ABU DIS, West Bank, 28 August 2004 — The grandson of Mahatma Gandhi told about 2,000 protesters at Israel’s West Bank wall yesterday that the wall recalled the way South Africa’s former white-minority regime treated blacks.
Arun Gandhi, whose grandfather’s pacifist campaign helped end British rule in the Indian subcontinent, is on a weeklong Middle East visit to spread the message of nonviolence to Palestinians and Israel locked in bloody conflict.
Speaking to a crowd of Palestinians and foreigners, as well as Israeli left-wing activists, he said the wall, which Israel says keeps out suicide bombers but Palestinians call a land grab, might isolate Palestinians but not silence them just as apartheid rule failed to suppress blacks in South Africa.
“I spent my childhood in South Africa. What I’ve seen today reminds me of Bantustans. This wall will not bring security to Israel,” he told 2,000 Palestinians at the foot of the huge cement wall slicing by the West Bank town of Abu Dis. Bantustans were scattered “homelands” designated for blacks under white-ruled South Africa’s policy of racial separation. They were abolished when democratic black-majority government came into being a decade ago.
As Gandhi spoke, some protesters rappelled up the concrete barrier and waved a Palestinian flag as they reached the top. “I think it’s very bad how a democratic government in Israel and also the people who experienced the Holocaust accept this (situation),” Arun, founder of the US-based M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence, told Reuters after the rally.
But he said Palestinians must embrace forms of “nonviolent resistance” which would be more likely to foster talks and steps toward independence than a campaign of suicide attacks.
Mordechai Vanunu, the ex-nuclear technician who was jailed for blowing the whistle on the country’s nuclear program, was among the hundreds of Israeli activists who joined Palestinian residents.
Many carried banners with slogans such as: “The Wall - No. Dialogue - Yes” and “The Wall Must Fall”. The International Court of Justice has ruled that parts of the wall — a montage of concrete, razor wire and electronic fencing — built within the West Bank in places such as Abu Dis are illegal and should be torn down. The Israeli government has vowed to ignore the nonbinding verdict.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei, whose offices are in Abu Dis, also voiced his support for peaceful resistance in his address to the protesters.
“Our people are one of the people who believe in his (Mahatma Gandhi’s) school of thought and have followed his steps since the beginning of the struggle,” said Qorei, who also raised the plight of the Palestinian prisoners currently on hunger strike in Israeli prisons.
Addressing Arun, Qorei said: “Your visit here coincides with the 13th day of the hunger strike by our prisoners who are entering into a dangerous phase all because they are asking to be treated like human beings.”
Arun himself said that the prisoners were “being treated worse than animals”, adding that such treatment was incompatible with Israel’s commitment to democracy and human rights.
Some 8,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, with up to a half thought to be refusing food.
The Israeli government says it will not negotiate with the prisoners while Public Security Minister Tzahi Hanegbi has said he is prepared to watch them die.
But in a statement issued yesterday, the UN’s top envoy to the region urged Israel to resolve its dispute with the prisoners and guarantee their health.
Terje Roed-Larsen “called on the Israeli authorities to comply with its international obligations and to make every effort to find, with the prisoners, an appropriate resolution to the hunger strike.
“The UN agencies and offices remind Israel of its obligations under the fourth Geneva Convention and relevant international human rights instruments which provide for the protection of detainees and prisoners,” he added. The cycle of violence claimed another casualty yesterday when a 71-year-old Palestinian died of injuries sustained in an Israeli helicopter strike in the southern Gaza Strip.
Jaduwa El-Qurd had been seriously injured in Thursday night’s attack on a refugee camp in the town of Rafah which also wounded Mohammed Sheikh Al-Khalil, a senior leader of the Palestinian organization.
A member of another militant group, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, was killed in an overnight explosion in Gaza City’s eastern Shejaya neighborhood. The cause of the blast was not immediately known.
