The Nakba march

Jonathan Cook writing from Nazareth, Live from Palestine, 16 May 2008

(Nidal El-Khairy)

It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country's forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue.
But this year's Independence Day festivities have concealed as much as they have revealed. The images of joy and celebration seen by the world have failed to acknowledge the reality of a deeply divided Israel, shared by two peoples with conflicting memories and claims to the land.
They have also served to shield from view the fact that the Palestinians' dispossession is continuing in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. Far from being a historical event, Israel's "independence" -- and the ever greater toll it is inflicting on the Palestinian people -- is very much a live issue.
Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population -- more than one million Palestinian citizens -- remembered the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society.
As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel's Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.
But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year's march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.
Although most of the refugees from the 1948 war -- numbering in their millions -- ended up in camps in neighboring Arab states, a few remained inside Israel. Today one in four Palestinian citizens of Israel is either a refugee or descended from one. Not only have they been denied the right ever to return to their homes, like the other refugees, but many live tantalizingly close to their former communities.
The destroyed Palestinian villages have either been reinvented as exclusive Jewish communities or buried under the foliage of national forestation programs overseen by the Jewish National Fund and paid for with charitable donations from American and European Jews.
There have been many Nakba processions held over the past week but the march across fields close by the city of Nazareth was the only one whose destination was a former Palestinian village now occupied by Jews.
The village of Saffuriya was bombed from the air for two hours in July 1948, in one of the first uses of air power by the new Jewish state. Most of Saffuriya's 5,000 inhabitants fled northwards towards Lebanon, where they have spent six decades waiting for justice. But a small number went south towards Nazareth, where they sought sanctuary and eventually became Israeli citizens.
Today they live in a neighborhood of Nazareth called Safafra, after their destroyed village. They look down into the valley where a Jewish farming community known as Zippori has been established on the ruins of their homes.
This year's Nakba procession to Saffuriya was a small act of defiance by Palestinian citizens in returning to the village, even if only symbolically and for a few hours. The threat this posed to Israeli Jews' enduring sense of their own exclusive victimhood was revealed in the unprovoked violence unleashed against the defenseless marchers, many of them children.
Like many others, I was there with a child -- my five-month-old daughter. Fortunately, for her and my sake, we left after she grew tired from being in the heat for so long, moments before the trouble started.
When we left, things were entirely peaceful. Nonetheless, as we drove away, I saw members of a special paramilitary police unit known as the Yassam appearing on their motorbikes. The Yassam are effectively a hit squad, known for striking out first and asking questions later. Trouble invariably follows in their wake.
The events that unfolded that afternoon have been captured on mostly homemade videos that can be viewed on the Internet. The context for understanding these images is provided below in accounts from witnesses to the police attack:
Several thousand Palestinians, waving flags and chanting Palestinian songs, marched towards a forest planted on Saffuriya's lands. Old people, some of whom remembered fleeing their villages in 1948, were joined by young families and several dozen sympathetic Israeli Jews. As the marchers headed towards Saffuriya's spring, sealed off by the authorities with a metal fence a few years ago to stop the villagers collecting water, they were greeted with a small counter-demonstration by right-wing Israeli Jews.
They had taken over the fields on the other side of the main road at the entrance to what is now the Jewish community of Zippori. They waved Israeli flags and sang nationalist Hebrew songs, as armed riot police lined the edge of the road that separated the two demonstrations.
Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Culture and Tourism Association whose parents were expelled from Saffuriya, said: "There were some 50 Jewish demonstrators who had been allowed to take over the planned destination of our march. Their rights automatically trumped ours, even though there were thousands of us there and only a handful of them."
The police had their backs to the Jewish demonstrators while they faced off with the Palestinian procession. "It was as if they were telling us: we are here only for the benefit of Jews, not for you," said Shehadeh. "It was a reminder, if we needed it, that this is a Jewish state and we are even less welcome than usual when we meet as Palestinians."
The marchers turned away and headed uphill into the woods, to a clearing where Palestinian refugees recounted their memories.
When the event ended in late afternoon, the marchers headed back to the main road and their cars. In the police version, Palestinian youths blocked the road and threw stones at passing cars, forcing the police to use force to restore order.
Dozens of marchers were injured, including women and children, and two Arab Knesset members, Mohammed Barakeh and Wassel Taha, were bloodied by police batons. Mounted police charged into the crowds, while stun grenades and tear gas were liberally fired into fields being crossed by families. Eight youths were arrested.
Shehadeh, who was close to the police when the trouble began, and many other marchers say they saw the Jewish right-wingers throwing stones at them from behind the police. A handful of Palestinian youngsters responded in kind. Others add that the police were provoked by a young woman waving a Palestinian flag.
"None of the police were interested in stopping the Jews throwing stones. And even if a few Palestinian youths were reacting, you chase after them and arrest them, you don't send police on mounted horseback charging into a crowd of families and fire tear gas and stun grenades at them. It was totally indiscriminate and reckless."
Clouds of gas enveloped the slowest families as they struggled with their children to take cover in the forest.
Therese Zbeidat, a Dutch national who was there with her Palestinian husband Ali and their two teenage daughters, Dina and Awda, called the experiences of her family and others at the hands of the police "horrifying."
"Until then it really was a family occasion. When the police fired the tear gas, there were a couple near us pushing a stroller down the stony track towards the road. A thick cloud of gas was coming towards us. I told the man to leave the stroller and run uphill as fast as he could with the baby.
"Later I found them with the baby retching, its eyes streaming and choking. It broke my heart. There were so many families with young children, and the police charge was just so unprovoked. It started from nothing."
The 17-year-old boyfriend of Therese Zbeidat's daughter, Awda, was among those arrested. "It was his first time at any kind of nationalist event," she said. "He was with his mother, and when we started running up the hill away from the police on horseback, she stumbled and fell."
"He went to help her and the next thing a group of about 10 police were firing tear gas canisters directly at him. Then they grabbed him by the keffiyah [traditional checkered scarf] around his neck and pulled him away. All he was doing was helping his mother!"
Later, Therese and her daughters thought they had made it to safety only to find themselves in the midst of another charge from a different direction, this time by police on foot. Awda was knocked to the ground and kicked in her leg, while Dina was threatened by a policeman who told her, "I will break your head."
"I've been [at] several demonstrations before when the police have turned nasty," said Therese, "but this was unlike anything I've seen. Those young children, some barely toddlers, amidst all that chaos crying for their parents -- what a way to mark Independence Day!"
Jafar Farah, head of the political lobbying group Mossawa, who was there with his two young sons, found them a safe spot in the forest and rushed downhill to help ferry other children to safety.
The next day he attended a court hearing at which the police demanded that the eight arrested men be detained for a further seven days. Three, including a local journalist who had been beaten and had his camera stolen by police, were freed after the judge watched video footage of the confrontation taken by marchers.
Farah said of the Independence Day events:

"For decades our community was banned from remembering publicly what happened to us as a people during the Nakba. Our teachers were sacked for mentioning it. We were not even supposed to know that we are Palestinians.
And in addition, the police have regularly used violence against us to teach us our place. In October 2000, at the start of the intifada, 13 of our unarmed young men were shot dead for demonstrating. No one has ever been held accountable.
Despite all that we started to believe that Israel was finally mature enough to let us remember our own national tragedy. Families came to show their children the ruins of the villages so they had an idea of where they came from. The procession was becoming a large and prominent event. People felt safe attending.
But we were wrong, it seems. It looked to me very much like this attack by the police was planned. I think the authorities were unhappy about the success of the processions, and wanted them stopped.
They may yet win. What parent will bring their children to the march next year knowing that they will be attacked by armed police?"

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net.

60 years of Nakba - 60 years of suffering

Sixty years ago in Battir (Part 2)

Hasan Abu Nimah writing from Amman, Jordan, Live from Palestine, 7 May 2008
Women and girls in Battir prepare to dance, early 1950s. (Photographer unknown)

For a long time any discussion of the "Arab-Israeli conflict" has skipped one basic fact: Israel, whether one loves or hates it, was created at the expense of the Palestinians. An entire people and hundreds of communities that had lived for centuries in tranquility had to be ruthlessly and unjustly shattered to make room for the Zionist state. The story of my village, Battir, southwest of Jerusalem, is only one of hundreds.

When I was growing up, hardly anyone in the village was aware, or needed to be aware, that our village traced its roots back to the second century. Generation after generation tilled the land, lived off its gifts and engaged in small trade. They adapted to the often harsh environment, brought up their children, interacted with their neighbors from villages near and far and lived their lives relatively happily and peacefully.

Although Palestine had a large Christian population, the 1,200 people in our village were all Muslim -- though there was one German wife who was very popular and known for her kindness, and I believe she was Jewish, by the name of Lina Shaffer -- and lived in effect like a large extended family. Everyone in the village knew everyone else, and everyone shared happy and sad moments. The whole village knew if someone was getting married, got a job in the city, was caught up in a problem, was expecting guests, or even bought a new garment.

Life was simple, indeed you could say primitive. There was no electricity, running water or other services, no paved roads, no cars or any kind of machines. Most houses had one or two rooms, which people often shared with their animals. Unless cold weather dictated otherwise, women cooked on open fires in front of their houses using home-made pottery. So in addition to everything else, the neighbors always knew what you were cooking.

People never locked their doors, even when they were not home. But that does not mean that there were no disputes, rivalries and even fights. Indeed, in such close quarters these were unavoidable. But these were mostly settled through the wisdom and compromise of family chieftains as there was no police station in the village. Only serious cases, involving injuries, were reported to the Mandate authorities in Jerusalem who would come down by car if there was a matter they had to address.

The village elementary school which I attended taught boys Arabic, arithmetic and Qur'an until the fourth grade. By that time they were expected to have learned the Qur'an by heart. The school was gradually extended up to seventh grade by just the time the winds of danger began to gather over the country. Girls did not attend school until UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, established a school for them in the early 1950s after the first war was over and the village people returned home.

The village was much like a voluntary cooperative. If someone wanted to build a house people would offer free labor and contribute small amounts of cash to buy materials, a practice that was strictly and evenly reciprocated village-wide. This system also applied to gathering the harvest and preparing the land for the next planting season. People also made small donations for weddings and attended to the needs of the sick and the poor.

Apart from agriculture, many young men worked for the Mandate government, mainly the railways, the Palestine Police, the post office or other clerical jobs. A few managed to finish high school in Jerusalem to become school teachers.

Battir had a simple mosque with one large room and no minaret. The call to prayer was made from just in front of the mosque and could be heard throughout the village. There were also a few public places for men to meet in the evenings for coffee and conversations. Each family took turns to supply coffee and firewood for these gatherings. Visitors from outside the village were received, entertained and sometimes offered accommodation in those public houses, which were also used for other community occasions such as weddings or mourning.

When the Mandate administration started to crumble, most village men, including those who lost their jobs, started to join militias to defend the country. Though they did not match the Jewish militias in organization, training or arms, they fought as best as they could. Mainly armed with second hand rifles they rushed to help defend neighboring villages as they fell under attack.

The Palestine war of 1948 was disastrous. Neither the volunteers who came to the country from the Arab world, nor the Arab states' armies that intervened in May 1948, well after much of the Zionist ethnic cleansing plan had been put into action, managed to save much.

Once the fighting stopped 78 percent of Palestine had fallen to the Zionists, and became the "State of Israel." After fierce fighting around Jerusalem, the Jordanian army held on to the West Bank, and Egypt held the Gaza Strip, which together formed the remaining 22 percent of Palestine.

Battir itself was not occupied, although all the villagers fled under heavy fire from Zionist forces on the opposite slopes. The village ended up right on the front line when the armistice lines were drawn. Israel wanted to control the entire Jerusalem-Jaffa railway, which it mainly did, except for the small sector which runs through Battir's valley.

A special proviso in the armistice agreement drew the line two hundred yards east of the railway, thus cutting the village almost in half. This was meant to allow Israel to use the railway and to provide a corridor for its protection, but at the same time it allowed the village inhabitants to reach their lands beyond the demarcation line on the Israeli side. This was an unusual overlap which caused serious problems. About 15 village houses and the school ended up on the Israeli side, but two gates in the barbed wire allowed people to cross either way and to reopen the school under the Jordanian administration following the unification of the West Bank with East Jordan in 1950. Nevertheless, several villagers crossing the barbed wire to reach their property were shot dead by Israeli patrols.

For the villagers who had spent months sleeping in fields as refugees, or dispersed further away, returning to the village after the armistice was a great relief. But nothing was the same. Now we were cut off from Jerusalem, the city which had been our lifeline to any services not available in the village, as well as the main market for our produce.

The armistice line became like a wall concealing an alien, hostile and inaccessible world, where before there had been an environment of gracious Arab villages enjoying ties of kith and kin that we had taken for granted and whose end we could not have imagined.

The village of al-Walaja had lain across the valley on the other side of the railway line, close enough that Battir's people could watch al-Walajah's coming and goings, hear people calling to each other, and even hear their wedding celebrations. Similarly, al-Qabu lay just to the south and tens of other villages to which we were linked lay beyond our line of sight. Many ended up deserted and in enemy territory.

Instead of hearing the ordinary sounds of al-Walaja, after the war, we watched with dismay as the Israeli army blew up the deserted houses, as it rushed to eliminate any trace of Palestinian existence. One after another, we would see a house disappear in a cloud of dust and seconds later we would hear the loud explosion. This went on until the entire village was destroyed. (Some of the destroyed town's inhabitants built a new village across the valley from the original site and this new village bears the name "al-Walaja" today).

Nor did the armistice provide much safety. Beyond the barbed wire, people had to move with extreme caution. Israeli patrols repeatedly arrested farmers, led them deeper into the occupied territory and then executed them. Villagers took great risks searching night after night in dangerous terrain until they recovered the bodies. The Israelis also made incursions deep into Arab-held territory with terrible tolls in death and destruction. Husan village a few miles south of Battir, and Nahalin experienced such attacks as did neighboring Beit Jala.

Villagers traveling early to market were also ambushed; one night I woke up to shrieks and wails to find that my sister Zahiyya had been brought home soaked in blood. Caught in one of these ambushes, she had been shot in her upper leg. She survived despite heavy loss of blood and no proper medical care.

When we returned to the village after the armistice, every house had been ransacked and emptied of its contents. Even doors and windows had been removed. Slowly we managed to replace and rebuild many of these things but there was much that was irreparable; we could not rebuild the same community atmosphere. That was lost forever.

But we are thankful that Battir, unlike hundreds of other Palestinian villages, did survive the Nakba -- the catastrophe. That was only a respite. In 1967, it fell under Israeli occupation along with the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Forty-one years later, Battir is drowning in a sea of Israeli settlements and lies virtually cut off from what is left of its Palestinian environment by Israel's relentless construction of settler roads and apartheid walls.

I was there last in the summer of 1966 spending my usual summer leave with my family. The 1967 occupation shut me out until I managed a brief visit in 1997, 36 years later. There was little that I could recognize and I have not been back again.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Sixty years ago in Battir (Part 1)

Hasan Abu Nimah writing from Amman, Jordan, Live from Palestine, 30 April 2008

The author's mother (right) with family members preparing food, early 1950s. (Photographer unknown)

Sixty years ago in Battir, my small hillside village near Jerusalem, I witnessed the chaotic collapse of the British Mandate administration in Palestine and the beginning of the Nakba.

The previous months had been decisive ones for the fate of Palestine, although we did not yet know it. The Jews, fed up with British procrastination in fulfilling Balfour's promise of letting them transform our homeland into their "national home," launched a bloody campaign of terror both against the British and the Arabs. The Jewish militias targeted the British to speed up their departure from Palestine, and hit the Arabs to quell the rising resistance to Zionist colonization. Violence broke out in early 1947, after the British announced that they would leave Palestine by 15 May 1948. When the United Nations passed its partition resolution on 29 November 1947, the violence began to lurch into full-scale war.

Battir's 1,200 inhabitants were wracked by uncertainty. There were hopes that things would turn out all right, but fear dominated as the atmosphere became bleaker by the day.

I vividly remember the stories of horror which haunted the people of Battir, such as the attack on the railway station in Jerusalem on 21 October 1946. The train was their lifeline to the city where they marketed their produce and bought their supplies. People also walked to Jerusalem and often traveled by car on the unpaved road that ran parallel to the railway line, though that was much harder. A few months earlier a Jewish bomb attack on Jerusalem's King David Hotel, which served as the British headquarters, killed 91 people and injured dozens. Later, after the partition vote, when the Zionist forces began their armed campaign to seize Palestine, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews in the land they both claimed.

The gunfire and chaos edged ever closer to Battir, a village that traces its roots to the second century, and which now found its peace and tranquility under threat.

Apart from home just up the hill, the center of my life was at the elementary school for boys, that I attended, and that lay at bottom of the valley that Battir overlooks. Just next to the school was the railway station which was the first stop on the railway line from Jerusalem to Jaffa. The station and the school with its small football field formed a sort of campus at the edge of the village, surrounded by tall pine and citrus trees providing ample greenery and shade on hot summer days. For us children it was the perfect place to play and loiter in and out of school hours.

I remember these as the lively, busy places they once were with schoolchildren, the station staff, and at one point a British military garrison. Families would take the train down from Jerusalem to enjoy weekly picnics in the romantic rural atmosphere of our village and they would be joined by local people doing the same. At school we experimented with practical agriculture which was part of the curriculum; this included keeping beehives for honey and breeding chickens.

A view of the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway line as it runs along the valley below the village of Battir in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Ruined station buildings can be seen to the left of the track, while the village elementary school can be seen to the right. (Photographer unknown)

Villagers, adults and children alike, never tired of the spectacle of the steam engines stopping to fill their huge tanks with water, and bringing with them all kinds of people to spark local curiosity. Villagers would sell fruit and vegetables to passengers through the carriage windows -- a small but steady source of badly needed income.

The nearest village to Battir was al-Walajah, just less than two miles north, and across the railway line to the west. People from the neighboring villages mixed and intermarried freely.

During the last days of the Mandate all this began to change. Cargo trains became the targets of robbers who forced them to stop along the line and emptied them of all their valuables. British soldiers on board the trains, supposedly to guard them, hardly offered any resistance; they often dropped their arms and left the scene peacefully. Soon the trains stopped coming completely, and when the trains stopped everything else fell apart too. The station offices and the station manager's house were ransacked, and so was our school. There was no law or authority to protect people's lives and property. We had to look after ourselves.

By this time the well-documented and carefully organized campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Haganah and other Jewish militias had begun, with the goal of conquering as much land as possible from the Palestinians so that the state of Israel could be established. One wave after another of people from Jerusalem-area villages, fleeing Jewish attacks, started to arrive in Battir, seeking shelter and safety. People received them hospitably, believing it was only a temporary crisis. But as one village after another fell to the Jewish forces, and the front line approached us, we too had to leave for safety.

That was soon after news of the April 1948 massacre in the village of Deir Yassin reached us. As Deir Yassin was not far away, some of the survivors arrived in Battir. They told of the horror they witnessed and the futile attempts to resist the onslaught. As the Jewish attackers intended, their deeds instilled terror in the hearts of Palestinians.

One afternoon in May 1948, Battir fell under heavy fire from the opposite slopes, across the railway line to the west, which had fallen to the Jewish fighters. We carried whatever belongings we could and headed east a few miles where there were vineyards and a small spring. I was only with my mother and my younger sisters; all the other members of my family had left separately. We too thought it would be a short escape, but we camped in that vineyard with many other people from the village all summer, our hopes dimming as the heat rose.

At first we slept in the open, under the trees. Then we built small shelters out of branches in an attempt to gain some privacy. We cooked and baked bread on an open fire. The one great relief is that the spring gave us a reliable supply of fresh water, but otherwise life was very difficult and dreadfully uncertain. When people started to fear that our departure might not be temporary, some of them risked their lives to return to the village to recover whatever belongings they could.

By the end of the summer, with life under the trees becoming unbearable, people started to disperse in every direction. Many joined refugee camps in the Jordan Valley. My mother, my younger sister and I went to Bethlehem where we joined my older brother who had previously been an officer in the Palestine police and had now joined the Jordanian army. In his tiny officer's apartment, as well as us, he ended up sheltering my eldest sister and her large family as well as his own. It was hard, but we were grateful. We stayed in Bethlehem until the summer of 1949 when the war was ended by the armistice agreement.

Battir lay right on the ceasefire line, and it was now physically divided by barbed wire. Unlike hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians forced out of their villages, we did return home. But there we faced a totally new situation.

To be continued.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Gaza death toll, humanitarian crisis escalates

Relatives of 14-year-old Maryam Talat Mahuf, killed when Israeli forces attempted to assassinate her father, mourn during her funeral in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, 26 April 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Report, Al Mezan, 6 May 2008

The number of victims killed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) has increased amid continued escalation of its attacks on, and incursions into, the Gaza Strip recently. According to Al Mezan Center's monitoring and documentation, IOF stepped up their human rights violations and committed breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL) systematically in the Gaza Strip.

According to Al Mezan's statistics, 69 Palestinians have been killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip since the start of April 2008. Of them, 20 were children and one was a woman. This brings the toll of Gazans killed by IOF since the beginning of 2008 to 316, including 62 children and 16 women. During the same period the IOF carried out 30 incursions into the Gaza Strip. During these incursions, 127 Palestinians were detained; 17 of them are still under detention. Furthermore, IOF razed 372 dunams of agricultural land, and destroyed 15 homes.

Both IOF's aggression and blockade have caused paralysis to Gaza's economy, as they increased the poverty and unemployment rates, and hindered production and distribution of agricultural goods. The restriction of fuel supply including cooking gas, has also encroached severely on the lives of the population and their livelihood.

According to Al Mezan's investigations, during April, the IOF allowed the entry of 6,406,000 liters of industrial diesel to operate the power plant, with an average 213,533 liters daily. This represents a decrease by over 50 percent when compared with the amount IOF allowed into Gaza before October 2007, when it imposed the restrictions on fuel. Also, IOF permitted 2,229 tons of cooking gas during the same month, with a daily average of 74.3 tons. This amount is less than 30 percent of the previous rates allowed into Gaza, which was over 250 tons per day.

The quantity of ordinary diesel for transportation and electricity generators that entered the strip that same month is 1,306,410 liters, a daily average of 43,547 liters; i.e. less than 10 percent of the pre-October 2007 rate. As for benzene, IOF allowed 135,010 liters to enter during April. This is an average of 4,500 liters per day, only 20 percent of the pervious rates.

Al Mezan renews its condemnation of IOF escalation of its aggression and collective punishment on the Gaza Strip. These acts have brought about serious violations of human rights and are considered as grave breaches of IHL and human rights norms. Al Mezan believes that the occurrence of these violations is, at least partly, a result of the continued international silence as such violations occurred over a long time.

Al Mezan therefore reiterates its calls upon the International community to take urgent actions to provide effective protection for civilians in the Gaza Strip and halt the Israeli violations, some of which mount to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also calls on the international community to intervene to lift Israel's blockade of Gaza, and bring to an end the illegal collective punishment of civilians.

This report was issued on 4 May.

U.S. Aid to Israel: What U.S. Taxpayer Should Know

by Tom Malthaner
This morning as I was walking down Shuhada Street in Hebron, I saw graffiti marking the newly painted storefronts and awnings. Although three months past schedule and 100 percent over budget, the renovation of Shuhada Street was finally completed this week. The project manager said the reason for the delay and cost overruns was the sabotage of the project by the Israeli settlers of the Beit Hadassah settlement complex in Hebron. They broke the street lights, stoned project workers, shot out the windows of bulldozers and other heavy equipment with pellet guns, broke paving stones before they were laid and now have defaced again the homes and shops of Palestinians with graffiti. The settlers did not want Shuhada St. opened to Palestinian traffic as was agreed to under Oslo 2. This renovation project is paid for by USAID funds and it makes me angry that my tax dollars have paid for improvements that have been destroyed by the settlers.
Most Americans are not aware how much of their tax revenue our government sends to Israel. For the fiscal year ending in September 30, 1997, the U.S. has given Israel $6.72 billion: $6.194 billion falls under Israel's foreign aid allotment and $526 million comes from agencies such as the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Information Agency and the Pentagon. The $6.72 billion figure does not include loan guarantees and annual compound interest totalling $3.122 billion the U.S. pays on money borrowed to give to Israel. It does not include the cost to U.S. taxpayers of IRS tax exemptions that donors can claim when they donate money to Israeli charities. (Donors claim approximately $1 billion in Federal tax deductions annually. This ultimately costs other U.S. tax payers $280 million to $390 million.)
When grant, loans, interest and tax deductions are added together for the fiscal year ending in September 30, 1997, our special relationship with Israel cost U.S. taxpayers over $10 billion.
Since 1949 the U.S. has given Israel a total of $83.205 billion. The interest costs borne by U.S. tax payers on behalf of Israel are $49.937 billion, thus making the total amount of aid given to Israel since 1949 $133.132 billion. This may mean that U.S. government has given more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen in a given year than it has given to the average American citizen.
I am angry when I see Israeli settlers from Hebron destroy improvements made to Shuhada Street with my tax money. Also, it angers me that my government is giving over $10 billion to a country that is more prosperous than most of the other countries in the world and uses much of its money for strengthening its military and the oppression of the Palestinian people

Mahmoud Darwish... Mohammad

Mohamed,
nestles in the bosom of his father, a bird afraid
of the infernal sky: father protect me
from the upward flight! My wing is
slight for the wind … and the light is black

Mohamed,wants to return home, with no
bicycle ... or new shirt
yearns for the school bench …
the notebook of grammar and conjugation, take me
to our home, father, to prepare for my lessons
to continue being, little by little …
on the seashore, under the palms …
and nothing further, nothing further

Mohamed,
faces an army, with no stone or shrapnel
of stars, does not notice the wall to write: my freedom
will not die, for he has no freedom yet
to defend. No perspective for the dove of Pablo
Picasso. He continues to be born, continues
to be born in a name bearing him the curse of the name. How
many times will his self give birth to a child
with no home ... with no time for childhood?
Where will he dream if the dream would come …
and land is a wound ... and a temple?

Mohamed,
sees his inescapable death approaching. But then
remembers, a leopard he has seen on the tv screen,
a fierce one besieging a suckling fawn. When it
came near and smelt the milk, it would not pounce.
As if the milk tames the wild beast.
Hence, I will survive - says the boy -
and weeps: for my life is there hidden
in my mother's chest. I will survive ... and witness

Translated into English by Amr Khadr