Palestine

The struggle against the apartheid, separation wall continues on a daily basis. Protests by mixed groups of Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals are met with regular violence from the Israeli armed forces. A Infos produce bulletins almost every day on the struggle, helping to show the solidarity and strength of the resistance. There is far too much for us to publish here and keep it up to date. To find out more, follow these instructions:

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Introduction:

AF Intro:  this is the text of a talk given in Manchester on June 7th, 2004.  It has been edited slightly.  We have tried to use most of the pictures Uri showed during his talk.  As this makes it a very large file, we have broken it down into smaller chunks.  Follow the link at the end of each page.  Some of the later sections are still under construction and have text and no photos. 

My name is Uri Ayalon I’m an Israeli and I'm working as a journalist and as a facilitator in the school of peace in Neve-Shalom Wahat al-Salam. As a journalist I used to be the media reporter of “Haaretz” newspaper and now I’m writing articles about politics and culture for “Walla” website, and also I’m the theatre critic of the finance newspaper “Globes”.

 

I have been an activist since I was 13 years old. After the murder of Rachel Corrie on March 2003, I decided to devote my time and power to the struggle against the Israeli occupation. In the last few months I'm participating in the civil protest against the "Separation Fence". As part of a group named "Anarchist Against the Wall" I've attended a lot of demo's in the occupited teritorrie as well as direct action, such as the famous cutting of the fence on the day the soldiers fired at us seriously injuring one of my friend – Gil Na’amati.

 

I’m here not only in the name of my group or my friends in the radical left of Israel. I’m here in the name of my good friend Mohanad from Nablus and in the name of Nazee from Mas’ha. Nazee and Mohanad not only can’t go aboard to the UK, they even can’t go outside their village or city.

    

My lecture will deal with:

The history of the occupation since 1947

The history of the aparthaid wall

How does it look and what does it do to the Palestinians

And then I’ll show a short movie (of 4 minutes) about the new kind of resistance against the wall that started few months ago by the people who live near the wall. I’ll talk about the change in the Palestinan tactic and I’ll also review the Israeli forces that join and help this new activities.

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A short history of the occupation:

·        According to the decision of the UN this  should be the distribution between the Palestinians and the Jewish people who lived in Palestine. The Jewish were only 600,000 - 37% of the population, but they got 55% of the land. Almost half of the Palestinians should have been under Israeli control. This decision of the UN made Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq join to the Palestinian people in the struggle against the new state of Israel. 

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·        In the end of the war of 1948 – which contained horrible massacres and expulsions, 2.5 millions of Palestinians became refugees. 

·        In the war of 1967 Israel occupied the Golan hights, Sinai, the west bank and Gaza strip. Before 1967 only 400,000 Palestinians were residents of Israel, in the occupation of 1967 1.1 millions Palestinians were added (a lot of them were all ready refugees).  Few days after the war a small Israeli radical left group “Matzpen” (“compass”) published this statement: “ occupation leads to foreign regime, that leads to resistance, that leads to oppression, that leads to terror and opposite terror. Keep holding the occupied territories will turn us to a people of murders and victims of murders”.  

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·        The Intifada (“rising up”) of the Palestinians that started on 1987 brought to the beginning of the “peace process” in 1993. Rabin’s government signed the Oslo agreement with the PLO and most of the Israelis felt that we are putting an end to the occupation and starting new relationships with the Palestinians and with the Arab world. But the reality in the occupied territories was different (areas A, B and C – separeted the Palestinians in to bantutsans).   

  

·        The disappointed from the so called “peace process” together with provocation in Al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holly places for the Muslims in Jerusalem of Ariel Sharon who was the leader of the opposition in the parliament at that time lead to The 2nd Intifada. Since October 2000 Palestinians fighters killed more then 1,000 Israelis. Israel re-occupied the territories and killed more then 3,000 Palestinians. Suicide bombers are the most terrified issue for most of the Israelis bringing the territories into the green line (the border between Israel to the west bank).

 

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·        According to the Israeli government the fence is meant purely to prevent suicide bombers from getting into Israel, not to set the country's borders. The settlers feared that the fence would be made on the Green Line and leave them outside. That is why the right wings apposed the fence especially Ariel Sharon. In practice, the fence's root takes as much as it can from the land of the West Bank without considering security issues. The fence is actually a system of fences that will imprison hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in barbed wire-enclosed enclaves.

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The History of the Wall:

·        Since 1994 the Gaza Strip has been surrounded by a barrier that cuts off the residents from the rest of the world (especially from the West Bank); Gazza has no economic autonomy, Israel controls everybody and everything that goes in and out of the strip.

The Fence of
 The Gaza Strip

·        In November 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak (Labor party) approved the first project to build a "barrier". His election campaign was: “We are here – they are there”. The leader of the opposition, Ariel Sharon, was one of the main opponent to the idea of a fence. He didn’t want to give in the dream of “Big Israel” -  from the Jordan to the sea.

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·        In June 2002, the new government of Israel, leading by Ariel Sharon, decided to build a physical barrier to separate Israel and the West Bank in order to prevent the uncontrolled entry of Palestinians into Israel. Construction of the Wall, including land confiscation and the uprooting of trees in Jenin.

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·        Only In September 2002, the first public map of the Wall-consisting of only the northern part -was made available to the public.

·        In March 2003 Sharon declared the expansion of the Wall by building a wall within and along the entire Jordan Valley, bringing the settlements in this area under total Israeli control.

·        In July 2003, the Israeli defense Ministry announced the completion of the "first phase" of the Wall, a total of 145 km from the planned 728 km . The Israeli government allotted an additional $171 million for the construction of the Wall. The Wall costs some $3 billion, approximately $4 million per kilometer. On any given day have 500 bulldozers at work, paving and building one of the largest projects in the history of the country.

·        Currently, it has been already built in the districts of Qalqiliya, Tulkarem and Jenin (from salem to masha) and being built in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem. In 2005, the entire project should be finished.

·        Besides the horrific humanistic and economic reality that the wall imposes on the Palestinian people, the wall is the biggest environmental disaster in the history of Israel.

Click here to go to part two