Young Israeli conscripts, their guns slung loosely across their backs, can seem horribly out of place passing through the galleries of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s new $100-million memorial to the Holocaust. But the soldiers are not brought to the museum to mourn so much as to learn. Since it first one opened in 1957 this museum has focused on Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, the extermination camps, and the struggle of the survivors to get to Palestine. The first lesson has been that the Holocaust is the primary reason Israel must exist; the second, that modern Jews are not like those who went so unresistingly into the gas chambers.

Tom Segev, author of The Seventh Million, a book about the Holocaust survivors who settled in Israel, says that “In the past decade, the Holocaust has become a universal code of the ultimate evil. By building this kind of museum, Israel is trying to gain back the monopoly on the Holocaust; the Holocaust is ours and ours alone, and no humanistic or universal values should overtake what we feel about the Holocaust.

“At the beginning, in the first years of Israel, the Holocaust was a taboo,” says Segev. “Parents didn’t tell their children about their experiences and their children wouldn’t dare to ask. A great silence surrounded the Holocaust. That began to change in the 1960s with the trial of Adolf Eichmann when the government needed these Holocaust memories for the trial. For the first time, people started to find an audience for the terrible things they had gone through. Until then most Israelis refused to listen.”

This was partly because many Israelis instinctively wanted to separate themselves from the ‘weak Jews’ who died without a fight. “They were supposed to be very different from Jews in the diaspora,” says Segev. “They were supposed to breed some kind of ‘new man', heroes who would be directly connected to the heroes of the Bible and kind of wipe out 2,000 years of Jewish history in the diaspora which we regarded as shameful.”

“Until then many Israelis were ashamed; why didn’t you defend yourself? That has changed completely.”

But Israel’s own wars, Segev says, forced people to be less judgmental of the dead. “One interesting stop was in 1973 (during the Yom Kippur war) when many Israelis realized they too might be in a situation where they could not resist, they could not defend themselves, they might be annihilated. It gave them a whole different view of the Jews in the Holocaust. Until then many Israelis were ashamed; 'why didn’t you defend yourself?' That has changed completely. We have totally stopped an approach of making any judgment about what had happened there with regard to the behavior of the victims. I think the public, and specifically the younger generation, deals with it with much more compassion.”

Yad Vashem means Memorial to the Name—the underlying purpose of the museum is to move beyond just the historical record to one that remembers each person...by name! The final room inside the tunnel is the Hall of Names, the most moving stop of the old museum where individual pages of testimony by relatives or friends of the murdered were displayed, often with a photograph of a face from Amsterdam or Budapest or Warsaw. Two million pages of testimony line the walls in boxes, one for each known victim. The shelves have space for four million more. They will never be filled.
—The Guardian Weekly

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By Nick Dearden and Joe Zacune
Caterpillar: Making a Killing in Palestine
“Homes have been destroyed in a purely purposeless manner.
Bulldozers have savagely dug up roads, including electricity, sewerage and water lines, in a brutal display of power.”

Frequently in the global economy it seems that corporations are able to get away with activities which would see an individual locked up in The Hague for decades. Take the case of the Caterpillar Company of Peoria, Illinois, USA. Without selling a single bomb, gun or F-16 fighter, Caterpillar has been supplying the Israeli military with its “key weapon" (in the words one Israeli commander) in its illegal and brutal occupation of Palestine. According to the United Nations, Caterpillar’s D-9 bulldozers have been responsible for destroying “agricultural farms, greenhouses, ancient olive groves…numerous Palestinian homes, and sometimes human lives.”

The toll of human lives destroyed with these machines is truly horrifying. During the last four years the Israeli army has flattened over 4,000 homes, rendering tens of thousand homeless, traumatized, and impoverished. Israel claims that these demolitions are punitive actions against suspected terrorists. While, in any event such punishment is illegal under international humanitarian law, a recent report by Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem found that in half of all cases of destruction there was nothing linking the houses to terrorism.

Caterpillar bulldozers have been used to rip up extensive areas of cultivated land, destroying thousands of olive and citrus trees. The destruction of wells, storage tanks, and water pumps limits access to drinking water. Caterpillar’s bulldozers have been the weapon of choice to carry out some of the worst human rights violations witnessed during the Intifada. In Jenin camp, home to 14,000 refugees, bulldozers were a key component of Operation Defensive Shield, the “most extensive and severe” rights violation since 1967, says B’Tselem.

During the destructions, many people were buried alive, including 38-year-old paraplegic Jamal Suliman. In his mother’s words, “The bulldozer wouldn’t wait even one minute so that we could take Jamal out of the house.” During a similar raid on a refugee camp in Rafah, Gaza, a United Nations official noted, “Homes have been destroyed in a purely purposeless manner. Bulldozers have savagely dug up roads, including electricity, sewerage and water lines, in a brutal display of power.” In Rafah, 298 homes were destroyed in a single month.

“23-year-old US peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003. In one demonstration she stood in front of a Palestinian home, trying to prevent its demolition.”

But perhaps the bulldozers are best described by the experiences of two young people on either side of the Occupation. Israeli Army D-9 operator Moshe Nissim describes his experience of Jenin: “I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9…when I was told to demolish a house, I took the opportunity to bring down some more houses.” His unit was cited for outstanding service. On the other side was 23-year-old US peace activist Rachel Corrie who was killed on March 16, 2003. In one demonstration Rachel stood in front of a Palestinian home, trying to prevent its demolition. The D-9 driver initially dumped sand on Rachel, later driving over her as demolition proceeded. Rachel died of her injuries.

Among the gems of irony lifted from Caterpillar’s Corporate Code is the statement, “We believe that our success should also contribute to the quality of life and the prosperity of communities.” Caterpillar openly advertises its bulldozers in military conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed many bulldozers sent to Israel are actually paid for by the US taxpayer as part of the US’s substantial contribution to Israel’s military.
—The Electronic Intifada.
More information: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3705.shtml

For photos of Caterpillar bulldozers at work in Palestine,
and US demonstrator Rachel Corrie, click here.

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By Nurit Peled-Elhanan *
The Impassioned Cry of a Jewish Woman
* Nurit lives in Jerusalem, and lost her only daughter to a suicide bomber. Excerpts from her speech to the European Union Parliament
on International Women’s Day.

“I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman in my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. When I asked the people who invited me here why wouldn’t they invite a Palestinian woman the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized. I don’t know what non-localized violence is. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local; humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.

“It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army has expanded around the globe. In fact state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA. They are afraid of the Muslim womb.

“I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour. I don’t know the kind of violence that turn a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, whose houses are demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life: this is not part of my personal ordeal. But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers.

“We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenetic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out "I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is worth less than a piece of land."

“I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation,
such disrespect from the whole world.”

“Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is; European indifference and co-operation is; and Israeli racist and cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda, and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allows American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that gives license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses, and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers, to bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees, and to prevent them from cultivating their fields.

“I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. The mothers’ cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know, and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them…”
With her husband Rami, Nurit is part of Bereaved Parents Circle: http://www.theparentscircle.com/

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Increase in Violent Acts by Israeli Settlers

A senior Israel Defense Forces officer stationed near the West Bank city of Nablus stated that the number of violent attacks carried out by settlers will increase if effective enforcement action against extremists is not implemented. “The situation will only intensify. We see a trend of extremity in the actions of the radical activists. There is an increase of attacks committed by Jews against Palestinians.”

A partial list of incidents in the area includes settlers wounding three IDF officers during the evacuation of two caravans in the settlement of Yitzhar in January, a settler’s attempt to run over an IDF officer who tried to prevent him from hanging anti-disengagement signs, an attack carried out by four settlers against a Palestinian man, an attack against a Nablus truck driver last week, and a number of confrontations between settlers and Palestinians.

The IDF source believes that hundreds of settlers are involved in the incidents. “A distinction needs to be made between the extremists and the tens of thousands of other settlers who are not involved in these activities. The extremists are cooperating less and less with the army, and the relations between the extremists and the military in becoming more tense.”
—Ha’aretz

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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REPORT

“Some 400,000 Israelis live in violation of international law.”
Removing Unlawful Israeli Settlements:
Time to Act

For the first time in four and a half years, we are witnessing some positive developments in the human rights situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In recent months killings by both the Israeli army and Palestinian armed groups have significantly diminished, as has the destruction of Palestinian homes and properties by Israeli forces, and preparation is under way for the evacuation of the Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip.

These welcome developments have raised new hopes among the Israeli and Palestinian civilian populations who have borne the brunt of the violence in recent years. Since September 2000, more than 3,200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and some 1,000 Israelis have been killed by Palestinian armed groups. Most of those killed were unarmed civilians, and among them over 600 Palestinian children and 100 Israeli children.

But the cycle of killings has not been the only human rights tragedy which has wrecked the lives of so many men, women and children. Palestinians, who have been living under Israeli occupation for 38 years have faced an unprecedented level of human rights violations in the past four and a half years. The unlawful destruction by Israeli forces of more than 4,000 homes, vast areas of agricultural land, commercial properties and infrastructure throughout the Occupied Territories has left tens of thousands of Palestinians homeless and destitute.

Hundreds of checkpoints, blockades and roadblocks hinder the movement of Palestinians between towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, arbitrarily curtailing access to their land and their jobs, to education and healthcare facilities, and to other crucial services. As a result unemployment and poverty have dramatically increased, pushing a growing number of Palestinians below the poverty line, and a growing number of people are suffering from poor health and malnutrition. Children, women, and others amongst the most vulnerable members of Palestinian society have been particularly affected.

The ongoing construction by Israel of fences and the wall through the West Bank has exacerbated the problems of access for Palestinians to crucial services in the affected areas. The fact that most of the fences/wall lie inside the West Bank and not on the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank indicates that it is intended to encompass most Israeli settlements rather than to stop Palestinian suicide bombers and other attackers from entering Israel, as Israel claims.

Israel’s decision to dismantle all its settlements in the Gaza Strip and some sparsely populated settlement in the West Bank is a welcome development. However, the evacuation of some 8,000 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and from some very sparsely populated settlements in the West Bank must not be allowed to be used by Israel as an opportunity to expand other settlements in the West Bank, where some 400,000 Israelis live in violation of international law.

The international community has long recognized the unlawfulness of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. UN Security Council Resolution 465 (of March 1, 1980) called on Israel “...to dismantle the existing settlements, and in particular to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction, and planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem.”

However, the international community failed to take any measure to implement this resolution. Most Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories were built after this resolution was passed, with the greatest expansion having taken place in the past decade. Last month the Israeli government confirmed its plan to built 3,500 new settlement houses in the East Jerusalem area of the West Bank.

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From The New York Times
One Step Back in the Mideast
"Mr. Sharon is unfairly trying to stack the deck before peace talks even begin."

Maybe Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel doesn’t quite get it yet, but this new era of hope in the Middle East means he needs to restrain his instincts for settlement building. We all know that any final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians will have to include an adjustment of borders; returning to the 1967 lines is fine in theory, but there are too many Israeli Jews living outside those boundaries to expect all of them to move. But that is precisely why adding to those numbers right now is so cynical. And claims by the Israelis that they never intend to give certain settlements back anyway just don’t cut it.

Mr. Sharon is unfairly trying to stack the deck before peace talks even begin by expanding the Jewish presence around the traditionally Arab eastern parts of Jerusalem. Such a move could further seal off those Israeli Arabs in east Jerusalem from Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

Mr. Sharon deserves credit for the upcoming withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip. The disengagement promises to be emotionally gut-wrenching, pitting young Israeli soldiers against Zionist settlers who believe that God gave them the land from which they’re about to be evacuated. But building new settlements is the wrong way to ease that political pressure. Israel can’t simply exchange Gaza for more settlements in the West Bank. There is no realistic substitute for a negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and such a pact will never happen without Israeli withdrawal of most of its settlements.

“Settlers have a long history of harassing village residents,
poisoning their wells, destroying property, and beating residents.”
Palestinian Hillside Poisoned, Settlers Suspected

One morning two weeks ago, the Palestinian shepherds of At-Tuwani, south of Hebron, discovered that the hillside next to Havat Maon outpost was covered in tiny green poison pellets affecting five acres of land. The pellets were strategically placed under bushes where the sheep usually graze, prompting the shepherds to quickly move their flocks from the hill. The poison was also placed close to one of the village’s major water sources.

The shepherds immediately called the Israeli police who eventually arrived to take samples, pictures, and statements. The shepherds are unsure when the hill will be cleaned and when they can return with their sheep. Settlers from the area have a long history of harassing village residents, poisoning their wells, destroying property, and beating residents. In the last two months alone, international volunteers have recorded at least 20 incidents of settler violence against South Hebron Hill shepherds who are grazing their sheep. In fact, only five days before this recent poisoning, a Maon settler security officer told international volunteers that he wanted a “demarcation zone” around the settlement where neither Palestinians nor settlers could go. He warned that if the village did not agree to such a zone, he had “ways of making it happen.”

The shepherds of At-Tuwani will not be able to graze on the hillside next to the Israeli outpost of Havot Maon for a while, leaving even less space to graze. Last month the Israeli military informed villagers that the area south of the village had been made into a military firing zone and they were forbidden from grazing their sheep there. The shepherds have been prevented from grazing to the north of the village, as they are prohibited from crossing the Israeli settler road. To the west of At-Tuwani, shepherds have undergone illegal harassment from both settlers and soldiers as they tried to graze within 400 meters of Maon settlement.
—For more information (in Spanish) see http://www.operazionecolomba.org
—In English, see http://www.operazionecolomba.org/opcoleng.htm

“O Little Ghetto of Bethlehem”
“It is a window for people around the world to look in; to see past the walls and barbed wire fences, to hear from the people in Bethlehem themselves.”

A new website features voices from one of the most famous ghettos—Bethlehem. The Bethlehem Bloggers website is dedicated to bringing first hand insight into life and politics inside Israeli-occupied Bethlehem. The site is managed by a diverse group of activists and professionals living and working in the area. And an introductory statement posted to the website explains: “We are Palestinians and internationals who are living in the Bethlehem region, and who want to tell the world what it is like to be living in occupied territory, under an economic siege, encircled by a wall and military checkpoints: what it is like to live in a Palestinian Ghetto.”

As Israel tightens its control throughout occupied Palestine, indigenous Palestinian communities continue to suffer. Israeli occupying forces dominate the Bethlehem region with a network of illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints, and by-pass roads. The Apartheid Wall now pushes in close on Bethlehem and the neighboring towns and villages, segregating villages and appropriating large portions of Palestinian land.

There are seven permanent Israeli military checkpoints in the Bethlehem District which control access to the ghetto. Israeli troops also often set up an additional three temporary checkpoints to monitor movement within the area, and more than 35 roadblocks make it difficult for Palestinians to move between their towns and cities. There are also more than 11 illegal Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in the Bethlehem District. Most of these settlements are currently undergoing expansion, despite Israel’s stated adherence to the Roadmap peace plan which demands a “settlement freeze” as part of its first phase of implementation.

The Bethlehem Bloggers site shows the effect of the Israeli occupation on life in Bethlehem. It is also a window for people around the world to look in; to see past the walls and barbed wire fences, to hear from the people in Bethlehem themselves.
See the site at: http://www.bethlehemghetto.blogspot.com

To view a photo of "the gateway to Bethlehem" click here.

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