Unleashing the bulldozers
As Israel pursues its quiet policy of ethnic cleansing, the PA fails to help Palestinians remain on the land, writes Muna Hamzeh
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Amal Zahanin plays in the ruins of his family's home in Beit Hanoun that was destroyed during an Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in May
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As the ripple effects of last week's suicide bombing in West Jerusalem and Israel's assassination of senior political Hamas leader Ismael Abu Shanab threatened to drag Israel and the Palestinians into a bloody quagmire, Israeli bulldozers unobtrusively went to work.
Their target was Nazlat Isa, a lush agricultural village of 2500 people located north of Tulkarm and bordering the Green Line. Although the village had endured continued curfews and had in recent months been the target of repeated declarations of demolitions, nothing prepared its residents for the disaster that was about to unfold. Several hundred Israeli troops entered the village under the cover of the night on Friday and imposed a curfew. With the break of light, they gave residents minutes notice before setting more than a dozen industrial demolition type equipment into motion. By late afternoon, and in what turned out to be the largest scale demolition to take place on a single day, four houses, two garage buildings and 140 shops were reduced to rubble. A large market area consisting of small industrial shops was completely levelled. Tulkarm Governor Izz Al-Din Al-Sharif estimated the damage between 15 to 20 million dollars.
Flo Razowsky, 28, a Jewish-American International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist was one of 11 peace activists from the US, Catalonia and Italy who rushed to the scene to document the demolitions and help shop owners salvage what undestroyed merchandise they could find in their stores.
"The soldiers I spoke with said this was being done because the houses and stores were built without permits," Razowsky told Al-Ahram Weekly. "When I questioned them further, they said the demolitions were to make way for the path of the security wall."
Indeed, the motive behind the demolitions is both premeditated and well calculated. Since Nazlat Isa borders the Green Line and lies in the area where Israel's apartheid wall is being constructed, the village is extremely important to the Israelis. The demolitions simply pave the way for Israel to continue its construction of the wall and further its process of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.
"The wall in this region is almost complete, running at most times several kilometres inside of the Green Line," explained Razowsky. "In this particular area, there is to be a fence both east and west of the village, creating a literal pocket. Nazlat Isa, Baqa Al-Sharqia and Nazlat Abu Nar all are villages that will be inside this pocket, cut off from the rest of the West Bank and Israel."
This explains why four months ago, the Israeli army handed demolition orders to 28 home owners and 170 commercial shop owners in the village. Although the military claimed that some of these homes and shops were built illegally and must be evacuated for demolition purposes, the owners were never notified when the demolitions would actually take place.
But the justification of illegal construction is simply an excuse. Construction of the apartheid wall has already led to the confiscation of thousands of dunums of agricultural land, the uprooting of thousands of olive trees and the demolition of homes and commercial stores. In the northern West Bank area bordering the Green Line, Israel's intent is to reduce as much as possible the number of Palestinians who live between the apartheid wall and the Green Line. When the entire area is illegally annexed into Israel, as it is expected to, Israel would have succeeded in its unilateral policy of separation and ethnic cleansing.
As the Palestinian Authority (PA) this week threatened to expose international bank accounts it claims exist in the names of notable Hamas leaders, the irony of this claim did not escape ordinary Palestinians. Since the outbreak of the current Intifada in late September 2000, more than 40,415 people have become homeless following Israeli court orders to demolish their homes. The PA has flagrantly failed to provide its citizens with the funds or construction materials to rebuild. The lack of funds has hardly been the reason. For the same PA that is now claiming that the leadership of Hamas has secret bank accounts, has long been accused of corruption and of funnelling public funds.
Numerous press reports in the past have exposed the existence of secret PA accounts in foreign banks. Last March, top Palestinian financial official Salam Fayad denied claims that the PA has $600 million worth of liquid assets. A special annual issue of Forbes Magazine once reported that Arafat has $300 million. In June 2002, Al-Watan Kuwaiti daily said it received documents from private sources at the Cairo branch of an Arab bank showing that Arafat had deposited $5.1 million into a personal account.
This is not all. In November 2002, the PA discovered 20 serious cases of embezzlement of public funds by senior level officials who agreed to return the money but went unpunished otherwise. At the start of this year, Israeli press reports revealed the involvement of high-ranking PA officials in stealing medicine and food supplies that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) distributes in the refugee camps and selling them on the black market. None of the officials have been brought to justice.
The more than 300 residents of Nazlat Isa who had to impotently stand and watch Israeli bulldozers demolish what took them years and lots of hard work to build have nothing to look forward to. Israel's construction of the apartheid wall in the area these past months has already suffocated the village. Unemployment at the village stands at a near 100 per cent. College students are unable to reach their universities. School teachers are unable to reach the village. Farmers are having difficulty reaching their fields. Pregnant women and those suffering from chronic diseases are having immeasurable difficulties reaching nearby hospitals.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military continues to work on the apartheid wall. The military has declared its intent to build a wall near the villages of Eizariya and Abu Dis east of Jerusalem. They have confiscated Palestinian land in the villages of Al-Sawahra and Sur Baher south of Jerusalem villages, and are expected to confiscate an additional 173 dunums. Equally disturbing is a recent report by the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, which blasted Israel for forcing nearly 43 per cent of the residents of the Old City of Hebron to leave their homes.
By the time PA President Yasser Arafat and his Premier Mahmoud Abbas come to an end -- whether peaceful or otherwise -- of their tug of war, they may be come to realise the grave extent of their contribution to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine.
