Few people other than Palestinians visit the Ofer Israeli military prison in the West Bank. Part military prison and part military courthouse, the Ofer prison complex feels like a desert version of Guantanamo Bay. Palestinians families wait for hours inside the prison walls while their loved ones stand trial in makeshift courthouses before military tribunals. The soul crushing layout of the courtrooms mimics the architecture of the occupation itself: intimidating, segregated and devoid of contact between Israelis and Palestinians. On the 7th of July 2010, five Palestinians from villages throughout the West Bank stood trial for the involvement in unarmed struggle against Israel's continued military occupation. Those on trial had been snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, accused of stone throwing or participation in an illegal protest and interrogated in unnamed Israeli military bases . They are the latest to be caught in Israel's recent wave of repression directed at the popular unarmed resistance in the West Bank.
The names of the Palestinian detainees never came up in the recent talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and President Obama. However, Palestinian society is intently focused on the fate of the most prominent figure on trial, Adeeb Abu Rahma. Abu Rahma is a resident of Bilin, a West Bank village that has been a nexus of unarmed resistance to the Israeli military occupation for over five years. Bilin's struggle began as reaction against the construction of Israel's separation wall, which will annex significant portions of the village's agricultural land if completed. Thousands of Israelis, Palestinians and international supporters including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, Desmond Tutu and Naomi Klein have joined in Bilin's weekly demonstrations since they began. The village's struggle is the subject of a riveting documentary, "Bil'in, Habibti," by Israeli filmmaker/activist Shai Pollak.
The American media has largely ignored the widespread unarmed Palestinian campaign of resistance, preferring to cover continued Israeli defiance over the creation of new settlements throughout the West Bank. If it were to examine Abu Ramha's case, the mainstream American press would quickly discover a truly Kafkaesque system of laws governing the Palestinian population in the West Bank which contradict Israel's bluster about upholding democratic values in a sea of tyranny. Indeed, the creation of settlements is less of issue than the maintenance required to control the Palestinian population. Instead of focusing on the settlement issue as the main threat to the so-called peace process, the Obama administration should begin establishing some degree of justice for average Palestinians. The White House could start by denouncing the increasing repression of grassroots unarmed Palestinian resistance.
Adeeb Abu Rahma's story offers a stark view of the bureaucracy of occupation. A taxi driver and father of nine who has been active in the unarmed resistance in Bilin from its outset, he was arrested in Bilin on July 10, 2009 while taking part in one of the weekly Friday protests. The Israeli army accused him of participation in 'violent demonstrations' against the Israeli separation wall, presence in a 'closed Israeli military zone' and disturbing the public order. Abu Rahma's conviction relies heavily on coerced testimony gleaned from four teenagers arrested in a night raid in Bilin on charges of stone throwing. Following their arrest, the teens were interrogated late at night, under harsh conditions and without their parents or lawyers present. According to the Israeli army's version of events, they eventually declared that Abu Rahma told them to throw stones during a protest in Bilin.
The popular struggle committee of Bilin, of which Abu Rahma is a member, officially discourages stone throwing at protests, preferring to encourage non-violent demonstration. During Abu Rahma's trial, the teens insisted that their testimony was illegitimate and coerced. In addition to the coerced testimony, Israeli military prosecutors argued that they had videotape footage of Abu Rahma directing stone throwers at a protest but when asked to release the footage to the court, the tapes were mysteriously deleted. Despite the questionable legal application of all of the testimony presented by the prosecution, the court accepted the testimony and 'footage' as legitimate in the persecution of Abu Rahma.
On July 7, 2010 Abu Ramha was sentenced to one year in prison which he had already served. Israeli military prosecutors quickly filed an appeal against the verdict, calling it "too lenient" and asking that Abu Ramha remain in custody until the appeal process is finished. Their request was granted by a military judge named Lieutenant Colonel Benisho from the military court of appeals. Benisho argued that "this appeal fails to set the proper punishment in a unique case in which a general punishment level which has not yet been set." In other words, the judge argued that there was no legal precedent to help him decide whether Abu Ramha should remain in prison during his appeal period. However, the judge's statement was discredited by previous legal precedents in similar cases in which defendants received harsher punishments than Abu Ramha. Abu Ramha will have to remain in prison for an unknown amount of time while the appeal is filed despite already serving his sentence.
According to the Israeli lawyer Gaby Lasky, who represents many of popular struggle leaders in Bilin, Abu Rahma is the latest example of Israeli military efforts to completely repress any popular unarmed resistance to Israel's occupation and separation wall. The maintenance of occupation and continued settlement expansion have forced the Israeli military to target nonviolent Palestinian leaders and use occupation law to incarcerate them for long periods of time. Amnesty International has said in a recent statement regarding Abu Rahma's case that, "The broad scope of Israeli military orders mean that Adeeb Abu Rahma could be imprisoned solely for legitimately exercising his right to freedom of expression in opposing Israeli policies in the West Bank... If this is the case, we would regard him as a prisoner of conscience who should be released immediately and unconditionally"
Commentators of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often complain that there has not yet been a legitimate Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. to emerge from within Palestinian civil society. The reality is that there are many Palestinians engaged in popular unarmed resistance to the Israeli occupation, preferring organized demonstrations in the West Bank to suicide bombs in Tel Aviv. Common people like Adeeb Abu Rahma could become the non-violent leader everyone claims to be waiting for. However, the Israeli government seems to recognize how much damage such a figure could do to their international image and to the occupation they will defend at any cost. And so hundreds of Palestinian Gandhis are brought before draconian Israeli military tribunals each year, only to face long sentences that nearly ensure that the world will never learn their names.
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duh......
http://internationalglobe.com/world/news/osama%E2%80%99s-son-hears-dad%E2%80%99s-voice-splits-with-wife/
Zania and Palin are apparently twins separated at birth.
Israel sits on 1/650th of the middle east (and there are more arabs that live in Israel today than in 1947), the arabs control 649/650th and have (for the most part) made their lands Juden Free…
It’s an Alice in Wonderland world
It's so easy to stand on the stronger side, the Israelis should remember their Holocaust and remember how it is to be victims.
Good to see some Jews and Israelis, like filmmaker Shai Pollak and lawyer Gaby Lasky, fighting for Justice.
It reminds me of the same thing I see on that section of a boardwalk, it's like target practice, "sport" hunting- where I almost expect to see people slapping each other on the back to congratulate each other on the hit.
There are many non-violent groups out there, who have members from both the Israeli side and Palestinian side... cooperating together to try to rally for peace. Those videos are rarely seen. There are plenty of Israelis who are against the occupation, but those stories are hardly ever heard unless you really look for them.
It's easy, in a police state, to make sure certain stories don't get out, to twist facts around so those who would be heroes, would be looked at as criminal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnu5qPXEmkc&feature=PlayList&p=E1F6339D3CD7E74F&playnext_from=PL&index=4
A peace prize winner getting shot during a peaceful protest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUGVPBO9_cA&annotation_id=annotation_571895&feature=iv
A former Israeli Prime Minister talks about the view of justifying what they do to the Palestinians.
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/docs/English_Research_Report_with_Cover_low_res.pdf
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/FERB-86VD9T?OpenDocument
"Conditions for children in Area C have reached a crisis point:
79% of communities surveyed recently in Area C don't have enough nutritious food - this is higher than in blockaded Gaza where the rate is 61%.
84% of families rely on some form of humanitarian assistance to survive.
Rates of stunting in Area C are more than double than in Gaza. More than 15% of children under-5 surveyed were underweight.
An alarming 44% of children in the surveyed area have diarrhoea – the biggest killer of children under-5 in the world."
It is time to sever the umbilical cord on this 62 year old. It's time to shame it into doing the right thing. It's time for the world bodies to step up, stand up in unision and say loudly and clearly, "Enough is ENOUGH".
Israel can be part of the solution for a lasting and just peace or remain a PARIAH for the next decade or so, OR untill the world and/or it's own occupied and free populations face the new realities and DEMAND an equitable solution.
THE STATUS QUO IS NEITHER JUST NOR SUSTAINABLE.
Threre are many potential solutions but ALL solutions are meaningless without :
1. An unconditional Right Of Return for the indigenous populations.
2. A single state with a one person, one vote democracy.
3. Equal Justice and rights for ALL, without exception.
Why is this a problem? Imagine a group of hippies who want to come into your town while behind them lurk a group of criminals armed with guns and knives. The hippies demand that you let them in along with the criminals, since they are all part of the same group.
And then when you aren't willing to give them all free reign in your town, they scream and cry and can't understand why you aren't showing these peaceful, harmless hippies basic humanity. It never occurs to them to ask the criminals to put down their weapons.
[and before you snark, i live in the US and women are not forced to join the military.
in fact, many question if women should serve in harm's way.
and i have lost loved ones in iraq and afghanistan
and i prepare monthly "care " boxes for our troops.]
http://www.angelfire.com/pro/canthos/GhandiEinstein.html
Gandhi's major statement on the Palestine and the Jewish question came forth in his widely circulated editorial in the Harijan of 11 November 1938, a time when intense struggle between the Palestinian Arabs and the immigrant Jews had been on the anvil in Palestine. His views came in the context of severe pressure on him, especially from the Zionist quarters, to issue a statement on the problem. Therefore, he started his piece by saying that his sympathies are all with the Jews, who as a people were subjected to inhuman treatment and persecution for a long time.
"But", Gandhi asserted, "My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?"
I saw a photo spread concerning. a Hasidic Rabbi who visited a Gaza orphanage where a number of children who's parents were murdered by Operation Cast lead. The photographer related how a young boy of perhaps 8 years approached him and shouted "YOU ARE A JEW! I HATE YOU!
The Rabbi got down and one knee and in Arabic explained to the boy that he was there to apologize for what some Jews had done and assured him there are many other Jews who think what happened to the Palestinians of Gaza was wrong. He listened to the boy talking in very emotional tones for quite some time and the Rabbi took great care to express what the witness did not need a translation to understand was the deepest love and compassion. They hugged became quite cordial.
Soon the Rabbis and the children were laughing and the best of friends.
Peace can happen.
The Symington Glenn and Pressler Amendments prohibit aid to countries that develop or traffic in Nuclear weapons and do not sign up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Thus, despite the fact that everyone knows Israel has a couple of hundred Nukes, nobody can admit it officially because we might find JUST ONE American Patriot to launch an action to have Israel's $ 5 billion in official aid cut off
1 Israeli soldier in Palestinian prison.
The occupier always packs the prisons, this is one way to terrorize the occupied.