Violence erupts as 2,000 peace activists try to bring food, medicine to Ramallah By Anat Cygielman and Yossi Verter
Police yesterday used tear gas and batons to prevent a peace march of some 2,000 protesting Israeli Jews and Arabs from delivering truckloads of food and medicine to besieged Ramallah. The clashes erupted at the A Ram checkpoint north of Jerusalem. Demonstrators from Israeli peace groups, including Gush Shalom, Ta'ayush, Physicians for Human Rights, Bat Shalom and Israeli Arabs, led by Arab MKs and members of the Arab National Monitoring Committee, arrived by buses from the center and north. They brought 20 vehicles full of donated food and medicines for the besieged town. They planned to enter Ramallah and distribute the supplies to residents of the town.
Chanting slogans against the Sharon government and the occupation, the demonstrators began marching toward police who responded with round after round of tear gas. When that did not stop the marchers, police used batons, and some demonstrators responded with rock-throwing. By the end of the clashes, some 20 of the demonstrators were injured, and police said that seven policemen were lightly wounded. Among the wounded demonstrators were MK Mohammed Barakeh (Hadash), who said, "if they are ready to use the butt of a rifle on an MK, who knows what they are doing inside the territories."
More demonstrations are planned in the coming days inside Israel by mainstream groups, including the Peace Coalition, which includes both liberal dovish parties like Meretz and Peace Now, which is planning a Saturday night march from Rabin Plaza to the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv. "The government's decisions and actions are endangering life and not protecting it," says a decision issued by the coalition on Tuesday night.
The decision also slams all those on the Palestinian side "directly or indirectly responsible for the terror that destroys every chance for coexistence." According to the group, they plan to step up demonstrations and other street activity, to protest the government's military moves in the territories. Right wing MK Michael Kleiner (Herut), called the peace group "Oslo criminals who have long been a fifth column inside Israel."
Also on Tuesday, representatives from Arab National Monitoring Committee, the umbrella group for nonpartisan political activity in the Israeli Arab community, met with diplomatic representatives of Jordan and Egypt in Israel to lodge protests that those countries' leaders "are not taking action on behalf of the Palestinian people." In a statement issued by the committee, they called the U.S. a "terrorist entity" and called for a boycott of American products. The committee attacked the Israeli media, calling it "draftees in the establishment campaign," and charging it ignored Israeli Arab public "expressions of protest and other demonstrations against the Israeli aggression in the territories."
In most Israeli Arab communities, there are now donation campaigns underway for food and medicines to be transferred to Palestinian residents of the territories.
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A NAZI BY ANY OTHER NAME By Akiva Eldar
The Israeli liberal left was quick to join the chorus of protests against Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago for drawing a comparison between the situation in Ramallah and the Auschwitz death camp.
Gentiles who liken Jews to Nazis or to collaborators with the Nazis are denounced - justly so - as anti-Semites. Some even wrote that Saramago had made Israelis fair play for assailants with his comments.
On the other hand, Israeli left-wing liberals find nothing wrong with co-signing a "covenant" with a Jew like Brigadier General (res.) Effi Eitam, who called the Palestinians a "cancer in the body of the nation." The fact that the Nazis were especially fond of this metaphor is probably not lost on the general.
By the same token, the women members of "Kapowatch" - the response of the rightist Women in Green to "Machsomwatch," which was set up to observe the behavior of Israeli soldiers at checkpoints in the West Bank - know what a "kapo" is. The kapos were Jews who acted as police for the Nazis in the death camps (although in the end most of them were also murdered).
And what crime did the women who watch the checkpoints commit to be thus branded? "They are a group of traitors from the extreme left," wrote Nadia Matar, the leader of Women in Green to her colleagues last week. She urged them to stand up against "the anti-Israeli organization that supports the enemy under the guise of being a human rights organization that wants to ensure that the soldiers are nice to the Arabs."
Matar reports that she and Yael from the settlement of Tekoa and Jacqueline from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo visited an army checkpoint north of Bethlehem early one morning to boost the morale of the soldiers and offer them refreshments. "At 7 o'clock the traitors from the left arrived," Matar wrote. "I had asked Jacqueline to bring a camera and I started to follow the women and photograph them. They asked me who I was and I replied, `We are from KapoWatch, we are photographing Jewish traitors. We are adding your names to the black list of collaborators with the Arab enemy, so that when the time comes you will be placed on trial for crimes against the Jewish people on its soil.'"
If KapoWatch members don't understand they are emulating Samarago, they would do well to have a look at a book by former Knesset Speaker Dov Shilansky, "In a Jewish Jail: From the Diary of a Political Prisoner." On page 18 Shilansky, who was a member of the National Military Organization (Irgun, led by Menachem Begin) and afterward a Herut and Likud MK, writes about the Jewish collaborators: "Everyone murdered, including the Jews in the service of the Germans, and nearly every Jew who wore a ribbon of a deputy Kapo on his hand murdered, with only a few exceptions."
In his book "The Seventh Million" Tom Segev reports how Holocaust survivors lynched former Kapos. On January 9, 1946, the daily Hatzofeh, the organ of the religious Zionist movement, called on the authorized institutions "to liquidate these people."
Jews, it seems, are allowed everything. That includes the liberty of likening Jews to Israel's worst enemies, while at the same time whining about those who liken Jews to Israel's worst enemies. They can foment a disturbance against the playing of Wagner as an encore to those in the audience who want to stay and hear it. They can also shrug off as a "technical mistake" an army officer's order to write numbers on the arms of Palestinian prisoners.