13 February 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
The Israeli courts ordered
the release this week of two foreign women arrested by
the army in the
West Bank
in what human-rights lawyers warn has become a
wide-ranging clampdown by Israel on non-violent
protest from international, Israeli and Palestinian
activists.
The arrest of the two women
during a nighttime raid on the Palestinian city of
Ramallah
has highlighted a new tactic by Israeli officials:
using immigration police to try to deport foreign
supporters of the Palestinian cause.
A Czech woman was deported
last month after she was seized from Ramallah by a
special unit known as Oz, originally established to
arrest migrant labourers working illegally inside
Israel.
Human
rights lawyers
say Israel’s new offensive is intended to undermine a
joint non-violent struggle by international activists
and Palestinian villagers challenging a land grab by
Israel as it builds the separation wall on farmland in
the West Bank.
In what Israel’s daily
Haaretz newspaper
recently called a “war on protest”,
Israeli security forces
have launched a series of raids in the West Bank over
the past two months to detain Palestinian community
leaders organising protests against the wall.
“Israel knows that the
non-violence struggle is spreading and that it’s a
powerful weapon against the occupation,” said Neta
Golan, an Israeli activist based in Ramallah. “Israel
has no answer to it, which is why the security forces
are panicking and have started making lots of
arrests.”
The detention this week of
Ariadna Marti, 25, of Spain, and Bridgette Chappell,
22, of Australia, suggests a revival of a long-running
cat-and-mouse struggle between Israel and the
International Solidarity Movement
(ISM), a group of activists who have joined
Palestinians in non-violently opposing the Israeli
occupation.
The last major
confrontation, a few years into the
second intifada,
resulted in a brief surge of deaths and injuries of
international activists at the hands of the Israeli
army. Most controversially,
Rachel Corrie,
from the US, was run down and killed by an army
bulldozer in 2003 as she stood by a home in Gaza
threatened with demolition.
Ms Golan, a co-founder of
the ISM, said Israel had sought to demonise the
group’s activists in the Israeli and international
media. “Instead of representing our struggle as one of
non-violence, we are portrayed as ‘accomplices to
terror’.”
The first entry of Israeli
immigration police into a Palestinian-controlled area
of the West Bank, the so-called “Area A”, occurred
last month when a Czech woman was arrested in Ramallah.
Eva Novakova, 28, who had recently been appointed the
ISM’s media co-ordinator, was accused of overstaying
her visa and was deported before she could appeal to
the courts.
Human rights lawyers say
such actions are illegal.
Omer Shatz, the lawyer
representing Ms Marti and Ms Chappell, said a
military operation
into an area like Ramallah could not be justified to
round up activists with expired visas. “The activists
are not breaking any laws in Ramallah,” he said. “The
army and immigration police are effectively
criminalising them by bringing them into Israel, where
they need such a visa.”
Officials in the
Palestinian Authority (PA) have grown increasingly
unhappy at Israeli abuses of security arrangements
dating from the Oslo era. The PA’s president, Mahmoud
Abbas, recently described the Israeli operations into
Area A as “incursions and provocations”.
Although the supreme court
released the two women on bail on Monday, while their
deportation was considered, it banned them from
entering the West Bank and ordered each pay a $800
bond.
The judges questioned the
right of the army to hand over the women to
immigration police from a
military prison
in the West Bank, but left open the issue of whether
the operation would have been legal had the transfer
occurred in Israeli territory.
The Spanish government is
reported to have asked the Israeli ambassador in Spain
to promise that Ms Marti would not be deported.
Ms Marti said they had been
woken at 3am on Sunday by “15 to 20 soldiers who aimed
their guns at us”. The pair were asked for their
passports and then handcuffed. Later, she said, they
had been offered the choice that “either we agree to
immediate expulsion or that we will be jailed for six
months”.
On Wednesday, shortly after
the court ruling, the army raided the ISM’s office in
Ramallah again, seizing computers, T-shirts and
bracelets inscribed with “Palestine”.
“Israel has managed to stop
most international activists from getting here by
denying them entry at the borders,” said Ms Golan.
“But those who do get in then face deportation if they
are arrested or try to renew their visa.”
The ISM has been working
closely with a number of local Palestinian popular
committees in organising weekly demonstrations against
Israel’s theft of Palestinian land under cover of the
building of the wall.
The protests have made
headlines only intermittently, usually when
international or Israeli activists have been hurt or
killed by Israeli soldiers. Palestinian injuries have
mostly gone unnoticed.
In one incident that
threatened to embarrass Israel, Tristan Anderson, 38,
an American ISM member, was left brain-damaged last
March after a soldier fired a tear-gas cannister at
his head during a demonstration against the wall in
the Palestinian village of Nilin.
In addition to regular
arrests of Palestinian protesters, Israel has recently
adopted a new tactic of rounding up community leaders
and holding them in long-term
administrative detention.
A
Haaretz
editorial has called these practices “familiar from
the darkest regimes”.
Abdallah Abu Rahman, a
schoolteacher and head of the popular committee in the
village of Bilin, has been in jail since December for
arms possession. The charge refers to a display he
created at his home of used tear gas cannisters fired
by the
Israeli army
at demonstrators.
On Monday, the offices of
Stop the Wall, an umbrella organisation for the
popular committees, was raided, and its computers and
documents taken. Two co-ordinators of the group, Jamal
Juma and Mohammed Othman, were released from jail last
month after mounting international pressure.
The Israeli police also
have been harshly criticised by the courts for beating
and jailing dozens of Israeli and Palestinian
activists protesting against the takeover of homes by
settlers in the
East Jerusalem
neighbourhood
of Sheikh Jarrah.
Last month, Hagai Elad, the
head of Israel’s largest human rights law centre, the
Association for Civil
Rights in Israel,
was among 17 freed by a judge after demonstrators were
detained for two days by police, who accused them of
being “dangerous”.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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