Israel Resource Review |
26th May, 1998 |
Contents:
Head of Fatah Youth, Hakim Awad,
on Weapons Training
by Aron Lerner
IMRA interviewed Hakim Awad, the head of Fatah Youth in the West
Bank and Gaza, in Hebrew and English, on May 24:
IMRA: It was reported that last Thursday a group of Fatah Youth
completed a two week course in weapons training and combat
technique. Was this a one time course or will there be more.
Awad: You have made a big thing out of this. This was one
course.
It was normal. Nothing dangerous. Like you talk about summer camp
or youth camp. Normal exercises. Maybe there is a second or third
course.
You have to understand that it is a normal thing. Its an ordinary
youth activity.
IMRA: Learning how to shoot guns.
Awad: It is an ordinary activity. There are exercises with
weapons but you can't call it a program. You have to know that all
the time there is talk for the Israeli side 'we want to go into
Gaza and the West Bank and if the Palestinians don't do what we
want.' All the time the Israelis are talking about attacking the
West Bank and Gaza.
You have to know that as the Palestinian youth we are defending the
peace. the just peace. And as the leader of Fatah youth in the
West Bank and Gaza I have attended hundreds of meetings with
Israel's you the organizations like Labor Youth, Peace Now,
Mapam.
Not only in Israel or Gaza or the West Bank. We organized for
several meeting in a Scandinavian country and Europe and other
places in the world.
We try to defend the peace all the time but at the same time, all
the time we are hearing what Netanyahu is saying. Both sides have
to respect the agreement. It wasn't just signed between the
sides.
It is an international agreement. All the sides have to respect
it.
We are looking for just peace for both sides - the Palestinian side
and the Israeli side. We ask the Israeli Government to respect
the agreements but at the same time we are hearing the declarations
from Binyamin Netanyahu warning the Palestinian side that they have
plans to attack the West Bank and Gaza .
As a Palestinian we have to protect the Palestinian National
Authority, because it is the whole Palestinian people here.
IMRA: So that's why you have the training.
Awad: Its not the reason. As I told you, its ordinary
training.
Its not military training. You can say that part of the training
is military training. For one time. Its not a program. I don't
think that there's is another course.
IMRA: I guess what puzzles me is that under the Oslo Agreement
there are only 7,000 guns in Gaza and 18,000 police. That mean
that you already have more than twice as many police as guns. What
value is there to teach other people how to use guns when there
aren't even enough guns to go around for the police?
Awad: If I have a summer camp and the young people have training
in sports and other activities like swimming and one of these
activities is guns and military activity this is like having a
group from the Israeli side - university or high school to go to
an
Israeli army camp to have some knowledge about that. its the same
thing exactly.
Dr. Aaron Lerner,
Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
P.O.BOX 982 Kfar Sava
Tel: (+972-9) 760-4719
Fax: (+972-9) 741-1645
imra@netvision.net.il
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Minister of Defense Office
- No Specifics on Compliance
by Aaron Lerner
IMRA asked Minister of Defense Media Coordinator Avi Benayahu's
office the following question:
In today's Cabinet Communique, the Minister of Defense said
"Israeli society is now confident that there exist interim stations
in the [peace] process for inspection and examination, during which
we seek results -- whose sum total are that our national
security
is not affected." Can you identify a specific thing which is
inspected in a particular interim station?
Reply: The Minister means that there is a process which, unlike
in the past, has stations - breaks. We don't just run forward,.
IMRA: But you can't identify something specific?
Reply: No. There are these breaks. That's what he means.
IMRA: But the rest of the sentence in his statement is that there
are results.
Reply: Yes. We want there to be results.
IMRA: So I am trying to understand if there is a specific thing
that one can point to.
Reply: There isn't anything specific.
Dr. Aaron Lerner,
Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
P.O.BOX 982 Kfar Sava
Tel: (+972-9) 760-4719
Fax: (+972-9) 741-1645
imra@netvision.net.il
Return to Contents
Let Their People Go
by David S. Bedein, MSW,
Media Research Analyst
Bureau Chief: Israel Resource News Agency
Beit Agron International Press Center, Jerusalem
YC, a healthy yet distraught young man recently showed up at my
office.
We all hear horror stories of the trials and tribulations of new
immigrants.
We have all experienced these stories in our own lives.
However, the story that YC recounted conveyed a new traumatic
dimension of
Aliya.
YC is a skilled building tradesman.
He contacts companies and offers his services. He speaks with a foreign
accent, in broken Hebrew, and manages to get the job interviews
because he
has the skills to do the job.
Yet on four occasions, when YC showed up for each interview,
after he
described his skills and after he showed his Israeli identity
card to the
contractor, the potential employer told him, in no uncertain
terms, that
contractors today would rather not hire him because he was...an
Israeli.
No Jew need apply? In Israel?
Yes, you heard me. Why?
A simple economic calculation.
Many Israeli contractors simply do not want to "pay social
benefits".
These Employers prefer cheap foreign workers, to whom they can
pay a lower
wage and not have to cover any "social benefits".
Eliminating these "social benefits" often means that a worker
has no rights
at the work place whatsoever, and abuses of foreign workers
remain rampant.
Such practices in Israeli industry began more than thirty years
ago, when
Israeli contractors "discovered" the UNRWA Arab refugee camps,
where the
United Nations covers the health, education, electricity, water,
and
housing needs of Arab refugees,leaving the contractor to hire
the UNRWA Arab
workers and offer them a low wage.
Such an UNRWA-Israeli contractor "arrangement" fostered a boom
in the
Israeli economy for many years to come, but with a moral price
that Israeli
society pays to this day.
Over the coming month, each of the immigrant organizations in
Israel will
hold their national conventions, beginning with the AACI, the
Association of
American and Canadian immigrants in Israel.
Perhaps this would be the opportune time for immigrant
organizations to
discuss the implications of these hundreds of thousands of
foreign workers
to Israel. These workers take away jobs from Jews who live in Israel.
My elementary school arithmetic was never that great. However,
there are
160,000 unemployed Israeli citizens and at least 150,000
foreign workers
now in the country.
You do not have to be a mathematical genius to figure out the connection
between the importation of foreign workers and the rising
unemployment in
Israel.
Yet Israel's powerful private contractors are not alone in
promoting foreign
non-Jewish workers to come to Israel.
Even Israeli politicians also encourage them.
A case in point: the Mayor of one regional municipal council
that comprises
twenty three thriving agriculural communities, has made three
junkets to
Thailand, to actively recruit hundreds of Siamese workers to
work in his
thriving farming communities. Other mayors have travelled to
Romania and to
the Balkans, while the cheap worker industry flourishes with labor
representatives working in Nigeria, the Phillipines and Korea.
When I asked the Mayor's spokesperson as to whether the Mayor
would make
similar visits to immigrant absorption centers, she responded in
the negative.
That simple: a new "affirmative action action policy for foreign
workers".
Perhaps the time has come for Israel's immigrant organizations
to remind
Israeli society and the decision-makers in Israeli society that Zionism
means preferential treatment for Jews.
After all, even the UN canceled the resolution that "Zionism is racism".
At this point in time, employers are actually encouraged by the Israel
Ministries of Finance and Labor to hire thousands of non-Jewish foreign
workers. Yes, the contractors pay a fine ... yet the fine becomes a
deductible "tax credit" for the contractors.
That of course nothing to do with the fact that the Israel State
Controller
warns that building contractors remain the greatest contributors
to Israel's
major political parties. The 1995 Israel State Controller report
noted with
alarm that many of these contractors give to competing political
parties.
Jewish immigrants to Israel often feel the brunt of competition
from these
foreign workers.
"Olim", defined as Jews who have chosen to live in Israel, are
the ones who
can combine self-interest with basic Zionist ideology to
galvanize the
immigrant organizations in Israel to make a stink about this
mess and to
launch a campaign that will stop the incentives for foreign
workers to come
to Israel.
In short, let their people go home.
Return to Contents
The Telltale Silence of
the Post-Oslo Palestinian Press
by Roni Ben Efrat
Editor of Challenge
(Lecture for the conference: "A 21st century Dialogue: Media's
Dark Age?"
Athens, 24th - 28th May 1998, organized by "Women for Mutual Security")
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The Palestinian Authority oppresses its people and intimidates
its press.
In what follows I shall give examples of this intimidation, nine
in all,
picked out of a multitude. But let me say at the start that this
fact
should not come as a surprise. Oppression may be said to be a
corollary
of the Oslo agreement. The logic is simple: The strong side,
Israel, took
advantage of its strength, cutting a deal that gave the weak
side, the
PLO, as little as possible. The designers of Oslo set up, in
other
words, a situation where people, a great many people, were bound
to
oppose the deal they had gotten. Although they lacked the
foresight to
make real peace, they did foresee the opposition to the nasty,
brutish
thing that they did make, and they were careful, therefore, to
provide
the new non-state with a huge police force and plenty of
rifles.
Imprisonment without trial is the norm. Torture is carried out
wholesale.
Numerous security organisations vie with one another in
extortion, and
big brother is everywhere. The curbing of the press is merely a
part of
this general picture. The most alarming aspect in the story has
been the
speed with which the press agreed to lay down its weapon, the pen.
The first acts of oppression
The press was the first to be hit. Arafat arrived in Gaza on
July 1,
1994. Twenty-seven days later, forces of the Palestinian Secret
Security
invaded the offices of Al-Nahar, then the second largest daily
in the
Territories. They forbade the distribution of Al-Nahar in the
West Bank,
Gaza and East Jerusalem. (According to the Oslo accords, in
fact, they
had no jurisdiction at the time in the West Bank - except for
Jericho -
nor in Jerusalem, but when it comes to oppression, Israel gives
the
PA a free hand.) No explanation was given, but it was understood
that the
closing of Al-Nahar had to do with the paper's pro-Jordanian
tendency.
The rest of the Palestinian press hardly covered the event.
Palestinian
human rights activist Bassem Id, then of B'tselem, initiated a
protest
demonstration, and eight journalists showed up. Perhaps all the
others
thought it wouldn't happen to them - They, after all, are not
"pro-Jordanian"! The epilogue: Al Nahar began publishing again
after
several weeks, but it soon collapsed financially. (For the full
story
Challenge # 27).
Four months later it was the turn of the biggest Palestinian
daily,
Al-Quds, also published in Jerusalem. On November 18, Authority
forces
killed fourteen Palestinians during a demonstration at a mosque
in Gaza.
The opposition party Hamas held a mass rally protesting the
massacre.
Gaza's Chief of Police, General Ghazi Jibali, sent the press his
estimate
that 5000 people had attended. To his consternation, Al-Quds
preferred
the estimate of a foreign press agency, which had counted
12,500.
Jibali's response was to keep Al-Quds from entering the Gaza
Strip. He
simply blocked the papers at the Erez checkpoint for a number of
days,
claiming that heavy rain and floods were preventing their
distribution. I
interviewed the chief editor of Al-Quds, Maruan Abu Zuluf,
concerning the
strange weather in Gaza. He firmly adherred to his right to
publish
whatever he saw fit. (Challenge # 29: "Gaza Weatherman"). Ever
since that
incident, however, Al-Quds has never dared to publish a word
contradicting the official Palestinian line. Not even a paid ad.
The third incident involved an independent Palestinian
opposition paper
called Al-Uma, which was also located in Jerusalem. In the
eighties its
owners, members of the Khatib family, had put out a left- wing
daily,
Al-Mithaq, but Israel had closed it down. In January 1995,
however,
Israel granted the Khatibs a license for Al-Uma. Four months
later the
paper published an unflattering cartoon of Arafat. Thirty armed
Palestinians, members of Preventive Security, entered the print
shop and
confiscated the plates. The angry editors alerted human rights
organizations. Palestinian figures signed a petition. On May
3rd, the
offices of Al-Uma were burned. The Khatibs never went back to
publishing
(Challenge # 32).
Self Censorship
Since these incidents, the Palestinian Authority has licensed
quite a few
new media projects. Some of these function as mouthpieces for
the
Authority - for example, Al Khayat al Jadida or the radio
station, Sout
Falastin. All, however, mouthpieces or not, practice strict
self-censorship. This may seem odd at first, because the
Authority
itself, with super-democratic panache, forgoes all official
censorship. On June 25, 1995, Arafat signed the Palestinian
Press Law,
which guarantees the right to freedom of opinion and a free
press. It
does contain, nonetheless, several vague and potentially
restrictive
provisions. Article 37(3), for example, prohibits the
publication of
anything that "may cause harm to national unity".(Human Rights
Watch, op. cit.) In reality, censorship Arafat-style has proved to be more
zealous
and harsh than Israel's ever was. To quote the Authority's radio
director, Ali Khayan: "The opposition can express its own
opinions, but
some things are not allowed because we need time to explain what
it means
to be democratic." (Challenge # 32.)
Under Israeli occupation Palestinian journalists did indeed
suffer from
oppression. There are stories of chief editors, in house arrest,
who
edited major dailies from their homes. Numerous journalists were
kept in
Administrative Detention for renewable periods of six months at
a time.
But such measures did not intimidate them. When they got out,
they went
back to their work. Today it is different. Why?
First, there are no rules.
During the period of direct Israeli occupation, every
Palestinian editor
had to send the entire paper to the censor. (The Israeli media,
in
contrast, only have to send articles that relate to security).
The censor
would send the Arab paper back, marking what had to go. The
censor
decided what was fit to print. There was no guesswork, and there
were no
personal reprisals.
Today Palestinian editors have to guess what might not be
accepted, and
if they guess wrong, they find themselves in trouble. According
to the
data of Human Rights Watch /Middle East (Vol. 9, No. 10, Sept.
1997), in
the first two years of self rule, 25 journalists and
photographers
"guessed wrong." One of them was Fayez Nur-A-Din, a photographer
for
Agence France Press. He photographed some boys washing a donkey
in the
sea at Gaza. This was a bad guess. The Special Intelligence
Service
detained him for ten hours on May 13, 1996. They beat him and
whipped
him, accusing him of being in the pay of French intelligence in
order to
"harm the image of the Palestinians." The donkey, it seems,
should have
been a Jaguar.
In the report cited above, Human Rights Watch / Middle East gave
many
examples of self censorship. Most of the journalists were afraid
to give
the researchers their names. "The problem," said one, "is not
that Arafat
doesn't want this or that item to be published. The problem is,
journalists are afraid that maybe he won't like it - so they
just stay
quiet."
"Frankly," said another, "we wish the Authority would tell us
exactly
what we can and cannot publish. That would be easier. It seems
that it is
impossible to talk about the security apparatus, or violations
relating to trials, prisons, and torture, or the president. The president
is sacred."
The latest story of this kind is that of Abbas Momani, a
photographer
working both for Reuters and Al-Quds. The Authority had
attributed the
death of Hamas bomb-maker Muhi a-Din Sharif, "Engineer # 2," to
a dispute
within Hamas. It claimed that Hamas leader Adel Awadalla had
killed
Sharif. Shortly after the Authority made this accusation,
photographer
Momani received a phone call telling him to go to a flat in
Ramallah.
Here he received a video cassette, in which a masked man
claiming to be
Adel Awadalla denied having killed Sharif. He brought the
cassette to his
manager, Paul Holms, and they discussed whether or not to air
it. Holms
took full responsibility, and the video was distributed and
broadcast on
April 8. The Authority found the video believable enough to
change its
story, blaming Adel's brother instead. (See Challenge # 49.) But
it also
closed the Reuters office in Gaza. On April 9, photographer
Momani
received an order to come for investigation to the office of
Preventive
Security Chief, Jibril Rajoub. When Rajoub heard, however, that
Paul
Holms was going to accompany him, he cancelled the meeting.
Instead,
Momani was arrested by another security branch the next day -
then
released. On May 5 he was arrested again, this time by Rajoub's
men. Four
days later, at 3 a.m. he escaped by jumping from a third-floor
window of
the interrogation building, breaking his leg, and in this
condition he
managed to reach the hospital. His brother came to help him, and
Momani
told him how they had hung him by his legs from the ceiling and
whipped
him with electric cables. (The report was later confirmed by
human rights
activist, Bassem Id.) They had wanted him to confess, said
Momani, that
he himself had made the video. His brother helped him leave the
hospital
for another flat, but here Rajoub's men caught up with him,
arresting him
again. As to how they treated him after that, we do not yet know
- he was released on May 14, a day before this writing.
According to the Israeli weekly, Kol Ha-Ir, neither of
Momani's
employers, Reuters or Al-Quds, reported his first arrest. Nor
did any of
the Palestinian media. After his escape, most continued to
ignore the
issue. Journalists Michal Schwartz and Diana Mardi, from our
"sister
paper" in Arabic, Al-Sabar, contacted Paul Holms of Reuters. He
told
Schwartz that the agency was following his case, and that it had
put
out a statement on May 6 for "whoever wanted to publish it."
Mardi asked
the editor of Al-Quds, Maher al-Sheikh, why his paper had failed
to print
a word on the matter, seeing that Momani is one of their
journalists. He
answered: "Our paper doesn't publish news of that sort." Mardi
pressed
him: "Of what sort"? The editor answered: "News concerning
arrests on the
part of the PA." "Why not?" she asked him. He answered:
"Because we are
afraid. We are afraid of the authorities." (From an interview on
May 11,
1998, published in Al-Sabar.)
The Momani story brings us to the second reason for self censorship.
Second, the journalist stands alone.
Momani stood alone.
Here is an earlier example. At midnight on December 24, 1995,
Al-Quds was
about to print an article on page eight about Arafat's meeting
with the
Greek Orthodox Patriarch. A phone call came, in which editor
Maher Alameh
was instructed to move the piece up to page one. (How, by the
way, could
the Authority have known exactly what was to be printed on which
page?)
In a moment of exceptional courage and resolution, Alameh
refused. He was
arrested and imprisoned in Jericho for five days. Not a single
Palestinian newspaper, including Al-Quds, reported the case.
(Human
Rights Watch/Middle East, op. cit.). After Alameh's release, he
refused
to talk about the matter.
In the post-Oslo situation, when you stick your neck out as
Alameh did,
you're practically alone. Pre-Oslo you were a hero, part of a
fighting
people. Solidarity was widespread. The atmosphere was such that
if you
hadn't served time in an Israeli prison, something was wrong
with you.
Since the entry of the Palestinian Authority, however, most
opposition
factions have been co-opted, or else they are looking for ways
to be
co-opted. The atmosphere is one of fear and despair. No lawyer
can
protect you when you are taken in the middle of the night to be
interrogated, say, in Jericho. Nor does it help if you work for
a foreign
news agency. The agencies want to keep their offices running.
This
(partially) explains why journalists, who were in the forefront
of the
Intifada, have retired into the woodwork.
Other kinds of media
Does this mean that Palestinians don't know what is happening?
No. They
can get information from Israeli radio and television. Ever
since the
Oslo process began, however, Israel's media have either avoided
or played
down Arafat's violations of human rights. The Israeli
establishment measures him, after all, by the strength with which he curbs the
opposition. It is remarkable, for example, how quickly most of
the Israeli press adopted, one after another, the Authority's
changing versions of how Hamas Engineer #2 was killed, although no account
withstands the slightest examination. (Challenge #49.)
Despite the lack of an uncompromising press, alternative
Palestinian
channels have opened occasionally, but they too have encountered
interference.
The Palestinian National Council (PLC) is an elected Parliament.
Each
member represents a constituency. One cannot simply arrest him
or her
without, as it were, gagging a whole group of voters. This fact
provides
PLC members with a measure of freedom to speak. It was the
Council, for
example, which exposed the astonishing scope and depth of
corruption in
the Authority. (Challenge # 43 # 45) The Palestinian papers did
not dare
publish what the elected representatives had revealed.
Journalist Amin
Abu Warda told People's Rights (a human-rights monthly of the
organization, Land and Water):"The print media avoided reporting
on
Council sessions right from the start. Editors consistently
censored
reports about the sessions, especially when the members
criticised Arafat
or his associates." (March 1997.) But outside media could and
did.
Stories appeared in Al-Sabar and Challenge, and later in the
Hebrew daily
Ha'aretz. The Ha'aretz article was translated into Arabic, and
circulated
in the Territories like an underground leaflet.
The Council legislators fought for the right to have their
sessions
broadcast directly. They finally won this at the beginning of
1997.
Viewers watched with interest. Too much, it appears. All through
March,
April and May ,when corruption was on the agenda, all kinds of
static
broke out on the screen. The manager of the broadcasting
company, Da'ud
Kuttab, complained about this to the Washington Post. He found
himself in
jail for a week. The broadcasts have not resumed.
Another path that seemed relatively free was that of local cable
TV. The
channels carry many open discussion programs, in which people
can speak
out. During the recent Gulf Crisis, these talk shows were very
popular
and militant. They too were forced to close, however, after the
U.S.
pressured Arafat to stop showing solidarity with Iraq.
The story of the Palestinian press is sad, if not demeaning. But
one can
hardly expect to find a free and thriving press alongside a
regime that
is basically scared of its people. The press will stand on its
feet only
when Palestinians face the fact that their current leadership
cannot be
reformed and that peace must be re-negotiated. Only then will it
be
possible for a democratic sovereign state to arise, one with
enough self-confidence to tolerate pictures of children washing donkeys in
the sea of
Gaza.
Roni Ben Efrat
Editor of Challenge
Ma'agalei Yavne 7/23
Jerusalem 93582 , Israel
Tel & Fax (+972-2) 679-2270
e-mail: odaa@p-ol.com
(Source: INFOPAL)
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