RAMADAN KAREEM
FROM THE NETANYAHU AND OBAMA ADMINISTRATIONS

Jeff Halper

August 11, 2010

Yesterday, the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” For all that, and despite (proper) Israeli outrage when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated anywhere in the world, the dismantlement of the Mamilla cemetery has been systematic. In the 1960s “Independence Park” was built over a portion of it; subsequently an urban road was built through it, major electrical cables were laid over graves and a parking lot constructed over yet another piece. Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for…..a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (Ironically, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center’s Director, appeared on Fox News to express his opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, because the site of the 9/11 attack “is a cemetery.”)

The month-long period between Netanyahu’s July 6th visit to Washington and the start of Ramadan has provided Israel with a window to “clear the table” after a frustrating hiatus on home demolitions imposed by the “old,” mildly critical Obama Administration – although there is no guarantee that Israel will not demolish during Ramadan, especially if it wants to exploit the period until the November elections, knowing that until then Obama will not overtly oppose anything it does in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the process of demolishing Palestinian homes never ceased. On June 6th, for example, a year after the demolition of more than 65 structures and the forced displacement of more than 120 people, including 66 children, nine families of Khirbet Ar Ras Ahmar in the Jordan Valley, totaling 70 people, received a new round of “evacuation orders.” A week later the Israeli High Court ordered the Civil Administration to “step up enforcement against illegal Palestinian structures” in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control.
 
And so, on July 13th, upon Netanyahu’s return (Palestinian homes are not demolished without an OK from the Prime Minister’s Office), three homes were demolished in the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, followed by three more homes in Beit Hanina. The Jerusalem Municipality also announced the planned demolition of 19 more homes in Issawiya this month. In the West Bank, the Israeli “Civil” Administration demolished 55 structures belonging to 22 Palestinian families in the Hmayer area of Al Farisiye in the northern Jordan Valley, including 22 residential tents and 30 other structures used to shelter animals and store agricultural equipment. According to the UN’s Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): “This week [July 14-20, the week of Netanyahu’s return from Washington] there was a significant increase in the number of demolitions in Area C, with at least 86 structures demolished in the Jordan Valley and the southern West Bank, including Bethlehem and Hebron districts. In 2010, at least 230 Palestinian structures have been demolished in Area C, forcibly displacing 1100 people, including 400 children. Approximately 600 others have been otherwise affected.” Two-thirds of the demolitions for 2010 have occurred since Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama. More than 3,000 demolition orders are outstanding in the West Bank, and up to 15,000 in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

The demolition of homes is, of course, only a small, if painful, part of the destruction Israel wreaks daily on the Palestinian population. Over the past few weeks a violent campaign has been waged against Palestinian farmers in one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the West Bank, the Baka Valley, steadily being encroached upon by large suburbs of the settlement of Kiryat Arba, in Hebron. Israel already takes 85% of the West Bank’s water for its own use, either for settlements (settlers use five times more water per capita as do Palestinians, and Ma’aleh Adumim is currently building a water park in addition to its four municipal swimming pools and the huge fountains constantly flowing in the city center) or to be pumped into Israel proper – all in flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an Occupying Power from using the resources of an occupied territory.

Accusing the farmers of “stealing water” – their own water – the Israel water company Mekorot, supported by the Civil Administration and the IDF, has in recent weeks destroyed dozens of wells, some of them ancient, and reservoirs used to collect rain water, which is also “illegal.” Hundreds of hectares of agricultural land have dried up as irrigation pipes have been pulled out and confiscated by the Civil Administration. Fields of tomatoes, beans, eggplants and cucumbers are dying just before they can be harvested, and the grape industry in this rich valley is threatened with destruction. “I’m watching my life dry up before my eyes,” Ata Jaber, a Palestinian farmer who has had his home demolished twice, most of whose land lies buried under the Givat Harsina neighborhood of Kiryat Arba and whose plastic drip irrigation pipes are destroyed annually by the Civil Administration just before he can harvest. “I had hoped to sell my crop for at least $2000 before Ramadan, but all is gone.”

(You can see a BBC report on the destruction of Palestinian reservoirs on YouTube <Earth Report - 2003 - Conflict over water in Israel/Palestine> and a heart-rending scene filmed just a week ago when Ata’s cousin was arrested in front of his small child for resisting the destruction of his water system <Hebron Palestinian Child's Torment Caught On TV>.)

Settlements continue to be built, of course. The much-trumpeted “settlement freeze” amounted to no less than a temporary lull in construction. (Indeed, Netanyahu never used the word “freeze”; in Hebrew he refers only to a “pause.”) According to the August report of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch, at least 600 housing units have started to be built during the freeze, in over 60 different settlements – meaning that the rate of construction is about half of that during the same period in an average year when there is no freeze. Given that the approval process has never been halted – the Israeli government announced the planned building of 1600 housing units in the settlements when Vice President Biden was visiting, if you recall – making up for lost time when the “freeze” ends in late September will be an easy task. According to Ha’aretz, some 2,700 housing units are waiting to be constructed.

The fact that the so-called settlement freeze did not really end settlement construction is obvious. The American government seems ready to accept lip-service only from Israel, as against overt and brutal threats towards the Palestinians if they do not acquiesce to the charade. Palestinian negotiators revealed last week the Obama Administration threatened to cut all ties with the Palestinian Authority, political and financial, if they continued to insist on a genuine freeze on settlements or even clear parameters on what the sides will negotiate. (Netanyahu refuses to accept even the elementary principle of the 1967 borders being the basis of talks.)

Just as destructive of any real peace process, however, is the fact that the focus on settlement freeze deflects attention from attempts by Israel to create “irreversible facts on the ground” which will defeat the very process of negotiation. Even if Israel did respect a settlement freeze, there is no demand, no expectation, absolutely nothing to prevent it from continuing to build the Wall (the enclosing of the Shuafat refugee camp inside Jerusalem and the town of Anata is being completed in these very days, and the village of Wallajeh, some of which spills into Jerusalem, is losing its lands, ancient olive trees and homes even as we speak). Nothing is preventing Israel from continuing to impoverish and imprison the Palestinian population through its twenty-year economic “closure,” including the siege on Gaza, having reduced the Palestinian economy to ashes. Nothing stands in the way of completing a system of parallel (though not equal in size and quality) apartheid highways, big ones, going through Palestinian lands, for Israelis; narrow ones for Palestinians. Nothing keeps Israel from expelling Palestinian from their homes so that Jewish settlers can move in – on July 29th nine families living in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, returning home at night from a wedding, found themselves locked out of their homes by settlers and prevented from entering by the police. (Palestinians, of course, have no legal recourse to reclaiming their properties, whole villages, towns and urban neighborhoods, farms, factories and commercial buildings, confiscated from them in 1948 and after.)

Nothing prevents Israel from terrorizing the Palestinian population, whether by its own army or the surrogate militia founded by the US and run by the Palestinian Authority to pacify its own population, whether by settlers who shoot and beat Palestinians and burn their crops with no fear of arrest, or by undercover agents, aided by thousands of Palestinian forced to become collaborators, many simply so that their children could receive medical care or so they could have a roof over their heads; whether by expulsion or the myriad administrative constraints of an invisible yet Kafkaesque system of total control and intimidation. Nothing opposes Israel’s boycott of the Palestinian people, isolated from the world by Israeli-controlled borders, or policies that effectively boycott Palestinian schools and universities by preventing their proper functioning. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stops Israel from demolishing Palestinian homes – 24,000 in the Occupied Territories since 1967, and counting.

Perhaps this way of welcoming Ramadan comes at no surprise in terms of the Occupied Territories. It took on an entirely different cast when, on July 26th, more than 1,300 Israeli Border Police, the shock-troops of the police’s Yassam “special operations” unit and regular police, accompanied by helicopters, descended upon the Bedouin village of al-Arakib, just north of Beer-Sheva, a community within Israel inhabited by Israeli citizens. Forty-five homes were demolished, 300 people forcibly displaced. One of the most grotesque and dismaying parts of this operation was the use of Israeli Jewish high school students, volunteers with the civil guard, to remove the belongings of their fellow citizens from their homes before the demolition. Besides reports of vandalism and contempt for their victims the students were photographed lounging in the residents’ furniture in plain sight of its owners. Finally, when the bulldozers began demolishing the homes, the volunteers cheered and celebrated. Over the next week, as Israeli activists helped the residents pick up the pieces and rebuild their homes, the Jewish National Fund, the Israeli Land Authority, the Ministry of the Interior and the “Green Patrol” of the Ministry of Agriculture (established by Ariel Sharon to prevent Bedouin “take-over” of the Negev) sent in police and bulldozers and had the village demolished twice more.

Although al-Arakib is one of 44 “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the Negev – of which only eleven have even rudimentary education and medical services, no electricity, extremely limited access to water and none have paved roads (see http://rcuv.wordpress.com) – it is nevertheless populated by Israeli citizens, some of whom serve in the Israeli army. While demolitions of Arab homes within Israel is not a new phenomenon – last year the Israeli government demolished three times more houses of Israeli (Arab) citizens inside Israel as it did in the Occupied Territories (the destruction of up to 8,000 homes in the Gaza invasion aside) – it signifies that the term “occupation” cannot be restricted to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza (and the Golan Heights) alone. The situation of Arab citizens of Israel is almost as insecure as that of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, and their exclusion from Israeli society almost as complete. While around 1,000 cities, towns and agricultural villages have been established in Israel since 1948 exclusively for Jews, not a single new Arab settlement has been established, with the exception of seven housing projects for Bedouins in the Negev where none of the residents are allowed to farm or own animals. Indeed, regulations and zoning prohibit Palestinian citizens of Israel from living on 96% of the country’s land, which is reserved for Jews only.

The message of the bulldozers is clear: Israel has created one bi-national entity between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River in which one population (the Jews) has separated itself from the other (the Arabs) and instituted a regime of permanent domination. That is precisely the definition of apartheid. And the message is delivered clearly in the weeks and days leading up to Ramadan. It is papered over with fine words. Netanyahu issued a statement saying: “We mark this important month amid attempts to achieve direct peace talks with the Palestinians and to advance peace treaties with our Arab neighbors. I know you are partners in this goal and I ask for your support both in prayers and in any other joint effort to really create a peaceful and harmonious coexistence.” Obama and Clinton also sent their greetings to the Muslim world, Obama observing that Ramadan “remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam's role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings." Both the White House and the State Department will hold Iftar meals. But the bulldozers and other expressions of apartheid and warehousing tell a much different story.

(Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at <jeff@icahd.org>.)

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is based in Jerusalem and has chapters in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Please visit our websites:
www.icahd.org
www.icahduk.org
www.icahdusa.org

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Statement on “Freedom Flotilla” Incident

The General Board of Church & Society of The United Methodist Church condemns the deadly interception Monday by Israeli troops of the “Freedom Flotilla” trying to bring aid to the beleaguered people of Gaza.

The killing of nine humanitarian-aid workers and injuries to many more occurred in international waters as the six-boat convoy, sponsored by the Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish humanitarian relief organization, headed toward breaking Israel’s three-year blockade of Gaza. About 700 passengers from 35 countries were on the vessels attempting to deliver 10,000 tons of humanitarian supplies such as food and medicine to Gaza.

We grieve the loss of life and injuries sustained in what became a tragic confrontation between the forces of peace and those of armed aggression. We pray for the families of those who lost their lives. We are thankful, though, that Israeli authorities have begun to release the peace activists and humanitarian aid workers they detained.

The United Methodist Church has long advocated for a peaceful settlement of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: a settlement that provides justice and security for both parties (“Opposition to Israeli Settlements in Palestinian Land,” 2008 UMC Book of Resolutions). The United Methodist Church believes negotiation and diplomacy will achieve this rather than through methods of violence and coercion (“Saying No to Violence in Middle East Conflict,” 2008 UMC Book of Resolutions). The need for this has been made patently clear by this morally reprehensible assault in international waters on peace activists and humanitarian aid workers.

Boarding the Freedom Flotilla in international waters is more than just an act of high-seas piracy. It is symptomatic of a broader, hopelessly flawed policy by Israel to subjugate the Palestinian people, allegedly to protect its own security. The United States has been complicit in this flawed policy.

We urge the Obama administration to take immediate steps to facilitate an international, independent investigation of this deadly interception of the Freedom Flotilla. Israel’s violent assault on the peace activists and humanitarian workers further destabilizes an already incendiary situation. This high-seas confrontation demonstrates the urgency of achieving a just peace before more innocents are slaughtered.

The United Methodist Church works with ecumenical and interfaith bodies to advocate for Palestinian self-determination and an end to Israeli occupation. Our General Conference has repeatedly affirmed Israel’s right to exist within secure borders. But this assault against civilians engaged in peaceful activities is an affront to any standard of decency. It will set back any attempts to achieve a peaceful two-state solution.

This tragedy could have been averted had Israel permitted the boats to arrive at Gaza and then searched them to ensure they contained humanitarian aid only. Such restraint would be a sign of mature, thoughtful statesmanship, which has been consistently lacking on both sides in this 40-year-old drama of and oppression, destruction and death.

It is necessary for Israel to end the blockade of Gaza. The government of Israel should permit immediate delivery of humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza. It is time to implement the two-state solution originally envisioned for the region.

We urge the United States government to take steps to bring Israel to the negotiating table to seek a fruitful, honest peace. We urge Israel to stop blockading Gaza, ending its oppression of 1.4 million Palestinian civilians, who deserve the right of liberty in pursuing a livelihood.

The violence must stop on both sides. The time for decisive action to impose a just, peaceful resolution has never been more evident than in this tragic assault on persons whose sole purpose was to achieve peace and bring aid to an oppressed populace.

—Jim Winkler, General Secretary
General Board of Church & Society
The United Methodist Church
June 3, 2010

BY SANNA TOWNS - MARCH 4, 2010

In two of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most memorable writings, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence,” he bemoaned the failure of Americans to speak out, to break their silence when witnessing injustice and immoral acts against humankind. He confessed his disappointment that Birmingham’s white Christian and Jewish communities were more devoted to “’order’ than to justice.” Motivated in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech to break “the betrayal of [his] own silences,”

King called for a “true revolution of values” within the United States – a revolution that shifted from profit motives and property rights to a society that valued people. A society, he lamented, that didn’t speak to the social betterment of humanity was not just and thus made the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism . . . incapable of being conquered.”

Internationals, Israelis and Palestinians peacefully protest the construction of Israel’s Wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in Photo: Palestine Monitor

Today there is a growing community of human rights activists in the U.S., around the world, and especially in Palestine-Israel whose behavior mirrors and extends King’s confrontation with injustice in their own efforts to break the silence on the injustice of the cruel, oppressive Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian people. They realize that by maintaining a deafening silence, mainstream U.S. media and political leadership keep large segments of the U.S. population ignorant about the true nature of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and human rights. Few Americans know that the Palestinian freedom struggle has been predominantly nonviolent for the vast majority of Palestinians, and has always been grounded in some of the same principles expounded by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sanna Nimtz Towns with young people at the Dheisheh Refugee Camp (2005).

In his “Letter,” King identifies four basic components of a nonviolent campaign: “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.” So what are the facts of the Israeli injustices against the Palestinian people? For more than 62 years beginning in 1948, reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing experienced by Native Americans, Palestinian Muslims and Christians (the indigenous descendants of the first Christians) have suffered as the Israeli government expels them from their homelands, creating the state of Israel upon the 500-plus Arab-Palestinian towns and villages.[i] The suffering continues under a 42-year Israeli occupation marked by land confis

cations for settlement building and wall construction and by restrictions on movement: to work, markets and water; to agricultural land and olive trees; to health facilities and educational institutions; and to Christian and Muslim religious sites, all but destroying family ties – discrimination similar to America’s segregated past. The separation wall and Israeli-only roads and settlements in Palestine divide populations racially for the benefit of illegal Israeli settlers (echoes of apartheid South Africa). Israel’s apartheid system has caused thousands of civilian deaths, many of them children, and widespread human rights violations.[ii] While the injustices mount, Israel has defied rulings by the International Court of Justice,[iii] violating more than 65 UN Resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.[iv]

Sanna Nimtz Towns at the Israeli separation wall; an example of the resistance art found all along this wall.

Americans have been led to believe that Palestinians have not been “honest partners for peace.” The truth is, however, negotiating for their freedom has been a daunting task. Palestinians have experienced the same broken promises, “blasted” hopes, and deep disappointments that King describes in his negotiations with Birmingham’s white leaders. President Clinton’s famed Oslo Peace Process began in 1993 with negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leadership and the promise to end Israel’s occupation and the formation of a Palestinian state. Essential to these negotiations, however, was a blatant imbalance of power: on the stronger side, the nation of Israel, militarily superior and prosperous, supported by the wealth and power of the U.S., controlling more than 78% of original Palestine; on the weaker side, the Palestinians, barely surviving and holding on to the remaining 22% of land.

Currently, Palestinian leadership has refused to return to negotiations due to Israel’s unwillingness to abide by past agreements and to cease expanding illegal settlements. Israel has scoffed at and dismissed longstanding U.S. policy of ending illegal Israeli settlement expansion in Palestine, a policy that President Obama attempted but failed to enforce upon Israel.

Surviving this imbalance and the suffering it causes has been traumatic for Palestinians, requiring unimaginable resources of strength and faith. King would have identified with their plight and their need to find ways to cope with and confront their circumstances in ways that enable them to sustain themselves. King describes the process of self-purification as self-analysis and a way of discovering the extent to which he and his fellow protesters were prepared to endure the ordeals of their nonviolent actions. For many Palestinians, their lives as devoted Muslims and Christians make self-purification through fasting and prayer a much-practiced tradition and surely one that has empowered them during nearly 100 years of suffering and injustice. One ultimate self-purifying act within Palestinian society is articulated in the recent Kairos Document by Palestine’s Christian leadership, a document that proclaims “that our Christian word in the midst of all [the tragedies in our lives], in the midst of our catastrophe, is a word of faith, hope and love.”

While Americans know well the direct action tactics of the movement King led, little do they know about the decades of Palestinian engagement in nonviolent, civil resistance for justice and freedom. As far back as 1902, Palestinian villagers, in what is now Israel, staged peaceful protests against confiscation of their land by European Zionist settlers. From 1987 to 1993, during the largely nonviolent mass movement of the First Intifada, Palestinians were involved in mass public demonstrations, refusing to pay taxes, boycotting Israeli goods and facilities, and planting olive trees on land confiscated by Israelis.[v] But the most effective resistance to Israeli expulsions, expansionism, and occupation has been their refusal to stop “living in their homes, going to school, eating and living.”

According to Palestinian scholar and human rights activist Mazin Qumsiyeh, “this colonial occupation wants all Palestinians to give up and leave the country. . . . When Shepherds . . . go to their fields despite repeated attacks by settlers and even the attempted poisoning of their sheep, that is non-violent resistance. When Palestinians walk to school while being spat on, kicked and beaten by settlers and soldiers, that is non-violent resistance. When Palestinians spend hours at check points to get to hospital, their farm land, their work, their schools, or to visit their friends, that is non-violent resistance.”

More recently, Palestinians, along with Israeli and international activists, are resisting by protesting the construction of the separation wall that is stealing more of their land. In February, demonstrators in the village of Bil’in cleverly invoked Hollywood, reenacting the film Avatar by dressing up as the blue Na’vi natives opposing the encroaching occupation of an Alien (human) corporate empire.

Israel’s typical response to these nonviolent protests and others by Palestinians against home expulsions in East Jerusalem includes shooting rubber bullets and live ammunition, tossing tear gas, and showering protesters with sewage – the Israeli equivalent of Alabama’s Bull Connor.

While dozens of Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations are participants in this nonviolent, civil rights movement, the international community is also supporting the campaign by heeding the call of Palestinian Civil Society in 2005 for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. This international campaign (inspired by the international BDS campaign against apartheid South Africa) is the most politically and morally sound civil resistance strategy for ending Israeli occupation of Palestine until Israel complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights. In Minnesota human rights activists recently received extraordinary support at precinct caucuses for the “Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign: Divest for Justice in Palestine,” a campaign calling on the state of Minnesota to divest from Israel Bonds.

King’s appeal to the Birmingham clergy, pleading with them to break their silence and speak for justice, is equal to the pleas of the Palestinian Christian leadership of the Kairos Document as they call on Christians and Muslims, Palestinians and Israelis, and the world community for a serious commitment to justice and freedom for the Palestinian people. Furthermore, King is critical of the lax leadership of his fellow clergy and reminds them of the early Christians; they, too, struggled against injustices and endured criticisms but remained steadfast in their beliefs, thus, determined to transform “the mores of society.” How ironic that the descendants of the first Christians, the Palestinian Christian leadership, find themselves repeating the struggle for justice of their ancestors. Today this is their message to the world: “These days, everyone is speaking about peace in the Middle East and the peace process. So far, however, these are simply words; the reality is one of Israeli occupation . . . [and] deprivation of our freedom.”

Resources:

[i] Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. This work is a revised edition of Morris’s earlier and classic work, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949_, published in 1988. Based on newly opened Israeli military archives and intelligence documentation, this work sheds further light on the battles, expulsions, and atrocities that led to the disintegration of Palestinian life and resulted in 700,000 Palestinians becoming refugees.

Pappe, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004.

Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict A Primer. The Middle East Research and Information Project. http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/toc-pal-isr-primer.html

[ii] Interfaith Peace Initiative. Apartheid and Discrimination in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. http://www.interfaithpeaceinitiative.com/apartheid.php

The Initiative has compiled a good overview of Israeli apartheid and discrimination examples with reputable sources for reference.

B’tselem http://www.btselem.org/English/

- The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policy makers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel.

[iii] “UN rules against Israeli barrier.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3879057.stm

“Anniversary of the ICJ’s Ruling on the Illegality of Israel’s Wall.” July 2009. http://www.nad-plo.org/inner.php?view=news-updates_080709

[iv] Neff, Donald. “Lessons to be Learned From 66 U.N. Resolutions Israel Ignores,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. March 1993. http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/article/146-1993-march/7132

[v] Awad, Sami. “Non-Violent Resistance.” Palestine Monitor. 18 Dec. 2008, http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article49