http://www.imemc.org/article/58881
Israeli Troops Issue 10-day Eviction Orders To Palestinians In Jordan Valley
by Saed Bannoura -
IMEMC News: June 08, 2010
Five Palestinian families in the Jordan Valley, in the eastern part of the
West Bank, received eviction orders from the Israeli military on Sunday,
just days after Israeli settlers set up an illegal outpost on the families'
land and took over a water well in the area. The eviction orders told the
families to vacate their homes and land within ten days so that Israeli
troops could occupy it.
According to a town council member from Atuf, Abdallah Bisharat, the
eviction will render 50 people homeless and, given that the families
receiving the notices are farming families dependent on their land for their
livelihoods. The evictions will be "devastating" for the families in
question.
Bisharat told the Palestinian news agency Ma'an News, "[t]he lands the
families are being evicted from have been inhabited by the farming and
herding groups for many years. They are the pastoral lands from which
hundreds of residents make their livings. The Israeli order to evacuate
means a total destruction of the social fabric."
The five Palestinian families who received eviction orders described the
recent establishment of an Israeli settler outpost on their land as
terrifying, as the settlers are armed, and have the full protection of the
Israeli military. The Palestinian farmers are unprotected and vulnerable,
although most retain titles to their land dating back to the Ottoman empire.
The settler outpost is considered illegal by the Israeli government, but the
Israeli military has nonetheless been deployed to protect it, and have, over
the last week, invaded the village on multiple occasions and broken into
people's homes.
At the same time, the armed Israeli settlers who set up trailers on the
Palestinian farmers' land last week took control of the area's only water
well, and have prevented the local indigenous Palestinian population from
accessing the water. According to Bisharat, when the villagers went to the
nearby Israeli military base to tell them about the water takeover, " we
were told to get water from the other villages and collect it in tanks".
The Jordan Valley, in the eastern West Bank, is an area listed for takeover
by the Israeli state in Israeli government documents. The area is among the
most fertile land in the West Bank, and Israeli government officials have
been quoted as saying that this land should be taken over for the state of
Israel - despite its discontiguity with the rest of what is now Israel.
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25648.htm
The Deadly Closing of the Israeli Mind
The decline in Israel's reputation since the brutal attack on the Gaza
flotilla is unlikely to influence the country's leaders
By Ilan Pappé
The Independent June 07, 2010
At the top of Israel's political and military systems stand two men, Ehud
Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, who are behind the brutal attack on the Gaza
flotilla that shocked the world but that seemed to be hailed as a pure act
of self-defence by the Israeli public.
Although they come from the left (Defence minister Barak from the Labour
Party) and the right (Prime Minister Netanyahu from Likkud) of Israeli
politics, their thinking on Gaza in general and on the flotilla in
particular is informed by the same history and identical worldview.
At one time, Ehud Barak was Benjamin Netanyahu's commanding officer in the
Israeli equivalent of the SAS. More precisely, they served in a similar unit
to the one sent to assault the Turkish ship last week. Their perception of
the reality in the Gaza Strip is shared by other leading members of the
Israeli political and military elite, and is widely supported by the Jewish
electorate at home.
And it is a simple take on reality. Hamas, although the only government in
the Arab world elected democratically by the people, has to be eliminated as
a political as well as a military force. This is not only because it
continues the struggle against the 40-year Israeli occupation of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip by launching primitive missiles into Israel - more
often than not in retaliation to an Israel killing of its activists in the
West Bank. But it is mainly due to its political opposition for the kind of
"peace" Israel wants to impose on the Palestinians.
The forced peace is not negotiable as far as the Israeli political elite is
concerned, and it offers the Palestinians a limited control and sovereignty
in the Gaza Strip and in parts of the West Bank. The Palestinians are asked
to give up their struggle for self-determination and liberation in return
for the establishment of three small Bantustans under tight Israeli control
and supervision.
The official thinking in Israel, therefore, is that Hamas is a formidable
obstacle for the imposition of such a peace. And thus the declared strategy
is straightforward: starving and strangulating into submission the 1.5
million Palestinians living in the densest space in the world.
The blockade imposed in 2006 is supposed to lead the Gazans to replace the
current Palestinian government with one which would accept Israel's
dictate - or at least would be part of the more dormant Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank. In the meantime,Hamas captured an Israeli
soldier, Gilad Shalit, and so the blockade became tighter. It included a ban
of the most elementary commodities without which human beings find it
difficult to survive. For want of food and medicine, for want of cement and
petrol, the people of Gaza live in conditions that international bodies and
agencies described as catastrophic and criminal.
As in the case of the flotilla, there are alternative ways for releasing the
captive soldier, such as swapping the thousands of political prisons Israel
is holding with Shalit. Many of them are children, and quite a few are being
held without trial. The Israelis have dragged their feet in negotiations
over such a swap, which are not likely to bear fruit in the foreseeable
future.
But Barak and Netanyahu, and those around them, know too well that the
blockade on Gaza is not going to produce any change in the position of the
Hamas and one should give credit to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, who
remarked at Prime Minister's Questions last week that the Israelis' policy,
in fact, strengthens, rather than weakens, the Hamas hold on Gaza. But this
strategy, despite its declared aim, is not meant to succeed or at least no
one is worried in Jerusalem if it continues to be fruitless and futile.
One would have thought that Israel's drastic decline in international
reputation would prompt new thinking by its leaders. But the responses to
the attack on the flotilla in the past few days indicate clearly that there
is no hope for any significant shift in the official position. A firm
commitment to continue the blockade, and a heroes' welcome to the soldiers
who pirated the ship in the Mediterranean, show that the same politics would
continue for a long time.
This is not surprising. The Barak-Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman government
does not know any other way of responding to the reality in Palestine and
Israel. The use of brutal force to impose your will and a hectic propaganda
machine that describes it as self-defence, while demonising the half-starved
people in Gaza and those who come to their aid as terrorists, is the only
possible course for these politicians. The terrible consequences in human
death and suffering of this determination do not concern them, nor does
international condemnation.
The real, unlike the declared, strategy is to continue this state of
affairs. As long as the international community is complacent, the Arab
world impotent and Gaza contained, Israel can still have a thriving economy
and an electorate that regards the dominance of the army in its life, the
continued conflict and the oppression of the Palestinians as the exclusive
past, the present and future reality of life in Israel. The US
vice-president Joe Biden was humiliated by the Israelis recently when they
announced the building of 1,600 new homes in the disputed Ramat Shlomo
district of Jerusalem, on the day he arrived to try to freeze the settlement
policy. But his unconditional support now for the latest Israeli action
makes the leaders and their electorate feel vindicated.
It would be wrong, however, to assume that American support and a feeble
European response to Israeli criminal policies such as one pursued in Gaza
are the main reasons for the protracted blockade and strangulation of Gaza.
What is probably most difficult to explain to readers around the world is
how deeply these perceptions and attitudes are grounded in the Israeli
psyche and mentality. And it is indeed difficult to comprehend how
diametrically opposed are the common reactions in the UK, for instance, to
such events to the emotions that it triggers inside the Israeli Jewish
society.
The international response is based on the assumption that more forthcoming
Palestinian concessions and a continued dialogue with the Israeli political
elite will produce a new reality on the ground. The official discourse in
the West is that a very reasonable and attainable solution is just around
the corner if all sides would make one final effort: the two-state solution.
Nothing is further from the truth than this optimistic scenario. The only
version of this solution that is acceptable to Israel is the one that both
the tamed Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the more assertive Hamas in
Gaza could never ever accept. It is an offer to imprison the Palestinians in
stateless enclaves in return for ending their struggle.
Thus even before one discusses either an alternative solution - a single
democratic state for all, which I support - or explores a more plausible,
two-state settlement, one has to transform fundamentally the Israeli
official and public mindset. This mentality is the principal barrier to a
peaceful reconciliation in the torn land of Israel and Palestine.
Professor Ilan Pappé, a Jewish Israeli, directs the European Centre for
Palestine Studies at Exeter University and is the author of The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine
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