No lesser a newspaper than The New York Times - a booster for Israel if there ever was one - details the disgraceful, thuggish and illegal conduct of the Israelis in relation to a small village of only 340 (Susiya) in the occupied West Bank.
"How did a hamlet of 340 Palestinians in a dusty corner of the southern West Bank find its way onto the global stage? Residents point to a chain of events that began two decades ago with visits from sympathetic foreigners and that have now made Susiya a symbol for pro-Palestinian activists of how Israel has sought to maintain control over large parts of the West Bank.
“We could not have imagined all this,” Mr. Nawajaa said as two of his 12 children argued over a toy helicopter.
“The Israelis used to destroy our village, and we slept in the wild, in the rain, and nobody knew anything about us.”
Three times in the past 30 years, the village has been displaced, and residents are faced with ejection once again. Unless the Israeli Supreme Court orders defense officials to reverse themselves, Susiya will soon be demolished.
The court’s ruling is due on Aug. 3, but residents fear that the bulldozers will not wait that long. They say officials have warned that parts of the village may be demolished sooner. The villagers’ lawyer, Qamar Mashriki-Assad of Rabbis for Human Rights, said she was shown a map and a list of buildings that were to go.
Susiya’s residents now live on a stretch of land between an Israeli archaeological site and a Jewish settlement with a very similar name, Susya. They were pushed out of their homes in 1986 to make way for the archaeological dig, which uncovered a fourth-century synagogue with a mosaic floor inscribed in Hebrew.
They were uprooted again, in 1990, for unclear reasons, and then in 2001 as a collective punishment tied to the shooting death of a Jewish settler. With nowhere else to go, they landed in their orchards and pastureland, improvising homes out of tarpaulin tents and concrete.
Their land lies in what is known as Area C, a part of the West Bank directly overseen by Israeli agencies rather than by the Palestinian Authority. It is very difficult for Palestinians to get permission to build in much of Area C, so much so that Israel has attracted international criticism."
"How did a hamlet of 340 Palestinians in a dusty corner of the southern West Bank find its way onto the global stage? Residents point to a chain of events that began two decades ago with visits from sympathetic foreigners and that have now made Susiya a symbol for pro-Palestinian activists of how Israel has sought to maintain control over large parts of the West Bank.
“We could not have imagined all this,” Mr. Nawajaa said as two of his 12 children argued over a toy helicopter.
“The Israelis used to destroy our village, and we slept in the wild, in the rain, and nobody knew anything about us.”
Three times in the past 30 years, the village has been displaced, and residents are faced with ejection once again. Unless the Israeli Supreme Court orders defense officials to reverse themselves, Susiya will soon be demolished.
The court’s ruling is due on Aug. 3, but residents fear that the bulldozers will not wait that long. They say officials have warned that parts of the village may be demolished sooner. The villagers’ lawyer, Qamar Mashriki-Assad of Rabbis for Human Rights, said she was shown a map and a list of buildings that were to go.
Susiya’s residents now live on a stretch of land between an Israeli archaeological site and a Jewish settlement with a very similar name, Susya. They were pushed out of their homes in 1986 to make way for the archaeological dig, which uncovered a fourth-century synagogue with a mosaic floor inscribed in Hebrew.
They were uprooted again, in 1990, for unclear reasons, and then in 2001 as a collective punishment tied to the shooting death of a Jewish settler. With nowhere else to go, they landed in their orchards and pastureland, improvising homes out of tarpaulin tents and concrete.
Their land lies in what is known as Area C, a part of the West Bank directly overseen by Israeli agencies rather than by the Palestinian Authority. It is very difficult for Palestinians to get permission to build in much of Area C, so much so that Israel has attracted international criticism."
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