As a longtime activist for peace between Israel and Palestine and against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, I'm well used to one of the most dreary aspects of the American media. The violence gets coverage, the ongoing daily grind of occupation doesn't. I don't know why, but this week that changed.
I never thought I'd live to say these words, but I'm quite pleased with The New York Times . Last week, on Tuesday, they published an in-depth article on Highway 60, one of the main arteries of transportation for ordinary Palestinians, well within the West Bank, far from the Israeli border, and on the kafkaesque difficulties of transversing it on a daily basis. From Greg Myre's report:
But getting much less notice have been parallel and perhaps even more restrictive measures imposed by the Israeli military much deeper inside the West Bank. The internal checkpoints and barriers on roads have increasingly limited movement, something Palestinians say they find especially grating, because they are not trying to enter Israel, only to go from one Palestinian area to another. ...
“We’re seeing an increasing fragmentation of the West Bank,” said David Shearer, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which monitors the West Bank. “The whole fabric of life for the Palestinians has been disrupted.”
His office says Palestinians traveling within the West Bank now face 542 obstacles, 83 of which are guarded by soldiers, compared with fewer than 400 a year ago. The obstacles have effectively divided the West Bank into three sectors — northern, central and southern — and limited movement among them.
Of course, the Times doesn't get it perfect: they print the Israeli suggestion that travel restrictions only exist in response to Palestinian terrorism and the al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000, when in fact internal checkpoints within the West Bank were established in the mid-90s after the Oslo peace accords and have restricted travel through the occupied Palestinian territories, not just near "hotspots." But it's a start.
And it wasn't a one-off. Today the Times gave front-page treatment to Israeli anti-occupation group Peace Now's latest report on settlements. Steven Erlanger wades into one of the conflict's knottiest (and yet most basic) problems: land.
An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.
Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.
If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace. The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private.
Read the full report here. This means that the land that illegal Israeli settlements are built on were directly confiscated from private Palestinian landowners. Of course, all of the land across the "green line" that demarcated Israel's borders in 1967 is occupied territory and it is illegal, under international law, for Israeli citizens or the Israeli government to build anywhere on it.
I haven't yet had a chance to read or parse Erlanger's report more closely, but twice in one week, a week that saw an Israeli killed by Qassam rocket fire and dozens of Palestinians killed, as well as spectacular nonviolent resistance against Israeli missiles, I'm pleased that at least someone is paying attention (however incompletely) to the background issues.
This is what occupation looks like.
--Ethan Heitner |
Tuesday, November 21, 2006 11:36 AM
