Khalid’s replanted olive trees in Al Walaja
We lezen vaak over kolonisten die Palestijnse olijfbomen vernielen, Palestijnen die zomaar worden gearresteerd en Palestijnen die van hun land worden verdreven omdat een nederzetting wordt uitgebreid. Maar kloppen die verhalen wel? Lang niet altijd, zo blijkt uit onder andere dit onderzoekje van Missing Peace. Waarmee niet gezegd is dat kolonisten nooit Palestijnen treiteren en Israel nooit onterecht Palestijnen arresteert, maar wel dat we niet alles klakkeloos kunnen geloven wat van zogenaamde ‘mensenrechten- en vredesorganisaties komt en hier klakkeloos door de NRC, Trouw en de Volkskrant wordt overgenomen, om van de riooljournalistiek van Joop.nl wat betreft Israel nog te zwijgen.
RP
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The West Bank distortions industry
http://missingpeace.eu/en/2011/08/the-west-bank-distortions-industry/
By Missing Peace
Monday, August 15, 2011 - 9:37 AM
A shocking tale about UNWRA’s involvement in the cognitive war against Israel.
There is no shortage of claims about alleged Israeli human rights violations in the so called ’West Bank’. Most of these claims originate from Palestinian sources and NGO’s and are part of a disinformation campaign that aims to delegitimize Israel. This campaign of distortions, bias and, sometimes, outright lies is well documented by a host of bloggers and organizations – such as Honest Reporting and Camera.
One of the players in this campaign is UNWRA, an organization that is supposed to be impartial and to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees. UNWRA’s anti-Israel bias is not quite new but, until recently, has been limited to refugee related issues. Now UNWRA has apparently decided to interfere in the already explosive situation in the West Bank and joined the general disinformation campaign against Israel. Here’s how that campaign works.
Dutch orchestra attacked by IDF?
At the end of July the Palestinian News Network published an article about a Dutch orchestra that was supposedly attacked by the IDF during a performancein the Palestinian village Kfar Qadum. The PNN article was widely distributed among international media outlets. However, a member of the orchestra wrote a detailed account about the actual events. The orchestra participated in the weekly peaceful demonstration against an IDF checkpoint in the vicinity of the village, he said.
According to another account on the Palsolidarity website a group of Palestinians approached the soldiers who responded by firing teargas grenades. The IDF, in response to our request for more information, said that the missing piece in the accounts was that the Palestinians started throwing stones at the soldiers
So there was no performance and no peaceful demonstration.
Olive trees destroyed by IDF?
Another claim that originated from a Palestinian source, involved the alleged destruction of 200 olive trees in the village Al Walaja near Bethlehem. JAI, the Joint Advocacy Initiative, published a report about Na’el Khalid, a Palestinian farmer who claimed that 200 olive trees were destroyed when Israeli authorities started building the security fence on part of his land.
JAI also reported that Khalid would lose his land to Givat Ya’el – a planned Jewish community adjacent to Al Walaja.
We asked the IDF to comment on this report and received the following answer:
“In accordance with Israeli Supreme Court rulings regarding the rerouting of Israel’s security fence, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) transplanted trees from Mr. Na’el Khalil’s property to an adjacent plot, ensuring that he was able to continue working his land.
The Israeli court authorities have previously denied several petitions seeking ownership of the land adjacent to the Palestinian village Al-Walajah by the Givat Ya’el community, a private building project in Judea”.
A field investigation in Al Walaja where we visited Na’el Whalid’s lands, proved the IDF right.
The photo [above] was taken on August 9th and shows some of the Dutch funded olive trees on a plot adjacent to the fence which is still under construction.
Al Ahram and The Economist
Then there was an Economist article that was apparently based on a B’Tselem report and an article on the 972 website. According to the Economist, Israel routinely arrests Palestinian minors at night, some as young as eleven, and shows no mercy when they stand trial.
The Economist also quoted Israeli Eran Segal from Halamish saying that
“Israeli soldiers don’t maim enough Palestinians”.
Asked to comment, Segal denied he ever said a thing like that. In fact he had told The Economist:
“If the IDF would have taken the incidents more seriously and had acted in a different way the stone throwing would have been a thing of the past”.
The Egyptian paper Al Ahram outdid the Economist when it charged ‘Israel’s most aggressively racist government ever’ with ‘prosecuting and imprisoning Palestinian children at will on bogus charges such as throwing stones’.
In a reaction, the Israeli Military Prosecutor’s Office stated that stone throwing is a criminal offense in Israel. Throwing stones can cause severe injuries and even – as has happened in the past – death.
Israeli law calls for the punishment of stone throwers, even if they are minors and regardless of their nationality or religion. However contrary to what was written in the Economist’s article, there are almost no cases where Palestinian minors under the age of 14 have been convicted for stone throwing.
The Military Prosecutor’s Office also stressed that a special court for minors has been established (Military Juvenile Court) which is meant to take care of the defense of the rights of minors.
In addition, almost all suspects in the Juvenile Court are represented by counsel, which is contrary to the state of affairs in Israeli civil courts. Most of the trials take place within a rather short amount of time and minors, whose case has not been heard in a reasonable amount of time, are often released.
The IDF tries to arrest the suspect as soon as possible after an incident has taken place. If this proves impossible the military, for security reasons only, carries out arrests during night time. Minors are held in special wings of three prisons and their needs are met on an individual, case by case, basis. So there is no prosecution and Imprisoning without due process but, rather, a legal procedure that takes in account the age of the suspect.
UNWRA
The most shocking example of the distortions industry came from UNWRA spokesman Chris Gunness during an interview with Ma’an News Agency.
Reacting to this interview, and a related UNWRA press release, we asked Gunness for additional data and information on demolitions issues.
UNWRA then sent us a report that only contained locations and dates of the West Bank demolitions.
When asked for additional information about the demolitions, such as court orders, Gunnes became extremely agitated, used crude language and demanded immediate publication of ‘the facts’. Facts? Let’s examine this claim in the Ma’an interview:
“Many displacements are taking place where settlements are expanding and with it we are seeing an upturn in vicious attacks by Jewish settlers. Palestinians are being thrown off their ancestral lands to make way for settlers”,Gunness told Ma’an.
This suggests two things. First, that settlements are still expanding outside the municipal boundaries and second that Jews are replacing Palestinian Arabs. As Gunness knows very well, since 2005 settlement expansion has only taken place within the existing zoning lines of the municipal boundaries. No Palestinian Arabs have been kicked off their land to be replaced by Jews.
In fact Gunness was referring here to Bedouins who are illegally camping. A COGAT official told us that the Bedouin increasingly tend to camp in the vicinity of settlements and are often paid to do so by pro-Palestinian NGO’s. In the same Ma’an interview Gunness claimed the following:
“There is growing evidence that it (demolitions in Area C of the West Bank) is destroying the very fabric of these communities and ultimately contributing to a demographic shift which is changing the ethnic make-up of the West Bank.”
This suggests a slow “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian population on the West Bank. Of course Gunness is well aware of the fact that only 3% of the Palestinian population lives in Area C – most of them Bedouins, who mostly live in tents and are used to moving from place to place. UNWRA’s own census from 2007 shows an average population growth of the Palestinian population on the West Bank of 2,5 % per year.
But there was more. In an e-mail to Missing Peace Gunness wrote the following:
“127 people expelled in maale nikhmas – displaced for settlement in the last few weeks. Is that enough?
Really? The 127 Palestinians expelled from Maaleh Michmas ‘displaced for settlement’were in fact Bedouins who decided to leave, as his own UNWRA press release states. There is no evidence that Ma’aleh Michmas residents took their place.
In fact, according to a report by the pro-Palestinian organization International Solidarity Movement, 16 Bedouin were evicted in the Maaleh Michnas area at the end of July. This happened after they illegally camped within a closed military zone and received eviction orders two years ago.
UNWRA’s mandate
This was not the first time Gunness was caught distorting the facts and engaging in an anti-Israel campaign. During the Gaza war he falsely accused Israel of firing at UNWRA convoys.
The new shocking aspect in this affair is that UNWRA now clearly interferes in politics and oversteps its current mandate, as defined by the UN:
UNRWA’s contemporary mandate is to provide relief, human development and protection services to Palestine refugees and persons displaced by the 1967 hostilities in its fields of operation: Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, West Bank and the Gaza Strip. UNRWA’s mandate has been repeatedly renewed by the UN General Assembly. The current mandate runs till 30 June 2014.
What do the UNWRA investigations into West Bank building issues and violence between Jews and Arabs have to do with providing humanitarian services to displaced persons.
Gunness told us that UNWRA has a team of 12 investigators conducting research on settlement and building issues on a daily base. Got that? A UN organization designed to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees is going after Israel’s building policies on the West Bank.
Instead of focusing on the plight of the refugees and their descendants in, for example, Lebanon, where the Palestinians living in refugee camps still are without basic human rights, UNWRA prefers to join the disinformation campaign against Israel.
Too late
It may be too late for Israel to repair the damage caused by this global disinformation campaign. That’s too bad because this is where many other campaigns like BDS, and delegitimization start.
The Israeli government does not seem to grasp the severity of the situation and still doesn’t respond decisively to the endless flurry of distortions and outright false claims. However, it is not too late to demand an immediate investigation into UNWRA’s participation in this cognitive war against the Jewish state.
This affair, on top of earlier scandals in which UNRWA’s ties to Hamas were exposed, should finally lead to a complete overhaul of the way the UN deals with the Arab Israeli conflict.
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