How Palestinian women successfully defended their village from demolition

By Dilip -
By Sarah Flatto Manasrah  Waging Nonviolence 

One year after Israel gave the green light to demolish Khan al-Amar, the small Bedouin village survives thanks to a bold and creative women-led campaign. Just over one year ago, photos and videos of Israeli border police violently arresting a young Palestinian woman went viral. She appeared to be screaming as they ripped her hijab off and wrestled her to the ground.

It captured a moment of crisis on July 4, 2018 when Israeli forces arrived with bulldozers in Khan al-Amar, poised to expel and demolish the tiny Palestinian village at gunpoint. It was an indelible scene in a theater of cruelty that has defined the beleaguered village. Army and police were met by hundreds of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists who mobilized to put their bodies on the line. Together with clergy, journalists, diplomats, educators and politicians, they ate, slept, strategized and sustained nonviolent resistance against the impending demolition.

Immediately after police arrested the young woman in the photo and other activists, residents filed a Supreme Court petition to stop the demolition. An emergency injunction was issued to halt it temporarily. The Supreme Court asked the parties to come up with an “agreement” to resolve the situation. Then, the court declared that Khan al-Amar residents must agree to forcible relocation to a site adjacent a garbage dump in East Jerusalem. They refused to accept these conditions and re-asserted their right to stay in their homes. Finally, on September 5, 2018, judges dismissed the previous petitions and ruled that the demolition could move forward.

Communities in occupied Palestinian territory are used to forced displacement, especially in Area C, which is under full Israeli military and administrative control. Frequent demolitions are a defining tactic of the Israeli government’s declared plans to annex all of Palestinian territory. Khan al-Amar straddles a uniquely pivotal location termed the “E1” area by Israel, lying between two massive Israeli settlements which are illegal under international law. If Khan al-Amar is destroyed, the government will succeed in engineering contiguous Israeli territory in the West Bank and cutting Palestinian society off from Jerusalem.

International condemnation of the Israeli government’s plan to demolish the village was unprecedented. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued a statement that “extensive destruction of property without military necessity and population transfers in an occupied territory constitute war crimes.” The European Union warned that the consequences of the demolition would be “very serious.” Round-the-clock mass nonviolent protests kept vigil over Khan al-Amar until late October 2018, when the Israeli government declared the “evacuation” would be delayed, blaming election-year uncertainty. When the protests finally waned, hundreds of Israelis, Palestinians and internationals had protected the village for four months. Over a year after the demolition was given the green light, Khan al-Amar lives and breathes a sigh of relief. Its people remain in their homes. They are resolute, determined to stay there until physically removed. The young woman in the photo, Sarah, has become another icon of women-led resistance.

What went right?
In June 2019, I sat in Khan al-Amar drinking tea with sage and snacking on pretzels with Sarah Abu Dahouk, the woman in the viral photo, and her mother, Um Ismael (her full name cannot be used due to privacy concerns). At the entrance to the village, men reclined in plastic chairs and smoked shisha, while children played with a ball. There was a sense of welcome but hesitant calm in this isolated community buttressed by vast swaths of bare desert. We chatted about last summer’s existential crisis, euphemistically calling it mushkileh, or problems in Arabic....
https://www.juancole.com/2019/10/palestinian-successfully-demolition.html

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more