A Day in Court (as a Palestinian), Destruction of a Hudna and more

A DAY IN COURT
By Gabriel Ash
YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)
(YellowTimes.org)

The military tribunal of Salem is hosted inside a military base overlooking Jenin. Officially, it is open to the public. In practice, it isn't. The soldiers decide who is allowed in. Usually, the only audience is relatives of the accused. But unwelcome visitors are so rare that I managed to sneak in, attaching myself to lawyer Shamai Leibovitz, grandson of the philosopher Yeshaiyahu Leibovitz. Inside, the court usher is alarmed by my incongruous presence. But I pretend to speak only English, which confuses him enough to leave me alone.

Shamai is a young and combative Israeli human rights lawyer, who enjoys confrontation and thrives on challenging the court's routine racism. He wears a settlers' style yarmulke and peppers his speech with Biblical metaphors. His very appearance, defending a Palestinian accused of involvement in "terrorism," makes the court clerks tense up. But he has no illusions about his power. "The system is strong," he says. Court battles alone, without publicity and media, lead nowhere. His strategy for his clients? Try every possible legal avenue and hope for an opening. But victories are rare.

A batch of prisoners are ushered in around 11:30 AM. The prisoners sit in a walled bay, the size of a bathroom, in the corner of the courtroom. They look haggard and subdued.

We stand up as the "judge" enters, a chirpy, thirty something woman in a dressy sleeveless shirt, casually designed to be offensive to the mostly elderly Muslim audience. The judge singsongs through the proceedings, smiling and joking with the staff. There is something unwholesome about her jolliness, like too much perfume in a shithouse.

The first case is decided quickly: twelve months in jail for shuttling a "wanted" man. No arguments are heard. The defense agrees to the punishment.

Most prisoners are brought for a fifteen day extension of their arrest so they can be interrogated again, usually through long sessions of sleep deprivation, threats of harm to their family, beating, and other forms of "moderate" torture that Israel's courts overlook. The "judge" doesn't even pretend to evaluate the merits of the police requests. All extensions are approved, usually with the agreement of the defense.

The court pretends to follow procedures. Everything is translated to and from Arabic. Decisions are dictated to stenographers. The "judge" asks prisoners if they have legal representation and insures that they understand what they are told. But as one defense lawyer tells me during the break, "we're all playing a role in this theater."

Saleh (pseudonym) appears to be in his late teens. He smiles a lot, a bashful smile, especially when he is trying to make sense of what he is being told. The prosecution asked for the usual fifteen day extension.

Saleh wants the court to release him because he has already been seven months in jail. Yes, he tells the court, he does have a lawyer, but the lawyer isn't present. He doesn't know why. The absence of the lawyer isn't a problem for the uncurious "judge." She approves the fifteen day extension and then patiently explains to Saleh: "You were six months in administrative detention," (arbitrary imprisonment) which doesn't count apparently. "Now the request is for you to be held for interrogation." That's different.

When the "judge" leaves, the families rush to get close to the prisoners. Some cry, their faces the image of despair. This is a rare occasion for relatives to see their loved ones. Israel considers the right of prisoners to family visits an unnecessary privilege, honored mostly in the breach. But the court usher, a yarmulke-wearing young soldier with Yemenite features, firmly herds the families and leads them out in the other direction. One woman begs him to let her speak to her son. He tells her off, adding that he is punishing her for the two recent bomb attacks in Ariel and Rosh Ha-Ein. She is no doubt guilty. All Palestinians are.

Abed (pseudonym), for whose hearing we came to Salem, is brought to the court after a five hour delay. He comes before a different "judge," a grumpy officer in uniform, who gives the impression talking makes her physically uncomfortable. Our "judge" is unfazed by the delay. She dismisses the suggestion that she should reprimand the prison service. What's a few hours of a lawyer's time?

Shamai, Abed's lawyer, has just received the dossier of the charges against him, which consists almost entirely of four confessions he has signed during his two months in jail. According to Abed, he was kept awake for a hundred hours and threatened that his wife, who has just given birth, be imprisoned, his children left without parents and his house demolished.

Shamai asks the court to give him a few days to read the material and schedule a preliminary hearing to argue whether Abed should be kept in prison. The "judge" stares at him in disbelief. "Perhaps you want to confer with the other lawyers who have more experience in this court," she advises him. The court, she explains, unknowingly paraphrasing a character from Kafka's novel, never releases accused Palestinians like Abed.

Shamai reminds the judge that she must follow Israeli law, and insists he has a right to try to convince the court that the prosecution's request for keeping Abed in prison without bail should be denied. Perhaps, he suggests, he would discover that the evidence is flimsy, or find other reasons to justify release. The "judge" is peeved. At first, she orders that Abed be arrested without bail. But Shamai insists, citing precedents. At last, she allows for a written petition explaining why a hearing should be held. Put simply, the "judge" asks the defense to explain why the court should follow basic due process. What is more basic than the right of the accused to challenge the prosecution's motions?

While waiting for Abed to arrive from prison, I follow Shamai as he tries to track a former client, Faruq (pseudonym), who is here to petition the "civil administration," housed in the same military base. A few days earlier, Shamai spent hours on the phone trying to get Faruq's mother a special permit to travel to Herzlia for a consultation with a breast cancer specialist.

Faruq's mother sat in front of the checkpoint in Nablus from eight o'clock in the morning to six o'clock in the evening. The permit was finally granted, but the officers at the checkpoint did not bother to deliver it to her. She had given up hope for getting the proper tests. Faruq informs us that she is undergoing a mastectomy in Nablus as we speak, perhaps unnecessarily.

Finding Faruq isn't easy. Palestinians who have business with the "civil administration" enter the base through a separate entrance to an enclosure in the base. The gate leading to that space is locked and the officer in the police booth near it takes some persuasion to open it for Shamai. He warns us, with the attitude of a zookeeper, that it is dangerous for us to enter the Palestinian enclosure -- we could be kidnapped.

Stepping inside, I glance at the few dozen Palestinians who came today to brave the Israeli bureaucratic maze in the often futile hope of achieving some little achievement that, for a free person, would not be worth mentioning, like traveling to visit a friend in the town nearby, or going to see a doctor, or getting to school, but that for Palestinians is sometimes as much of a victory as bringing home the milk of the lioness.

The petitioners wait for their turn, mostly silent, affected by the oppressiveness of the place: a few benches, surrounded by concrete on one side, and fence and barbed wire on the other side; in front, a wall with a row of darkened windows, fitted with an intercom system, through which they communicate with the almost disembodied clerks. So these are the beastlike people that make Israelis tremble with fear.

We find Faruq. He is trying to get an explanation from the Shaback why he is refused a magnetic card. His petition has been denied without comment. Shamai wants to represent Faruq. The "civil administration" officer reacts hysterically. He shouts that Shamai must leave at once. He won't speak to anyone but the Palestinian himself. Denial of the right to legal representation is just one more tool in the toolbox of repression that sustains Israel's rule over Palestinians.

Later, as we walk out of the courtroom at the end of Abed's "trial," an armed soldier, perhaps one of the clerks, shouts at us from behind: "here there is a different law." How true.

[Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is an unabashed "opssimist." He writes his columns because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword - and sometimes not. He lives in the United States.]
Gabriel Ash encourages your comments: gash [at] YellowTimes.org


August 19, 2003 (http://www.counterpunch.org)


Punish Others For Your Crimes
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
By JULIANA FREDMAN


Residents boast about the size and scope of Askar and Balata, "largest refugee camps in the West Bank"; Balata, birthplace of the intifada, Askar the less glorious cousin. But from the hundreds of stricken faces watching as they pulled the body out of the smoldering rubble it suddenly becomes clear that Askar is a very crowded small town of 13,000.

"Min?" (who) they ask, looking as though they know the answer.

"Faez." The name travels rapidly through the crowd, heads go into hands among those digging and those scavenging and those collecting cloths and other salvageable items in makeshift sheet parachutes of brought from neighboring houses.


This is not, of course, the first time the Israelis have broken the Hudna. There was the murder of little Machmoud Quabaya and the severing of his sisters arm by an`accidental' burst of machine gun fire into their car at the Notorious checkpoint at Barta, a village trapped between the wall and the green line.

He is one of 11 palestinians killed in July, including extrajudicial asasinations, the 280 wounded the 316 quietly arrested even as a few hundred others were released in the full glare of the flashbulbs. That is not even to mention the 100 house demolition orders in East Jerusalem alone, the land confiscations and the unconscionable progress of the suffocating apartheid wall through the farmlands and villages of the West Bank.

And yet the resistance faction, these godless bands of savages and terrorists have held their hudna even as the most moral army in world wreaks its calculated havoc.

So as the world rubs its eyes and finds no `terrorism' to splash across front pages with which to nullify and marginalize the reality of occupation, some people began to notice the wall, under construction for a year, and the brazen theft of yet more vast tracts of Palestinian land as well as almost the entire western aquifer.

And what is the only democracy in the middle east to do when `the terrorists' will not cooperate as distractions from their crimes?

Here is what to do. Early in the morning on Friday August 8 (Nagasaki day) enter Askar refugee camp with 3 tanks, 15 jeeps, several personel carriers and an apache helicoper and suround the house of a leading figure of Hamas. Fire a tank shell into the 4 story house and cause an explosion that kills the `wanted' man and shatters every window around throwing matresses and couch cushions into neighboring trees . Next, drag his body out onto the pavement and leave it there in the hot sun for 7 hours before loading it into a military ambulance and stealing it from his grieving family. Leave only a bloody print behind.

In the meantime pump thick gas down the narrow alleys of the camp so that all anyone can see through their own teary eyes this morning is glimpes of others in the street above the hands cupped over noses and eyes and all one is aware of is slivers of onion pressed into hands and the sound of gunfire beyond the blindness.

To really ensure maximum provocation pump sufficient gas through for one more death from suffocation and kill a stone throwing boy for good measure.

Now run over the ravaged house for two hours in a bulldozer waving a large blue and white Israeli flag , make sure nothing is salvageable form this home. And always, always hold back the ambulances by whatever means necessary to ensure a maximum number of shaheeds.

Now pull the army back and leave the 4th body to be discovered under the rubble by family and friends clutching meager almost delicate scooping tools.

This is how to end a ceasefire when everyday prolonged brutality and the occasional murder just won’t do, the pragmatic occupier must use a recipe of grand scale, flagrant and outrageous provocation. We'll see what they manage to cook up.

Tommorow: closing all checkpoints detaining hundreds between every village and town and ascribing it to threat of terrorism based on the attacks in Askar. In other words, collectively punish others for your crimes.

Juliana Fredman is a film maker working on a documentary about health care under occupation in the West Bank. She can be contacted at joolz [at] riseup.net


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Checkpoint
by Juliana Fredman
August, 2003



Although it is cliche to say, her beauty and serenity evoke an aging Virgin Mary, especially in this setting. She sits on her donkey expression unchanged as she bounces along among the olive trees through the rocky valley pass eyes glancing outward watchful and placid.

Her donkey has an open sore on its behind and she has a grotesquely bulbous and purple arm irritated to elephantine proportions by the holes made to clean her blood three times a week.

It is this arm that she offers to the soldier as proof of her right to pass. The man she travels with, also a dialysis patient, on a healthier donkey with less corroded looking track marks, speaks English, "Please", he says looking up at the two boys lounging on the hill, guns cocked, "Dialysis, we are dialysis."

Nidal has no common language with these people. She offers the arm and a slight faraway smile.

The soldiers let them pass with very little trouble. Around the corner invisible from the informal checkpoint sat the 25 people who had already been detained by 5:30 this morning, quietly beneath the olive trees not lucky enough to have a life threatening illness and luck with the soldiers. Their huweas (identification cards) have been taken tying them invisibly to this spot.

This is the road between the incredibly beautiful village of Assyra and the equally spectacular urban center of Nablus. In this spot the solders asked me why I carried a tri-pod. To take pictures, I said, it is very beautiful here.

"Why here? Why don't you take pictures in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?” (The response, go visit beautiful Tel Aviv is so widespread and rote that it must be part of basic training. It is as if they are so enamoured of the smoggy skies and modern art/ Stalinist architecture of Tel Aviv that they really cannot see the spectacular rugged mountains, knarled 1000 year olive trees all around.)

As if, as one detained man told me, "Soldiers have 3 eyes. The 2 eyes on their face and the eye on their gun. And they wear dark glasses over their real eyes."


So we arrive after the journey that would be 10 minutes on a road that has been closed for 3 years, after about an hour. Car to donkey to checkpoint to car to hospital. At the hospital the patients exchange stories of the journey while waiting for their tubes to be inserted. They come from villages in every direction through some of the most notoriously difficult permanent checkpoints in Palestine; Beit Iba, Beit Farik, and the dreaded Huwara. All of them left before sunrise to arrive here and the conversation is dominated with how were the roads from Luban? "How were the soldiers at Beit Farik?" as if they are farmers discussing the weather.

During the course of the dialysis treatment it filters out that all of the checkpoints have been completely closed. This is not to surprising as the previous day the army invaded Askar refugee camp, killing 4 people and dealing the hudna final blow after a long series a provocations.

Displaying a cynical foreknowledge of the possible results of this act, the Israelis were sealing off the west bank in anticipation of the retaliation that they courted.

The patients clamoured around the ambulances as they drove by, squeezing in beyond what space would allow, knowing that this was their only hope of getting home this day.

Nidal and Mofid do not join the crush. Ambulances cannot enter Assyra on the best of days. This is because one of the tallest mountains in Palestine overlooks the village. From its peak, say long time residents who can remember, as children flying kites up there, you can see cars driving in cities in Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Now at the top of the mountain one can see a series of towers and wires. It is an army base, almost entirely underground, the second most important in the territories. This is why people who live in Assyra are told to travel hours out of the way to Beit Iba or Beit Farik where they have little chance of passing and no chance of taking a car through and why they are told by 20 year olds with guns, "this is our road, for you there is no road here"

The same soldiers are there after we walk back over the mountains. Because of the stringent security Nidal's sons are afraid to run the donkeys across as this practice (taking people and parcels around the soldiers through the mountain or valley) is the sole source of income for her family of ten. Anyway, they say, we always feel stronger after dialysis although Mofid is agonizingly slow on his cane.

Again the soldiers let them through with remarkable ease so again the 60 people, this time on the far side of the roadblock were a shock anew. This has nothing to do with the `increase security measures unique to this day. Rather, as the soldier explained to me, `they must learn to go through Beit Ibaa `but Beit Iba is all the way around the mountains it takes hours more each way, these people work and go to school in Nablus, you can't expect them to go that way."

If they know that every time they pass this way they will be held for 6 hours they will learn to stop coming this way. As if these were dogs to be trained by repetitive punishment (although as any dog trainer will tell you, this approach does not really work.)

``Anyway, I continued to argue. `Beit Iba is closed today, so is Beit Farik and Huwaraâ`` then they should stay in their houses, they should have known the checkpoints would be closed today

Under I sat for 3 hours listening to where people were trying to go this day, to work, to university, to physical therapy, shopping. We all watched as new groups arrived, approach the soldiers, see their huweas disappear into camoflage pockets and come join the group under the trees. Intervention with soldiers led to the release of a few medical cases including an old woman with eye cancer returning to the village from chemotherapy in Nablus and a baby with a broken arm but most remained.

And the logic of this, the uniquely twisted logic was revealed through interaction with the soldiers. It was not merely the daily project of attempting to teach people that the quickest way between two points is not a straight line, and that in fact there is no quick path between two points for Palestinians. No on this day they revealed that they had good reason to believe that there would be a `terrorist' attack. Why do you think this, I pressed the question in various forms. “Well because we killed 4 Palestinians this week of course, because we broke the ceasefire.”

And suddenly the lethal absurdity that is collective punishment reveals itself. The dance that becomes pre-emptive punishment of a population for acts which you yourself have committed. The army recognizes its guilt and embraces it.

Sitting in Jerusalem, after hearing the loud explosion from a huge bomb that everyone knew was coming from the moment that the army gave its latest series of extra judicial assassination orders I know why those people are dead. And as I watched the police and soldiers roll up to Damascus gate and grab every Palestinian man on the street, in the stores, in their cars and beat them and lead them away in a slow march I knew then also. Israel knows that it is guilty as surely as Nidal knows that she is not and this is why they can never let this end.


Other Resources:

Recent reportbacks from Palestine at http://www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org

The Meaning of Rachel Corrie - Of Dignity and Solidarity, Edward Said
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/Activism/The_Meaning_of_Rachel_Corrie.htm

Hic Road Map. Quo Vadis?, Gabriel Ash
http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1427&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Under Cover of Righteousness, Shulamit Aloni
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3202

Threats of Forced Mass Expulsion, Amira Hass
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3077

Five-part series advocating ethnic cleansing in the name of a homogenous religious state with the usual, lies, distortions, euphemisms. 'Transfer' of Palestinians has become a common topic in Israeli political and academic discourse.
http://www.gamla.org.il/english/article/2002/july/b1.htm

Native American radio show comparing the struggles of Palestinians and Native Americans posted at http://www.nativeamericacalling.com/ (February 11 past shows)

For news and analysis from Palestine:
http://www.flashpoints.net/
http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/meastwat.htm
http://www.between-lines.org
http://www.electronicintifada.net
http://www.ccmep.org
http://www.rafah.vze.com
http://www.imemc.org
http://www.palestinechronicle.com
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/
http://www.karameh.net
http://www.sphr.org
http://www.ismcanada.org
http://www.gush-shalom.org/
http://www.radio4all.net

To get involved in Palestine solidarity in the US:
http://www.sustaincampaign.org
http://www.justiceinpalestine.org
http://www.al-awda.org
http://www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org
http://www.palsolidarity.org

Torture and illegal detention of Palestinian political prisoners:
http://www.ppsmo.org/e-website/

Weekly report on Israeli human rights violations in Palestine:
http://www.pchrgaza.org/