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| Ander Nieuws week 36 / Midden-Oosten 2013 |
 
 
 
Soldiers break silence on Israeli tactics

 
The Australian
August 27, 2013
Deborah Cassrels
 
"They call me a traitor," says Roni Hammermann, 73, an Israeli activist from Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, which monitors Israel's West Bank checkpoints for human rights violations against Palestinians.
 
Israeli soldiers are edgy as masses of Palestinians queue at the largest military checkpoint, Qalandiya, between northern Jerusalem and Ramallah.
 
Only those with permits can exit for work, medical care, education or religious reasons. Considered security risks, males aged between 16 and 35 are turned back. An insistent man is pushed hard in the chest.
 
Nearby, new Jewish settlements mushroom behind Israel's security wall - erected to stop Palestinian terror attacks. The settlements threaten to derail relaunched talks to establish a Palestinian state. Despite pleas for a settlement freeze in occupied Palestinian areas, 3000 apartments have been approved.
 
Hagit Ofran, director of Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now, says hilltop outposts populated by radical settlers are heightening tensions. "They are dividing the West Bank into pieces, making a viable Palestinian state impossible."
 
Against this backdrop, Palestinians navigate checkpoints daily. Queues started at 5am. Thousands are screened five times. A relieved Hammermann says friction is "low-level today".
 
Hammermann, 73, was born to Austrian refugees. Most of her family died in the Holocaust. "My choice of human rights issues is very strongly connected with my Holocaust experience. Never be silent about what's happening around you, tell about everything that is connected with human rights violations."
 
While NGOs acknowledge Palestinians "are not blameless", they cite as unjustified arrests and increasing permits restricting Palestinian movement.
 
Questions are being raised about the culture of the Israeli Defence Force within former military circles. Breaking the Silence, an organisation with more than 800 Israeli veteran combat soldiers and officers who served in the IDF since 2000, has been attacked for focusing on Israel's human rights record.
 
On a book tour to the US next month, former IDF paratrooper and BTS activist Avner Gvaryahu, 28, will discuss the group's report Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010.
 
Testimonies depict the multifaceted power Israel wields in the West Bank, including what Gvaryahu calls an extreme separation policy, while settlers' roles in determining policy and enforcing law applied to Palestinians focus on legal double standards.
 
Gvaryahu, who served in the territories until 2007, says: "The links between the army and the heads of settlements are unbelievable. When I was deployed to guard a specific settlement ... I was sent to protect unauthorised settlements and the people giving me orders who I could shoot, what were the boundaries, were settlers, not my officer, not my commander. We have testimonies of regional guarding officers (settlers) actually arresting Palestinians, tying their eyes and hands. They are not army."
 
On a BTS tour to Hebron city, the only one with a Jewish settlement in its midst, were 10 young adult American Jews.
 
A walk through the Israeli-controlled sector of Hebron, holy to Muslims and Jews, reveals a ghost town. Soldiers patrol streets protecting settlers in otherwise empty areas.
 
Hebron was divided in 1997 into two sectors, H1 under Palestinian jurisdiction and H2 administered by Israel. About 40 per cent of the Palestinians in H2 have been displaced, the remaining 20,000 forbidden on main streets.
 
Nearby, at a museum in the Jewish quarter, Noam Arnon, spokesman for Hebron's 800 Jews, displays pictures of Jews killed and maimed in the 1929 massacre by Arabs seeking to drive Jews out.
 
"Terror has been destroyed. We are here again to make sure justice will win. It's not simple because somehow the world supports the terror and the idea that Jews have no right to live here.
 
"By building this community, we say no."
 
A few doors up, Palestinian human rights activist Issa Amro, claiming he has received death threats from settlers, talks about Israeli efforts to replace Palestinians with settlers. "Shabbat (Jewish sabbath) is my nightmare. They burnt our house - settlers expose themselves on Shabbat. I told one of them 'is it allowed on Shabbat?' They say 'if it's against you it's OK'. If you destroy people's dignity, they go outside for revenge."
 
Reflecting confusion among the touring Jews, Micah Rose, 23, put it this way: "It's uncomfortable to confront so many different perspectives and to hear pieces of rationalisation and explanation that at once rang true to me and directly contradict other things ... if you have conflicting feelings about Israel, the easy thing is not to confront that. If American Jews don't engage with those issues then we risk losing very important voices in the American Jewish political paradigm."
 
Adam Ragson, 22, said the tour "opened my eyes to the immoral and ugly face of martial law in the West Bank".
 
"Israel is committing serious human rights violations that do not embody the fundamental Jewish values I studied in my Jewish upbringing," he said.
 
BTS challenges Israel's claim its defensive policy is intended to safeguard Israeli civilians. While most Israelis agree it is done in the name of security, Gvaryahu argues it's a distortion of security. "The end game should be how to end the occupation and that, I believe, will provide the most security."
 
Many Israelis would argue that since the wall was erected terror attacks have dramatically diminished.
 
Copyright 2013 News Limited
 
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| Ander Nieuws week 36 / Midden-Oosten 2013 |