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The War on Gaza and Public Opinion with Ms. Nadia Hijab
Friday, July 24, 2009
Edited
Transcript of Remarks by Ms. Nadia
Hijab
Transcript No. 316 (24 July 2009)
Transcript No. 316 (24 July 2009)
As the war on Gaza
unfolded in December 2008 and January 2009, the
reaction by individuals and the international
community as a whole has caused the conflict to
be characterized as possibly one of the most
important events in shifting perceptions of the
Arab-Israeli conflict. First, tracing why
the war on Gaza is so different, Nadia Hijab,
senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine
Studies, shows how the situation in Gaza and in
the Occupied Territories as a whole is
unbearable for the Palestinian
population. With these conditions set,
shifts in both state policy and public opinion,
in part a result of the war on Gaza, will
certainly play a role in any attempt to end the
conflict.
To view the video
of this briefing online go to
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/6442/pid/3584
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
9 July 2009
Ms. Nadia Hijab:
Thank you very much, Holly, and I'd like to really thank the intern program of the Palestine Center for inviting me to speak. I think it's a great program. It gives a lot of people a lot of exposure to the issues and, of course, the interns of today are the speakers and the leaders of tomorrow. So, thank you for having me here.
So, I'm going to do three things today, and it's going to be offering rather a broad sweep on the issues. First, I want to talk about why the war on Gaza is so different from other events during the 60-year course of this Arab-Israeli conflict. Second, I want to talk briefly about the actual conditions in the Occupied Territories. And third, I want to discuss the shifts in state policy and public opinion and to look at, kind of, the different forces that are shaping the future and opportunities for intervention by different actors.
So first, what is the significance of the war on Gaza? Why are we still talking about it, you know, months after it happened when there's been so much conflict and war during the last 60 years?
I think future historians of the Arab-Israeli conflict will identify certain defining moments when the balance of power shifted between the Israelis and the Arabs, starting from the War of 1948 through the War of 1967, which led to the Israeli occupation of the rest of Palestine and other Arab lands, and through to the present time. I think the War on Gaza, which of course took place in December 2008/January 2009, will probably stand out as the most defining moment of all. We might even start to speak of the conflict before Gaza and after Gaza.
Now, in almost all other conflicts and during most of the course of this conflict, Israel has had the upper hand militarily as well as in terms of framing the debate, framing the discourse on this conflict, which is actually a very crucial dimension in the way it's perceived. There have been some notable exceptions to Israel's supremacy. One was the '73 Arab-Israeli War in October '73 and [late Palestinian President] Yasser Arafat's speech at the UN in 1974. This ushered in a period, for a variety of factors, a period of Palestinian strength; not military strength to be sure but in the more important areas of diplomacy and framing the debate. This period of Palestinian strength lasted, I would say, until 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, dispersed the Palestine Liberation Organization throughout the world and really crushed it for a while.
Another exception to Israeli supremacy came in 1987 with the first intifada, which was almost fully nonviolent. You know intifada means uprising, and it was the first uprising against Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This period of Palestinian strength ended with the Oslo Accords of 1993. And in fact, in hindsight, one could say that the Oslo Accords constituted, for all intents and purposes, a Palestinian concession of defeat by the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]. The years after '93 were marked by the steady dismemberment of the Palestinian national movement and also of what had been a very powerful international movement of solidarity with the Palestinians, until then. And one indication of Palestinian weakness was the fact that Israeli settlement continued during the entire peace process between 1993 and 1999 when Palestinians and Israelis were actually signing peace agreements. Israeli settlement continued, and they more than doubled the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And this was during all Israeli governments, whether Labor or Kadima or Likud.
So in a sense, the impact of the Israeli war on Gaza this past winter echoes that of the first intifada of 1987 in some ways. The first intifada presented the conflict to the world in really unmistakable terms. It was a defenseless population rising up against an overwhelmingly superior occupier in a struggle for justice and for human rights. Now in Gaza--in spite of all of Israel's attempts to frame the conflict as being between two military forces, two military adversaries, i.e. Hamas and Israel, [that] are equal and they are struggling; they are in a conflict and a war. In spite of all of Israel's attempts to frame the Gaza war as a battle between two military forces--and this attempt included excluding the news media from Gaza--the reality came through in the starkest possible terms.
For one thing, Israel didn't succeed in framing this battle because everyone who is in any way a consumer of the news media, of any news media, knew that Gaza had been under siege for the two years preceding the Israeli assault. The siege had been a major news story since it started in spring of 2006 after Hamas won parliamentary elections in January and after it formed the government. And it had become much tighter after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007.
So, here's this besieged population exposed to the most destructive arms that a modern army can throw at them, including illegal weapons such as white phosphorus. Israel's violations of international law during its war on Gaza were very many and they ranged from the indiscriminate use of force against civilians to preventing medical teams from reaching the wounded. But the American Jewish Professor of International Law Richard Falk, who's documented actually a lot of the violations and analyzed them because that's his job as a professor of international law, plus he's the Special Rapporteur of the UN on the conflict, he's gone to the heart of the issue. He says that actually Israel's decision to attack Gaza violates international law because there was a cease-fire. There was a different way of keeping Israel safe, if that's the rationale, from Hamas rockets, a cease-fire. And that cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was holding until Israel broke it on November 4, 2008 with an attack that killed six Hamas guerillas. As a result, Richard Falk says that the Israeli attacks to begin with were a prohibited non-defensive use of force under the UN Charter and actually constitute a crime against peace.
Now, I think these kinds of things were clear to a lot of people around the world, even though they may not have framed them in this way. The collective punishment of the Gaza population throughout the months of siege, before the war, during the war and after the war is actually a war crime. You have no right as a state to collectively punish an entire population, and Richard Falk has described it as a crime against humanity.
I think maybe what was particularly horrifying about Gaza--and again everyone who in any way watched TV or consumed any news media during December and January could see this--what was particularly horrifying was that the population had nowhere to flee. And Richard Falk identifies this as, perhaps, introducing a new violation of international law and human rights--the right to seek refuge. The Palestinians in Gaza are completely surrounded by a barrier by Israel and all the Israeli crossings were closed, and Egypt did not open its crossing with Gaza. So, they had to stay there and just be bombarded in an area which is effectively just twice the size of Washington and be bombarded for over three weeks.
The war also exposed the behavior of the Israeli army when soldiers revealed--and this was in all the mainstream press actually including the New York Times--when soldiers said well they basically had been told not to spare civilian lives. The New York Times also carried another very shocking story--the behavior of the Israeli soldiers, namely their production of t-shirts to commemorate their service in a war. And some of the t-shirts had images as crude and as awful as a soldier pointing at a pregnant woman and saying, "One shot, two kills." So, the war revealed this aspect.
Now, the war was followed by, within a few weeks, the election of the most right-wing government that Israel's had probably. And the positions of members of this government, like Avigdor Lieberman who's the Foreign Minister, have come to further expose Israel's treatment of the Palestinians under occupation and also Israel's treatment of its own citizens. About a fifth of Israel's citizens are Palestinians, and as I'm sure you know, Avigdor Lieberman would very much like them out of there or to have them completely controlled by, for example, swearing a loyalty oath that Israel is a Jewish state, i.e. swearing that they themselves do not count for anything within Israel. So, in short, the flagrant injustice and sheer horror of the war on Gaza has exposed the nature of this conflict, and in this conflict, framing the discourse is really important; the person who is able to frame the discourse then is able to shape the nature of the conflict.
I want to quickly talk about conditions in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem today, at the present time. Of course, Gaza is still under siege; only the bare minimum of food and medicine and fuel gets in. And I would encourage you all to go to the website of the UN Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator, which is ochaopt.org, and read some of the reports; they're very short and they're accompanied by very good maps. And, they tell you what's going on week to week. Now, don't forget that in Gaza about 4,000 homes were destroyed and several thousand others were damaged. Well, no reconstruction materials have been allowed in yet that will allow these homes to be rebuilt, and some Palestinians in Gaza are so desperate they're rebuilding from mud. Although billions of dollars have been pledged in aid to Gaza, nothing really can get in due to the blockade, the Israeli blockade which is very tight on land and also at sea. Palestinian fisherman can't go beyond three kilometer radius, three miles, I believe, from the coast to fish, which is where the real catch is. Otherwise, they are fired on.
So, a lot of what comes in Gaza is smuggled in through tunnels, which is a very dangerous business. During the course of 2008, 46 Palestinians were killed in those tunnels as they tried to bring in goods and another 69 were injured. Actually, a Palestinian was killed just a week ago in a tunnel and about six others were trapped for several hours. I mean, can you imagine such a life where you have to smuggle things in underground to survive?
Now, as horrible as the situation in Gaza is, in some ways it's a red herring to cover up what's going on in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. While everyone's focused on the siege and trying to get food in, people are really, the international community is really busy with what's going on in Gaza, the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is proceeding at a breakneck speed in spite of what the Obama administration is calling for. And, it's continued, as I've said, no matter which Israeli government has been in power. During the last quarter of 2008, 454 new housing units were started in the West Bank, and another 3,229 were under construction. The Israeli group Peace Now, which monitors the settlements, says that the Israeli Ministry of Housing wants to build another 73,000 housing units. This is in illegally occupied land, Palestinian land in the West Bank, which of course means taking farms, orchards, water, etc. just to build for illegal colonizers. So, it wants to build another 73,000 housing units, and about 15,000 have received approval.
Now, you can't carry out the settlement project in the West Bank and East Jerusalem unless you control the population and you control any resistance by the population against what's happening to their land and their country. So, there are constant incursions by Israeli forces, constant arrests and attacks. And I just want to take the example of one week in May, and these figures are from, as I say, OCHA [UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], which I encourage you to look up. During one week in May, Israeli security forces injured 23 Palestinians, including eight children in the West Bank, in various incidents. And this is the same as the weekly average throughout the first quarter of 2009. So, this is going on all the time. And, it's the same as the weekly average of all of 2008. And, a lot of these injuries happened when Palestinians are protesting the seizure of their land to build the separation Wall.
So, there are continuous arrests, incursions. As you know, probably, there's about 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails at the moment. And, talk about population control--over the course of the occupation, from 1967 till now, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have actually been through Israeli jails. So, some estimates have it that about a quarter of the population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem at any one time has been through Israeli jails.
Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes, including and especially in East Jerusalem. And just during the last week of June, there were three such demolitions of Palestinian homes, including two that were forced self-demolitions, i.e. Palestinians had to demolish their own homes. Eleven Palestinians were displaced, including seven children.
Now, it's really scary living there; it's like living in the Wild West with no rule of law, nothing to protect you. There's attacks all the time by armed Israeli settlers. During the last week of June, in East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers assaulted seven Palestinians with their rifle butts and with clubs, including a woman and an infant. And, of course, there's about 600 obstacles to freedom of movement within the West Bank and the separation Wall that Israel is building.
Ok, having presented this somewhat depressing picture, I want to go on to the third part of my talk, which is what are some of the different forces shaping the future of this conflict? First of all, we have the new [U.S. President Barack] Obama administration and, of course, the Gaza attack happened before the Obama administration came in but, I think, really highlighted the need to have a settlement to this conflict. But I believe that all the indications are that the Obama administration came in determined. He said so; he came in determined to see a resolution of this conflict within his first term, within his term of office effectively. Why? Because this administration believes that it is actually a national U.S. security interest to resolve this conflict. And if you want to find out where they're getting their ideas from, I would suggest that you read the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report. I think that's had a huge influence on the direction of the policies of this administration. What this report said is that the U.S. can't achieve any of its objectives in the Middle East without tackling the Arab-Israeli crisis head on--to diffuse the ability, for example, of al-Qaeda to capitalize on sympathies, on popular sympathy throughout the Arab world and the Muslim world for Palestinians and diffuse the possibility of extremist groups cashing in and recruiting members.
Resolving the conflict would enable the United States to get out of Iraq and get out of Afghanistan much more easily; get relations with Iran back onto a normal working relationship if not a bosom friendship; and it would diffuse support for resistance groups. So, I think we're seeing in the Obama administration a determination to end and begin to reverse the Israeli colonization project in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
However, there are limits on what this means the Palestinians would get in terms of their human rights. And if you want to understand what those limits are then I would suggest that you see the report of the U.S. Middle Eastern Project, which is led by Henry Siegman and Brent Scowcroft. The limits would be no Right of Return for the Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel, instead they would get compensation and some might be able to go to the Palestinian state. It would be a two-state solution with a shared Jerusalem, a land-swap to accommodate the majority of settlers, a demilitarized Palestine with a U.S.-led multinational force.
Now, if we look at the role the U.S. is actually playing in the Palestinian territories now, it's not that positive; they're really building up a very strong Palestinian security force, but the aim of the security force is not to enable the Palestinians to resist what Israel is doing to them but to control the Palestinian population. But in spite of these limits, these are important shifts that are happening in the U.S. administration and are reframing the official U.S. discourse and are reframing the media discourse.
Now, if we look at the role of the rest of the international community, they basically take their lead from the U.S. So, if the U.S. is willing to move now, they will move. But, otherwise, if the U.S. isn't willing to move, we don't see much movement from, let's say, the European Union or the United Nations or others. Now, however, given the U.S. leadership, I think you're seeing some European countries speak up. Britain has been very vocal about the illegality of settlement products and cracking down on the sale of settlement products, products that are produced in the illegal Israeli settlements, in Britain. When [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu visited Europe a few weeks ago, he was surprised that both [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy and [Italian Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi, who are seen to be close friends of Israel, both said, "Look, you know, the settlements really have got to be frozen." So, they came up with this strong message. The European Union has come up with a very strong statement just a couple of days ago in which they say basically, "Look, we're fed up for paying for Israel's colonization of the West Bank." The European Commission pointed out, according to an Associated Press report, that Israel's settlement policy is strangling the Palestinian economy and making it extremely dependent on what? On aid. Who's giving most of the aid? The European Union, and they're tired of it. And they say in their statement on Monday, the Commission said, "It's the European taxpayers who pay most of the price of this dependence." I think these are new elements in the discourse that we're hearing.
But, I think the bottom line is that the U.S. role is still very crucial. So, even if the U.S. is weakened as a superpower economically, militarily and politically as a result of a lot of the policies of the [former U.S. President George W.] Bush administration and, in fact, previous administrations still, what the U.S. says goes as far as this conflict is concerned. And so, that makes the role that U.S. citizens play even more important compared to other parts of the world.
So, what is happening at the popular level, at the level of public opinion? Not much of this public opinion is reflected in the media. We're seeing some interesting new reports that I don’t think would have come into the media previously like, for example, there've been two reports, I believe, both in the Washington Post that speak to the role that U.S. , American Jewish charities are playing in subsidizing Israeli settlements. Well, these kinds of reports are pretty new; I don't think we would have seen them if there hadn't been a shift in official discourse.
But, underneath the surface, not that visible in the media, there's a huge change in public opinion which has been there before Gaza but which has been very galvanized by Gaza, and it's reflected in the movement to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it allows or upholds international law and until the Palestinians achieve their human rights. So, this boycott movement, which has been underway since July 2005, actually the call by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions as nonviolent tools to secure Palestinian human rights was made on this day in 2005--July 9, 2005--and if you want to read that call, which I think is a highly significant call, you can find it on pacbi.org. That's the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott.
But, the boycott is happening against corporations and also against individuals, and there's been a coordinated boycott movement against Veolia, a French company which is involved in building a light-rail in Jerusalem to connect Jerusalem to the illegal Israeli settlements. And local Palestinian solidarity groups in places as diverse as Bordeaux in France and Birmingham in Britain and out in Australia and in Sweden and many churches have been involved and others have managed to, it's estimated that they've managed to cost Veolia losses of contracts of about $7 billion. Now, that's serious money that you're talking about. As a result, Veolia recently pulled out, announced anyway, that it was pulling out of the Jerusalem light-rail project. So, this shows the efficacy of nonviolent measures to achieve results.
And, I think maybe one of the biggest shifts that we're seeing in public opinion and in public activism has happened amongst American Jews. There's a growing number of American Jewish groups, both on the left and in the center, that are pushing for either rights on both sides, in the center, or for Palestinian human rights, on the left. They're very involved in the boycott movement for both the cultural and the product boycott. I mean, for example, Jewish Voices for Peace, and you can go to their website and see--jewishvoiceforpeace.org--are playing a leading role in trying to convince Caterpillar to stop selling its bulldozers to Israel because then they're militarized and used to demolish Palestinian homes.
And, just a few days ago, I don't know how many of you have heard of the Yes Men but they're two Jewish activists that target corporations and expose corporate misdeeds, they made a film that was going to be on display in the Jerusalem Film Festival, and they decided to withdraw their film from the Jerusalem Film Festival. And they came up with a very powerful open letter that said this was a hard decision for them to make because of their Jewish roots and because they feel an affinity with many people in Israel, but then they came up with a list of all of Israel's human rights violations or some highlights of Israel's human rights violations in the Occupied Territories. They said, "For us, the bottom line is we cannot be seen to be supporting a state that does those things." We've seen also acts by very brave citizens who try to break the blockade of Gaza on boats. Recently, the Spirit of Humanity was boarded and prevented from going in. But, the group Code Pink has been able to go in through the regular border to stand in solidarity. So, I think we're seeing a big shift.
And I just want to conclude by saying that today is also the fifth anniversary of the International Court of Justice decision reaffirming that the Wall that Israel is building in the Occupied Territories, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is illegal, calling for Israel to pay reparations and calling on all states not to support the regime of settlements and the construction of the Wall. And, this is a very major decision. We haven't seen its impact yet, but if you compare what's happening in Israel today and what happened in South Africa previously, you'll see that you had a state that appeared extremely powerful at one point that was unshakable, which was apartheid South Africa, and the first chinks in the armor of apartheid South Africa came with an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice ruling against it for its attacks on South-West Africa. So, I think we're seeing the beginnings of a major movement that will set a different framework for this debate. I don't know if the Obama administration will be able sort of do a deal or shepherd a deal before this movement gains even more in strength and power and is able to impose itself on the scene or not. But I think we are a very interesting juncture that is a lot more hopeful over the long term and the medium term than it does look at the short term.
Thank you.
Nadia Hijab is senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, an independent non-profit research organization and a leading resource on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/6442/pid/3584
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
9 July 2009
Ms. Nadia Hijab:
Thank you very much, Holly, and I'd like to really thank the intern program of the Palestine Center for inviting me to speak. I think it's a great program. It gives a lot of people a lot of exposure to the issues and, of course, the interns of today are the speakers and the leaders of tomorrow. So, thank you for having me here.
So, I'm going to do three things today, and it's going to be offering rather a broad sweep on the issues. First, I want to talk about why the war on Gaza is so different from other events during the 60-year course of this Arab-Israeli conflict. Second, I want to talk briefly about the actual conditions in the Occupied Territories. And third, I want to discuss the shifts in state policy and public opinion and to look at, kind of, the different forces that are shaping the future and opportunities for intervention by different actors.
So first, what is the significance of the war on Gaza? Why are we still talking about it, you know, months after it happened when there's been so much conflict and war during the last 60 years?
I think future historians of the Arab-Israeli conflict will identify certain defining moments when the balance of power shifted between the Israelis and the Arabs, starting from the War of 1948 through the War of 1967, which led to the Israeli occupation of the rest of Palestine and other Arab lands, and through to the present time. I think the War on Gaza, which of course took place in December 2008/January 2009, will probably stand out as the most defining moment of all. We might even start to speak of the conflict before Gaza and after Gaza.
Now, in almost all other conflicts and during most of the course of this conflict, Israel has had the upper hand militarily as well as in terms of framing the debate, framing the discourse on this conflict, which is actually a very crucial dimension in the way it's perceived. There have been some notable exceptions to Israel's supremacy. One was the '73 Arab-Israeli War in October '73 and [late Palestinian President] Yasser Arafat's speech at the UN in 1974. This ushered in a period, for a variety of factors, a period of Palestinian strength; not military strength to be sure but in the more important areas of diplomacy and framing the debate. This period of Palestinian strength lasted, I would say, until 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, dispersed the Palestine Liberation Organization throughout the world and really crushed it for a while.
Another exception to Israeli supremacy came in 1987 with the first intifada, which was almost fully nonviolent. You know intifada means uprising, and it was the first uprising against Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This period of Palestinian strength ended with the Oslo Accords of 1993. And in fact, in hindsight, one could say that the Oslo Accords constituted, for all intents and purposes, a Palestinian concession of defeat by the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]. The years after '93 were marked by the steady dismemberment of the Palestinian national movement and also of what had been a very powerful international movement of solidarity with the Palestinians, until then. And one indication of Palestinian weakness was the fact that Israeli settlement continued during the entire peace process between 1993 and 1999 when Palestinians and Israelis were actually signing peace agreements. Israeli settlement continued, and they more than doubled the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And this was during all Israeli governments, whether Labor or Kadima or Likud.
So in a sense, the impact of the Israeli war on Gaza this past winter echoes that of the first intifada of 1987 in some ways. The first intifada presented the conflict to the world in really unmistakable terms. It was a defenseless population rising up against an overwhelmingly superior occupier in a struggle for justice and for human rights. Now in Gaza--in spite of all of Israel's attempts to frame the conflict as being between two military forces, two military adversaries, i.e. Hamas and Israel, [that] are equal and they are struggling; they are in a conflict and a war. In spite of all of Israel's attempts to frame the Gaza war as a battle between two military forces--and this attempt included excluding the news media from Gaza--the reality came through in the starkest possible terms.
For one thing, Israel didn't succeed in framing this battle because everyone who is in any way a consumer of the news media, of any news media, knew that Gaza had been under siege for the two years preceding the Israeli assault. The siege had been a major news story since it started in spring of 2006 after Hamas won parliamentary elections in January and after it formed the government. And it had become much tighter after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007.
So, here's this besieged population exposed to the most destructive arms that a modern army can throw at them, including illegal weapons such as white phosphorus. Israel's violations of international law during its war on Gaza were very many and they ranged from the indiscriminate use of force against civilians to preventing medical teams from reaching the wounded. But the American Jewish Professor of International Law Richard Falk, who's documented actually a lot of the violations and analyzed them because that's his job as a professor of international law, plus he's the Special Rapporteur of the UN on the conflict, he's gone to the heart of the issue. He says that actually Israel's decision to attack Gaza violates international law because there was a cease-fire. There was a different way of keeping Israel safe, if that's the rationale, from Hamas rockets, a cease-fire. And that cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was holding until Israel broke it on November 4, 2008 with an attack that killed six Hamas guerillas. As a result, Richard Falk says that the Israeli attacks to begin with were a prohibited non-defensive use of force under the UN Charter and actually constitute a crime against peace.
Now, I think these kinds of things were clear to a lot of people around the world, even though they may not have framed them in this way. The collective punishment of the Gaza population throughout the months of siege, before the war, during the war and after the war is actually a war crime. You have no right as a state to collectively punish an entire population, and Richard Falk has described it as a crime against humanity.
I think maybe what was particularly horrifying about Gaza--and again everyone who in any way watched TV or consumed any news media during December and January could see this--what was particularly horrifying was that the population had nowhere to flee. And Richard Falk identifies this as, perhaps, introducing a new violation of international law and human rights--the right to seek refuge. The Palestinians in Gaza are completely surrounded by a barrier by Israel and all the Israeli crossings were closed, and Egypt did not open its crossing with Gaza. So, they had to stay there and just be bombarded in an area which is effectively just twice the size of Washington and be bombarded for over three weeks.
The war also exposed the behavior of the Israeli army when soldiers revealed--and this was in all the mainstream press actually including the New York Times--when soldiers said well they basically had been told not to spare civilian lives. The New York Times also carried another very shocking story--the behavior of the Israeli soldiers, namely their production of t-shirts to commemorate their service in a war. And some of the t-shirts had images as crude and as awful as a soldier pointing at a pregnant woman and saying, "One shot, two kills." So, the war revealed this aspect.
Now, the war was followed by, within a few weeks, the election of the most right-wing government that Israel's had probably. And the positions of members of this government, like Avigdor Lieberman who's the Foreign Minister, have come to further expose Israel's treatment of the Palestinians under occupation and also Israel's treatment of its own citizens. About a fifth of Israel's citizens are Palestinians, and as I'm sure you know, Avigdor Lieberman would very much like them out of there or to have them completely controlled by, for example, swearing a loyalty oath that Israel is a Jewish state, i.e. swearing that they themselves do not count for anything within Israel. So, in short, the flagrant injustice and sheer horror of the war on Gaza has exposed the nature of this conflict, and in this conflict, framing the discourse is really important; the person who is able to frame the discourse then is able to shape the nature of the conflict.
I want to quickly talk about conditions in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem today, at the present time. Of course, Gaza is still under siege; only the bare minimum of food and medicine and fuel gets in. And I would encourage you all to go to the website of the UN Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator, which is ochaopt.org, and read some of the reports; they're very short and they're accompanied by very good maps. And, they tell you what's going on week to week. Now, don't forget that in Gaza about 4,000 homes were destroyed and several thousand others were damaged. Well, no reconstruction materials have been allowed in yet that will allow these homes to be rebuilt, and some Palestinians in Gaza are so desperate they're rebuilding from mud. Although billions of dollars have been pledged in aid to Gaza, nothing really can get in due to the blockade, the Israeli blockade which is very tight on land and also at sea. Palestinian fisherman can't go beyond three kilometer radius, three miles, I believe, from the coast to fish, which is where the real catch is. Otherwise, they are fired on.
So, a lot of what comes in Gaza is smuggled in through tunnels, which is a very dangerous business. During the course of 2008, 46 Palestinians were killed in those tunnels as they tried to bring in goods and another 69 were injured. Actually, a Palestinian was killed just a week ago in a tunnel and about six others were trapped for several hours. I mean, can you imagine such a life where you have to smuggle things in underground to survive?
Now, as horrible as the situation in Gaza is, in some ways it's a red herring to cover up what's going on in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. While everyone's focused on the siege and trying to get food in, people are really, the international community is really busy with what's going on in Gaza, the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is proceeding at a breakneck speed in spite of what the Obama administration is calling for. And, it's continued, as I've said, no matter which Israeli government has been in power. During the last quarter of 2008, 454 new housing units were started in the West Bank, and another 3,229 were under construction. The Israeli group Peace Now, which monitors the settlements, says that the Israeli Ministry of Housing wants to build another 73,000 housing units. This is in illegally occupied land, Palestinian land in the West Bank, which of course means taking farms, orchards, water, etc. just to build for illegal colonizers. So, it wants to build another 73,000 housing units, and about 15,000 have received approval.
Now, you can't carry out the settlement project in the West Bank and East Jerusalem unless you control the population and you control any resistance by the population against what's happening to their land and their country. So, there are constant incursions by Israeli forces, constant arrests and attacks. And I just want to take the example of one week in May, and these figures are from, as I say, OCHA [UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], which I encourage you to look up. During one week in May, Israeli security forces injured 23 Palestinians, including eight children in the West Bank, in various incidents. And this is the same as the weekly average throughout the first quarter of 2009. So, this is going on all the time. And, it's the same as the weekly average of all of 2008. And, a lot of these injuries happened when Palestinians are protesting the seizure of their land to build the separation Wall.
So, there are continuous arrests, incursions. As you know, probably, there's about 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails at the moment. And, talk about population control--over the course of the occupation, from 1967 till now, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have actually been through Israeli jails. So, some estimates have it that about a quarter of the population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem at any one time has been through Israeli jails.
Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes, including and especially in East Jerusalem. And just during the last week of June, there were three such demolitions of Palestinian homes, including two that were forced self-demolitions, i.e. Palestinians had to demolish their own homes. Eleven Palestinians were displaced, including seven children.
Now, it's really scary living there; it's like living in the Wild West with no rule of law, nothing to protect you. There's attacks all the time by armed Israeli settlers. During the last week of June, in East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers assaulted seven Palestinians with their rifle butts and with clubs, including a woman and an infant. And, of course, there's about 600 obstacles to freedom of movement within the West Bank and the separation Wall that Israel is building.
Ok, having presented this somewhat depressing picture, I want to go on to the third part of my talk, which is what are some of the different forces shaping the future of this conflict? First of all, we have the new [U.S. President Barack] Obama administration and, of course, the Gaza attack happened before the Obama administration came in but, I think, really highlighted the need to have a settlement to this conflict. But I believe that all the indications are that the Obama administration came in determined. He said so; he came in determined to see a resolution of this conflict within his first term, within his term of office effectively. Why? Because this administration believes that it is actually a national U.S. security interest to resolve this conflict. And if you want to find out where they're getting their ideas from, I would suggest that you read the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report. I think that's had a huge influence on the direction of the policies of this administration. What this report said is that the U.S. can't achieve any of its objectives in the Middle East without tackling the Arab-Israeli crisis head on--to diffuse the ability, for example, of al-Qaeda to capitalize on sympathies, on popular sympathy throughout the Arab world and the Muslim world for Palestinians and diffuse the possibility of extremist groups cashing in and recruiting members.
Resolving the conflict would enable the United States to get out of Iraq and get out of Afghanistan much more easily; get relations with Iran back onto a normal working relationship if not a bosom friendship; and it would diffuse support for resistance groups. So, I think we're seeing in the Obama administration a determination to end and begin to reverse the Israeli colonization project in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
However, there are limits on what this means the Palestinians would get in terms of their human rights. And if you want to understand what those limits are then I would suggest that you see the report of the U.S. Middle Eastern Project, which is led by Henry Siegman and Brent Scowcroft. The limits would be no Right of Return for the Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel, instead they would get compensation and some might be able to go to the Palestinian state. It would be a two-state solution with a shared Jerusalem, a land-swap to accommodate the majority of settlers, a demilitarized Palestine with a U.S.-led multinational force.
Now, if we look at the role the U.S. is actually playing in the Palestinian territories now, it's not that positive; they're really building up a very strong Palestinian security force, but the aim of the security force is not to enable the Palestinians to resist what Israel is doing to them but to control the Palestinian population. But in spite of these limits, these are important shifts that are happening in the U.S. administration and are reframing the official U.S. discourse and are reframing the media discourse.
Now, if we look at the role of the rest of the international community, they basically take their lead from the U.S. So, if the U.S. is willing to move now, they will move. But, otherwise, if the U.S. isn't willing to move, we don't see much movement from, let's say, the European Union or the United Nations or others. Now, however, given the U.S. leadership, I think you're seeing some European countries speak up. Britain has been very vocal about the illegality of settlement products and cracking down on the sale of settlement products, products that are produced in the illegal Israeli settlements, in Britain. When [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu visited Europe a few weeks ago, he was surprised that both [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy and [Italian Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi, who are seen to be close friends of Israel, both said, "Look, you know, the settlements really have got to be frozen." So, they came up with this strong message. The European Union has come up with a very strong statement just a couple of days ago in which they say basically, "Look, we're fed up for paying for Israel's colonization of the West Bank." The European Commission pointed out, according to an Associated Press report, that Israel's settlement policy is strangling the Palestinian economy and making it extremely dependent on what? On aid. Who's giving most of the aid? The European Union, and they're tired of it. And they say in their statement on Monday, the Commission said, "It's the European taxpayers who pay most of the price of this dependence." I think these are new elements in the discourse that we're hearing.
But, I think the bottom line is that the U.S. role is still very crucial. So, even if the U.S. is weakened as a superpower economically, militarily and politically as a result of a lot of the policies of the [former U.S. President George W.] Bush administration and, in fact, previous administrations still, what the U.S. says goes as far as this conflict is concerned. And so, that makes the role that U.S. citizens play even more important compared to other parts of the world.
So, what is happening at the popular level, at the level of public opinion? Not much of this public opinion is reflected in the media. We're seeing some interesting new reports that I don’t think would have come into the media previously like, for example, there've been two reports, I believe, both in the Washington Post that speak to the role that U.S. , American Jewish charities are playing in subsidizing Israeli settlements. Well, these kinds of reports are pretty new; I don't think we would have seen them if there hadn't been a shift in official discourse.
But, underneath the surface, not that visible in the media, there's a huge change in public opinion which has been there before Gaza but which has been very galvanized by Gaza, and it's reflected in the movement to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it allows or upholds international law and until the Palestinians achieve their human rights. So, this boycott movement, which has been underway since July 2005, actually the call by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions as nonviolent tools to secure Palestinian human rights was made on this day in 2005--July 9, 2005--and if you want to read that call, which I think is a highly significant call, you can find it on pacbi.org. That's the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott.
But, the boycott is happening against corporations and also against individuals, and there's been a coordinated boycott movement against Veolia, a French company which is involved in building a light-rail in Jerusalem to connect Jerusalem to the illegal Israeli settlements. And local Palestinian solidarity groups in places as diverse as Bordeaux in France and Birmingham in Britain and out in Australia and in Sweden and many churches have been involved and others have managed to, it's estimated that they've managed to cost Veolia losses of contracts of about $7 billion. Now, that's serious money that you're talking about. As a result, Veolia recently pulled out, announced anyway, that it was pulling out of the Jerusalem light-rail project. So, this shows the efficacy of nonviolent measures to achieve results.
And, I think maybe one of the biggest shifts that we're seeing in public opinion and in public activism has happened amongst American Jews. There's a growing number of American Jewish groups, both on the left and in the center, that are pushing for either rights on both sides, in the center, or for Palestinian human rights, on the left. They're very involved in the boycott movement for both the cultural and the product boycott. I mean, for example, Jewish Voices for Peace, and you can go to their website and see--jewishvoiceforpeace.org--are playing a leading role in trying to convince Caterpillar to stop selling its bulldozers to Israel because then they're militarized and used to demolish Palestinian homes.
And, just a few days ago, I don't know how many of you have heard of the Yes Men but they're two Jewish activists that target corporations and expose corporate misdeeds, they made a film that was going to be on display in the Jerusalem Film Festival, and they decided to withdraw their film from the Jerusalem Film Festival. And they came up with a very powerful open letter that said this was a hard decision for them to make because of their Jewish roots and because they feel an affinity with many people in Israel, but then they came up with a list of all of Israel's human rights violations or some highlights of Israel's human rights violations in the Occupied Territories. They said, "For us, the bottom line is we cannot be seen to be supporting a state that does those things." We've seen also acts by very brave citizens who try to break the blockade of Gaza on boats. Recently, the Spirit of Humanity was boarded and prevented from going in. But, the group Code Pink has been able to go in through the regular border to stand in solidarity. So, I think we're seeing a big shift.
And I just want to conclude by saying that today is also the fifth anniversary of the International Court of Justice decision reaffirming that the Wall that Israel is building in the Occupied Territories, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is illegal, calling for Israel to pay reparations and calling on all states not to support the regime of settlements and the construction of the Wall. And, this is a very major decision. We haven't seen its impact yet, but if you compare what's happening in Israel today and what happened in South Africa previously, you'll see that you had a state that appeared extremely powerful at one point that was unshakable, which was apartheid South Africa, and the first chinks in the armor of apartheid South Africa came with an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice ruling against it for its attacks on South-West Africa. So, I think we're seeing the beginnings of a major movement that will set a different framework for this debate. I don't know if the Obama administration will be able sort of do a deal or shepherd a deal before this movement gains even more in strength and power and is able to impose itself on the scene or not. But I think we are a very interesting juncture that is a lot more hopeful over the long term and the medium term than it does look at the short term.
Thank you.
Nadia Hijab is senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, an independent non-profit research organization and a leading resource on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.