Red Pepper » Libby Powell

Airline blocks activists from travelling to Palestine

admin — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:52:41 +0000

Budget airline Jet2.com has refused to carry three British women bound for Palestine after being threatened with a fine by Israel. The airline notified the passengers of the cancellation by email yesterday morning, less than 24 hours before they were due to fly to Tel Aviv from Manchester.

The women were en route to Bethlehem with 1,500 others from Europe and the US to take part in an international meeting and an education project. The initiative has been organised under the banner of ‘Welcome to Palestine 2012’, with the aim of challenging the isolation of Palestinians as a result of the Israeli occupation.

Update: After the demonstration in Manchester Airport, the airline promised the passengers refunds. The managers would not even show their faces, leaving the police to pass on the news.

Many visitors, from around the world, did get to Tel Aviv—but were arrested or put on return planes. Israel had ordered around 1,200 people to be kept off flights, and deployed 650 police to patrol Ben Gurion airport and catch any who made it to Israel.

In the email to the British women, Jet2.com said that they had been mandated by the Israeli authorities to provide the details of all passengers on flights to Israel. The company said it had been informed that the group would not be permitted to enter Israel and that the airline would face a fine from Israel if they carried the three women.

The Welcome to Palestine initiative follows on from a series of recent attempts by international activists to push for free access to the Palestinian territories. Last summer, 100 activists attempting to fly to Palestine were detained at Ben Gurion Airport and deported. The violent interception by Israeli forces in 2010 of an international boat, the Mavi Marmara, bound for Gaza’s coastline resulted in the death of nine activists. Several other attempts to reach Gaza by boat have since been deflected by the Israeli navy.

Israel, which maintains a blacklist of identified Palestinian supporters, has in the past put pressure on airlines to refuse passengers. The authorities have made it clear that they intend to bar all those traveling as part of the campaign, stating that measures will be taken at border control to detain and return all passengers to their home countries. Lufthansa has also been forced by Israel to reject dozen of passengers wishing to travel from Swansea for the event.

In a public statement, high profile supporters of the initiative, including Sam Bahour, Tony Benn, Chomsky, John Pilger and Desmond Tutu, said that ‘Israel has turned Palestine into a giant prison’—but make the point that even prisoners have a right to receive visitors.

There is no direct access for foreigners wishing to visit Palestine. Landlocked West Bank is surrounded by the Israeli wall and travel within the region is restricted by more than 500 checkpoints and barriers. Those wishing to visit must first fly to Tel Aviv, where anyone declaring their wish to visit Palestine is likely to be refused entry.

From within Israel, entry by road to the central West Bank city of Ramallah is funneled through the vast Kalandia checkpoint, where cars and people can wait for hours against the backdrop of watchtowers and political graffiti.

Access to besieged Gaza is even more obstructed. The airport was bombed in 2002 and Israel maintains its blockade of all sea, air and land entry points, closing the Strip to all but essential humanitarian staff.

One of the women due to travel from Manchester tomorrow is retired nurse, Norma Turner, who has worked in the NHS since she was 16. In 2010, Norma visited Gaza to help deliver training to nurses and develop a community health course for women in Nusrat refugee camp. ‘My goal was always to empower patients to control their own lives with dignity and without fear,’ she said. ‘For those nurses, it is impossible from them to work with that goal because Palestinian people do not have any control over their own lives.

‘The suffering and injustice that I have witnesses on my visits to Gaza and the West Bank is worse than anything I have experienced in my whole career as a nurse in England, India and Africa.’

Norma was planning to travel with teacher Sandy Broadhurst and fellow NHS health worker Pia Feig. Pia’s rejection by the state is particularly poignant as a Jewish woman with family in Israel. “The Israelis have created a ghetto for the Palestinians”, she says.

Norma says that the group is considering legal action against the airline. They organised a protest at the Jet2.com desk in Manchester Airport this morning.

‘Israel is able to control any border it chooses, including Europe and America,’ she added. ‘This shows that the Palestinians in the West Bank are as imprisoned as those in Gaza.’

Punishing Palestine: How the US plays politics with aid

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:52:44 +0000

In September, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas handed an official letter to United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon containing his people’s bid for statehood at the UN table. Then he turned to ask the world. As he concluded his address to the heads of the collected nations, he was greeted with a standing ovation. Crowds in Palestine, watching New York on a large screen, roared, their faces proudly daubed with the colours of their flag. After 63 years of occupation, their appeal was for recognition that they, like Israel, have a legal right to exist. Well aware of the US intentions to veto their bid at the security council, they celebrated anyway, welcoming a day of empowering action after months of stalled talks.
Two days later, despite expressions of alarm from members of the Obama administration and international aid agencies, the US Congress voted to slash $200 million of humanitarian aid to Palestine. Standing in front of Congress members, the American-Jewish policy analyst, Elliott Abrams, held up the suspension of aid as the perfect punishment: ‘It is a good way of telling the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organisation] officials that their caper in New York was a serious mistake and that they will pay a price for it.’
Gaza’s aid-dependency
More than 75 per cent of the 1.6 million Palestinians trapped in the walled enclave of Gaza are dependent on aid. Half of these are children. The former head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), John Ging, said that, in 2010, Gaza was already in the ninth year of using emergency rations. The queues outside their distribution centres lengthened significantly after the 22-day Israeli assault at the start of 2009, which left thousands without homes and unable to rebuild.
Gaza’s aid-dependency is firmly rooted in its inability to trade with the outside world, prevented by the Israeli blockade, which is now into its fourth year. Suspended in a frozen economy, people’s skills have stagnated. There were once thriving agriculture and fishing industries; today 35 per cent of Gaza’s farmland and 85 per cent of its fishing waters are inaccessible due to Israeli military measures. The undernourished industries are barely supplemented by the piecemeal imports that come up through Rafah’s maze of hazardous tunnels.
The blockade has created a unique, man‑made poverty, carefully crafted to prevent starvation but promote suffering.
Congress’s decision will augment the sad reality that, across the West Bank and Gaza, access to aid is persistently obstructed by politics. Some $85 million of the cut US funding was due to go towards improving the struggling Palestinian health system. Just to reach clinics, patients must run the gauntlet of the more than 500 checkpoints that divide up the West Bank, or submit themselves to the political lottery of the Israeli health permit system to access treatment outside Gaza.
Those that reach the clinics find that supplies are often scarce and doctors lack training. Even with the support of international donors, healthcare is not a given right.
Playing politics with aid
Steve James, chief executive for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said he was ‘deeply concerned about the implications of the US withdrawing aid funding from the Palestinian Authority’. Haven spent more than two decades working with Palestinian communities on health development, MAP has increasingly come up against the politicisation of aid as a barrier to health. ‘In addition to the very real impact it will have on the health and welfare of Palestinians, the decision is a clear case of playing politics with aid,’ said James.
Beyond the humanitarian consequences, the political precedent this sets is deeply concerning. The concept of international humanitarian assistance is founded on a shared belief that every human has the right to life without suffering. This principle cannot be pegged to the political whims of a powerful donor, lest we endorse a corrupt global economy whereby humanitarian aid is held hostage to political submission.
Palestine’s ‘caper in New York’ was an occupied nation seeking statehood through the most legitimate and legal channel available, as opposed to the potential bloodshed of a third intifada. Congress’s subsequent decision to withdraw aid can be viewed as nothing less than the collective punishment of a civilian population and blatant political blackmail. Palestinians looking around at their neighbouring Arab states will rightly be questioning why international funds have been poured into the uprisings of the Arab Spring (and the regimes that preceded them) while they must bear grave sanctions for sending one man and a letter to the UN table.
In the wake of the decision, the US can no longer maintain its incongruous role as a supposed ‘honest broker’ of peace between Israel and Palestine. The inequality of support is now staggering. Israel is set to benefit from $3 billion-plus in aid from the US in 2012. It is the largest cumulative recipient of aid since the second world war. The allocated budget, said Republican US official Nita Lowey, ‘fully funds our commitment to ensure our ally Israel maintains its qualitative military edge’. The great moat of wealth disparity that runs along the length of the separation wall grows deeper by the day.
US demands that Palestine must simply sit down and play by their rules are increasingly absurd. For one, the notion that Israeli officials have been waiting patiently at the negotiating table with olive branches in their hands has all but evaporated over the past year. The ‘Palestine papers’ leaked in January 2011 revealed that Israel has time and again rejected requests for compromise; its rebuttals have been so extensive that Palestinian negotiators were humiliated to see the papers published. Israel’s ongoing refusal to halt settlement-building during negotiations, Palestine’s prerequisite for returning to the talks, is further evidence of its disregard for the process.
Congress’s cuts do not stop at the door of the Palestinian Authority. Two US laws, passed in 1991 and 1994 by the Bush and Clinton administrations respectively, made it mandatory to halt funding to a UN agency that granted membership to a Palestinian state. These laws were explicitly introduced to scare UN agencies into rejecting Palestine as a member, thereby keeping it in a state of rolling isolation.
A Palestinian state
Israel and the US are most fearful of Palestine’s potential membership of the International Criminal Court, for then Israel is likely to be called to account for its actions and the deaths of civilians during the 2009 war on Gaza.
Despite the punitive US laws, UNESCO has been the first of the UN agencies to accept the state of Palestine as a member. The US has already suspended its funding as a result, and others are likely to follow.
Speaking to Congress before the vote, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reminded her fellow congressmen of the old laws: ‘The George H W Bush administration, which is highly regarded to this day for its success in multilateral diplomacy, made a bold pledge: the US would withhold funding to any UN entity that granted membership, or any upgraded status, to the PLO. The PLO’s scheme was stopped dead in its tracks. The administration should use the same funding conditions that worked two decades ago to stop Palestine’s dangerous unilateral scheme today.’
What Congress really fears is that Palestine may realise that, after years of being locked between two aggressive powers, the world is ready to accept a state of Palestine based on the 1967 borders. ‘How will any Palestinian leader be able to accept less when he sits down with Israel than he has already gotten at the UN?’ asks Elliott Abrams, nervously.