No Christmas for Some

Tuesday December 17, 2002 13:05

by Saddened

This year, for the first time ever, Christmas will not be celebrated in Bethlehem. The 35% Christian Palestinian population of Bethlehem has announced that they will not be putting up a christmas tree or celebrating in any form in Manger square this year due to the ongoing curfews, detentions and killings by the Israeli forces. The have said that even if they did want to put up decorations there wouldn't be time to do that in the small time that the curfew would be lifted. They need to use that time to buy food and visit doctors etc. There will be a midnight mass on Christmas Eve though.

On that note, I give you below an article from Ha'aretz [Israeli Daily Newspaper] - Dec 15, 2002

EYELESS IN ISRAEL

By Gideon Levy, [email protected]

Is it too much to ask Israelis to take a look, even a glimpse, at
what's going on in their backyard? Are we even capable of dropping
our relentless preoccupation with primaries and the battle between
Tnuva and Strauss over cottage cheese, to pay attention to what is
happening in the territories under our occupation?

A foreigner who happened to find himself here wouldn't believe his
eyes: A few weeks before the general elections - a period that is
supposed to be marked by an airing and sharpening of views -
Israel continues to close its eyes, not to see, not to hear and not to
know what it is doing to three million people who live less than an
hour from our homes. If this crass disregard is hard to accept in
normal times - the approach being that what doesn't interest me
doesn't exist - on the eve of elections that are considered (as
always) critical, it is nothing short of criminal.

Here are a few updates from the past few days: Five unarmed
Palestinians, probably desperate workers who were using a ladder
to enter Israel from the Gaza Strip to find work, were shelled by a
tank and killed on Thursday. On Monday, soldiers killed a
Palestinian who was mentally handicapped. On Sunday, soldiers
shot two women and three children in Rafah, on the border with
Egypt. One of the women, a mother, was killed along with her two
children, aged four and 15, and the other woman suffered serious
injuries. The soldiers said they thought the women and children
were terrorists.

A week ago Friday, 10 people were killed, including one woman and
two employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency, in a failed liquidation operation in Al-Bureij refugee camp in
the Gaza Strip. Earlier that week, a 95-year-old woman who was
traveling in a taxicab near Ramallah was shot to death by a soldier.
And a couple of days before that, soldiers demolished a building,
burying under the rubble a 70-year-man who was inside. All told,
more than 30 Palestinians were killed in the first 10 days of
December, at least half of them innocent civilians. What was once
an "anomaly" has become a daily event, and what the army used to
investigate, it no longer even reviews.

Does anyone care? Innocent victims - women, children, the aged -
exist only on our side. Most Israeli media outlets report these events
cursorily, if at all, and no politician makes any reference to them. To
this bloody harvest we need to add the mass arrests. According to
data of the IDF Spokesman's Office, 3,094 Palestinians are
currently incarcerated in military facilities alone; 932 of them have
been placed in administrative detention (arrest without trial). In other
words, there are nearly a thousand individuals detained for a six-
month period without any prospect of trial, many of them in two
makeshift detention facilities, Ketziot and Ofer, in which the
conditions are apparently particularly difficult. Otherwise, it is hard to
explain why the IDF has prevented reporters from visiting these
sites for months.

These are facts and statistics that should be of great concern to
public opinion, even if the public in question is constantly threatened
by terrorism. Daily killing of innocent people and mass arrests
without trial are issues that should at least be the subject of public
discussion, but here no one takes an interest, as though the matter
doesn't have a decisive influence not only on the victims
themselves, of course, but also on security and on the character of
the regime and society in Israel.

But that is not enough. If the acts of killing and the arrests are
marginally reported by the media, the imprisonment of the entire
Palestinian people is continuing uninterrupted and unreported.
Whole cities, parts of which lie in ruins, are under almost unceasing
curfew; an entire population is unable to move from one village to
the next or from city to city without the authorization of the
occupation army - but within the Israeli public there is not even an
echo of this. No one asks why, or for how long, or whether this state
of affairs does not induce terrorism rather than prevent it. The
security experts say in an appallingly uniform voice that this is the
only way, and hardly anyone protests. It is more than likely that the
majority of the public doesn't know (and couldn't care less) whether
the Palestinians are now under curfew or just closure or maybe
encirclement.

The focus is exclusively on our own difficulties and pain, which are
certainly grave enough. Are Israelis afraid to sit in cafes? It's been a
long time since Palestinians could even dream of that. Is it scary to
travel on a bus in Israel? There is no longer any such travel in the
territories. Afraid to fly? Most Palestinians have never flown.
Unemployment is rising? That is nothing compared to the
malnutrition and near hunger in the territories, where the great
majority of the residents are not terrorists.

A few weeks remain before the elections. No one is mentioning the
responsibility of Ariel Sharon, Shaul Mofaz and Benjamin Ben-
Eliezer for the killing and destruction. The Labor Party leader,
Amram Mitzna, talks a lot about separation and about what's good
for Israel's security - but not a word about morality or justice.
Perhaps Meretz will take a more cogent stand on these issues now
that Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan, former Labor stalwarts, have
joined the party. As for Hadash and the Arab parties, which try to
talk about what is actually going on in the territories - no one listens
to them.

This is a very serious state of affairs. No terrorist threat, however
murderous, is grounds for a wholesale annulment of values; no
suicide bombing can justify the daily killing of innocent people or the
large-scale incarceration of others without trial; and nothing, but
nothing, can justify the absence of a public discussion and the total
disregard of what's going on in our backyard, especially on the eve
of general elections.