The Economist Analyse La Situation En Palestine

[Ronnie Hayek]

Excellent article sur l'accumulation des tracasseries israéliennes et leurs conséquences globales sur le manque de liberté des Palestiniens.

A ressortir quand des gens répliquent aux anarcaps : "Oui, mais quid du cas où un méchant propriétaire achète toute un quartier et encercle ta maison ?"

http://www.economist.com/world/africa/disp…tory_id=8571800

It's the little things that make an occupation

Jan 18th 2007 | JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH

From The Economist print edition

Those seemingly minor inconveniences that make life hellish

DURING 2006, according to B'tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, almost half of them innocent bystanders, among them 141 children. In the same period, Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians and six soldiers. It is such figures, as well as events like shellings, house demolitions, arrest raids and land expropriations, that make the headlines in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What rarely get into the media but make up the staple of Palestinian daily conversation are the countless little restrictions that slow down most people's lives, strangle the economy and provide constant fuel for extremists.

Arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules. No one can predict how a trip will go. Many of the main West Bank roads, for the sake of the security of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, are off-limits to Palestinian vehicles—only one road connecting the north and south West Bank, for instance, is open to them—and these restrictions change frequently. So do the rules on who can pass the checkpoints that in effect divide the West Bank into a number of semi-connected regions (see map).

A new order due to come into force this week would have banned most West Bankers from riding in cars with Israeli licence plates, and thus from getting lifts from friends and relatives among the 1.6m Palestinians who live as citizens in Israel, as well as from aid workers, journalists and other foreigners. The army decided to suspend the order after protests from human-rights groups that it would give soldiers enormous arbitrary powers—but it has not revoked it.

Large parts of the population of the northern West Bank, and of individual cities like Nablus and Jericho, simply cannot leave their home areas without special permits, which are not always forthcoming. If they can travel, how long they spend waiting at checkpoints, from minutes to hours, depends on the time of day and the humour of the soldiers. Several checkpoints may punctuate a journey between cities that would otherwise be less than an hour's drive apart. These checkpoints move and shift every day, and army jeeps add to the unpredictability and annoyance by stopping and creating ad hoc mobile checkpoints at various spots.

According to the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the number of such obstacles had increased to 534 by mid-December from 376 in August 2005, when OCHA and the Israeli army completed a joint count. When Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, agreed last month to ease restrictions at a few of these checkpoints as a concession to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, human-rights people reported that not only did many of the checkpoints go on working as before; near the ones that had eased up, mobile ones were now operating instead, causing worse disruption and pain.

It is sometimes hard to fathom the logic of the checkpoint regime. One route from Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, to Jerusalem, involves a careful inspection of documents, while on another the soldiers—if they are at their posts—just glance at cars' occupants to see if they look Arab. Israeli law strictly forbids Israeli citizens from visiting the main Palestinian cities, but they can drive straight into Ramallah and Hebron without being challenged, while other cities, such as Jericho and Nablus, remain impermeable. In many places the barrier that Israel is building through the West Bank for security purposes (though in Palestinian eyes to grab more land) is monitored with all the care of an international border, while around Jerusalem the army turns a blind eye to hundreds of people who slip through cracks in the wall as part of their daily commute.

Because of the internal travel restrictions, people who want to move from one Palestinian city to another for work or study must register a change of address to make sure they can stay there. But they cannot. Israel's population registry, which issues Palestinian identity cards as well as Israeli ones, has issued almost no new Palestinian cards since the start of the second intifada in 2000. And that means no address changes either. This also makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians from abroad to get residency in the occupied territories, which are supposed to be their future state, never mind in Israel.

No-through-roads galore

On top of that, in the past year several thousand Palestinians who had applied for residency in the West Bank and were living there on renewable six-month visitor permits have become illegal residents too, liable to be stopped and deported at any checkpoint, not because of anything they have done but because Israel has stopped renewing permits since Hamas, the Islamist movement, took control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) a year ago. (Israel says it is because the PA isn't handing over the requests.)

Like Israelis, Palestinians who commit a traffic offence on the West Bank's highways have to pay the fine at an Israeli post office or a police station. But in the West Bank the only post offices and police stations are on Israeli settlements that most West Bank Palestinians cannot visit without a rare permit. If they do not pay, however, they lose their driving licences the next time the police stop them. They also get a criminal record—which then makes an Israeli entry permit quite impossible.

Some of the regulations stray into the realm of the absurd. A year ago a military order, for no obvious reason, expanded the list of protected wild plants in the West Bank to include za'atar (hyssop), an abundant herb and Palestinian staple. For a while, soldiers at checkpoints confiscated bunches of it from bewildered Palestinians who had merely wanted something to liven up their salads. Lately there have been no reports of za'atar confiscation, but, says Michael Sfard, the legal adviser for Yesh Din, another Israeli human-rights body, the order is still in force. As he tells the story, he cannot help laughing. There is not much else to do.

[pierreyves]

Excellent article sur l'accumulation des tracasseries israéliennes et leurs conséquences globales sur le manque de liberté des Palestiniens.

A ressortir quand des gens répliquent aux anarcaps : "Oui, mais quid du cas où un méchant propriétaire achète toute un quartier et encercle ta maison ?"

Je ne sais pas si tout est précisément relaté (j'ai du mal à y croire) … mais si c'est le cas, pas étonnant que les terroristes recrutent en masse…

Pas bien compris ta remarque sur le méchant proprio…

[Invité jabial]

Et un nouvel article :

From bad to worse

Jan 29th 2007

From Economist.com

Retaliation for a Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel may bring further woes to strife-torn Gaza

Reuters

EILAT, a cheerful seaside resort at Israel’s southern tip, has up to now been virtually unscathed by the violent impacts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So the suicide bombing that killed three Israelis and critically wounded two others on Monday January 29th was a terrible shock to the city, especially as such attacks are now a relative rarity.

It was, in fact, only the second suicide bombing in Israel proper since Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in March, though Israeli authorities say they have foiled a great many other attempts. Undoubtedly the growing West Bank separation barrier, the tighter seal around Gaza since Israel pulled out its settlers and troops in 2005, and the Israeli army’s constant arrests and killings of suspected Palestinian militants have all contributed to stemming the flow. As with the last bombing, Hamas did not claim responsibility—that went to three other armed groups, among them loyalists of the ousted Fatah party—but did not condemn it either.

The immediate question is how Israel will respond. After several months of intense shelling and raids that followed the abduction of an Israeli soldier last summer, the two sides agreed a ceasefire in Gaza, which Israel’s army has largely adhered to. Gaza’s militants, on the other hand, have not; nearby Israeli towns have endured a constant drizzle of Qassam rockets. If, as one of the militias now says, Gaza is where the Eilat bomber came from, then Israel’s leaders may calculate that a swift, sharp but limited retaliation is the best response. Coming after two months of restraint it may bring home to Gazans the message that it is their own militants who are the source of their woes.

In reality, though, any action will be mainly for the Israeli public’s consumption. Gazans hardly need reminding of what trouble their own gunmen bring. In the past few days, clashes between Hamas and Fatah fighters have killed 30 people in Gaza, including several innocent bystanders and children. The tit-for-tat feuding is also spilling over into the West Bank, with militants in towns like Nablus and Hebron taking revenge (as they call it) for the attacks on their brethren in Gaza. The violence has dashed hopes that Fatah and Hamas, whose leaders met earlier this month in Damascus, might at last conclude the deal on a unity government that they have been pursuing for months.

Each accuses the other of trying to sabotage such a deal, but the truth is that neither has had enough of an incentive to make it work. Hamas does not want to relinquish the power it won fair and square in a democratic election. Fatah does not want to share responsibilities with Hamas unless the Islamist party agrees to a political platform that persuades the Western world to lift its economic embargo of the PA. This would include, at the very least, an implicit formal recognition of Israel’s right to exist, which Hamas has so far rejected. As the situation worsens both parties risk losing power and control entirely, giving them a growing incentive to form a unity government. But internal divisions currently prevent each of them from taking that leap of logic.

Nor is the West doing much to help. It has not made any clear promises about what it would do to push Israeli-Palestinian peace after a unity government is formed. And rather than encourage compromise, it is supporting Fatah and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in the hope that if he cannot reach a deal with Hamas, he might force it out of power or subdue it. As things are going, none of those outcomes looks realistic.

[Cadmos]

The Economist, c'est bien connu, est « antisémite »…

Pour les tracasseries, ce n'est pas nouveau…ni fini…

http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/achet…objet_id=971450

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/01/…iya-demolition/

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/819633.html

Après tout ça, on se demande bien pourquoi les Palestiniens trouvent que le processus de paix proposé n'est qu'un processus d'intensification de la guerre…sans doute ils ne comprennent pas « le langage de paix » du gouvernement israélien…qui continue à prétendre qu'il n'y a pas de partenaires pour parler de paix.

[Timur]

Pas bien compris ta remarque sur le méchant proprio…

RH voulait dire que certains opposants à l'anarcapie pointent du doigt un effet pervers soi-disant possible alors que celui-ci existe déjà avec l'Etatisme.