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May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
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WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
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Michelle
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Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
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Greens 04: In or Out?
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DubyaCo.: It's Not So Funny Any More
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America's Dying: Arts and Philosophy Hold the Key
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What If There's No Such Thing as Al-Qaeda?
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27, 2003
Kurt
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Terror, Bush and Joseph Conrad
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an Interpretation of Bush's Character
Kathleen
Christison
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Jeffrey
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AIPAC Hijacks the Roadmap
Steve
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Trouble in the Hinterlands
May
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The Final Conflict
May
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Uri Avnery
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Diane
Christian
Who's the Real Enemy?
"Just Cause" or "Kill the Bastards"
Alexander
Cockburn
Derrida's Double Life
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S. Lind
Is Saddam Really Out of the Game?
William
Cook
Road to Nowhere
David Krieger
Bush's War on the Poor: Economic Justice
Ilan
Pappe
Academic Freedom Under Assault in Israel
Wayne Madsen
American Idle
Noah
Leavitt
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Z.
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Ortiz Hill
Grievous Harm Here and Abroad
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May
23, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Lifting the Sanctions: Who Benefits?
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Long Live People's Park!
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The Shi'a of Iraq
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Greeder
After the Layoffs (poem)
Steve
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Bush's Wars Weblog 5/23
May
22, 2003
Mark
Gaffney
Christian in Name Only
Carl
Estabrook
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Carl
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Reason for Hope
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What Rates a Headline from the Middle
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Terror Alerts in Australia
Mickey
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Instant Understanding
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Monkerud
Snowballs in a Soggy Economy
Barry Lando
The Nether-Nether World of G.W. Bush
Steve
Perry
Total Information
Awareness: Secret Shadow Program?
May
21, 2003
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Lindorff
Ari Fleischer Quits the Scene: The
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Floyd
How Blood Money Becomes Business Opportunity
Dr. Gerry
Lower
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Two Morning Poems, May 2003
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Ashcroft Justice Comes to Iraq
May
20, 2003
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Ali
The Empire Advances
Ahmad
Faruqui
Whither American Nationalism?
Ben Tripp
Dialysis with Osama
Linda
Heard
The Cage of Occupation
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McKinney
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Said
The Arab Condition
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Why Ari Should Have Resigned in Protest Long Ago
Stew
Albert
Yale Men
Steve Perry
The New Face of Al-Qaeda
May
19, 2003
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Eats Crow
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Blair's Awkward Lies
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May
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May
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Those Who Don't Count
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May
15, 2003
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Laura Carlsen
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A Story I Will Tell
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Assassinating JFK Again
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More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
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Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
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The Saudi Arabia Bombing
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Watch
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The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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May
30, 2003
Land Theft & Confinement
The Bad Fence
By NEVE GORDON
Jerusalem.
Although Mazmuriah is located less than 20 minutes
drive from my Jerusalem apartment, all roads connecting the small
village to the city have been blocked off.
Using roundabout roads which wind across
the hilly terrain of the southern Jerusalem municipal border,
it took us more than an hour to reach the village. The Palestinian
residents invited us. They wanted to tell Israeli peace activists
about the imminent expulsion, about their fear of being forced
to move from their ancestral land. They wanted to tell us about
the bad fence.
But first some background. After the
1967 War, Israel annexed some 70 sq. kilometers of land to the
municipal boundaries of West Jerusalem, imposing Israeli law
on this area. These annexed territories included not only the
part of Jerusalem which had been under Jordanian rule but also
an additional 64 sq. kilometers, most of which had belonged to
28 villages in the West Bank.
Unlike most of the inhabitants of the
annexed villages, who were subsequently registered by the Israeli
civil administration as Israeli residents (as opposed to citizens),
the inhabitants of Mazmuriah were given West Bank identity cards.
This created a juridical situation taken
straight out of a Kafka tale. The Mazmuriah residents and their
houses belong to  different legal and administrative systems:
the houses and land are part of the Jerusalem municipality system,
while the inhabitants are residents of the West Bank and therefore
subjected to Israeli military rule.
Using its juridical control of the land,
in 1992 Israel classified the area in which the village is located
as "green land" -- land that cannot be built on and
is basically a nature reserve. The idea was to strangle the local
population, prohibiting them from constructing new houses. Young
adults who wished to build a family home were forced to choose
between leaving their birthplace or building illegally, knowing
that the Israeli authorities would most likely destroy any new
house.
Simultaneously, the Jerusalem Municipality
also refused to provide basic services to the village like extending
water and sewage lines. Later, after the eruption of the second
Intifada, all roads between the village and Jerusalem were closed
off, thus forcing the residents to become dependant on the West
Bank for their livelihood and their children's education.
What appeared to be a "legal anomaly"
slowly became the grim reality of everyday life. Although they
live on land annexed by Israel, for all practical purposes the
Palestinian residents themselves do not belong to Jerusalem,
they are West Bankers. The only "defect" in this grand
plan is that they still reside in the annexed area. It is this
so-called defect that Israel now intends to fix.
Accompanied by border policemen, a coordinator
for the Israeli Housing Ministry, Defense Ministry, and Jerusalem
Municipality recently visited the village. He showed the residents
a map of where the separation fence will pass, a fence that Israel
is building around the West Bank in order to "prevent the
uncontrolled entry of Palestinians into Israel."
The fence, the residents learned, would
surround the village on its southern side and thus separate it
from the West Bank. No openings or gates have been planned for
this section of the fence, meaning that even if the residents
are allowed to stay in their village, their water supplies will
be cut-off, they will not be able to reach work and their children
will be unable to go to school. To make things clear, however,
the Israeli official notified the Palestinian residents that
due to the village's proximity to the planned separation fence
they would have to move.
Israel's goal, it appears, is to expropriate
the land "uninhabited." It is highly unlikely, however,
that the villagers will actually be forced out of their homes
at gunpoint and put on buses. A more intricate strategy will
be employed.
Creating a physical barrier between the
village and the West Bank and not allowing the inhabitants any
contact with either the Palestinian Authority or the Jerusalem
Municipality will undermine their infrastructure of existence.
They will be living on a virtual island with no possibility to
sustain themselves. Ultimately, they will have to leave the village
of "their own accord."
This scheme of expelling a whole population
from their land is in blatant violation of basic rights as well
as all the agreements Israel has signed, not least the principles
laid out in the Road Map. In Israel we call this policy "transfer."
While the end of this story has yet to
be told, the first 145 kilometers of the separation fence will
be completed in two months time, violating, according to the
Israeli human rights group B'tselem, the rights of more than
210,000 Palestinians residing in sixty-seven villages, towns,
and cities.
The crux of the matter is that the fence
is not being erected on the 1967 borders, but is being used as
a mechanism to expropriate Palestinian land and create facts
on the ground that will affect any future arrangement between
Israel and the Palestinians. Already in this early stage, thirty-six
communities, in which 72,200 Palestinians reside, will be separated
from their farmlands that lie west of the fence. More importantly,
thirteen communities, home to 11,700 people, have become enclaves
imprisoned between the fence and Israel. A recent report published
by the World Bank suggests that by the time the fence is completed
95,000 Palestinians will be living in cantons closed off from
all sides.
Yehezkel Lein from B'tselem concludes:
"In the past, Israel used 'imperative
military needs' to establish settlements on expropriated Palestinian
land and argued that the action was temporary. The settlements
have for some time been facts on the ground and Israel now demands
that most of them be annexed to Israel. As in the case of the
settlements, it is reasonable to assume that the separation fence
will also be used to support Israel's future claim to annex territories."
Good fences, Robert Frost once wrote,
make good neighbors; the question the Israeli government must
ask itself is "what do bad fences make?"
Neve Gordon
teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is a contributor
to The
Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (New Press
2002). He can be reached at ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il.
Today's
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