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Recent
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August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
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Steve
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Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
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Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
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Wolfowitz the Censor
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July
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The Prostitution of Intelligence
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Sheldon
Hull
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August
2, 2003
"They
Arrested 19 Men and We Don't Know Where They Took Them!"
Nightlife
in Jerusalem
By NEVE GORDON
JERUSALEM.
The meal had been lovely, and I was preparing
to pay the bill when my cell phone rang. Even though it was just
a few minutes before midnight, the Jerusalem restaurant was bustling
and I had to walk outside to hear what the caller was saying.
"They arrested Jammal, Yusef and
seventeen other men!" the woman on the other end exclaimed.
"We don't know where they took them But Irit, Ezra, Tamara
and Amiel are on their way to the military checkpoint."
Together with Farid and Mounther, I left
the restaurant. We drove towards checkpoint 300, the one between
Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
On the way Mounther noted that the time
and day of the operation had been carefully chosen. The hour
was late and it would be difficult to find a lawyer who could
file an urgent appeal; moreover, the Israeli weekend newspapers
were already at the printers - by Sunday the incident would no
longer be news.
This was the third time that Israeli
Border Police had entered Nuemann, a small Palestinian village
located on the southern hilly terrain of Jerusalem. This village,
together with 27 others, had been annexed to the municipality
immediately following the 1967 war. Yet, unlike most of the inhabitants
of the other villages, who were subsequently registered by the
Israeli civil administration as Israeli residents (as opposed
to citizens), the inhabitants of Nuemann were given West Bank
identity cards.  Thus, the Nuemann residents and their
houses belong to different legal and administrative systems:
the houses and land are part of the Jerusalem municipal system,
while the inhabitants are residents of the West Bank and therefore
subjected to Israeli military rule.
We arrived at the checkpoint just after
midnight. The nineteen men were already there, crammed inside
a small tin shack. A few of them looked like they were in their
late-teens, but most of them were in their mid-thirties, and
two or three were in their sixties, my father's age.
The detainees described how the policemen
had entered each house, waking the inhabitants, including the
children, and gathering the men. Everyone who was not too old
to walk had to go. The accusation was "illegal entrance
into Israel."
Imagine living in a village your whole
life, the very same one in which you and your parents were born.
Your four children go to a nearby school and you work the land,
growing olive trees and wheat.
Then one night the police show up at
your door. They make you walk to a military checkpoint a few
kilometers away, only to tell you that you are an illegal occupant
and must leave your ancestral home.
You, of course, argue, stating that you
were born in the village and have lived there all your life.
The policeman in charge asks for your
identity card. You hand it over. He examines it for a moment
and then points out that you are actually not a resident of the
village, but rather belong to the West Bank and therefore must
leave your home. "All I want to do is to maintain the rule
of law," he explains.
Although the rule of law is often associated
with justice and democracy, law can often be employed to perpetuate
crimes. After all, the rule of law upheld the Apartheid regime
in South Africa and is currently sustaining Israel's brutal occupation
of Palestine.
But why now? Why, after thirty-six years
of occupation, has Israel decided to enforce its draconic laws
in Nuemann?
In order to figure out this mystery,
one needs to travel to Nuemann and look south. Not far the bulldozers
are busy working. They are building the separation wall, a complex
series of barriers, trenches, roads, and fences. The goal is
to expropriate the land north of the wall "uninhabited,"
which means expelling Nuemann's residents from their homes. In
Israel we call this policy "transfer."
Nuemann is just one example of how the
wall is being built in order to confiscate Palestinian land and
create facts on the ground that will affect any future arrangement
between Israel and the Palestinians. A recent report published
by the World Bank suggests that by the time the wall is completed,
95,000 Palestinians will be living in Bantustans closed off on
all sides.
At around 3:00 am the policemen decided
to release the nineteen Palestinians, after warning them that
they will be punished if they don't leave their homes in the
near future.
This was the third time in the past month
that the men had gone through the same ordeal, only this time
the police had been much more cautious since members from Ta'ayush
(Arab-Jewish partnership) were watching.
We dropped the Nuemann residents off
and drove home, passing the pubs and nightclubs, breathing in
Jerusalem's nightlife.
Neve Gordon
teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is a member of
Ta'ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership. He is one of the writers featured
in The
Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal and can be
reached at ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il.
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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