Students and community activists staged a mock street closure on the UC Berkeley campus last Monday to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre and the closing of Shuhada Street to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. Like other actions covered here, the checkpoint is a response to the call for global solidarity by Youth Against Settlements.
Taking over a small section of Sproul Plaza, demonstrators erected a checkpoint manned by armed Israeli soldiers. Students wearing keffiyehs attempted to cross the checkpoint, explaining that they lived or attended school on the other side of the street and demanded to be let through. They were then arrested and made to kneel with their heads covered as they held signs indicating their “crime” of living in their own city. Armed settlers walked passed the soldiers unhindered, holding Israeli flags and signs that read “All of Judea and Samaria is ours,” and pausing every few minutes to throw trash at the Palestinians.
The scene attempted to mimic the daily harassment and hardship of Palestinians in Hebron by Jewish settlers and the Israeli Defense Force who protect them. A statement by Youth Against Settlement explains:
Shuhada Street is the main street connecting the southern and the northern parts of the City of Hebron. For the past 16 years, this street has been closed to Palestinian pedestrians and vehicles. Israel has also forced the closure of Palestinian shops and sealed shut the entrances to Palestinian homes along the street.
The city of Hebron is home to approximately 200,000 Palestinians. 600 Israeli settlers, supported by a large number of Israeli Military, now inhabit and control the heart of the Old City. The Israeli military severely restrict the movement of tens of thousands of Palestinian residents. However, the settlers have total freedom of movement, despite their presence being illegal under international law. They can both walk and drive vehicles through the Palestinian neighbourhoods. Shuhada Street is the most important thoroughfare in the area.
On Shuhada Street, all the shops and the majority of the houses are owned by Palestinians. The merchants of the street have incurred tremendous losses due to the street closure. In addition, Israel had welded shut all the Palestinian houses’ doors on the street, completely ignoring the rights of the Palestinian citizens living behind these doors. Residents have to jump over their back yards’ walls to get in and out of their houses. Those that cannot do this have had no choice but to abandon their homes as they have no way of accessing them.
The act of closing the street was taken arbitrarily without any legal justification from the Israeli occupation forces. The "safety of the settlers" was the only excuse given, despite the fact that the settlers’ presence in Hebron is illegal and based on the confiscation of Palestinian properties, and the fact that the settlers are outnumbered by the heavily armed soldiers who are there to stand guard over them. The closure of Shuhada Street is simply a part of the Israeli strategy to ethnically cleanse Hebron of its Palestinian population.
Update: This piece originally appeared under Phil Weiss's byline as he published it. Apologies to Maggie Sager --Phil
When you read this, try to remember that antisemitism, islamophobia, fascism may be called crimes-against-humanity without rebuke (as Turkish PM did recently) but calling zionism a c-a-h (as he also did) is (still) a vigorously opposed no-no in some circles.
For how long?
Even if any aspect of zionism (e.g., resucing Jewish refugees, and offering a safe haven to Jews in the event they are oppressed elsewhere in future) might not be opprobrious, surely the history of zionism-in-practice since 1967 (I am going to ignore the history 1945-1967) justifies calling zionism-as-practiced-1967-to-2013 a c-a-h, and THIS DEMONSTRATION should help to prove it in Berkeley.
Well said pabelmont. Zionism is a crime against humanity, including Jews. History will show that Zionism had the most negative and detrimental impact on Jews.
And hopefully, History will also show that religions have had the most negative and detrimental impact on mankind
Agreed Ramzi. From the very beginning of the Zionist project its architects have sought, and found, powerful backers among the gentile nations. Israel depends, for its existence, on the support of the US, in particular, and other western nations. Should the kind of anti-semitism arise which necessitates Jews to flee their homes in New York, London, Paris or Sydney Israel will become a prison camp and killing field for Jews as the Palestinians and surrounding nations take revenge for Israeli arrogance.
What a humane vision, but also a page taken from another era – finishing off Jews in a “camp” en masse is not exactly compatible with today`s conditions of war asymmetry. If you happened to have a couple of hundred nukes and capabilities to launch them from mountains, air and sea then no matter how small you are you can ensure that things can hardly be as one-sided as they were in the past – and swiftly so.
The obsession with Zionism especially by the Arab world, despite its many and infinitely more crucial problems, would rather be remembered there as a colossal miscalculation. At some point people there will begin to add up the devastating prices it brought on the Arab world, completely unnecessarily, and people will refuse to believe that such a negligible issue was able to cause all that (and who knows how worse it may still get).
That’s right, iver, keep your comments vague, obscure and ambiguous. Don’t write anything specific lest you expose yourself as someone who hasn’t an inkling of what he’s commenting about, nor would you want to post something detailed lest someone hold you to it.
Just go on ranting about Arabs, iver.
“The obsession with Zionism especially by the Arab world”
That’s pretty funny. The arabs are obsessed with Zionism. Not the Jews.
This is a tactic oft used by the Dersh who accuses those supporting Palestinain rights as being obsessed with israel. This from a guy who has written several books defending Israel and apparently spends most of his waking time doing the same.
The complete absence of self awareness among Zionists is truly breathtaking
You choose to put this comment in a diary about how a Jew massacring Muslims in a Mosque resulted in the closing of the main commercial street in the city. That’s not just chutzpah, it’s not just incredibly wrong, that’s an irony deficiency.
Here’s some slapstick irony for ya:
Not sure it’s such a “negligible issue” to all the people Zionism has dispossessed and killed over the years.
I’m surprised to see that the Oakland police (well trained by their counterparts in ISreal on crowd control on live Palestinians) didn’t descend on the students like locusts on a crop field. While Sgt. Price reminisced from his new post as a security guard at the local super WalMart over his glory days pepper-spraying the life out of harmless kids.
RE: “The scene attempted to mimic the daily harassment and hardship of Palestinians in Hebron by Jewish settlers and the Israeli Defense Force who protect them.” ~ Maggie Sagger
REGARDING THE DAILY HARRASMENT AND HARDSHIP OF PALESTINIANS IN HEBRON, SEE: “Swedish human rights worker viciously attacked by Jewish extremists in Hebron”, by ISM Hebron, 11/18/06
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to palsolidarity.org
P.S. ALSO RE: “The scene attempted to mimic the daily harassment and hardship of Palestinians in Hebron by Jewish settlers and the Israeli Defense Force who protect them.” ~ Maggie Sagger
MY COMMENT: Unfortunately, the harassment and hardship of Palestinians (by Jewish settlers [Israel's quasi-official equivalent of Mussolini's Blackshirts] and the Israeli Defense Force who protect them) is almost as severe in other parts of the West Bank a considerable distance away from the lunatic settlers in Hebron. And the harrasment isn’t confined just to the Palestinians. Read below about a scatalogical attack (near Nablus some years ago, and with the complicity of the IDF) on a Jew visiting the West Bank from her adopted country of England/U.K.! It is truly like something out of the Dark Ages.
FROM SEVERAL YEARS AGO: “Jews protect Palestinians in harvest of hate” ~ By Donald Macintyre in Awarta, West Bank, The Independent (U.K.), 10/10/08
• Israelis cross religious divide to shelter olive farmers from settlers’ attacks
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to independent.co.uk