Regional Arms Control: Regional Stability Unbalanced by New Deal: ETHNIC CLENSING IN THE WEST BANK By LINDA

» Rafehh - ETHNIC CLENSING IN THE WEST BANK By LINDA

ETHNIC CLENSING IN THE WEST BANK

By LINDA BRAYER

Executive Lebal Director

Society of St. Ives - Jerusalem

(1/29/97) On a misty Monday morning, the air wet from the
continuing drizzle, the Israeli Military High Command
decided to swoop on to a scattered Bedouin community
whose presence has been hindering the expansion of the
Jewish colony of Ma'ale Adumim in the Occupied
Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Ma'ale Adumim
is situated to the south east of the villages of Abu-Dis
and el-Azzariah (the latter being the home town of
Lazarus who was raised from the dead.) beyond the
expanded Israeli borders of Jerusalem, but it will be
annexed into Jerusalem very soon. Both the building of
this colony and its subsequent annexation are illegal in
international law, and in contravention of the agreement
with the Palestinians.

The Israeli forces carried out a military operation
against the Jahalin Bedouin who are unarmed civilians.
The police, most of whom carry standard army
automatic rifles, set up road blocks preventing people
entering the site of the military operation. Foreign
delegations , press representatives, peace activists and
Palestinian representatives, such as Mr. Faisal Husseini,
were all prevented from approaching the sites where
the operation was taking place In order to pass one
road block I had to give an explanation of what I was
doing there: I just told them that I was a lawyer and
seeing as I speak a fluent Hebrew I had no trouble
entering the "forbidden site."

Tens of policemen swooped down on to the first
encampment chosen for destruction; a wall of
policemen's bodies was set up to prevented any and all
civilians from approaching the tents and shacks up for
destruction, and the area was declared a "closed
military area" -an interesting designation for a police
action! The owner of the structures of the first
encampment tried to prevent his long-standing shelters
from being destroyed but the police surrounded and
arrested him. The young Bedouin men who witnessed
the violence and humiliation of the man tried to help
him and attempted to pull the police off him but they
were thrown back up the hill away from the
encampment and were pushed against a fence set up
against a 3 meter high ledge. The police and soldiers
then began shoving the young men down the hill to get
them away from the site where they would be held
under control in a confined area by police and army
forces. They kicked and pushed the Jahalin youngsters,
pulled their hair and their clothes, and at times, struck
them with their truncheons. At the lower end of the
hillock they pushed them down a one meter ledge on to
the ground, with many of them being injured in the
process. The army did not see fit to have an ambulance
on hand, nor did they call one. They also had not
brought any stretchers to deal with possible injuries.
Here more police, soldiers and secret service people
waited to surround and to control them. A member of
the "mohabarat" - secret services - was filming all the
action. Everyone at the site was filmed: the local
bedouin, the local and foreign press and myself, their
lawyer.

Meanwhile, down the hill on the other side, the
bulldozers had a free run of the encampment. Moving
trucks had been brought in to gather up the most
meagre of belongings which did not include the building
material for new shelters - neither the traditional woven
cloth nor the iron sheets. Shacks and tents had been
smashed with no thought of saving anything for the
alternative site and the inhabitants had been far
removed and had no say in what they wanted brought
over. I came in time to watch and photograph the
destruction of the central tent/tin shack which had
formed the heart of the compound that I had visited on
several occasions.

This was an army action in all its details although the
police carried it out. The Israelis wanted the forced
expulsion to look like an ordinary civil action taken by
ordinary civilian authorities against civilian
"lawbreakers" - rather than as a violent illegal military
action. It was so pathetic. Ordinary human beings,
unarmed and unprotected, whose only crime was that
they were not Jewish and who had lived in one place
for many years, had all traces of their habitation
removed within a matter of less than one hour.

After expediting this expulsion and destruction quite
efficiently, the troops moved on to the second
encampment located further south and trapped between
buildings under construction. Here, there was only one
tiny, elderly couple, each of whom was more than
eighty years old, who lived together with about twenty
to twenty five sheep and goats. The animals were in a
pen and the couple had three or four tents and shacks
which held their belongings and the food of the sheep.

This second entire operation did not last more than one
hour. The elderly couple had been removed, the tent
shacks were run down and destroyed, the foreign
workers from Rumania carried the sheep and goats into
a container on a truck, and the pen was destroyed.
Within about ten minutes, the couple and their goats
and sheep had been transferred to the alternative site
where the wind was howling and the couple looked
completely dazed. Udi, from the co-ordinating office
said that he would give the old couple a tin shack but
that the other five families evicted from the first
encampment would receive nothing. The partiality of
the generosity is indicative of an outlook which refuses
to regard all human beings as human and as equal.

On the alternative site the people were left stranded.
Despite all claims to the contrary, the Israeli authorities
did precisely what we have been predicting for years.
They threw the expelled Jahalin bedouin families on to
a rocky hill with no provisions made for their new life.
It proves the point that the Israeli authorities have
never had any intention of providing the Jahalin with
anything except sweet words. As Paul says in the New
Testament, "by their fruit ye shall know them." There
is no Israeli fruit: only a sterile, uninhabitable rocky
protuberance whose outer perimeter road serves 800
garbage trucks daily on their way to the Greater
Jerusalem garbage dump five hundred meters away.

It has been argued that I, Lynda Brayer, an aging
Jewish Catholic grandmother, has prevented the Israeli
government of coming to a solution of the problem that
they, the Israeli government, has created. I have told
the army, members of the Knesset and Israeli
journalists that no one has prevented the Israelis from
taking unilateral action. No-one has prevented the
army or "civil" administration from preparing a proper
infrastructure of water, sewage, electricity, telephone
lines, roads and pavements on the site. No-one has
prevented the army or "civil" administration from
building apartment blocks suitable for large families on
the site. No one has prevented the army or "civil"
administration from building a wall to protect the site
from the traffic of 800 garbage trucks per day. . No
one has prevented the army or "civil" administration
from building a medical clinic, a kindergarten, a primary
school building and a community center. No-one, in
fact, has, or can, prevent the army or "civil"
administration from doing anything it wants to do -
least of all an aging Jewish Catholic grandmother.

Instead, the new site will be an instant favello or barios
or squatter township as in South America or apartheid
South Africa. These are the dwelling places for the less
than human. In the Jahalin case, their crime is that they
are not Jewish and as such, they are not fully human
from the position of the Jewish authorities. The way
we know this is the way the Jewish authorities treat
them. The Jewish authorities do not think that the
Jahalin need the kind of housing that Jews need. This
reminds me of a Supreme Court Justice who
commented on a demand for the restoration of drinking
water for Palestinians in a particular village in the
amount that the Jews received in the neighbouring
Jewish illegal settlement. "I am not interested in what
Jews receive! What did they [i.e. the Palestinians]
receive before the water was cut off? That is what they
must get. You cannot compare Jewish and Palestinian
consumption!

He is right of course. You cannot compare
consumption because you may not compare
consumption. In the same manner, you cannot
compare Palestinian dwelling conditions with Jewish
housing conditions, because you may not compare
them. The High Court says you cannot!! Therefore one
may not compare the ultra-modern, well watered,
flowered and treed colony of Ma'ale Adumim with the
"alternative site" or the new Ma'ale Adumim
Township!

This new bedouin township will be a disaster for the
Jahalin; not only because a professional Israeli town
planner says so or a professional Israeli
environmentalist has deems the site uninhabitable - a
charge never answered either by the Israeli Ministry of
Justice or the High Court of Justice. In contrast to a tin
shanty slum, traditional bedouin shelters consisted of
tents made of woven woollen swathes of thick cloth or
sacking which is covered with plastic in the winter. In
the event that the weather conditions and topographical
features of the site do not permit additional tents, then
tin shacks lined with wood inside for insulation are
erected for various facilities such as a kitchen hut,
storerooms and pens for the animals. Bedouin
compounds need space in order to allow for the
spreading out of several of these shelters which need
to be placed sufficiently far apart to provide and
maintain the privacy needed for people living in these
movable dwellings. The space beside and between the
shelters constitute part of the actual dwelling place and
in itself contributes towards the dignity and
independence granted to each person living under these
conditions. Such dwellings needed constant repair and
at times replacement: this is always done without much
ado or fuss and was regarded as a necessary part of the
maintenance of the compound.

There is no space between the tin shanties - there is no
room for the animals. It is obvious that the Israelis will
come to a final solution for the Jahalin of area 06 in
Ma'ale Adumim with the forced expulsion of the last
encampments. We can only hope that the Jahalin
community will not destroyed culturally as a result of
this forced expulsion and eviction.

The forced eviction has been on the cards since the
High Court ratified the State of Israel's claim that the
land in the occupied territories is "state land" and
therefore forbidden for use to the native population -
and all this despite there being no documents to prove
this claim as the state had destroyed the files on its own
admission.

The destruction of the Jahalin of Ma'ale Adumim is
part of continuing Zionist policy. I predict that this
"alternative site" will be re-classified as Area B
unilaterally by the Israelis in the very near future as
part of the ethnic cleansing of Area C, towards the final
solution of the Palestinian problem.

I also want to point out a further point which no one
seems to have picked up. When Palestinians claim to
own land, they have to prove this ownership according
to Israeli standards. When the land is conveniently
expropriated in a myriad of legal methods, it becomes a
market commodity which can be traded. At that point,
it can no longer be obtained by Palestinians.

The land of Ma'ale Adumim was stolen - whether one
recognises the Israeli designation of "state land" or not.
The land was removed from Palestinian ownership
either actual or potential. It is now in Jewish hands,
and as we know, Ma'ale Adumim is about to be
officially annexed to Jerusalem.

The Jahalin were expelled yesterday, two weeks ago,
and will be expelled within the next several days or
maybe at the end of Ramadan, because the Jewish
contractors cannot fulfil their contractual obligations to
their Jewish clients. Jewish Israelis and new immigrants
have bought these apartments and they should have
moved into them months ago. The contractors are
either being sued or are about to be sued for damages.

The economics of the Jewish colonies/settlement are
the crux of the matter and not security. When will the
Israeli government be held accountable for this theft?

Further house demolition took place in Ramallah today,
Tuesday, 28th January as well as the destruction of
tents in the Jordan valley. Area C is being ethnically
cleansed of its "foreign subjects" according to Israeli
jargon and the land in these areas will become the
market commodity of property. How long will the
Palestinians and the world have to put up with this
gross violation of private property rights and the
violation of basic inviolable human rights of
Palestinian non-Jews?

Lynda Brayer, Advocate

Executive Legal Director

-- posted by Rafehh