Fears are growing as Israel escalates its military presence along its heavily militarized separation barrier with Gaza. Israel has deployed 60 tanks to greet Palestinian protesters gathering today to protest the ongoing Israeli occupation and demand the right of return for those displaced from their homes. Israel has announced it’s implementing a zero-tolerance policy towards protesters in Gaza, who have been staging weekly Friday protests since March 30th under the banner of the Great March of Return. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 170 Palestinians, including more than 30 children, and injured, it’s believed, close to 20,000 more Palestinians.
On Thursday, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem was invited to address the United Nations Security Council about the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank.
Hagai El-Ad talking:
It’s essential for us to try and bring about an end for the occupation. It’s a reality that is so well documented. All of this is happening in broad daylight. And the sense that we have—B’Tselem has been working on this issue for more than almost 30 years already at this point. And actually, the place where I would have agreed with the prime minister is that we would have wished that we would have been a short episode in our country’s history. We want to exist only as long as the occupation exists, and our mandate is to bring about an end to that reality. But, of course, this has been going on for more than half a century already.
And the only nonviable [sic] path that we identify to change this reality, also because of the huge imbalance of power between the occupied Palestinians and the ruling Israelis, is through assertive international action. And that’s the voice that we have been repeating already a number of times in recent years. And the one place—the most important place perhaps on the planet—to assert that point precisely is the U.N. Security Council.
The entire situation in Gaza, in many ways, is getting closer and closer to a humanitarian catastrophe. In some aspects, we have already arrived at that terrible point. But I think usually when people discuss humanitarian calamities, it’s a result of some natural disaster. In Gaza, everything that we’re seeing is a result of consistent policies that have been applied by this point already for more than 10 years. And discussions of issues, such as the deteriorating quality of water, the most basic essential need for human living, that’s not something that people woke up to a week ago. People have been warning from these developments already for years. So that, as well, is something that we’ve all been walking towards, stepping towards, already for quite a while, and now we are reaching those results.
You know, people say that Gaza is in crisis mode when there are three hours of electricity a day. But, hey, when there’s six hours of electricity a day, then that’s somehow acceptable or reasonable? And we’re also not talking about a reality that is happening in some distant corner of the world; this is at Israel’s doorstep. This is an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, barely, right? Right next door to the First World economy of the country that I live in, just one next to the other, and this is the way we police the reality in Gaza.
And it’s not a coincidence that we described it yesterday and also earlier as probably the largest open-air prison on Earth. The people don’t necessarily have even the understanding that this is already one of the most crowded places on the planet, but people can almost never leave the Gaza Strip. And even the lucky ones that occasionally are successful in doing that, because they can cross through the Rafah Crossing into the Sinai and then through Egypt to travel abroad, in many cases, they won’t even know when they will be able to come back into the Gaza Strip, because maybe that crossing, that is only open for short periods of time during the year, will be closed.
there are more than 170 Palestinians that died through Israeli soldiers firing—snipers—from inside Israel at demonstrators inside the Gaza Strip. And there are more than 5,300 that were injured just through the usage of gunfire, live gunfire.
B’Tselem is from the Old [Testament]. It means “in the image.” And, of course, the idea that we want to express here is one of universal and Jewish values, that all human beings were created in the image of God.
We believe that the only future that we would embrace, that we will accept, is a future that is based on the realization of rights, dignity and equality for all people that live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River—all 13 million people, Israeli and Palestinian. Now, I don’t know, and we have no position, how many states exactly—one state, two states, five-and-a-half states—would be the right political answer to that. We don’t—we’rew not a peace organization, so we don’t focus on that.
The essential question is: What would be the rights, what would be the level of equality and dignity, for the people who will live in that future agreed-upon solution? And there is one absolutely incompatible future with the realization of those rights, which is what we’re living in: a one-state reality that includes within it a perpetual occupation.
So, what was key for us is really trying to spell out the daily reality for a Palestinian living under occupation, in the moments that don’t necessarily make the news, when soldiers enter a Palestinian home in the dead of night—and people abroad might assume that they have a search warrant or probable cause or something like that, but, no, military law gives almost any soldier the authority to enter any Palestinian home any time, and the army does—and a million other ways in which Palestinians, day in and day out, have absolutely no control over their lives, have no representation in the Israeli institutions that determine everything in the life of a Palestinian, and to try and explain that, to give flesh and blood to the meaning of living under that regime, not for a month, not for a year, not for a decade—an entire people for more than half a century in that reality.
Great March of Return protests that began on March 30th. It’s more than 170 fatalities. More than 30 of them were minors, under 18. Three of them were actually children. They were 11 years old. These are the youngest ones that were killed since March 30. And more than 5,300 that were injured from live gunfire.
But it’s really important for me to emphasize that Gaza is also another example of Israeli control. Israel controls everything between the river and the sea. In Gaza, the control is external. We decide what and who gets in and out of the Gaza Strip, except of the Rafah Crossing with Egypt that is closed most of the time. We control the population registry in Gaza. If you’re a Palestinian in Gaza and you need medical care—not necessarily even in Israel; you need medical care in the West Bank or in Jordan—you need an Israeli permit for that. We control everything in different ways, directly or indirectly.
– Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar.
So this is just a few miles east of Jerusalem in a part of the West Bank known as Area C, that’s about 60 percent of the West Bank, and that’s in an area that has been high up on the Israeli list of priorities for a while to minimize Palestinians’ footprint there, to displace many Palestinians out of that area and to expand settlements in there. And it exposes, in great detail, the Israeli hypocrisy in its planning policies used against Palestinians living in the West Bank.
There was a letter by the Israeli ambassador, actually, to the Security Council just a day before my briefing, trying to articulate the Israeli argument, somehow, as if what is about to happen is legal. Why is it legal? Because the Palestinians have been building illegally. Why is it legal? Because this was backed by the Israeli High Court of Justice. Why is this legal? Because Israel was kind enough to offer relocation sites to the community. And all of this are just lies on top of distortions on top of lies.
Why are Palestinians building illegally? Because Israel created a planning regime that is meant to serve settlers and to dispossess Palestinians. If you’re a Palestinian in Area C in the West Bank, your chances of getting a building permit from Israeli authorities are around one in 100. Right? So Palestinians have no other choice, and that’s why they build without permission from Israeli authorities. And the Israeli High Court, when it makes a ruling that says that demolition orders are legal, while completely ignoring the context—that Palestinians cannot build legally in any way—doesn’t make that ruling just or sensible or even formally legal. It only makes the judges of the Israeli High Court complicit in what—if this indeed will take place—will be the war crime of forcible transfer of protected people in an occupied territory.
Khan al-Ahmar is the most visible example of this phenomenon these days, a community of some 200 people in that location with a school that serves other communities in the area. But this is happening not only now and not only in Khan al-Ahmar. This is part of a broader Israeli policy to take over as much Palestinian land, minimize Palestinians’ footprint, concentrate as many Palestinians as possible in the parts of the West Bank known as Area A and Area B, and then say that those areas, like Area A, “Hey, don’t worry about that. That’s where Palestinians are running their own lives,” when in fact what they’re talking about are isolated Bantustans that are getting more and more closed by further and further Israeli settlements in the rest of the West Bank.
And in the end, what you have is this picture in which Palestinian life and Palestinian territory and the Palestinian people and spirit are completely broken up into small, digestible, more easily controllable areas—Gaza separated from the West Bank, East Jerusalem walled off the rest of the West Bank, the West Bank itself chopped into these different segments.
We tried to make a nuanced point there, because often if you make that point, Israel will say, “How dare you compare these two realities? We don’t have laws that say that Palestinians and Israelis cannot sit on the same benches,” for instance. And indeed we don’t. But that’s why the distinction was made there between petty apartheid and grand apartheid, not those aspects of apartheid—the benches, the separate beaches and so on and so forth—and I’m not talking here about restrictions on movement, but to focus on the issue of the policies, the legal systems and, of course, voting rights.
“What are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they dare demonstrate, it’s popular terror. If they call for sanctions, it’s economic terror. If they pursue legal means, it’s judicial terror. If they turn to the United Nations, it’s diplomatic terror. It turns out [that] anything a Palestinian does besides getting up in the morning and saying ‘Thank you, Rais’—’Thank you, master’–is terror.”
This has become so routine in Israel. This has become so normalized after 50 years, that people have difficulty even in accepting that basic rights—that people who live under oppression have the right to reject that reality. And any avenue that the Palestinians try is met with one form or another of condemnation.
But for Israel, this is part of a broader agenda. The agenda is not only to overcome Palestinian opposition to their oppression, but also to silence Israelis and to silence the international community. So, it goes further, right? You know, if an Israeli is against occupation, she or he must be traitors. If an international is speaking or acting against occupation, they must be anti-Semites, right? And I’m saying that with a lot of cynicism, but this is no laughing matter. This is actually quite an effective silencing mechanism that Israel is deploying continuously, all over the world.
B’Tselem, called on Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to shoot unarmed protesters.
We published ads. This is actually also like a legal responsibility, a moral responsibility, not only, I think, from like any decent person, but also according to like Israelis’ own laws. If a soldier receives a flagrantly illegal command, he is duty-bound not to follow that command. And commands that order soldiers to fire at unarmed protesters that are not endangering anyone, from a distance, these are flagrantly illegal commands. They should not have been given. And the responsibility for that is with the country’s leadership, with the prime minister, defense minister, chief of staff. And that’s where the responsibility begins. That’s where the brunt of the responsibility is. But if such orders are given, soldiers are duty-bound not to follow such orders.
There’s a lot of information also about additional incidents, and I invite viewers to go to the B’Tselem website and read more data and analysis on this reality. What I would want to add is that one can rest assured that, in all likelihood, no one is going to be held accountable to any of these killings. Israel has a well-lubricated whitewashing mechanism that doesn’t really investigate. It performs what looks like an investigation in order to push against international legal authority. Sometimes it will take a very long time until they will close the case, sometimes a shorter time. But based on our data analysis, more than a decade of working on such issues both in the West Bank and in Gaza, more than 97 percent of the time, no one will be held accountable.
– Two years ago, Hagai El-Ad, spoke first before the United Nations Security Council. The Israeli government threatened to revoke his citizenship. He was then barred from speaking at Israeli schools. Then, this is Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon speaking yesterday.
He said it in Hebrew. No one could understand that in real time at the Security Council chamber, and of course he knew that. He was talking to an Israeli audience back home when he was saying that. Twenty seconds before that, he was speaking in English from the same very seat, celebrating Israeli “democracy,” because, “Hey, we have human rights organizations such as B’Tselem that get to present before the Security Council.”
It’s a perfect example of Israeli hypocrisy at its worst, in the sense that democracy is reduced to a product for export. That’s what we celebrate abroad—”the only democracy in the Middle East”—but at home, going after the traitors, trying to silence the opposition to the occupation—both things at the same time.
By this point, I’m already used to having both of these voices, but usually it will be the prime minister and then someone else speaking five days later somewhere else. Right? But to have the same person, within less than a minute, do “democracy” in English, “collaborator” in Hebrew—absolutely amazing. But to have like a deep understanding of how cynical that is, that’s all you need to look at.
I don’t want to over-credit Trump and Netanyahu. They haven’t begun this. They have both inherited this reality that has begun many years before that in Israel by governments left, right and center that were part of the occupation project. I don’t want to shy away from that history and that context.
At the same time, of course Trump is making everything much worse, in the sense, in Israel, of like this government, that not only they have a green light from the White House to basically get away with almost anything they want to do, but in fact that what they have here is, from their perspective, a concern, a limited-time window of opportunity in which to advance Israel’s occupation project with no fear of consequences from the U.S., with no fear of anything happening at the Security Council because of the American veto. And that is scary.
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Hagai El-Ad
executive director of the human rights group B’Tselem.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 19, 2018