Kk-Forum,
denne er fra 24. mai, men ligavel.
Ha'aretz magazine, Thursday, May 24, 2001
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=18&datee=5/25/01&id120038
" ... It's depressing. This is a city under military occupation without any
rights for the occupied. There was never a situation like this with
apartheid. The control in the black areas was not so forceful. I don't
think you can compare the two situations. Under apartheid, there was a
recognition that the blacks would continue to live in their areas. Here the
impression is that the objective is to push the Palestinians out...."
"... The Israeli soldiers appear to me to be more brutal than ever. There's
an atmosphere of power and domination and contempt. I don't believe it was
so in the past. They used to seem like they were serving their country. It
is my impression that the soldiers' brutality and arrogance is penetrating
all the authorities in their contact with the Palestinians. The police in
South Africa also treated blacks as if they weren't human. This is what is
happening here. Non-people, non-humans, people without any rights or human
dignity - so it's okay to do anything to them. And it permeates everything.
This is the ugly side of all political oppression. ..."
Knut Rognes
**************
Like the old days in South Africa
A tour of Hebron with Raymond Louw, former editor of the Rand Daily Mail,
the newspaper that was at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid
By Gideon Levy
I went to Hebron with Raymond Louw. For 11 years, Louw was the
editor-in-chief of the Rand Daily Mail, the Johannesburg newspaper that
resolutely fought apartheid during its darkest period. A youthful 74, Louw,
who has earned the nickname "Mr. Press Freedom," travels all over the
world. Last week, he was in Israel.We thought about visiting Hebron because
we thought about apartheid. No other place in the occupied territories can
better illustrate the brutal essence of the Israeli occupation and the
local version of apartheid. In Hebron, a tiny minority of about 400 people
cruelly controls a huge majority of 140,000 residents, about 30,000 of whom
live under direct Israeli military rule; tens of thousands of Palestinians
are subjected to curfews and closures due to a holiday or demonstration or
any other whim of the Jewish minority; there are roads for Jews only;
stores are burned down and market stalls are overturned; acts of violence
occur almost daily; the security forces stationed there do not lift a
finger when the violence is perpetrated by the ruling minority, but respond
severely when the violence comes from the subjugated majority. A guerrilla
war is being waged by the occupied against the occupier; between the two
peoples - not to say the two races - surges a deep and violent hatred
commingled with fear.
Louw has been to Israel a number of times, but this was his first visit to
its occupied territories, not counting East Jerusalem. On his past visits,
his hosts were careful to keep him away from those areas. They showed him
only the nice side of Israel - the beauty of Jerusalem, the liveliness of
Tel Aviv, the kibbutz and the moshav, the universities and Yad Vashem, the
Dead Sea and the holy places - the usual itinerary. Last week, I took him
to Hebron, perhaps the most abject place in the occupied territories. He
was frequently reminded of the "old days" - the days of the apartheid
regime against which he fought; he often found the situation here to be
incomparably worse than the way things were in South Africa in the old days.
Louw donned a bulletproof vest - for the first time in his life - and
together we walked about the streets of the bloody and divided city. He was
obviously shocked by what he saw - the anti-Arab graffiti, the soldiers'
body language, the poster of murdered infant Shalhevet Pass. The sweet tea
he sipped while sitting on a rickety stool at the shabby cafe of Abu-Adnan
at the entrance to the Hebron casbah was unlike any tea he'd ever tasted in
South Africa, he commented. "Something has to be different," remarked
someone sitting nearby.
How symbolic: Apartheid began in South Africa in 1948. It lasted for 42
years, with five million whites controlling 35 million blacks, "until we
came to the conclusion that we couldn't go on this way. Luckily, we managed
to reach a solution before we destroyed ourselves. We were on the verge of
a civil war. It simply wasn't right. There's no way you can keep on
preventing most of the residents from living their lives."
In the car, on the road from Emek Ha'ela, via Tzurif near Alon Shvut, we
came upon Efrat, which is endlessly expanding: "I've never understood the
logic of the settlements. What do they want to achieve? I'm not aware of
the full history of your conflict. I understand the Jews' need for a
homeland and your homeland is here. It has always been here. I can
understand that.
"What I don't understand is why there cannot be mutual recognition that
this is the land of two peoples. I understand that in the beginning, the
Arabs wanted to throw you into the sea. I understand that by now, they've
accepted your presence here. So if they accept your existence here and most
of the Jews accept the Palestinians' presence here, where do you plan on
going with this? I understand that most Jews and Palestinians do not want a
one-state solution, so the only thing left is a two-state solution.
"With us, the situation was that the whites wanted to keep South Africa for
themselves despite the black majority there. That's why they kept them
second-class citizens. It's exactly like what you're doing here: The
Israelis are determined to hold on to the territories despite the people
who live there. That's the similar part. But you haven't taken the kind of
steps that were taken in South Africa. You haven't prevented Palestinians
from doing business with Israelis."
But, in fact, that's exactly what's happening - the closure precludes them
from doing so.
"The blacks were only allowed to maintain very limited businesses in their
areas - only one store and no more. Almost all the resources were at the
whites' disposal and hardly anything was available to the blacks. Perhaps
it is similar here: With us, the whites saw the blacks as a political and
economic threat. You appear to view the Palestinians the same way. But are
you dependent on Palestinian labor in your economy? With us, the economy
was based on black labor. The first time I came here, Israelis were
concerned about the demographic threat. Are you still afraid of it?"
Which is more moral - the South African apartheid or the Israeli occupation?
"Neither one is moral or even practical. They can't last forever. With us,
that's already been proven."
At the Cave of the Patriarchs, which has separate entrances for Jews and
Arabs: "In the old days, stores in South Africa had separate entrances, one
for whites and one for blacks. If a black person entered through the
whites' door, no one would serve him. There was total separation. They also
wanted separate elevators, but you know what the problem was? They couldn't
build enough elevators. I told you apartheid wasn't practical."
We pass burned out Palestinian stores, a locksmith shop that has been
trashed, shuttered businesses situated opposite the Avraham Avinu
neighborhood. Elian Abu-Hadad is the proprietor of the ruined locksmith
shop. He'd worked here for 45 years. A few weeks ago, settlers came and
destroyed his business. Since the outbreak of the Intifada, he's struggled
to make ends meet; now his shop has been completely wrecked. Several days
ago, he tried to start rebuilding it, but says that the IDF wouldn't allow
him to. The 51-year-old locksmith who has 12 mouths to feed, including his
elderly parents, gazes forlornly at the destruction and says that he
doesn't know what to do. "I have no idea what will be. I am waiting for
God's help."
Further down the street: the bakery blown up by the settlers several weeks
ago. The walls are covered with soot; the owner would like to fix the place
up. "Shalhevet's blood cries out: No more terror!" screams a poster affixed
to the wall, which is also decorated with a drawing of angry Palestinians
shooting.
An Israeli soldier leans nonchalantly on his jeep, smoking a cigarette;
three young Palestinians stand submissively behind him holding plastic bags
full of groceries, waiting for the soldier to permit them to continue on
their way. They've already been standing here a long time, having given
their ID cards to the soldier. Now he's having a smoke. He's in no hurry.
Let them stand and wait. They're Palestinians.
A bulletproofed military truck transports a number of settler children up
Shuhada Street. Barbed wire fencing is spread along part of what, until
recently, were stalls of the Hebron marketplace. A sanitation worker loads
crates of rotten melons onto his wagon. The merchants here are having a
hard time selling their wares because of the economic situation in the city
and because of the fear of the army and the settlers felt by shoppers in
this market that abuts the Avraham Avinu area.
Raymond Louw's initial impression: "It's depressing. This is a city under
military occupation without any rights for the occupied. There was never a
situation like this with apartheid. The control in the black areas was not
so forceful. I don't think you can compare the two situations. Under
apartheid, there was a recognition that the blacks would continue to live
in their areas. Here the impression is that the objective is to push the
Palestinians out.
"With us, there were several pockets of blacks living in the heart of white
neighborhoods from which they were then expelled, but these were only in
isolated places. There was an area in Johannesburg - Sophiatown - where
blacks were living in the heart of an area inhabited by whites. They
expelled all the blacks to a distance of 15 or 20 kilometers away. And even
then, it was done by the police.
"Here it is being done by the settlers. I don't know if that makes a big
difference. It may not be exactly the same thing, but the motivation is the
same. What's happening here is an attempt to pressure them by means of
attrition. The Israelis prevent some of the Palestinians from making a
living, stores are closed or burned."
Who generally initiates the provocations, Louw asks. Bassam Eid, head of
the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, says that the Palestinians
are the ones fighting an occupation and thus the question of who started it
is meaningless.
"Ehud Olmert - A United Jerusalem" is the message embroidered on the cap of
the man clearing the rotten melons out of the market. "Arabs out," urges
the graffiti on the first closed store on Shuhada Street, referred to as
King David Street by the settlers. But this famous street belongs to the
settlers: Only Jewish cars are allowed on it, the Palestinian stores stand
deserted, some boarded up and sprayed with Hebrew graffiti. Most of the
windows of the Palestinian houses have been covered with iron bars to
protect them from stone-throwing settlers. A number of windows are
shattered. At the end of the street, approaching Beit Hadassah, we two Jews
- one Palestinian and one South African - are also denied passage. A
soldier wearing fashionable eyeglasses blocks our way.
"With us, in the old days, there were no separate roads for blacks and
whites. There were places that blacks needed a permit to enter, but they
could easily obtain the permit. With us, they couldn't close off the roads
to blacks since they were the servants in the whites' houses. There were
hours when they were forbidden to be in certain areas."
Purple bougainvillea crawls up the exterior of a closed-up furniture store.
To judge by the amount of bougainvillea covering the store's doors, it has
been a long time since any furniture was sold here. An illustrated sign is
the only reminder of the abandoned business.
Louw counts six IDF checkpoints in less than a kilometer, from the Cave of
the Patriarchs to Shuhada Street. In South Africa, there were roadblocks
only at the entrance to neighborhoods, not within them. "We hate you, you
stinking people," someone has scrawled in Hebrew on another boarded-up
store at the entrance to the market. No one - Jewish or Palestinian -
bothers to remove this particular bit of ugliness.
Were there slogans like this in South Africa?
"No, not at all. There was graffiti supporting the African National
Congress, such as 'Long live the ANC.' Not on the stores, only on the
walls. Of course, the whites would say similar things, but they never wrote
it."
By the next checkpoint, on the street leading from Shuhada to the market,
Louw again notices several young Palestinians who are being detained by
soldiers. He wants to follow what's happening, but after several minutes,
when it becomes apparent that these young people could be standing here for
quite some time, he gives up.
"The Israeli soldiers appear to me to be more brutal than ever. There's an
atmosphere of power and domination and contempt. I don't believe it was so
in the past. They used to seem like they were serving their country. It is
my impression that the soldiers' brutality and arrogance is penetrating all
the authorities in their contact with the Palestinians. The police in South
Africa also treated blacks as if they weren't human. This is what is
happening here. Non-people, non-humans, people without any rights or human
dignity - so it's okay to do anything to them. And it permeates everything.
This is the ugly side of all political oppression."
A distant memory: "Once, my car was pelted with stones after I entered a
black neighborhood. This was in the 1950s when blacks had just shot at
black train passengers who were returning from working for whites after a
general strike had been called. The car was suddenly surrounded by a black
mob and one of the blacks came up to me and told me that I had better get
away quickly. They wrecked the rear of the car. It was the most dangerous
situation I've ever been in. I had with me a pistol that my father had
given me as a present, but thank God, I didn't use it. I finished off half
a bottle of brandy because of the fear. The next day, when I was in the
tub, my son - who was then two years old - came in holding the pistol. I
returned it to my father that same day."
A traffic jam on the Tunnel Road, due to work being done to increase
protection on the road. "I cannot understand how the settlers can want to
live in such an atmosphere. We have a high crime rate in South Africa. My
house has alarms, bars and infrared and is surrounded by an electric fence.
Every time we come in, we bolt all the four doors to the house. We only
leave a door open if we're sitting in the garden. You never know if someone
armed is about to suddenly come over the fence with his gun drawn. We're
also cautious when we get into the car. This is the tension that we live
with. But I think that this is nothing compared to what we saw today in
Hebron. In Hebron, they're living atop a keg of dynamite."
Back in Jerusalem, Louw removed the bulletproof vest. Near Mishmar
Hashiv'a, on the eastern outskirts of Tel Aviv, he wanted to know if the
walls surrounding the highway were meant for protection against shooting or
to separate Jews and Arabs. But these walls were constructed only for
acoustic purposes.
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