Madison Rafah Journal

Reuters, 30 May 2007

JERUSALEM, May 30 (Reuters) – The speaker of the European Parliament used a speech in the Israeli parliament on Wednesday to urge Israel to release funds to the Palestinian Authority and to free dozens of Palestinian lawmakers it has arrested.

Coupling his plea for the jailed politicians with a call for the release of three Israeli soldiers and a British journalist believed held by Arab militants, Hans-Gert Poettering told the Knesset that Europe stood by Israel and was ready to work to promote new talks to bring peace and security to the region.

“The situation seems critical in a way that it has not for a long time,” the German Christian Democrat legislator said.

“The European Parliament calls on the one hand for the release of the abducted Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser, Eldad Regev and Gilad Shalit, as well as of the British correspondent Alan Johnston, and on the other for the imprisoned members of parliament and other politicians, including Education Minister Naser al-Deen al-Shaer, to be released from custody.”

Shalit was captured a year ago by Palestinians on the borders of Gaza. Goldwasser and Regev were seized by Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, sparking a month-long war. Johnston is a BBC correspondent missing in Gaza for nearly three months. (Read on …)

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Assaf Uni, 31 May 2007

Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) voted on Wednesday to promote a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, protesting Israel’s policy on the Palestinians. Jewish and Israeli officials in the U.K. and Israel reacted with outrage to the motion which, for the most part, is a rhetorical move.

The motion was approved by a 158 to 99 vote, and called for freezing European funding for Israeli academic institutions, while condemning “Israeli academia’s cooperation with the occupation.”

In addition, the UCU decided to bring the question of whether to boycott Israel up for discussion by all the union’s members, numbering about 120,000. The discussions are scheduled to take place over the next 12 months. The motion encouraged union members to “consider the moral implications of conducting ties with Israeli academic institutions.”

The vote was preceded by a heated discussion in which Israel was repeatedly referred to as an apartheid state, engaging in crimes against humanity in the occupied territories. The union representatives adopted two separate resolutions promoting an academic boycott against Israel. They said the situation in the territories did not allow spectators to stand idly by.

In addition, the union congress pledged to advertise the Palestinians’ request for a boycott against Israel in all the union’s offices, and to arrange for academics from the Palestinian Authority to attend delegations to the U.K. The union’s representatives also decided to establish direct contact with Palestinian workers’ organizations. (Read on …)

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Amira Hass, 31 May 2007

The air is one escape route from the roadblocks and the separation regime that Israel imposes on the Palestinians. But Israel catches up with them even in the air. Israel does not allocate cellular frequencies to the Palestinians that answer their modern technological, economic, social and personal needs. More precisely, Israel refuses to coordinate with the Palestinians so they can use the cellcom frequencies they should have according to the International Telecommunications Union.

The Communications Ministry claims there is no coordination because we are not speaking to the Hamas government. A convenient excuse, but flawed, because even before the Hamas government arose, Palestinian requests to coordinate additional frequencies went unanswered. The Palestinian cellphone company Jawwal received the frequencies it should have had only in 1999, two years after it was founded. In March this year, Jawwal got a competitor: Al-Wataniya. The Kuwaiti company Wataniya International won the Palestinian Authority tender at the end of 2006. Ownership is to be shared between the international company, the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) and the public. A professional British management team was appointed, 500 jobs were promised, but no frequencies were allocated.

The importance of the air is reflected in the following data: Jawwal has about 800,000 subscribers, about 60 percent of the Palestinian cellphone market. Economists estimate that Israeli companies have about a 40-percent share of the market. The approximately 4 million Palestinians have more than 1.3 million cellphones. Some people have two – a Palestinian one and an Israeli one. The Palestinians come in third in the Arab world in the number of people connected to the fast data transmission system ADSL. They are also frequent users of video-conferencing services at their parliament – the Palestinian Legislative Council – at government ministries and at private businesses.

That is how they overcome the severing of Gaza from the West Bank and the roadblocks between Jenin and Ramallah. Families who live a few dozen kilometers apart and who have not seen each other for five years or more have learned how to make do with phones, Skype, and e-mails. No wonder Paltel (the Palestinian telecoms company, of which Jawwal is a subsidiary) is the most profitable Palestinian firm.

Dozens of requests for operating permits for Internet and information technology companies lie on the desk of the deputy Palestinian communications minister, Suleiman Zuhairi, who has been working at the ministry since its establishment in 1994. He cannot approve them because of the lack of frequencies. (Read on …)

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Nir Hasson, 31 May 2007

In a harsh report released yesterday, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel accuses the Shin Bet security service and police of severely torturing Palestinian security suspects.

The report includes the testimonies of nine Palestinians who were arrested by the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet between 2004 and 2005, including one that charged police investigators with severe sexual abuse.

The prisoners interviewed complain of beatings, painful sitting positions for long periods of time and being tied up painfully, among other things.

The report says the doctors at the hospitals and prisons ignore the prisoners’ complaints or treat them with contempt, thus enabling the security services to continue torturing the prisoners.

A 24-year-old prisoner from Nablus testified that during questioning a police investigator held his legs in the air, and inserted an object into his rectum. (Read on …)

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Meron Benvenisti, 29 May 2007

In his article “Mazuz versus Herzl” (Haaretz, May 25), Israel Harel reminds us that we grew up on the ethos of the Jewish National Fund’s “blue box” for donations, whereby thanks to our small coins, the
JNF’s lands were redeemed. He writes: “The JNF owns 2.5 million dunam (625,000 acres) in Israel. They were bought – I must tell you today, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and the justices of the Supreme Court in its capacity as the High Court of Justice – ‘dunam by dunam, clod by clod,’ so they would become the ‘Jewish people’s eternal property,’ in accordance with the principle established by modern Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901.”

Harel is entitled to object to Mazuz’s decision, and even to warn the Supreme Court justices not to dare to apply the principle of nondiscrimination between Jews and Arabs in allocating lands. But there is no doubt that he would not want his arguments to be based on incorrect facts and an untruthful rewriting of history, thereby opening a Pandora’s box.

For Israel Harel’s information: Of the more than 2.5 million dunams owned by the JNF, two million dunams were not purchased with the small coins put into the blue boxes, but were rather lands abandoned by Arabs that David Ben-Gurion, in a typical maneuver, “sold” to the JNF in 1949-1950. The first deal was clinched on January 27, 1949. It included the sale of a million dunams of abandoned land in various areas in return for about 18 million Israeli pounds.

This was an improper and also an illegal decision. The Israeli government sold the JNF lands that it did not own, but which had rather been captured in the war (and even the laws that it had enacted by then did not grant the state ownership of these lands). Ben-Gurion thereby achieved three aims. First of all, he transferred responsibility for the abandoned lands, on which new settlements were planned, from the Mapam party, which held the agriculture portfolio, to the JNF, which was under the influence of his own party, Mapai. Secondly, he could claim to have clean hands with respect to the continued confiscation of lands. And thirdly, he established a political fact that barred the way to the refugees’ return.

A week before the decision on the sale of the million dunams, the United Nations General Assembly had passed Resolution 194, under which the refugees were to be permitted to return to their homes, and if they chose not to return, they would receive compensation. Ben-Gurion did not want Israel’s sovereignty to be sullied by matters that stank of illegality, deviation from international norms and immorality. (Read on …)

AMY TEIBEL, San Luis Obispo Tribune, May 23, 2007

Israeli troops killed more than 650 Palestinians last year – half of them unarmed civilians including some 120 children – a threefold increase from 2005, a leading human rights group said Wednesday.

In its annual 2007 global report, Amnesty International also criticized Israel for deepening the poverty in Palestinian territories by withholding customs duties and widening a network of blockades and other travel restrictions.

The group accused soldiers and settlers of committing “serious human rights abuses, including unlawful killings, against Palestinians, mostly with impunity.” No such killings were documented in the report.

The number of Israelis killed by Palestinian armed groups diminished by half last year, to 27, including 20 civilian adults and one child, the report said.

By The Associated Press’ count, 580 people were killed on the Palestinian side and 34 on the Israeli side in 2006. (Read on …)

Rami Almeghari, IMEMC NEWS, May 22, 2007

In an isolated barely field, located just few hundred meters away from the Israel-Gaza border line in eastern Rafah city, a heap of barely lies in the middle of the field. The field is now abandoned — why? Not because there are no farmers in the area, but rather because the Loulahi family, who had been harvesting barely, were hit by Israeli missiles.

Samah, the daughter, was killed, and Ahmad, the son, killed as well. The father Sulieman was wounded, while A’isha, 19, is being treated at the nearby European Hospital after sustaining shrapnel wounds to her leg.

With her pale and yellow face, while surrounded by relatives and friends, the simple Rafah farmer spoke out with a sadness and bitterness which she would have never felt unless the Israeli missiles hadn’t killed her “soul.”

Despite her pain, A’isha spoke out: “It was 6:30 pm. We were harvesting the barely near the Sufa crossing, the sun was setting, while myself, my father and my brothers and sisters were all bending down in our field.

“My father asked us to leave our brother Mohammad in the car. We left the field, then the Zannana [unmanned drone plane] fired a missile that hit us directly,” Aisha says. (Read on …)

I know it must seem like we’re writing to you with one crisis after another. Sadly, that’s how things are in Palestine, Iraq and now, Lebanon. Right now, as Palestinian refugees are being killed and driven from one Palestinian refugee camp to another, we wanted to give you some information about the situation and let you know what you can do to help. Attached are a few articles we thought would be helpful.

This afternoon we spoke with Marcy Newman, a friend who has been teaching at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She had just visited Shatila, Bourj al Barajneh, and Beddawi refugee camps and described the nightmare she witnessed and heard about. She was calling to see if MECA could send help for the thousands of terrified people who have fled to these camps and are barely receiving any aid. You can read Marcy’s account on Electronic Lebanon.

If you are able to, please make a contribution of any amount. MECA will be sending funds for the most basic necessities for people who have fled in terror, without their belongings, and are now living in small homes with more than twenty extra people.

Thank you!
From all of us at MECA

email: meca (at) mecaforpeace.org
phone: 510-548-0542
web: www.mecaforpeace.org (Read on …)