Coalition of Women for Peace invites you to a conference marking

The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Monday, December 3rd, 16:00 – 21:00, Na laga’at Center, Jaffa

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With Hebrew-Arabic-English translation

In the program:

16:00 – 16:30 Registration

16:00 – 16:35 Opening – Aliyah Strauss, Coalition of Women for Peace

16:35 – 17:30 Home, Violence: From House Demolitions to Domestic Violence

Farida Shaaban, active in the struggle to end house demolitions in the unrecognized village Dahamash

Atidal Abu Aeesh, Maan – Forum of Negev Arab-Bedouin Women’s Organizations

Nabila Espanioly, Director of Al’Tufula Center in Nazareth, 5th candidate on the list of Hadash to the Knesset

Ragda Elnabilsy, doctoral candidate in the School of Social Work, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Moderator: Yael Ben Yefet, Director of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, active in Hithabrut-Tarabut movement

17:45-19:15 Policies of Political Persecution and Violence Against Women Human Rights Defenders

Orna Kohn, Adv. , Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

Zabib Sultan, founder of the Community Center for Eritrean Women in the south of Tel Aviv

Zahava Greenfeld, active in the struggle for public housing and the Palestinian popular struggle

MK Haneen Zuaby – Balad Party

Moderator: Vered Lee, journalist

19:15 – 19:45 Dinner

9:45 – 21:00 Video Workshop and Discussion Tables

Video workshop (Claudia Levin); Women in the Negev (Muna Alhablin); Experiences of Activists (Esther Rapoport); Women and the Struggle in Jaffa (Sahar Saada); Women and Arms (Rela Mazali – project “Guns on the Kitchen Table”); Economic Violence (Asma Aghbariya Zahalka – Daam Party); Violence and Gender Difference; Women and the South of Tel Aviv (Shula Keshet); English-language discussion table on women’s rights in Israel – between international image and reality; Open-space

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We refuse the wave of hate and incitement against the residents of Gaza

We refuse the neglect of the South of Israel for a political spin

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No Social Justice
Without Ending the Occupation!
Demonstration
to mark
45 Years of Occupation

45 years, and the occupation in the 1967 borders still continues:
45 years of denial of denial of the Palestinians’ right to freedom
About four million Palestinians live under an occupation regime in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem
The policy of Apartheid, expulsion, settlement and land theft continue
600 checkpoints, thousands of political prisoners and over 300 administrative detainees without trial

The defense and settlement expansion budgets become ever more bloated, year by year

The Summer of 2011 had seen a momentous development in Israel: Hundreds of thousands of protesters joined millions, in the Middle East and throughout the world, demanding Social Justice, democracy and liberation from the shackles of oppression.

But the economic and social situation in Israel is not and cannot be detached from the political situation, from the continuing occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.

While the regional dictators are trampled one by one under the wheels of history, the government of Israel continues its policy of denial. But the peoples of our region have already shown that no regime based on brute force can maintain itself forever.

It’s time to choose between oppression, theft and settlement – or life in peace

How can we be good neighbors with people who seek freedom and democracy, while Israel continues to deny the Palestinian people the right to independence, to freedom of movement, work, health and education?

The separation policy must stop. An end must come to the injustice which contravenes morality and humanity, to the policy of ongoing expulsion.
This summer we cry out:
No Social Justice Without Ending the Occupation! An occupation which leads Israel into a confrontation with the Arab World and an international isolation like Apartheid South Africa? No way!

Anyone who wants to see peace and a decent society must go out into the streets and say loud and clear to the young Arabs and Palestinians:
We stand with you!

Anyone who seeks peace and demands social justice must go out into the streets and say loud and clear to the government of Israel:
Dismantle the settlements! Your war is not our war. Your occupation is the destruction of Social Justice and Human Rights.

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To:

Ban Ki-moon

Secretary General

United Nations

CC:

Helen Clark, head of UNDP

Valerie Amos, head of OCHA

We, the undersigned, call upon the UN to ensure that the rights of OCHA employee Ms. Khulood Badawi are not violated as a result of a political persecution against her. Ms. Badawi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a veteran human rights defender, has recently been subjected to false defamation and personal harassment as a UN employee. Increasing political persecution and harassment of Palestinian and Israeli civil society organizations and human rights activists has been noted with great concern by the international community.

This pressure aims to undermine the legitimacy of civil society in general and human rights defenders in particular; it includes legislative measures, restrictions of freedoms of speech and association, and systematic intimidation of individuals. The case against Ms. Badawi is particularly alarming as it attempts to engage and instrumentalize the UN and its institutions in the political persecution of human rights defenders. The UN must not succumb to any form of political pressure and must withhold from opening any proceedings against Ms. Badawi, as such action would undermine the very principles upon which the UN was founded. Proceedings against Ms. Badawi, a UN employee, could directly damage civil society organizations and it’s employees. Such an act would provide a backwind to political persecution against Palestinian and Israeli human rights defenders.

It should be noted that Ms. Badawi is persecuted after expressing in a personal statement her sorrow for the death of an innocent child, a sentiment shared by all humankind and in the spirit of the United Nations Charter. It is our view that Ms. Badawi is targeted only because she is a UN employee and a veteran human rights defender. We are deeply concerned that such a precedent would serve to intimidate all UN employees and may lead to the persecution of other committed and excellent professional employees of UN institutions in Israel and other countries. In light of these developments and their far-reaching consequences on the UN and the entire international human rights community, we appeal to you to intervene in this case and personally ensure that the rights of Ms. Badawi are respected.

For more information, see: http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/opinion/4347-where-is-un-employee-khulood-badawi-.html.

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• The prisoners on strike since over two months are in grave conditions.

Youth groups and activists from various regions are holding a sit-in rally on Thursday, 3.5. 2012 at 17:30, in front of the Ramleh Prison, where a number of hunger-striking prisoners, on strike since between one and two months, are lying in the prison’s hospital ward, headed by the prisoners Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, who have entered a life-threatening stage of their 65-day hunger strike.

According to information supplied by “Addameer”, the Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, about two thousand prisoners joined the open-ended hunger strike in the past thirteen days, namely since the last Prisoners’ Day on April 17^th. The demands of the prisoners include ending the policy of solitary confinement, ending the cases of administrative detentions, giving back the rights for academic and secondary education, allowing the parents of Gazan prisoners to visit their children and improving the living conditions and medical treatments received, among others.

As to the eight prisoners who had started the hunger strike before April 17^th, most of them are lying in the Ramleh prison’s hospital ward. In addition to Diab and Halahleh, these are Hasan As-Safadi – on hunger strike since 57 days; Omar Abu Shalal – on hunger strike since 58 days; Mahmoud Sursoq – since 32 days; Jafar E’zz Ed-Deen – since 43 days; Mohammed Rafiq Et-taj-  since 47 days and Abdullah Barghouti- since 22 days.

The organizers call upon all Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause and the great prisoners’ strike to join the sit-in, to show support for the prisoners and raise their morale in the ongoing hunger strike.

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A Year of green planting by the Jewish National Fund

24.02.2011 – by Edna Gorny and Erika Tamara Traubmann

Plantings on land from where the residents of Al-Arakib were expelled are disguised as “green” while representatives of the Jewish National Fund participate in the UN sittings on sustainability and on protecting the environmental rights of the local population.

Today, a general strike by local Arab authorities in the Negev will take place and activists will march from the center of Beer-Sheva to the government’s ministry in the city to protest the destruction of Al-Arakib in order to plant a forest by the Jewish National Fund, the expulsion of the people from their land and the ongoing violence towards the people of the village.

Parallel to the destruction, the Jewish National Fund already began the emissary plantation work of expending the forest on the land of Al-Arakib. The JNF has a program of affostering the Negev as part of the Judaization at the expense of the local population to take over their land. The plantings in Al-Arakib are part of the implementation of racist policies of judaizing the Negev and expelling the Bedouin which is pursued by the government, the Israel Land Administration and the JNF, who serves as the arm of implementation and as a central factor of this policy.

This tactic is not new: Yosef Weitz, former JNF leader, established a transfer committee during the war 1948 and made sure that the houses in most villages, whose residents were uprooted, expelled or fled due to the war, would be destroyed and that the ruins would be covered with trees planted by the JNF. Even now the JNF promotes tree planting in order to erase the physical village and the memory of its existence.

In recent years the JNF labeld itself as “green” and sells itself as an environmental organization to the public in Israel and the world. This year the fund announced to join “The Year of the Forrest”, an international UN event. In order to be accepted by the progressive club of the world’s environmental organizations, the JNF transferred its activities and goals into greenwash. For example: It was written in the JNF’s blog in honor of joining the “Year of the Forest”: “For our generation and future generations, we must increase awareness and promote worldwide action to maintain, protect and manage preservation of the forests on earth.” And: “In these activities the State of Israel will be advanced and progressive in the field of forestry, contribute to the environment and have the ability to export knowledge and experience.”

Representatives of the JNF as a “green” body travel the world and participate in the important environmental forums like the Johannesburg Earth Summit and the Cancun Conference. Where, ironically, its ambassadors take part in forums that support local (indigenous) populations who struggle against corporations and governments expelling them from their land which belonged to their ancestors for years and which provides the means of livelihood. JNF representatives come to the negotiation table and take part in decisions that support the rights of local populations, but when they return to Israel they roll up the sleeves, pull out the shovels and start their bulldozers to trample down exactly the same expelled populations. Apparently they changed their principles on the flight back to Israel.

Forest planting on land stolen from the original inhabitants is not green action; it is a means of control. Planting trees is seen as positive and “green” but you cannot separate nature protection and environmental activism from social and economic issues. Environmental justice is social justice, and vice versa. The most disadvantaged people in society, those who are not visible and not counted, those who are perceived as “others”, are always those who suffer from the greatest social/environmental discrimination. Their access to basic natural resources is limited – land, clean water and air and reserves to live from. They also suffer extremely from environmental pollution which is caused by the most powerful people in society, the industrialists, the consumers, the squanderers, who drive their polluting cars in their leisure and will wipe out by travelling natural reserves and planted forests from where they banished the Bedouins.

In recent decades the environmental movement around the world has succeeded in understanding that ecological issues cannot be separated from social issues and engraved the struggle for environmental justice on its banners. Even in Israel the time has come to distinguish between environmental activities and activities that are made due to national and ethnic reasons. Even in Israel the environmental movement is situated in the context between environmental and social justice and examined in the light of organizations such as the JNF.

Just as understood in the past that activists of nature preservation cannot fight for the environment without objecting the polluting industries, we understand today that the issue of expropriating Arab-Bedouin inhabitants is a question of environmental justice in the broadest sense of the word. As defined by Robert Bullard, an Afro-American philosopher: “Environmental justice is defined as fair treatment of all human beings, regardless of race, color, national origin or economic status, and their full participation with regard to development, implementation and enforcement policies, environmental laws and regulations. Fair treatment means that no group, including racial, ethnical or economical groups, will bear the burden of negative environmental consequences which are the results of industrial, business or governmental operations.”

The Jewish National Fund judaizes the Negev, makes the desert bloom and tramples on the Bedouins who lived in “wilderness” long before the fund was established and the State of Israel came to the Negev. But the state does not accept that its Bedouin citizens live on their land, continue their traditional lifestyle, which includes pasture and agriculture. According to the prevailing perception, only Jews are allowed to make the desert bloom, to build family farms in the Negev, to work dozens and hundreds of acres, while the fields of the Bedouins are sprayed with pesticides and their houses are destroyed.

The act of deleting the village and the memory is a criminal act. Moreover, it is not a success over time. As described by the writer AB Yehoshua in his story with the forests – the forest that covered the Palestinian village was burnt and the ruins of the village were exposed for all to see. Also the shame was exposed and the attempt to hide was discovered in all his nakedness.

Book by Dr. Edna Gorney, “Between exploitation and Rescue”, on the relationship between nature, society and culture in Israel, soon to be released by “Pardes”.

Erika Tamara Traubmann, activist of the Coalition of Women for Peace, partner in the fight for Al-Arakib.

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We, Israeli and Palestinian women, citizens of Israel, oppose the inflammatory rhetoric of war mongers and the recently advertized plan of the Israeli  government to attack Iran. Such an assault is not likely to stop the Iranian nuclear plan, but is likely to lead to regional war, loss of human life and a long term environmental damage. We join the brave call of Iranian women and say no to war.

For the Iranian women’s call, see: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4200346,00.html.

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