Saturday, 13 February 2010
Jerusalem - The Israeli courts ordered the release last week of two foreign women arrested by the army in the West Bank in what human-rights lawyers warn has become a wide-ranging clampdown by Israel on non-violent protest from international, Israeli and Palestinian activists.
The arrest of the two women during a nighttime raid on the Palestinian city of Ramallah that saw soldiers enter their home, highlighted a new tactic by Israeli officials: using immigration police to try to deport foreign supporters of the Palestinian cause.
A Czech woman was deported last month after she was seized from her Ramallah home by a special unit known as Oz, originally established to arrest migrant laborers working illegally inside Israel.
Human rights lawyers said Israel's new offensive is intended to undermine a joint non-violent struggle by international activists and Palestinian villagers challenging a land grab by Israel as it builds the separation wall on farmland in the West Bank.
In what Israel's daily Haaretz newspaper called a "war on protest," last month, Israeli security forces launched a series of raids in the West Bank starting in the end of 2009, detaining Palestinian community leaders organizing protests against the wall.
"Israel knows that the non-violence struggle is spreading and that it's a powerful weapon against the occupation," said Neta Golan, an Israeli activist based in Ramallah. "Israel has no answer to it, which is why the security forces are panicking and have started making lots of arrests."
The detention the internationals Ariadna Marti, 25, of Spain, and Bridgette Chappell, 22, of Australia, both working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), suggests a revival of a long-running struggle between Israel and ISM, a group of activists who join Palestinians in non-violently opposing the Israeli occupation.
The last major confrontation, a few years into the second intifada, resulted in a brief surge of deaths and injuries of international activists at the hands of the Israeli army. Most controversially, Rachel Corrie, from the US, was run down and killed by an army bulldozer in 2003 as she stood by a home in Gaza threatened with demolition.
Ms Golan, a co-founder of the ISM, said Israel had sought to demonize the group's activists in the Israeli and international media. "Instead of representing our struggle as one of non-violence, we are portrayed as 'accomplices to terror'," she said.
Targeting the internationals caused an escalation into the violation of already limited Palestinian sovereignty. The first entry of Israeli immigration police into a Palestinian-controlled area of the West Bank, the so-called "Area A," occurred during the arrest of the Czech woman. Eva Novakova, 28, had recently been appointed the ISM's media coordinator. She was detained because she allegedly overstayed her tourist visa and was deported before she could appeal to the courts.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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