ISRAELI STATE Palestinian leaders face deportation "THEY ARE important political leaders whose deportation will hamper the struggle against military occupation," stated Israeli defense attorney Felicia Langer. The appeal of four well-known Palestinians was to be heard before the Israeli high court on January 30.
"Discontinued in 1980 in response to international criticism, deportation has been resumed in Israel on a scale that suggests a serious escalation. At stake is the direction of Israeli policy toward the indigenous Arab population at a crucial juncture in its history," wrote Search, the respected Washington-based organization in a recent background paper. MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH
The case has gotten international attention. The Palestinians are being represented by a team that includes Felicia Langer, Lea Tsemel, and members of the West Bank-based Arab Lawyers Committee.
The Palestinians were roused from their beds, blindfolded, handcuffed, and led away by machine-gun-carrying Israeli soldiers in the dark morning hours of last October 28.
They were charged with secret unspecified "security offenses" Nelson Mandela's "crime" - and their deportation seems to be of a piece with the government's renewal of its "iron fist" policy.
No act of or advocacy of violence is alleged against them. They are not charged with a crime and were not given a trial with due-process protections.
Last summer a number of Israelis were killed by Arabs, providing the government with a pretext for their arrests. Twenty-one Palestinians were deported in September; 104 were placed under administrative detention, which requires no charges and can be extended indefinitely.
A delegation of American attorneys recently returned from Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza where they had undertaken a fact-finding tour regarding the deportations.
The delegation included National Lawyers Guild president and vice president Marc Van Der Hout and Mary Rita Lucke; as well as Michael Steven Smith, a member of the editorial board of Guild Notes, the publication of the group; Wilhelm Joseph, co-chairman of the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL); and Abdeen Jabara of the Palestine Aid Society's advisory board.
They spent eight days meeting with
Israeli governmental and military officials, American officials, and Palestinian political and cultural leaders.
The delegation observed that to date over half the territory of the West Bank has been taken by Israelis for exclusive Jewish use and illegal settlement. Opposing this and calling for a just peace and an independent Palestinian state is the true "crime" for which the Palestinians were arrested, the group concluded.
At a packed press conference that was held in Jerusalem and broadcast on Israeli TV on November 20, Guild president Marc Van Der Hout, speaking for the delegation, demanded reversal of Israeli deportation plans.
While affirming the Guild's support for the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state, Van Der Hout stated, "As a Jew I feel a special obligation to draw attention to the violation of human rights by Israel. The present deportations have no basis in Israeli or in international law."
To support the deportation, Israel is relying on a British emergency regulation from 1945, which the British themselves revoked. Prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, Mr. Yaacov Shimson Shapira, who was to become the first legal advisor to the new Israeli government, said that "even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws," that "they are unparalleled in any civilized country," and that "no government has a right to draw up such laws."
Ms. Langer was not optimistic about the Palestinians' prospects of avoiding banishment. Although Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Accords, which Israel signed, explicitly forbids the deportation of civilians from occupied territories, a
23
fate suffered by many European Jews, Ms. Langer said that "in the past the Israeli High Court has taken an attitude of total rejection of Article 49."
The four Palestinians the government seeks to deport have all been outspoken in their resistance to Israeli designs vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza. They are:
- Hasan Abd al Jawad, a journalist who heads the Bethlehem Press Service and is a leader of the Dheshieh refugee camp, where he lives. He is the sole support of his wife, aged parents, and his cousin's family. His cousin has already been deported.
- Ali Abu Hilal is the founder and secretary of the Workers Unity Block, a large organization of 52 affiliated unions of Palestinian workers on the West Bank. Although the union is legal, members told the delegation that most of their leaders were in prison, that their last convention was banned - unsuccessfully - by the Israelis, and their headquarters raided.
Dr. Azmi Shu'aibi is a dentist
-who served as city councilman in his West Bank town of El-Bireh until it was dissolved by the Israelis in 1982. He suffers from an acute and incurable lung disease but has nonetheless been adjudged fit for deportation. His wife told the delegation that should he be set across the border, she fears the worst. He has two young children.
Mrs. Suheir Shu'aibi said that her home was invaded after a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Her husband frankly discussed his political views with the soldiers. Thereafter he was taken away. When, in the morning, her children asked for their father she told them the truth but left room for hope.
She told the delegation that the soldiers confiscated their books on economies and Marxism. Her husband talked them out of taking a copy of the 1984 Amnesty International report on the torture of Palestinian prisoners. The military authorities have a list of 300 banned books, which are indexed and forbidden.
- Zaki Abu Steiteh was married upon his recent release from prison. He is accused of having made nationalist speeches and singing Palestinian songs at his wedding. The attorneys visited his mother and his wife at their one-room home under an Israeli machine-gun tower at the Jabalya Refugee Camp in the Gaza strip near Egypt.
His mother said that she left her farm in 1948 under a rain of Israeli bullets, carrying a year-and-a-half-old child. Her shawl fell from her head, but she didn't have time to pick it up. She went back to the land the next year and viewed it through a fence. She goes back yearly now, she said, 24 and rubs the dirt into her hair.
At a meeting with American Ambassador Thomas Pickering at the U.S. mission in Tel Aviv, the ambassador told the American attorneys that it is the U.S. position that the deportations are an illegal violation of the 1949 Geneva Accords. He said he believed the Israelis were deporting the men because of their opposition to Israeli plans to set up a semi-autonomous West Bank under Israeli control. This plan is generally derided by Palestinians as a "Bantustan" solution.
The attorneys met with Meir Gabay, director-general in the Ministry of Justice and Renato Jarach, the state prosecutor handling the deportations. Mr. Jarach conceded that the deportees had not been involved in violence and stated that the reason they were being banished from their homes was for their involvement in organizing, in his words, "pre-state formations."
He said that a network of informers supplied him with secret evidence that the four Palestinians were supporters of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, two member groups of the PLO - "Extremely ferocious," added Director General Gabay.
"It's so troubling meeting with Israeli government officials and seeing how they totally deny what's going on," Chicago attorney Mary Rita Lucke told the weekly Palestinian newspaper Al-Fajr (The Dawn). "On one hand, they say these are people trying to set up a pre-state government. In a sense, that recognizes the national liberation character of the struggle - and it's very clear to me from my visit that it is a national liberation struggle that's going on here. But the Israelis' whole emphasis is on trying to characterize these Palestinians as criminals. They refuse to acknowledge the mandates of the Geneva Convention and paint these people who are sincere and legitimate leaders in their own communities as 'terrorists' . The use of that word is a red herring."
Daoub Kuttab, Al-Fajr's editor, underscored this point at a meeting with the group. He showed them an editorial he had written denouncing terrorism as being counterproductive and supporting Yasser Arafat's condemnation of the highjacking of the Achille Lauro. Every single paragraph was crossed out by the Israeli censor and he was not allowed to print it. He said that even obituaries are scrutinized and crossword puzzles are censored. The word "homeland" for instance is not allowed.
In the occupied West Bank, 52 percent of the land has been seized. The number of settlers in the West
Bank is about 50,000. The number of Palestinians there is more than 850,000, that is, seventeen times greater, he explained. But only less than one-half of the land of their homeland is intended for their benefit. Two-thirds of the Arabs on the West Bank are now forced to work in Israel, making about five dollars a day, when hired.
Within the borders of the pre-1967 Israel, 90 percent of the land has been taken for exclusive Jewish use. All the world's Jews may become citizens of Israel, but Arabs who left or who were driven out during the various wars are not allowed to return.
It is forbidden to open any new factories that will make products for sale to inhabitants of the territories themselves. All Israeli exports to the territories are not only allowed but actually encouraged. At the same time, for all practical purposes all imports from the territories to Israel are prohibited.
Upon returning to New York, Wilhelm Joseph of the NCBL and Michael Smith testified before the United Nations' Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Effecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories. Joseph told the Special Committee that, "I find the parallels between Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories and South Africa's treatment of its Blacks to be absolutely frightening."
"For example," he testified, "West Bank Palestinians must carry passbooks which limit their freedom of movement. A Palestinian from the West Bank may sweep the streets of Tel Aviv by day, but must be back on the West Bank at midnight. Collective punishment, house and town arrest, and the bulldozing of Arab homes is routine practice. Incidences of torture were related to us by a number of Palestinians."
The last group to be deported were 18 Palestinians who, on September 15, were blindfolded, stripped of all papers including records of ownership of land, and dumped at gun point under the desert sun into Jordan in a mine field south of the Dead Sea at Wadi Araba.
Protest messages are effective and should be sent to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, the Knesset, Jerusalem, Israel, and to George Schultz, United States Department of State, Washington, DC 20520, with copies to attorney Lea Tsemel, 2 Abu Obeida, Jerusalem. Michael Steven Smith is an attorney who practises law in New York City. He is a member of the National Lawyers Guild and has been active in the civil rights and peace movements. International Viewpoint 24 February 1986