Focus on Israel’s Apartheid Wall
01 August 2003
Focus on Israel’s Apartheid Wall
Partners for Peace has spent part of the last few weeks working to inform the media that the Apartheid Wall Israel is constructing runs through the West Bank and not along the Green Line. We have made significant progress with CNN and now the New York Times is highlighting the Apartheid Wall due to the courageous efforts of Palestinians and Israelis as well as internationals with the International Solidarity Movement.
We urge all of you to monitor your local media carefully to make sure that they are accurately reporting that the wall runs through the West Bank and divides Palestinians from each other and from their agricultural land and water resources.
Please note the powerful photograph included at this link of “No Apartheid Wall!”
August 1, 2003
New Law Raises Obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian Marriages
By JAMES BENNET
JERUSALEM, July 31 – The Israeli Parliament voted today to block Palestinians who marry Israelis from becoming Israeli citizens or residents, erecting a new legal barrier as Israel finished the first section of a new physical barrier against West Bank Palestinians.
Supporters of the legislation called it a necessary bulwark against infiltration by terrorists. “We are in a state of war – not with the English, or the Americans, or the Dutch, or the Slovaks – we are at war with our neighbors, the Palestinians,” Gideon Saar, of the dominant Likud Party, told the Parliament in debate before the vote. “It’s a tragic reality.”
Proponents also called the law a way to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority.
Opponents called it a racist measure that threatened to divide thousands of families or force them out of Israel. Roughly 1.2 million of Israel’s 6.7 million citizens are Arabs, and they are far more likely than Israeli Jews to marry Palestinians.
“It cannot be that because of the actions of one, or 10, or 20, that a population of one million will be punished,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Arab member of Parliament. He called the law “blacker than black.”
Also today, Israel solicited construction bids to build 22 new homes in a settlement in the Gaza Strip. A new peace plan, the road map, calls on Israel to freeze settlement construction, but Israel says it must keep building to accommodate “natural growth.”
After occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel began permitting Israelis who married residents of the territories to apply for legal status for their spouses in Israel under a program of family unification. Last year, the Israeli government froze any such requests. Today’s parliamentary action, which effectively puts the government’s freeze into law, will lapse after a year if it is not renewed.
Yuval Steinitz, a parliamentary leader from Likud, accused the governing Palestinian Authority of encouraging Palestinians to marry Israeli Arabs and move into Israel. “It’s not a humanitarian case – or not only humanitarian – but a deliberate strategy by the Palestinian Authority to change the demographic balance in Israel in order to destroy us,” he said in a telephone interview.
He said that if, as envisioned by the peace plan, a Palestinian state was to be created in the West Bank and Gaza, then “Palestinians should be unified there.”
Orna Kohn, a lawyer for Adalah, a legal organization for Arab minority rights in Israel, said her group would petition the courts to overturn the law as a violation of basic rights. She noted that it did not apply to non-Palestinian foreign spouses of Israelis, and she said that it was aimed at Israel’s Arab citizens as well as Palestinians.
“You have an Israeli citizen who is an Arab, and you won’t allow him to live with his spouse?” she said. “If this is not racism, then perhaps we need to have a new definition.”
Tensions have been growing between Israel’s Jewish and Arab populations over the course of the conflict with the Palestinians, which began in September 2000. Today, the Israeli education authorities shut down an Israeli-Arab day care center in northern Israel that they said was extolling “suicide acts of Palestinians.”
The government did not disclose precise figures for how many Palestinians had become Israeli citizens or residents, or had submitted applications to do so. Israeli officials said that 49 Israelis had been killed in 20 attacks that to some extent involved Palestinians who had entered Israel through family unification.
The vote was 53 in favor and 25 against, with one abstention.
The Israeli Defense Ministry announced today that it had finished the first 85 miles of a barrier it says is intended to stymie Palestinian attackers from the West Bank. Roughly 200 people, including Palestinians, Israelis and Western activists staged a protest in Qalqiliya, a West Bank town that is surrounded by the barrier, a network of fencing, concrete walls, guard posts and ditches.
The protesters threw paint on a 25-foot-high wall that runs along the western side of Qalqiliya, and spray-painted slogans. A fence brackets the other three sides of the town, with only one exit, a heavily guarded Israeli checkpoint.
“We are living in a big prison,” said Mahmoud Farahmeh, 46, a Qalqiliya resident.
The United States is pressing the Israeli government to divert the planned path of the barrier so that it takes less West Bank territory.
____
This letter from Partners for Peace’s Executive Director Michael Brown about Israel’s Apartheid Wall was published in the Baltimore Sun of July 30, 2003.
ISRAEL’S FENCE COULD DERAIL THE ROAD MAP
Robert Satloff is dead wrong in saying that Israel’s security wall will only divide Palestinians from Israelis (“The good fence,” Opinion Commentary, July 23). As he surely knows, this modern-day Berlin Wall would also divide West Bank Palestinians from other West Bank Palestinians.
Israel can build a wall anywhere it wants inside Israel. By building this wall inside the West Bank, however, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gives the distinct impression that it is more concerned with grabbing land and preserving the occupation – almost certainly permanently – than promoting Israeli security.
Mr. Satloff writes that “President Bush should not find himself on the wrong side of an initiative that may actually offer a chance to produce” Israeli-Palestinian peace. But Mr. Satloff’s throwback argument would place Mr. Bush on the wrong side of history.
Support for an apartheid wall has no place in the 21st century and will definitely not help promote peace.
Michael F. Brown
Baltimore
(Unfortunately, the Baltimore Sun did not note the author’s work with Partners for Peace.)
_____
Robert Satloff’s column about Israel’s new security wall ignores the fact that the seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank to build the wall is a direct violation of Israel’s obligations under the “road map” to Mideast peace.
The road map specifically calls on Israel to take “no actions undermining trust, including … confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property.”
If the Bush administration is serious about advancing the road map, it cannot support this wall, as putting more than 50 percent of the West Bank behind an Israeli fence would certainly amount to confiscation of property.
If Israel pursues the current route of the fence, it will
demonstrate to the Palestinians a complete lack of sincerity about the road map and reaching a peace accord.
Debra DeLee
Washington
The writer is president and CEO of Americans for Peace Now.
