_______________________________________________________________________

NPK-info - Nederlands Palestina Komitee / www.palestina-komitee.nl

_______________________________________________________________________

Bijgaand twee oproepen

* Vrijdag 31 augustus van 14:00 - 15:00 uur.

   Picketline voor de Israelische ambassade te Den Haag.

   Wellicht komt hierover nog nadere informatie.

* BADIL 28-8-2001: CALL FOR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

 AGAINST EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLINGS AND INVASION OF PALESTINIAN LANDS!

Aansluitend

* Israel Assassinates Secretary General of the Popular Front for the

Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), LAW, August 27, 2001

* Israel's unrelenting war, Edward W. Said, August 27,2001

* Life under Israeli occupation, Amira Hass, Sunday, 26 August

* INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT, August 28, 2001

Voorts

Maandag 3-9 komt de Tweede Kamer terug van haar zomerreces.

Zou de zomer in het MO een bespreekpunt worden?

NPK/WL, 28-8-2001

_______________________________________________________________________

Bericht van NPK d.d. 27-8-2001

=========================

Naar aanleiding van de "liquidatie" van dr Abu Ali Mustafa, hedenochtend in

Ramallah.

Solidariteit met de slachtoffers van Israelisch staatsterrorisme

Met grote verontwaardiging nemen wij kennis van de zoveelste* bloedige

moordaanslag door Israel op Palestijnse leiders of activisten, ditmaal dr

Ali Mustafa, directeur-generaal van alle Palestijnse ziekenhuizen op de

bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever, PFLP-leider. Terwijl Israel zich

voortdurend rechtvaardigt met argumenten als "hiermee hebben we een

terreuraanslag in voorbereiding kunnen voorkomen" of "deze liquidatie volgt

op een aantal uitgevoerde terreurdaden waarvoor de gedode persoon de

verantwoordelijkheid droeg" komen deze moordaanslagen in feite neer op

standrechtelijke executies zonder dat enig bewijs geleverd wordt van de

beweerde beschuldigingen. De Israelische bezetter kan zich echter niet op

deze gemakkelijke wijze hiervan afmaken.

Door genoemde handelwijze, opererend met behulp van doodseskaders, verlaagt

de staat zich tot het niveau van een schurkenstaat.

En dan hebben we het nog niet eens gehad over de sowieso onschuldigen die

geregeld bij de Israelische aanslagen vanuit gevechtshelicopters of door

raketvuur van F-16's omkomen. Wij betuigen onze deelneming aan de

nabestaanden van de slachtoffers.

Vrijdag 31 augustus van 14:00 - 15:00 uur picketline voor de Israelische

ambassade,

Buitenhof, Den Haag

(organisatie: NPK, IS, Palestijnse Vereniging)

zegt het voort

kom ook!

Kees Wagtendonk

Namens NPK,

Wim Lankamp,

Kees Wagtendonk

Tel. 015 25 72 984 of 06 289 16 795

of    020 64 11 372

_______________________________________________________________________

BADIL Resource Center

For immediate release, 28-8-2001 (E/44/2001)

---------------------------------------------------------

ISRAELI ARMY INVADES BEIT JALA

CALL FOR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY AGAINST EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLINGS AND

INVASION OF PALESTINIAN LANDS!

Beit Jala, Palestine, 28 August 2001, 09:30:

Yesterday's extra-judicial killing, authorized by Israel's "small

security kitchen" composed of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense

Minister Benyamin Eliezer, of Palestinian leader Abu Ali Mustafa was

immediately followed by Palestinian protests and violent

confrontations with the Israeli occupation forces all over the 1967

occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among others, shooting was renewed

yesterday in the early evening hours between Palestinian forces in

the West Bank town of Beit Jala (Bethlehem) and Israeli army forces

stationed in the Israeli settlement of Gilo next to Jerusalem,

resulting in the slight injury of an Israeli settler. Consequently,

Israeli Prime Minister Sharon felt called upon to fulfill his

promise, made several weeks ago, that "one more shot on Gilo, and

Israeli will enter the PA controlled town of Beit Jala."

At around 01:00 this morning, Israeli tanks and ground forces moved

into Beit Jala, coming from the northwestern hill tops. The Israeli

movement was confronted with the resistance of Palestinian security

forces and residents of the area. One Palestinian security officer,

Muhammad Sammour (25) from the Gaza Strip, was reported killed and

several persons injured, among them a journalist of the Voice of

Palestine radio. As for now (Tuesday, 09:00 a.m.), the Israeli

invasion has come to a stand-still, with Israeli tanks stationed in

the upper part of the center of Beit Jala in the area of the Orthodox

Club. Israeli armed forces control the whole north-western section of

the town adjacent to the Gilo settlement and have imposed a curfew on

the residents.

Israeli media report that the army has taken control of five

Palestinian homes from which fire was allegedly opened on the Gilo

settlement. A decision is yet to be taken by the Israeli security

cabinet about the possible demolition of these homes, and about

whether the current invasion will be permanent or temporary.

According to reports of Palestinian residents of the adjacent Aida

refugee camp, Israeli armed forces have also occupied a building on

the north-western border of the camp. The inhabitants, a family of 20

persons, have been locked into one room, while Israeli soldiers use

the rest of the house as a base serving to back-up the Israeli forces

present in the center of Beit Jala. Shooting continues, and according

to Palestinian sources, the Israeli attack against Aida refugee camp

is intensifying and Israeli forces have reached the UNRWA school in

the camp.

BADIL Resource Center calls for massive protests against the Israeli

policies of de-legitimizing the Palestinian leadership and popular

resistance, extra-judicial killings, and the re-invasion of

Palestinian controlled territories in the occupied West Bank and Gaza

Strip. We are in urgent need of world-wide and strong solidarity to

stop the current escalation of Israeli violence against the

Palestinian people.

In particular, we call upon the participants at the World Conference

Against Racism in Durban to take all possible action in order to set

the foundations of a world-wide solidarity movement that can isolate

the racist and colonialist positions and policies of Israel and its

main supporter, the United States, by combining the forces of Arab

and international solidarity with the Palestinian people and the

worldwide movement against globalization. Only sustained solidarity

can put an end to occupation, colonialism, and racism in Palestine

and re-establish justice and peace in our region.

------------------------

BADIL Resource Center aims to provide a resource pool of alternative,

critical and progressive information and analysis on the

question of Palestinian refugees in our quest to achieve a just and lasting

solution for exiled Palestinians based on the right

 of return.

PO Box 728, Bethlehem, Palestine; tel/fax. 02-2747346; email:

info@badil.org; website: www.badil.org

_______________________________________________________________________

Israel Assassinates Secretary General of the Popular Front for the

Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

August 27, 2001

This morning in Ramallah the Israeli army assassinated PFLP Secretary

General Mustafa Zabri (62), known as Abu Ali Mustafa. At about 11.15 a.m.,

two missiles fired from US manufactured Apache helicopters of the Israeli

Air Force (IAF) hit his home and office. The latter was located on the third

floor of an apartment block in a residential area, behind the Ramallah

Governor's office. Abu Ali Mustafa was killed instantly; his body was torn

apart. Four people working in the building as well as a resident were

injured.

According to information gathered by LAW, several IAF Apache helicopters had

been hovering over the West Bank village of Kober, 15 kms northwest of

Ramallah, since 9.45 in the morning. After firing the missiles which killed

Abu Ali Mustafa, at about 11.15 a.m., the combat helicopters left the area.

The Israeli authorities acknowledged responsibility for the assassination

and said the PFLP had been responsible for a number of attacks on Israelis.

However, whatever the allegations against the PFLP, extrajudicial

executions, where the suspect is "sentenced" to death in a secret process,

without any opportunity to defend himself or to appeal the verdict, are

absolutely prohibited by international law.

While the United States have repeatedly condemned the Israeli assassination

policy, no conclusions have been drawn from the fact that US weapons are

being used to pursue this policy and thus commit grave violations of

international humanitarian law. So far US manufactured Apache helicopters

have been used by the Israeli army in 10 attacks, causing the death of 12

Palestinian activists and 13 bystanders including two children.

LAW strongly condemns the Israeli policy of extrajudicial executions, which

since the beginning of the current Intifada has claimed the lives of at

least 28 Palestinian activists and 17 bystanders including two children,

while others have been injured. As the case of Abu Ali Mustafa shows, Israel

is assassinating senior Palestinian political leaders with the aim of

suppressing the current Intifada. Extrajudicial executions against

Palestinians did however not start with the Al Aqsa Intifada. Undercover

units of the Israeli army also carried out extrajudicial executions during

the first Intifada as well as during the period of the Oslo Process.

LAW calls on the international community to pressurize Israel to comply with

international law. Extrajudicial executions are a fundamental violation of

international human rights and humanitarian law. Extrajudicial executions

constitute wilful killings and are as such a grave breach of the Fourth

Geneva Convention. Grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention amount to

war crimes and are subject to universal jurisdiction.

************************************************

LAW publications and press releases since 1994 are available on our website

at http://www.lawsociety.org

LAW - The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the

Environment is a non-governmental organisation dedicated to preserving human

rights through legal advocacy.

LAW is affiliate to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ),

Fédération Internationale des Ligues de Droits de l'Homme (FIDH), World

Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and Member of the Euro- Mediterranean

Human Rights Network

_______________________________________________________________________

F r e e d o m * Linking Palestinians & Their Friends

Israel's unrelenting war

By Edward W. Said

Source: Dawn: August 27,2001

(www.dawn.com)

In the United States, where Israel has its main political base and from

which

it has received over 92 billion dollars in aid since 1967, the terrible

human

cost of the recent Jerusalem restaurant bombing and Haifa disaster settles

quickly into a familiar explanatory framework.

The framework is: Arafat hasn't done enough to control his terrorists;

suicidal

Islamic extremists are to be found everywhere, bringing harm on "us" and our

strongest allies, driven by sheer human hatred; Israel must defend its

security. A thoughtful individual might add: these people have been fighting

tiresomely for thousands of years anyway; the violence must be stopped;

there's

been too much suffering on both sides, although the way Palestinians send

their

children into battle is another sign of how much Israel has to put up with.

And so, exasperated but still restrained, Israel invades unfortified and

undefended Jenin with bulldozers and tanks, destroys the Palestine

Authority's

police buildings plus several others, and then sends out its propagandists

to

say that it has sent a message to Yasir Arafat to curb his terrorists. In

the

meantime, he and his coterie are begging for American protection, doubtless

forgetting that Israel is the one with US protection and that all he will

get,

for the 6000th time, is an injunction to stop the violence.

The fact is that in America, Israel has pretty much won the propaganda war,

and

America is where it's about to put up several more million dollars into a

public relations campaign (using stars like Zubin Mehta, Yitzhak Pearlman,

and

Amos Oz) to further improve its image. But consider what Israel's

unrelenting

war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless and poorly led

Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast

that

it makes you cry.

Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power,

helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as

well

as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power

abusing a

people without any armour or artillery, no air force (its one pathetic

airfield

in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none of the institutions

of a

modern state.

The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's 34-year-old military occupation

(the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian

land

has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the

destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 per cent

of

its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today.

Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long

daily

pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in

Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The cruel

confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into

the

Gaza strip, plus the nearly 2 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank

has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism.

F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are against

Palestinian towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories

are

controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed wire fence),

which also controls the entire water supply.

Divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and

besieged

by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under

Ehud

Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as

Arabs

are referred to along with such unflattering epithets like thieves, snakes,

cockroaches, grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been

reduced

to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the

people

of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than two dollars a day). They can

neither travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at

Israeli checkpoints which detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the

student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus

trees have been punitively uprooted; 2000 of their houses demolished; acres

of

their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement

purposes.

Since the Aqsa intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have

been

killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities), 15,000 wounded, a dozen

times

more than on the other side. Regular Israeli army assassins have picked off

alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many

flies.

A fortnight ago, fourteen Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli

forces

using helicopter gunships and missiles. They were thus "prevented" from

killing

Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also

murdered,

to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings

that

were part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and

faceless,

Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news

programmes, even though - for reasons that I simply cannot understand -

Arafat

is still hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.

Nor is this all. Israel's plan is not just to hold land and fill it with

dreadful, murderous armed settlers who, defended by the army, wreak havoc on

Palestinian orchards, schoolchildren and homes; it is, as the American

researcher Sara Roy has named it, to de-develop Palestinian society, to make

life impossible so that they will leave, or give up somehow, or do something

crazy like blow themselves up. Since 1967, leaders have been jailed and

deported by the Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and farms made

unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students prevented from

studying, universities closed (in the middle 1980s Palestinian universities

on

the West Bank were closed for four years).

No Palestinian farmer or business can export to any Arab country directly;

their products must pass through Israel. Taxes are paid to Israel. Even

after

the Oslo peace process began in 1993, the occupation was simply re-packaged,

only 18 per cent of the land given to the corrupt Vichy-like Authority of

Yasir

Arafat, whose mandate seems to have been only to police and tax his people

for

Israel's sake.

After eight fruitless immiserating years of the Oslo negotiations

masterminded

by an American team of former Israeli lobby staffers like Martin Indyk and

Dennis Ross, Israel was still in control, the occupation packaged more

efficiently, the phrase "peace process" given a consecrated halo that

allowed

more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more Palestinian

suffering

to go on than before. Including a "judaized" East Jerusalem, with Orient

House

occupied and its contents looted or carted off (there are invaluable

records,

land deeds, maps, that in a repetition of what it did when it stole PLO

archives from Beirut in 1982, Israel has simply stolen) Israel has implanted

no

less than 400,000 settlers on Palestinian land. To call them vigilantes and

hoodlums is not an exaggeration.

It is worth recalling that after Ariel Sharon's gratuitously arrogant visit

to

Jerusalem's Haram al Sharif on September 28, with 1,000 soldiers and guards

supplied by Prime Minister Barak, Israel was condemned for this action by a

unanimous Security Council resolution a couple of weeks later. Then, as even

the merest child could have predicted, the anti-colonial rebellion broke

out,

with eight killed Palestinians its first victims. Sharon was swept to power

essentially to "subdue" the Palestinians, teach them a lesson, get rid of

them.

His record as an Arab killer goes back thirty years before the Sabra and

Shatila massacres that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has

now

been indicted in a Belgian court. Still, Arafat wants to negotiate with him

and

come perhaps to a cozy arrangement with him so as to safeguard the very

Authority that Sharon is systematically dismantling, destroying, razing to

the

ground.

But he isn't a fool either. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his

forces ratchet up the pressure a notch higher, tightening the siege more,

taking more land, making a habit of more and deeper incursions into

Palestinian

towns like Jenin and Ramallah, cutting off more supplies, openly

assassinating

Palestinian leaders, making life more intolerable, redefining the terms of

his

government's actions, that it once made "generous concessions" while

"defending" itself, that it "prevents" terrorism, that it "secures" areas,

that

it "re-establishes" control, and so on. Meanwhile, he and his minions attack

and dehumanize Arafat, even saying that he is the "arch-terrorist" (although

he

literally can't move without Israeli permission), and that "we" have no war

with the Palestinian people. What a boon for that people!

With such "restraint," why should a massive invasion, carefully bruited

about

to terrorize the Palestinians even more sadistically, be necessary? Israel

knows that it can retake their buildings at will (witness the wholesale

theft

of Jerusalem's Orient House, plus nine other buildings, offices, libraries,

archives there and in Abu Dis), just as it has all but eliminated the

Palestinians as a people.

This is the real story of Israel's pretended "victimization," constructed

with

such premeditated care and evil intent for months now. Language has been

sundered from reality. Pity not the inept, clumsy, pathetic Arab governments

who can and will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the

wounds

in their flesh and emaciated bodies of their children some of whom believe

that

martyrdom is the only way out for them. And Israel, stuck in a futureless

campaign, flailing about mercilessly? As James Cousins, the Irish poet and

critic said in 1925, the colonizer is in the grip of "false and selfish

preoccupations that stand in the way of its attention to the natural

evolution

of its own national genius and pull[ed] from the path of open rectitude into

the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech, and action, in the

artificial

defence of a false position."

All colonizers have gone that way, learning or stopping at nothing, until at

last, as Israel turned tail from its 22-year occupation of Lebanon, they

exit

the territory, leaving behind an exhausted and crippled people. If this was

supposed to fulfil Jewish aspirations, why did it require so many new

victims

from another people who had nothing to do with Jewish exile and persecution

in

the first place?

With Arafat in command, there is no hope. What is the man doing, grotesquely

fetching up in the Vatican and Lagos and other miscellaneous places,

pleading

without dignity or even intelligence for imaginary observers, Arab aid,

international support, instead of staying with his people, trying to aid

them

with medical supplies, morale boosting measures and real

leadership? -Copyright

Edward W. Said, 2001

_______________________________________________________________________

AMIRA HASS:  LIFE UNDER ISRAELI OCCUPATION - BY AN ISRAELI

    Jewish journalist Amira Hass doesn't merely report on the

    experiences of Palestinians on the West Bank - she shares

    their lives. Robert Fisk meets a determined and unflinching

    witness to oppression.

[The Independent - UK - Sunday, 26 August]:

Whenever Amira Hass tries to explain her vocation as a journalist, she

recalls a seminal moment in her mother's life. Hannah Hass was being marched

from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer's

day in 1944. "She and the other women had been 10 days in the train from

Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these

German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very

formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'. It's as

if I was there and saw it myself." Amira Hass stares at you through

wire-framed glasses as she speaks, anxious to make sure you have understood

the importance of the Jewish Holocaust in her life.

In her evocative book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Hass eloquently explains why

she, an Israeli journalist, went to live in Yasser Arafat's tiny,

garbage-strewn statelet. "In the end," she wrote, "my desire to live in Gaza

stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of

being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a

world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a

profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the

state of Israel - democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our

exposed nerve."

Now living in the West Bank town of Ramallah - with the Palestinians whom

many of her people regard as "terrorists", listening to the Palestinian

curses heaped upon "the Jews" for their confiscations and dispossessions and

murder squads and settlements - Amira Hass is among the bravest of

reporters, her daily column in Ha'aretz ablaze with indignation at the way

her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only

when you meet her, however, do you realise the intensity - the passion - of

her work. "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective," she

tells me, the same sharp glance to ensure my comprehension. "Palestinians

tell me I'm objective. I think this is important because I'm an Israeli. But

being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is

really about - it's to monitor power and the centres of power."

Each day, Amira Hass writes an essay about despair, a chronological

narrative she maintains when talking about her own life and about her

parents: her mother, a Sarajevo Jew who joined Tito's partisans and was

forced to surrender to the Nazis when they threatened to kill every woman in

the Montenegrin town of Cetinje; her father Avraham who spent four years in

the Transnistria ghetto, escaping a plague of typhus only to lose his toes

to frostbite.

The story of the secular Jews Hannah and Avraham is essential to an

understanding of Amira. "My parents came here to Israel naively. They were

offered a house in Jerusalem. But they refused it. They said: 'We cannot

take the house of other refugees.' They meant Palestinians. So you see, it's

not such a big deal that I write what I do - it's not a big deal that I live

among Palestinians." Hass became a journalist by default. She had survived

on odd jobs - she once worked as a cleaner - and travelled to Holland. "I

sensed there the absence of Jewish existence. And this told me many things,

especially about my attitude to Israel, how not to be a Zionist. This is my

place, Israel, the language, the people, the culture, the colours..."

Hass dropped out of the Hebrew University where she was researching the

history of the Nazis and the attitude of the European left to the Holocaust.

"I was stuck. The first intifada broke out and I didn't want to sit in

academia while all this was happening. I used wasta - you know that Arabic

word? - to get a copy-editing job on the Ha'aretz news desk in '89." Wasta

means "pull" or "influence". Ha'aretz is a liberal, free-thinking paper, the

nearest Israel has to The Independent. When the Romanian revolution broke

out, Hass pleaded to be sent to cover the story - she had many contacts from

a visit to Bucharest in 1977 - and much to her surprise, Ha'aretz agreed,

even though she'd been with the paper only three months.

"When I'd gone to Romania before, I felt I had this philosophical

responsibility to taste life under this socialist regime," she says. "It was

a thousand times worse than I imagined. There was this terrible pressure -

life under Israeli occupation is not as bad as life in Ceausescu's Romania.

It was unbelievable suffocation. So I covered the revolution for two weeks

and then went back to the paper. Ha'aretz didn't know if I could write - I

knew I could. But I also knew never to look for what all the other

journalists are looking for."

In 1990, with her parents' support, she joined a group called Workers'

Hotline, which assisted Palestinians who were cheated by their Israeli

employers. "During the Gulf War, I reached Gaza under curfew - I'd gone to

give Palestinians their cheques from Israeli employers. That's when my

romance with Gaza started. No Israeli journalist knew or covered Gaza. My

editor was very sympathetic. When in 1993 the 'peace process' broke out" -

Hass requests the inverted commas round the phrase - "Ha'aretz suggested I

cover Gaza. One of the editors said: 'We don't want you to live in Gaza.'

And I knew at once that I wanted to live there."

>From the start, Hass recalls, there was "something very warm about the

Palestinian attitude - there was a lot of humour in these harsh conditions."

When I suggest that this might be something she had recognised in Jews, Hass

immediately agrees. "Of course. I'm an east European Jew and the life of the

shtetl is inbuilt in me. And I guess I found in Gaza a shtetl. I remember

finding refugees from Jabalya camp, sitting on a beach. I asked them what

they were doing. And one said he was 'waiting to be 40 years old' - so he'd

be old enough to get a permit to work in Israel. This was a very Jewish

joke."

But Hass found no humour in the Israeli policy of "closure", of besieging

Palestinian towns and throttling their economy and people. "I spotted as

early as 1991 that the policy of 'closure' was a very clever step by the

Israeli occupation system, a kind of pre-emptive strike," she says. "The way

it debilitates any kind of Palestinian action and reaction is amazing.

'Closure' was also a goal: a demographic separation which means that Jews

have the right to move about the space of Mandatory Palestine. The 'closure'

policy brought this to a real perfection."

Hass found herself fascinated with the difference between Palestinian image

and reality. "Their towns were being portrayed in the Israeli press as a

'nest of hornets'. But I really wanted to taste what it means to live under

occupation - what it is like to live under curfew, to live in fear of a

soldier. I wanted to know what it was like to be an Israeli under Israeli

occupation." She has used that word "taste" again, just as she did about

Romania under dictatorship. She says she was still thinking about her

mother's trip to Belsen. "It was this idea of not intervening, not changing

anything. And luckily, this combined in me with journalism." Hass is

possessed of the idea that change can come only through social movements

and their interaction with the press - an odd notion that seems a little

illogical.

But there is nothing vague about her vocation. "Israel is obviously the

centre of power which dictates Palestinian life," she says. "As an Israeli,

my task as a journalist is to monitor power. I'm called 'a correspondent on

Palestinian affairs', but it's more true to say that I'm an expert in

Israeli occupation." Israeli reaction, she says, is very violent towards

her. "I get messages saying I must have been a kapo [a Jewish camp overseer

for the Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I'll get an e-mail saying:

'Bravo, you have written a great article - Heil Hitler!' Someone told me

they hoped I suffered breast cancer. 'Until we expel all Palestinians, there

will be no peace,' some of them say. I can't reply to them - there are

thousands of these messages."

But many Israelis tell Amira Hass to keep writing. "People misled themselves

into believing that Oslo was a peace process - so they became very angry

with the Palestinians. Part of their anger is directed at me. Israelis do

not go to the occupied territories. They do not see with their own eyes.

They don't see a Palestinian village with a settler on its land and a

village that has no water and needs government permission even to plant a

tree, let alone build a new school. People don't understand how the

dispersal of Jewish settlements dictates Israeli control over Palestinian

territory."

As her mother lay dying this spring, Amira feared that she would be trapped

by the Israeli siege of Ramallah - where she now lives - and spent hours

commuting the few miles to Jerusalem. Now she is alone. The woman who taught

her to despise those who were "looking from the side" died two months ago.

_______________________________________________________________________

From: Rapprochement Centre - George N R

Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 8:53 AM

Friends,

Last night the Israeli military again used heavy war artillery to

terrorize Palestinian civilians as helicopters hovered over Beit Jala,

Bethlehem and Beit Sahour and military tanks fired at civilian

neighborhoods in these towns.  Israeli soldiers rolled their tanks into

Beit Jala last night, occupying civilian homes and Israeli soldiers and

tanks have occupied the Aida Refugee camp.

International civilians are stepping in as human shields and will put

themselves in between Israeli tanks and the Palestinian civilian areas

that the tanks are aiming at.  Additionally these internationals will be

spending the next nights in Beit Jala until the occupation forces leave

the city and cease their shelling and shooting of Palestinian civilians.

The International Solidarity Movement continues to call on the United

Nations and the international community to provide Palestinians with

protection from the brutal aggression of the Israeli occupation forces.

We call on our respective governments to take immediate action to force

Israel to comply with international and human rights laws.

For more information or if you would like to join us, please call:

Heidi: 972(0)52-290-173

Neta: 972(0)52-481-261

PCR 972 2 2772018

Press release attached

================================================

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

For Immediate Release

Israeli Occupation Forces Extend Control Over Beit Jala & Beit Sahour

International Human Shields to Step In

International Human Shields based in Palestinian territories and serving

to protect Palestinian civilians from the brutal Israeli Occupation

Forces simply by their presence in targeted areas of Israeli aggression

are taking action this afternoon in Beit Jala to work to remove soldiers

from the homes of Palestinian civilians.  Additionally these Human

Shields will spend the next nights in Beit Jala until the occupation

forces leave the city, and cease their ongoing shelling and shooting of

Palestinian civilians.

Israeli Occupation Forces stormed into Beit Jala and Beit Sahour with

tanks, soldiers and Apache helicopters under the cover of darkness and

reoccupied areas of the town and houses of innocent civilians.  This,

combined with the political assassination of Abu Ali Mustapha yesterday

represents a significant escalation of the conflict by the Israeli

government, and another move towards Prime Minister Sharon's endgame in

which all Palestinian lands are occupied and Palestinians are forced to

leave their homes or face the wrath of the Israeli military - one of the

most sophisticated and deadly armed forces in the world.

And what are the Palestinians to do?  If they do nothing, they face

ethnic cleansing, condemned by the world in places like Kosovo, Bosnia

and Rwanda, but accepted with silence in Palestine.  If they resist with

nonviolent means through demonstrations and protests, they face the

wrath and force of the Israeli army, border police, and special security

forces that use rubber bullets, sound grenades and live ammunition.  If

they use force - as glorified by Western countries with respect to their

own histories in fighting occupation, resistance to despots and

liberation - with their limited weapons and complete tactical and

military disadvantage, then they are condemned for being "true to

themselves" as if they only know violence, and face advanced military

technologies, such as Apache helicopters, F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and

the most advanced tanks in the world.

The so-called "conflict" here is actually a war - prosecuted by arguably

the most capable military machines and militarized societies in the

world (Israel), against an occupied civilian population that has been

condemned throughout the world as aggressors, when in fact it is the

victim of repeated and ongoing brutality, force and occupation for over

thirty years.

The International Human Shields, through their own efforts and in

putting themselves at grave personal risk, will bring these self-evident

truths to light through their efforts in stopping the aggression of the

Israeli Occupation Forces.  No country, no government has the right to

terrorize a civilian population, and it is the responsibility of all

good men and women to stand up and say, "NO!" to these illegal and

immoral actions by the Israeli government.

For more information, please contact Heidi: 972(0) 52-290-173 or Neta:

972(0) 52-481-261

[END]

__________________________________________________________________

George N. Rishmawi

Projects' Coordinator

The Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People

Star Street No. 64  P.O.Box 24

Beit Sahour - Palestine

www.rapprochement.org  Telefax: +972-2-2772018

_______________________________________________________________________