Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 21. december 2006 / Time Line December 21, 2006
Version 3.520. December 2006, 22. December 2006
12/21/2006
Whose Land For Peace?
By Ethan Heitner
http://www.tompaine.com/print/whose_land_for_peace.php
As a longtime activist for peace between Israel and Palestine and
against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, I'm well used
to one of the most dreary aspects of the American media. The
violence gets coverage, the ongoing daily grind of occupation
doesn't. I don't know why, but this week that changed.
I never thought I'd live to say these words, but I'm quite pleased
with The New York Times . Last week, on Tuesday, they published an
in-depth article on Highway 60, one of the main arteries of
transportation for ordinary Palestinians, well within the West
Bank, far from the Israeli border, and on the kafkaesque
difficulties of transversing it on a daily basis. From Greg Myre's
report:
But getting much less notice have been parallel and perhaps even
more restrictive measures imposed by the Israeli military much
deeper inside the West Bank. The internal checkpoints and barriers
on roads have increasingly limited movement, something Palestinians
say they find especially grating, because they are not trying to
enter Israel, only to go from one Palestinian area to another.
...
“We’re seeing an increasing fragmentation of the West
Bank,” said David Shearer, head of the United Nations Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which monitors the
West Bank. “The whole fabric of life for the Palestinians has
been disrupted.”
His office says Palestinians traveling within the West Bank now
face 542 obstacles, 83 of which are guarded by soldiers, compared
with fewer than 400 a year ago. The obstacles have effectively
divided the West Bank into three sectors — northern, central
and southern — and limited movement among them.
Of course, the Times doesn't get it perfect: they print the Israeli
suggestion that travel restrictions only exist in response to
Palestinian terrorism and the al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000, when in
fact internal checkpoints within the West Bank were established in
the mid-90s after the Oslo peace accords and have restricted travel
through the occupied Palestinian territories, not just near
"hotspots." But it's a start.
And it wasn't a one-off. Today the Times gave front-page treatment
to Israeli anti-occupation group Peace Now's latest report on
settlements. Steven Erlanger wades into one of the conflict's
knottiest (and yet most basic) problems: land.
An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from
inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by
Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by
Palestinians.
Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private
property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for
security reasons, temporarily.
If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held
Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel
and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated
peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel
plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is
private.
Read the full report here. This means that the land that illegal
Israeli settlements are built on were directly confiscated from
private Palestinian landowners. Of course, all of the land across
the "green line" that demarcated Israel's borders in 1967 is
occupied territory and it is illegal, under international law, for
Israeli citizens or the Israeli government to build anywhere on
it.
I haven't yet had a chance to read or parse Erlanger's report more
closely, but twice in one week, a week that saw an Israeli killed
by Qassam rocket fire and dozens of Palestinians killed, as well as
spectacular nonviolent resistance against Israeli missiles, I'm
pleased that at least someone is paying attention (however
incompletely) to the background issues.
This is what occupation looks like.
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