Post by Helen Pearson (you can read the first article - 'Exile' here)

This is the second of a series of articles comparing Palestine/Israel and Guatemala written by GSN member, Helen Pearson, a Jewish activist from Leicester, UK, who has a long association with Guatemala and who visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in April 2006. 

II : Punishment (continued)

In the house with Mary and her family, as they talked about how they were unable to move around their own country, I had the sense of a set of people having their lifeblood squeezed from them.  Mary’s husband, George, and son, Sami, have a small workshop where they make olivewood carvings which they sell to pilgrims and tourists via shops in Bethlehem and Jerusalem.  Except there are hardly any tourists arriving in Bethlehem these days because travel is difficult, and people are put off by the checkpoints and the perception that violence could break out.  Neither George nor any of his family members can travel to Jerusalem so any business in the capital is impossible:  their livelihood is now at stake.  Mary and George’s daughter, Agnes, is only 20 but already bitter:  “I can’t even travel to my own capital city,” she said;  “we can’t go anywhere, I can’t do anything”.  The family exuded a sense of being trapped.  There was a sadness in their eyes which was not disguised by their hospitality and their smiles;  it was a look I had seen before in Guatemalans who had endured countless troubles not of their making.

One day we went on a tour of East Jerusalem with ICAHD where we saw one of the most inhumane aspects of ‘the matrix of control’ in operation.  The policy of house demolitions is, in  effect, used by Israel as a punishment for being Palestinian and is also motivated by the desire to control the population balance so that Jerusalem never becomes a majority Arab city.  Hand in hand with this is the push to expand Jewish settlements within East Jerusalem, the Palestinian area of the city according to the internationally recognised Green Line (pre-1967 borders).  As a Jew I find this demographically motivated abuse of another people completely abhorrent:  how can the Israelis who organise and carry out these demolitions have lost their collective Jewish memories of centuries of forced removal, harassment and racial hatred?

Israeli regulations demand that Palestinians living in areas which it controls need a permit to build new houses or expand their existing ones. The penalty for construction without a permit is demolition: often there is very little warning that a demolition will happen and no compensation when it does.  This practice is illegal under international law: Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that occupying powers are prohibited from destroying property belonging individually or collectively to private persons.  According to our ICAHD guide, the only way a Palestinian can get a permit is by paying a huge fee or becoming an informer for the Israelis.  Between 1967 and 2004, over 2,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem have been destroyed by Israeli occupation forces (6) and the demolitions are continuing. By contrast, since the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, 70,000 government sponsored housing units have been built for Israelis and none have been built for Palestinians.(7)  

We visited a neighbourhood where families had had their houses demolished several times over.  One house had been allowed to stand after it had been re-built four times only if no-one lived in it:  the local people have made it into a community centre with support from ICAHD.  Beside it are the remains of several other houses, squashed like huge sandwiches: rubble fill between thick slabs of concrete.  I was staggered by the unfairness of these demolitions and could barely imagine how they must devastate the mental and physical wellbeing of the families dispossessed in this way.

Israel does not only punish the Palestinian population;  it also punishes people who dare to challenge its actions from within.  Mordechai Vanunu was a technician working in an Israeli nuclear plant when in 1986 he decided that his conscience would not allow him to be silent any longer about Israel’s advanced nuclear capability.  His story was published by the Sunday Times but he was captured in Italy by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and imprisoned for 18 years.  Most of his sentence was spent in solitary confinement, where he endured maltreatment, such as sleep deprivation, designed to break his will.  For years on end he was not allowed to receive any prison visits and all his applications for parole were refused.  

We met Mordechai Vanunu in Jerusalem and after all he has suffered it is remarkable how lucid he is and how determined he continues to be to campaign against nuclear weapons.  He is still subject to court orders which prevent him from travelling outside Jerusalem and speaking to foreigners, although with regard to the latter he goes out of his way to flout the restriction as he refuses to accept this curtailment of his free speech.  Mordechai has been punished over and over again.  His head has been symbolically cut off and displayed on a spike, for all to see what will happen to anyone who betrays the Israeli state so publicly, in spite of the fact that Israel has admitted that the information Mordechai revealed posed no threat to its security.

Another former prisoner we met in Jerusalem was Rotem Mor, a young man who had been imprisoned for refusing to serve in the Israeli Army and who now works with New Profile, an Israeli anti-militarisation campaign (8).  In Israel, there is no recognition of conscientious objection, only for unqualified pacifism, which is rarely accepted.  Those who declare their refusal to serve in the armed forces, either altogether or in the Occupied Territories, are likely to be sent to a military prison. New Profile’s charter clearly expresses the context which exacts this punishment:  ‘Attitudes casting doubts on "security" related decisions, questioning the state's enormous military budgets, or its ongoing policies of military confrontation, are branded "naive," "hysterical," "ignorant." An attitude that dares question the fundamental principle of willing enlistment, is almost incomprehensible in a soldiers' state. It is rejected as illegitimate’.

In Guatemala, although democracy was restored in 1986 and peace accords signed in 1996, people who seek to expose and demand justice for the crimes of the past are severely punished.  The structures, and in some cases the people, that perpetrated the gross human rights violations of the early 1980s still operate with impunity behind the façade of democratisation.  Bishop Juan Gerardi led the Catholic Church’s Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI) (9), which documents thousands of cases of killings, rapes, and torture.  The REMHI report was published in April 1998:  two days later Bishop Gerardi was battered to death with a concrete block in his house in Guatemala City.  It took years, and innumerable threats against prosecution lawyers and the Archdiocese’s human rights office, but eventually two former army officers were convicted of committing the murder, along with a priest who had worked with the bishop.  The intellectual authors of this crime, however, remain at large and will likely never receive their punishment.  

The killing of Bishop Gerardi cast a long shadow forwards, presaging the difficulties ahead in calling to account those responsible for genocide and other atrocities   In 2005 the Guatemalan Human Rights Defenders Protection Unit recorded 224 attacks against human rights activists and organisations and so far this year the Unit has registered 65 such attacks.(10).

Since my trip to Palestine and Israel, and since I started writing this piece, the situation in the Middle East has exploded. The causes of the conflict are hugely complex, as are the solutions, but I for one am clear that the punitive action being taken against civilians in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon is indefensible and has to stop before more lives are devastated. Apart from legal and ethical objections, punishment, whether collective or selective, does not work: it is not forcing Palestinians to give up their right to self-determination; it is not stopping the Israeli refuser movement; and it is not stopping Guatemalan human rights defenders from seeking justice. State sponsored punishment which is disproportionate and unjustified embeds violence and mistrust within society and makes it harder to achieve what all Palestinians, Israelis and Guatemalans say they want:  to live in peace and with dignity.

Notes

Correction: In From Meso America to the Middle East. I: Exile I mistakenly referred to the Golan Heights as part of historical Palestine, when it was, in fact, part of Syria until occupied by Israel in 1967.

6)  www.palestinemonitor.org/updates/israel_emptying_jerusalem_of_palestinians.htm (5.5.04)
7)  www.icahd.org (Q&A section) (18.4.04)
8)  www.newprofile.org
9)  Guatemala: Never Again!  Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1998
10)  www.amnesty.org – AI Index: AMR/34/021/2006, 13 June 2006