[Bloquez l'empire!] Peter MacKay in Israel and Palestine

[Dru Oja Jay]

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/958

Peter MacKay in Israel and Palestine
What the Foreign Minister did not see or discuss during his visit

by Jon Elmer

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

GAZA CITY, GAZA -- Despite the impression cast by corporate news  
coverage, there is never anything like "calm" here in the West Bank  
and Gaza Strip. The casualty count for 2006 released by Israeli human  
rights group B'Tselem reports that Israeli forces killed 660  
Palestinians, while 17 Israeli civilians were killed, 13 of them in  
the West Bank [pdf]. The violence is often spectacular, as during the  
summer and fall siege operations in Gaza that killed more than 450  
Palestinians under withering aerial bombardment, artillery barrages  
and two major ground invasions. But, as an unusually frank headline  
in the current edition of the Economist rightly stated, "It's the  
little things that make an occupation."

When Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay visited Israel  
this week, it was these "little things" that he missed--like the more  
than 530 fixed checkpoints and roadblocks identified in a joint UN- 
IDF count in the occupied West Bank. These obstacles make simple  
travel between neighbouring Palestinian villages often impossible,  
particularly when added to the more than 7,000 "flying checkpoints"  
that spring up at the whim of the Israeli army, anywhere and at  
anytime. As the Economist pointed out, "arbitrariness is one of the  
most crippling features of these rules."

The checkpoints and closure regime enforced by Israel is more than  
inconvenient; all too often, it is deadly. On Friday, as MacKay met  
with President Abbas in Amman, Israeli soldiers at the Hawara  
checkpoint outside of the West Bank city of Nablus refused the  
Israeli-issued permits of a patient returning from liver surgery in  
Palestinian East Jerusalem. The soldiers forced Tayseer Al Qaisi out  
of the car and ordered him to walk across the checkpoint. Al Qaisi, a  
father of eight, was weakened critically by the surgery and collapsed  
only a few hundred feet into the checkpoint. As reported by David  
Chater of Al Jazeera International, a Palestinian ambulance was  
prevented from entering the area for two hours. Mr Al Qaisi died  
while waiting for help.

In meetings with top Israeli cabinet ministers, Peter MacKay did not  
mention the more than 2,200 hours of strict curfew enforced by tanks  
and gunfire over the last two years, or the more than 5,400  
Palestinians who were arrested or detained on Palestinian land last  
year [pdf]--including more than half of the elected Palestinian  
cabinet, the Speaker of Parliament and scores of local and municipal  
officials. He did not ask about the Palestinian prisoner who died in  
Israeli custody this week, or about the hunger strike being waged by  
political prisoners at Ansar III in the Negev desert in response to  
an attack by guards with police dogs and tear gas. While MacKay gave  
ample notice that he would be discussing the Israeli soldier captured  
on the Gaza border in June, he almost surely did not bring up the  
11,000 political prisoners being held by Israel, some 400 of them  
children.

Nor did MacKay talk about the more than 30 incursions into  
Palestinian cities and villages by the Israeli army in the last eight  
days, or the 14 fisherman shot off the coast of Rafah last week as  
they fished in Palestinian waters. He didn't talk about the 15  
Palestinians injured by Israeli forces in protests this week, or of  
10-year-old schoolgirl, Abir Aramin, who died on January 20 as she  
left the grounds of her school in Anata. According to witnesses, Abir  
was pursued by Israeli forces as she tried to run awayand was shot in  
the head with a stun grenade or tear gas canister at close range.

It's doubtful that MacKay raised the issue of last week's bulldozing  
of the entire "unrecognized" Bedouin village of Twail Abu-Jarwal in  
the Negev Desert. The Bedouin were displaced because they were  
illegally "trespassing" on the land of the Jewish state, despite the  
fact that their presence in the desert long predates the State of  
Israel. They are being forcibly relocated to urban reservations,  
while the Negev is prepared for settlement by the Jewish National  
Fund. In the "only democracy in the Middle East," at least 75,000  
Bedouin live in more than 40 villages that are officially  
"unrecognized," where, like in Palestinian areas, building permits  
are denied and demolition orders are routinely carried out. The  
unrecognized villages have no infrastructure--no sewage, no water or  
electricity, and often no health or education facilities.

While Arab and Bedouin homes are destroyed, Jewish ones are being  
built. On the same day that MacKay arrived in the region, the Olmert  
government announced that 44 new housing units would be built in the  
Maale Adumim settlement near Jerusalem, a settlement which  
effectively, if not absolutely, severs the West Bank in two. In fact,  
MacKay won't deal with the issue of settlements at all--not the 121  
illegal settlements and 100 outposts in the West Bank, nor the scores  
of settlements in occupied-East Jerusalem, beyond acknowledging the  
massive infrastructure of permanent dispossession as a "hindrance."  
In fact, along with their Jewish-only roads and attendant security  
footprint, these settlements render a Palestinian state an  
impossibility. Rather than fortified colonies on illegally occupied  
land, the Canadian government calls the settlements "facts on the  
ground." Not to be outdone, Stephen Harper referred to the settlement  
blocs as "democratic realities" in addressing a Zionist advocacy  
group in early 2006 [pdf].

MacKay did not address the substance of the 700 km-long barrier of  
sniper towers, concrete walls and deadly electronic fences snaking  
deep into the West Bank (80 per cent of the wall is built on UN  
recognized Palestinian land) in order to annex the massive settlement  
blocs into Israel and isolate the Palestinians into enclaves. He did  
not visit the machinery of settlement and dispossession created by  
the wall, the checkpoints, the settlements, the settler-only roads.  
John Dugard, South African human rights lawyer and UN Special  
Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory  
told the UN General Assembly, "In other countries the process would  
be described as ethnic cleansing, but political correctness [forbids]  
such language where Israel was concerned."

MacKay certainly did not visit Gaza, where 1.5 million people (one  
million of whom are refugees) are sealed off from the rest of the  
world, teetering on the edge of total social and humanitarian  
collapse because of the cruel and comprehensive sanctions regime that  
he so proudly vanguards. MacKay boastfully declared "not a red cent  
to Hamas" when the movement won the Palestinian elections early last  
year, but failed to see what that means on the streets of Gaza. He  
did not visit the EU-funded power station that was destroyed by the  
Israeli Air Force in June, nor did he visit the refugee camps where a  
million of the world's poorest people have been condemned to endless  
months of crippling power shortages, random blackouts and Israeli- 
imposed shortages of cooking and heating gas.

He didn't see the rubble left from thousands of aerial bombing raids  
and tens of thousands of artillery shells. He didn't see the roads  
shredded by tanks, or the pile of gravel in Beit Hanun that used to  
be an 800-year-old mosque. He didn't see the graffiti on the  
demolished houses that reads "we will never forget." He didn't walk  
in the refugee camps as winter rains and sewage run in rivers down  
the unpaved streets, or visit the beachside picnic site where the  
Ghaliya family was massacred in front of the eyes of seven-year-old  
Huda, whose horrified tears were broadcast around the world. He  
didn't visit the ambulance workers at the Red Crescent, four of whom  
were killed by the Israeli army since June. Where does Canada stand  
on the killing of medical relief workers, Mr. MacKay?

And what about the home of the Atamna family in Beit Hanun, where  
blood still covers the walls and pieces of shrapnel are scattered on  
the floor and embedded in the cinderblock walls after an artillery  
barrage by the Israeli army? The IDF had used the family's home as a  
forward operating base in the November operation during which more  
than one hundred Palestinians were killed; the Atamna family was  
cordoned into one room and guarded by soldiers. The morning after the  
army left their home, the shells came. Within moments, 60 members of  
the extended family lay in the street, either maimed or dead. When  
asked what they would say to the Canadian government, defending  
Israel's atrocities as it does time and again, Iyad Atamna said: "We  
don't want your money or your political support, just come here for  
one day before you speak about justice."

Jon Elmer is in Gaza City.