larger purpose – business as usual – the destruction of Palestine will continue.

But then the same could be said of apartheid in South Africa.  International ruling elites defended, financed and armed the apartheid regime for decades, comfortably oblivious to side issues like compassion, reason, ethics or international law.  After many years of steady organizing work by grassroots activists in South Africa and other countries, eventually for international elites the cost of apartheid outweighed the profit.

While I still believe that individual support is vital to grassroots organizations working for justice and freedom in Palestine and Israel, BDS – the international movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions – remains our single best hope for raising the cost of Israeli apartheid until finally it outweighs the profit.

For the latest news on BDS, check here.

“What do Israel and the international community get in return for their systematic plundering of Palestinian livelihood?  A stubborn, collective Palestinian memory which refuses to cower under the weight of historical injustice.  If this was merely a memory it would not be a big deal, but those damn Palestinians insist on keeping that memory alive via the performing arts – music,  dance, theater, circus, festivals and the like…”  Sam Bahour, on the upcoming Palestine International Festival for Dance and Music.

  Palestinian circus school.  (Photo: Activestills)

Sam Bahour lives in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh, about 10 miles north of Jerusalem.  Describing himself as “a Palestinian-American business development consultant,” he writes fiercely and with wry humor about living with, and against, the military occupation.  Sam Bahour blogs at www.epalestine.com.

Here he focuses on a spectacular cultural intifada which starts tomorrow, July 4.  Too late now to get tickets, but Sam offers a quick behind-the-scenes tour:

“Those damn Palestinians. They refuse to sit still.  They just don’t get it. They are unable to fathom their reality.  The more outrageous their situation becomes, the more human they become.  When all the powers-that-be think they have sufficiently battered (or bought) Palestinians into full political submission, we embark on yet another act of terrorism — the terror of dance, music, song, and cultural celebration.

This is not just any act of humanity; it has global dimensions.  The world had better take note. Continue reading →