Headbanging in the West Bank - Village Magazine

7 4 July 2017

UNE MARKED 50 years since the Six

Day War between Israel and the neigh-

boring states of Egypt, Jordan, and

Syria. Since then the region has been

in turmoil. The Association for Civil

Rights in Israel (ACRI) is the oldest civil society

organisations in the region. Its work is to pro-

mote human rights in both Israel and the

occupied Palestinian Territories.

Ronit Sela is the Director for The Human Rights

in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Unit with

ACRI. She was in Ireland recently on a trip spon

sored by Christian Aid Ireland.

When you meet Ronit the ﬁrst thing you notice

is how measured and calm she is, presumably a

prerequisite for this job. When we meet she is

dealing with the loss of her phone with superhu-

man serenity. It’s no surprise to learn from her

that for a long time she thought about a career

in diplomacy.

She tells me about ACRI: “It was set up to pro

tect and promote Human Rights in Israel and the

Occupied Territories in 1972. We feel it’s our

mandate to protect and to promote the rights of

everyone one who is affected by the Israeli gov

ernment. A lot of the work we do is with Israeli

citizens, the largest group of people who are

affected by Israeli policies, but we also work

with communities who are not citizens, so in the

Occupied Territories we protect the rights of Pal-

estinians who are under military occupation”.

She’s the head of the department that deals

with the Occupied Territories and she works in

the West Bank and East Jerusalem. “We don’t

work in the Gaza strip, we only get involved with

Gaza issues when there is a war and unfortu-

nately there were three. There we look at any

action taken by the Israeli military and deter

mine whether it’s in breach of international law”.

East Jerusalem has been annexed and even

though ACRI’s ofﬁcial stance is that its occupa-

tion is illegal and Israeli law shouldn’t be applied

there, it’s a reality that has to be dealt with. She

notes that, “if people don’t have access to health

services in the region we’re going to go to the

Health Ministry and say according to Israeli law,

they should have access to these services and

we demand it. It’s the part of the occupa

tion that we have to play along

with”.

East Jerusalem suffers from

extreme discrimination, the

infrastructure is very poor

on every level, especially

when you compare it to

West Jerusalem, which

has become more western.

There are parks, the streets

are clean and everything is

nice. But in the East of the city,

it’s a world apart. Sela says,

“East Jerusalem is full of border

police. We always joke that they need to have

so many border police because they need to

ﬁgure out where the border is, everyone is still

looking for the border, especially in Jerusalem,

where the border is so unclear!”.

Her work in the West Bank focuses in part on

Area C – a district that’s under full military con

trol, where all the settlers live, with some

Palestinians who are the hardest hit: “Especially

the people who are living in places that Israel

would like to annex in the future. Israel is apply-

ing very harsh measures to limit or diminish the

Palestinian presence here and Palestinians are

not allowed to develop the land. The longest-

standing case in ACRI is 17 years. We submitted

a petition on behalf of Palestinians living in a

location that Israel strategically wants in the

south Hebron hills. People were put on trucks

and were forced to ﬂee - they were herding com-

munities out, because Israel declared it a ﬁring

zone for military training”. ACRI have

been petitioning on this since

2000.

“We’ve had success but

my overall sense after

having worked in ACRI for

eight years, is that for

now the door is open but

it may not be in the future.

We go to committee meet-

ings at parliament, we sit

down with their ofﬁcials.

We are invited to very high-

proﬁle meetings, we go to the

high court, but at the end of the day

none of our victories are complete”, she

declares sadly. “For 17 years people have con-

tinued to live in a ﬁring zone under horrendous

conditions. Detention periods were shortened

but they are still too long. Our principal position

is that if there are Israelis and Palestinians living

in the same territory, they need to have the same

detention periods: you can’t have two systems!

Hardest hit are the

people who are living

in places that Israel

would like to annex in

the future

An interview with Ronit Sela, Israeli

human-rights activist in Palestine

Interview by Tess Purcell

Headbanging

in the West Bank

Ronit Sela

INTERNATIONAL

July 2017 7 5

In the West

bank and East

Jerusalem now the

door is open but it

may not be in the

future

At this point I don’t know what it feels like to be working

on something where you have clear victories. We have

moments, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem all

our victories, all our positive verdicts and all the advo

cacy success is only partial. You go to sleep happy and

you wake up in the morning and there’s another thing”.

I ask her about the pressures faced by organisations

like Acri. “One of the things that has characterised the

three Netanyahu governments is that they have been

gradually cracking down on civil society and on anyone

who has been a critic of Israeli policy that relates to the

conﬂict, so not just what we do in the West Bank speciﬁ

cally, but also on the Netanyahu approach to negotiation

or to peace deals. One of the strategic things that they

have done which I think they have succeeded in, is that

they have equated any anti-government policies in the

West Bank with being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic”.

In the case of an organisation like Christian Aid Ireland

it’s hardly surprising that it might say Israeli policies in

Area C are harming Palestinians and are in violation of

Human Rights. But, she notes, “That’s not just a criticism

of the current government; according to the Netanyahu

government that’s being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic;

and people buy it. Jewish people have endured such a

hard history of anti-Semitism that it’s easy to convince

us that things are bad. Organisations that support anti-

occupation work have been heavily targeted. The ones

at the front like ‘Breaking the Silence’ have been

assailed, individuals have been directly attacked and

there has been a lot of very negative rhetoric by mem-

bers of parliament and by ministers. ACRI in that sense,

is more in the background because we are an organisa

tion that deals also with Israel but also, we are vocal in

a more diplomatic way”.

How then does she deal, personally, with the central

truth that ACRI’s successes are only partial? “I grew up

outside of Tel Aviv and went to Tel Aviv University. I

hadn’t met any Arabs at all whether they were Israeli citi-

zens or other. And when I was at Uni there was a project

to bring together Jewish and Arab students, so citizens

of Israel. The idea was to have a meeting every other

week to get to know each other’s narrative and under-

stand each other and that was quite powerful for me. I

recognised that their narrative was so different and to

hear from them about their relatives in Gaza and the

West bank and to recognise the gap between how I see

the world and how they see the world. That sparked my

curiosity. When I ﬁnished school, I moved to Jerusalem

during the second intifada in 2002. Israel had started

building the separation barrier in East Jerusalem and I

just found this fascinating - it’s such a different part of

the city that had this almost Kafka situation. Half of the

city had a wall and soldiers are checking every person,

but you could just walk to another part where there’s no

wall and pass through”.

She retains a compelling optimism. “I joined ACRI 8

Years ago, and what gets me down is the situation itself.

I make a real effort to not do any work on Friday or Sat-

urday because I think after 5 days of doing the work, I

need those 48 hours of separation. Also, it helps that a

lot of people at ACRI have been here for a long time: our

legal adviser has been there for 25 years and the head

of the legal department has been there for 15. To be in

an environment with people who have fought the battle,

and get their perspective is good. I’m an optimist by

nature, I see how the world and life can be so unex

pected. Sometimes, you make momentous changes

without knowing it. Something that you invested 17 years

of your working life in, you might fail at and then some-

times you wake up on Tuesday morning and think ‘hey

I’ll call that person’ and suddenly problems are solved”.

She was in Dublin for Gay Pride: “We saw the Gay

Pride ﬂags here in Dublin. A year ago, a group in Beer-

sheba wanted to have the ﬁrst Pride parade. After the

organisers had interactions with the police, the local

municipality and the religious ﬁgures, they were asked

to march only on the side streets. They were asked ‘to

be considerate of other people’s feelings’! We chal-

lenged this - we took it to the high court. I was optimistic

- we’ve won such petitions before - but we lost and so

the organisers of the parade decided to cancel the

march. They said they were not going to be diverted

down back streets and instead they demonstrated out-

side city hall on that day, instead. But, in the year since

there have been ongoing conversations between the

people of Beersheba and the gay community and ACRI

was advising along the way. And, last week they marched

on the main street. There was no need for a legal petition

- instead an agreement was reached!”.

She is steely and relentless though, as well as good-

humoured. “Someone who did my job before me said

that sometimes that you bang your head on the wall and

then you wake up and you do it again and again, and

that’s what we do... professional headbanging!”.

Tess Purcell is Communications Ofﬁcer, Christian Aid

Ireland, christianaid.ie, @christianaidir

Area C, the West Bank