18 December 2006

 
The Military Court at Salem

Tuesday the 12th saw me at the Military Court at Salem. This, like the DCO at Qalqiliya, is an Israeli Army institution situated right on the Green Line, with entrances from both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. I was there with Yesh Din, monitoring the proceedings to ensure due process. I happened upon an interesting case, a trial for murder.

Again I started from my father’s place in Ramat Hasharon, meeting up with Hanna Aviram at the junction at the entrance to the town. We drove in her car and were soon at the Green Line. The base looks nondescript: a wall with barbed-wire, guards at the entrances, now used to the ladies from Yesh Din. It lies in a wadi (‘valley’ in Arabic, but used also in Hebrew and henceforth here), amid low-lying hills.

We entered at one of the gates. Later I saw the Palestinian entrance, relatives of inmates pressed into a huddle, trying to get the guards’ attention to ask to be allowed in. First we entered one of the normal court rooms. A massive Israeli flag hung resplendent behind the elevated seat of the judge, flanked on one side by the symbol of the Israeli Defence Force and on the other by that of the State of Israel. From left to right: a sword a Star of David and a menorah, that of the ancient Temple. Things are laid out clearly in Salem, lest anyone be confused before whom he stands.

We left two observers in that courtroom, passing through it to a small shack at the rear. Hanna Aviram and I took our places at the back, and waited. The rest of the cast arrived one by one, taking their places: the typist, a tall, blond Russian, pleasant when pointing out the toilettes; the translator, a Druze Arab army officer; the lawyers, Palestinian defence council and Israeli military prosecutor, a Druze Arab. The two lawyers spoke between them in Arabic. Then a rustle off chains outside before the defendant enters, a slightly chubby man, short, alone, with wondering eyes. He lifts his hands and waits for them to be uncuffed. And then the three judges. “All rise!” All rose. “You may be seated.” (Three judges are required for crimes where the punishment is likely to exceed twenty years.)

The defendant, Hassam Abu Hamed, was charged with taking part in an attack on Ariel in 2002 in which five people were killed. He had been tried and convicted in 2003 on unrelated charges.

Every word was translated, mostly from Hebrew into Arabic. But most of the participants were Arabs, the two lawyers, the translator and the defendant. There are a few Arab judges now in the military system. So the strange and Kafkaesque situation can arise in which every one in the room, lawyers, translator, judge and defendant are Arabs and yet the trial is held in Hebrew.

Much time was wasted over the defence council’s vain attempts to get the case postponed or thrown out, by use of arguments which were clearly hollow.

The first witness, called by the prosecution, was Feras. He is a prisoner in Israel, found guilty of membership of Hamas, and of participation in two attacks on Israeli targets, one in the Jordan valley and a suicide attack on Ariel. He said that he had supplied the explosive belt for the Ariel attack. He and a certain Muhammad Hanbali had planned the operation. For every question on the planning, Feras answered, “Muhammad Hanbali”. He said he had met the defendant, but knew nothing about him. The prosecutor became increasingly uncomfortable. At one point in mid-flow referred to, “The Settlement of Ariel”, then quickly corrected himself to, “Town of Ariel. Put ‘Town of Ariel’”, he said to the typist. He produced a testimony signed by Feras in 2002 but was told that while Abu Hamed had been in the car to Ariel on the day of the attack, he took no more part in it than that. This contradicted his expectations. Feras was supposed to be the prosecution’s strongest witness. The military prosecutor looked perplexed. The court adjourned once more. We left, homebound.

The base which houses the military court is, as noted above, a boring looking place. Inside it is small and cozy. There is a recreation area on one side where, between huts for offices and larger ones for courts, Palestinian lawyers huddle and chat, and Israeli soldiers scurry about or sit at the picnic tables amid the tall trees and colourful flowers. All very pleasant. The base is manned mainly by Druze Arab male officers, lawyers and interpreters, career soldiers, and by young Jewish female conscripts.

The sound of the base is the rustle of chain as prisoners are led around. Where once they might have been part of a group, a fighting gang of friends within a paramilitary framework, now they are alone. They rise and sit according to instruction. They address the court with respect, the judge as sir. They ask politely to be taken to the toilette.

My guess is that Hasan Abu Hamed was involved in the Ariel bombing, but marginally. On Christmas Day he will have been in Israeli custody for precisely three years and two months, with six years and ten months left to serve, which might now be extended. Five were killed in the attack he (allegedly) helped to carry out. He is an unremarkable man. When prisoner releases or exchanges are spoken of, and when those with “blood on their hands” are mentioned, then I suppose that it is also to Hasan Abu Hamed that they refer. These are grand terms. He is a man bowed, incarcerated and alone. But for his inept defence lawyer, no Palestinian came to witness his hearing, only a couple of Israelis from Yesh Din.

09 December 2006

 
Ariel

On Thursday, the 30th of November, I travelled with Yesh Din to Ariel, the Jewish town situated at the centre of the northern West Bank. We were to meet with a Palestinian who claimed that his settler neighbour had decided to enlarge his garden and, in so doing, had fenced off half a dunam of the Palestinian's land. The Palestinian, who I'll call Mo, owns 26 dunam, and the land taken was not his most productive. But it was his land, on which he himself had planted two olive trees in 1957. Mo is a 64 year-old man who speaks good Hebrew. He had his settler neighbour's phone number and had called him a number of times on the issue. On each occasion the neighbour promised to remove the fence but never did. Then the settler stopped answering the calls. For two years Mo hadn't been on this part of his land. Now he wished to make an official complaint to the police about the theft. But the regional police are stationed in Ariel into which Palestinians, or "Locals" as the police euphemistically call them, cannot enter alone.

So early on Thursday morning I, Ruti and Racheli, two Yesh Din volunteers, met Mo by the side of the motorway. He wore a woolly hat and had a short white beard. He had already brought the case to the DCO (see previous post) where he had been told to bring all the relevant papers to the police. These he now had, organised and complete.

As we approached Ariel Ruti called one of the police commanders to request that we be given permission to enter Ariel with a Palestinian, and that a vehicle be sent to escort us from the road-block. The officer said that no vehicle was available. Eventually he told us that it would be alright for us to enter with a Palestinian without an escort. The road-block waved us through without even a cursory check.

On entering the station we were challenged in the corridor by a fat burly officer. He wanted to know what we were doing with a "local" in the station, didn't we know that it was criminal offence to bring a "local" into a settlement? (Actually he said "into the Land of Israel", but I'm sure this was a slip of the tongue as that would suggest that the parts of the West Bank where there are no Jewish settlements are not the Land of Israel, which historically and semantically they clearly are). We protested that we'd been given express permission and eventually he relented, seeming to see us as more trouble than we were worth.

We entered the box-office of an officer called Miri. She was pleasant and proper. We went over the case. It emerged that she had dealt with Mo once already. Exasperated, he had entered his land using wire cutters to cut the settler’s fence, presumably to harvest olives. The police had been called and he was arrested, taken away in hand-cuffs. It now transpired that he didn't know that he had been arrested and thought that he'd made an official complaint against his neighbour. But this was not the case. On that occasion Miri had advised him to contact Yesh Din. The question now arises: are Yesh Din becoming the alternative investigation branch of the Israeli police in The Territories? There have been more and more cases where they have advised Palestinians to seek Yesh Din's services. If this is the case, are Yesh Din merely becoming part of the system, another cog in the occupation machine?

Miri’s office is decorated with pretty pictures of pastoral scenes: rolling hills, a boat on a lake, a windmill. Not images of the Land of Israel. The symbol for the Judea and Samariah[1] Police was printed large and in colour on a notice next to Miri’s office. On the right it has the normal spikes of the symbol of the Israeli police. On the left there is the outline of the West Bank, in which there are a number of houses. In the foreground these are small and white with pointed red rooves; in the background there are larger buildings, one of which has a dome and large pointed windows: unmistakably a settlement with its synagogue. It seems that no one looking at this symbol should be left in doubt whom the Judea and Samariah Police serve. Unfortunately I was not able to find the full symbol on the net.

Our business complete we left Ariel’s police station. We began to drive on the four-lane motorway along Ariel’s south. The town went on and on. It seems that Ariel is the longest town in the Land of Israel, longer end to end than Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem. This with only 13,000 inhabitants, half the population of Tiberius. Ariel is what we might call a Sausage Settlement: it is thin and long. There are other Sausage Settlements, like Yitzhar, built in two lines of houses, zig-zagging, stop-starting, in a chain along the hill top. Like a chain of sausages, one following from the last. Building like this is clearly not good for communal cohesion, it is not a staple of town planning theories. But it is good for taking control of land.

A view has become popular in Israel that the land of Ariel should not and need not be returned to the Palestinians as part of a peace treaty, even that it cannot be returned. But the Palestinians find the idea of giving up any of the land conquered in 1967 difficult, and this when settlements build on the old border, the Green Line, or considered. The idea of Israel retaining Ariel and a peninsular of Israeli sovereignty permanently poking deep into the interior of a future Palestinian state would be anathema to Palestinians. Ariel is build to look and feel big. It takes up land, has big building, (many of which are empty), has a motorway connecting it to Tel-Aviv, displaying road signs that list it alongside old established towns like Herzelliah or Ramat Gan. Ariel can be removed. A certain Ariel Sharon (after whom Ariel is named) was responsible for removing the settlement of Yamit from the sands of Sinai when Israel returned the peninsular to Egypt. Yamit had 13,000 inhabitants. Sharon destroyed it. But Ariel needn’t be destroyed. It is not like the settlements of Gaza which took up a great proportion of land in the middle of the most densely populated Area in the world. The West bank in not especially densely populated. Ariel’s land can be returned, its buildings and infrastructure sold to the Palestinian people.

There is a good reason for my straying from the events of last week. Ariel was established as a road-block to a Palestinian state. Its hold on the land and the rhetoric that surrounds it, like the rhetoric about a united Jerusalem, attempt to sow in the minds of Israelis the view that it is permanent, and that it ought to be permanent. This while Israel’s leaders know full well that no Palestinian leader could agree to a state without then two areas. Ariel was build to prevent peace.

[1] Judea and Samariah being the biblical-geographical name for the West Bank.

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