Israel deflects calls for settlement freeze

Israel deflects calls for settlement freeze

By DIAA HADID - Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM Israel deflected growing international demands for a settlement freeze Saturday, saying the issue should be dealt with in future peace talks with the Palestinians.

On Friday, the Quartet of Mideast mediators and foreign ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations, meeting in Italy, called for a halt in construction. They rallied behind President Barack Obama, who seeks a freeze but has encountered Israeli resistance.

Israel argues that it should be allowed to keep building to accommodate "natural growth" in settlements, built on lands the Palestinians want for a future state. The Palestinians won't resume peace talks with Israel without a freeze, saying the ongoing building pre-empts the outcome of negotiations. Under the U.S.-backed "road map" plan, Israel is required to halt construction.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Saturday that settlements should be left to future negotiations. "The best way to solve this problem is to resume at once bilateral Israeli-Palestinian talks," Palmor said.

Israeli officials say they are trying to find a formula agreeable to Washington that would allow at least limited construction.

Palestinian officials say such a compromise would undermine U.S. credibility.

"The stalemate with Israel will continue if settlement growth does not stop," said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Meanwhile, rival Palestinian factions - Abbas' Fatah and the Islamic militant Hamas - launched another attempt to reconcile. Hamas overran Gaza two years ago, ousting forces loyal to Abbas, who has since only controlled the West Bank.

Reconciliation is seen as key to ending a two-year blockade of Gaza's borders, enforced by Israel and Egypt, and to reaching a Mideast peace deal.

Hamas and Fatah negotiators were on route to Cairo on Saturday, with the Egyptian-brokered talks to begin Sunday.

Also Saturday, Egypt briefly opened its border with Gaza. Some 5,000 Gazans signed up to leave over the next three days. Most of those trying to leave were medical patients seeking treatment abroad and Gazans holding foreign residency.

The closure has trapped some 1.4 million people in Gaza.

Egypt opens the crossing periodically. Israel allows in food and humanitarian aid, but won't allow raw materials that the Gaza Strip needs to repair damage from Israel's winter war on Hamas, meant to stop militant rocket fire on Israeli towns.

Palestinian informers given draconian sentences

Palestinian informers given draconian sentences

Palestinian Tagrid, last name barred for publication by court, 22, covers her face on her way out of a military court in the West bank town of Jenin, Monday, June 15, 2009. A Palestinian military court found Tagrid guilty of collaborating with Israel on Monday, a rare conviction of a woman for an offense Palestinians consider socially abhorrent. (AP Photo/Mohammed Ballas) - AP

JENIN, West Bank — A 22-year-old Palestinian woman, who says she became an informer for Israel to earn money that would get her out of prostitution, is going to prison for life. Others convicted of collaboration with Israel by West Bank courts sit on death row.

Such draconian sentences reflect the loathing Palestinian society has for collaborators, even small-time informants or those blackmailed by Israeli intelligence agents into cooperating.
Yet the harsh treatment of collaborators also highlights the complex realities of life in the West Bank, where a U.S.-backed Palestinian government works increasingly closely with Israeli security forces against a common enemy, the Islamic militant Hamas. Israel has overall security control in the West Bank.

Such security coordination is unpopular among Palestinians, who unsuccessfully tried to shake off Israeli military rule in two uprisings in the past two decades. Some say collaborators have been made into scapegoats to deflect attention from the coordination between Israeli and Palestinian forces, which is aimed at preventing a Hamas takeover of the West Bank. The Islamic militants overran Gaza two years ago.
Palestinian officials say the information they share with Israel helps keep residents safe, while individuals selling information are betraying their country.

"There's no authority that should allow its people to collaborate," said Saleh Abdul Jawad, a Palestinian political scientist.
In the most recent case Monday, a military tribunal in a security compound in the West Bank town of Jenin sentenced 22-year-old Taghreed – her last name was not released – to a life term of hard labor.

The dark-skinned, portly woman, wearing a lace headscarf and blue jeans, remained calm while the sentence was announced. She refused to speak to reporters and none of her family attended the trial, indicating they had washed their hands of her.
The scene played out in a hastily assembled courtroom of plastic chairs, benches and a Palestinian flag.

Earlier, Taghreed had told the court that she turned informer after she left her husband, who had forced her to work as a prostitute and thus turned her into an outcast. The information the woman sold was low-level – nothing that led to arrests by the Israelis, according to military prosecutor Raed Dalbah.
Israel has long been running networks of informers in areas under its control, mainly seeking information about militant groups and the whereabouts of fugitives. In recent years, Israel often used such information to launch missile strikes from helicopters against wanted gunmen.

Since 1994, when a Palestinian self-rule government was established under interim peace deals with Israel, at least 35 suspected informers were sentenced to death, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Two defendants were executed by firing squad in Gaza several years ago.
Seventeen alleged informers, both those on death row and those still awaiting trial, were killed in vigilante-style shootings by Palestinians during Israel's war on Hamas in Gaza in January.

It is mostly the vulnerable, like Taghreed, who ultimately become Israeli snoops, often providing information to Israeli intelligence in exchange for money and to access key services like medical care and permits to work in Israel, said Ran Yaron of Physicians for Human Rights, which studies the issue.
They are nonetheless widely despised for helping Israel.

"If I was the judge, I would shoot her on the spot," said a guard outside the courtroom, spitting on the ground to emphasize his disgust at Taghreed.

In the past two years alone, West Bank tribunals have convicted seven people of collaboration, including Taghreed. She was the only one not sentenced to death, though the executions were not carried out.

During the two Palestinian uprisings, vigilante gunmen often killed suspected collaborators, at times with crowds looking on. After Israel withdrew from parts of the West Bank in the 1990s, it relocated hundreds of collaborators to Israel to protect them from retribution.
Palestinian human rights activists say they oppose the death penalty on principle, but most have not rushed to the defense of collaborators.

"We do not think there should be a death sentence," said Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian legislator and human rights advocate. "The punishment has to fit the crime. The crime, in the popular imagination, is the most unconscionable crime. It is a betrayal of everything that people hold sacred."

Christians hope pope will help them to return to their destroyed village in Israel

Christians hope pope will help them to return to their destroyed village in Israel

By DIAA HADID

Associated Press Writer

BIRAM, Israel (AP) _ Displaced during war decades ago, the Christians of Biram have never given up their dream of returning to this destroyed village in the hills of northern Israel. They still hold Easter rites, weddings and funerals in a stone church, the only building left standing.

Now, they are pinning their hopes on Pope Benedict XVI, who is visiting the Holy Land in May.

Biram's former residents and their descendants, some 3,000 Catholics altogether, are asking their spiritual leader to speak for them. They were driven out of during the 1948 Mideast war that surrounded Israel's creation. Most Israeli leaders who dealt with Biram's case refused their repatriation, fearing it would set a precedent for millions of Palestinian refugees seeking to return to former properties.

But the villagers argue their case is different because their hamlet was bombed years after the war ended, and that a 1952 court case paved the way for them to return.

"This pope must say the truth," said parishioner Edmond Rawis, 79, pointing toward where his house once stood.

The villagers say they have written to the Vatican's ambassador in Jerusalem, Archbishop Antonio Franco. The ambassador said he is aware of the issue, but has not received a letter and does not know whether the pope will discuss Biram with his Israeli hosts.

Only Biram's church, the cemetery and the ruins of an ancient synagogue are still standing. Descendants return here to worship, marry, baptize their children and bury their dead in crypts that eerily resemble homes.

On April 5, Palm Sunday, dozens of people holding candles and flowers sang and walked around the church before gathering inside. Women clambered up cobblestone stairs in high-heeled shoes and pantsuits. Giggling girls in white dresses tried to pull the heavy church bell rope as boys ran around, shrieking.

Inside the small church, they sang hymns in Arabic and Aramaic, a language spoken at the time of Jesus. Biram's Christians belong to the Maronite church, which prays in Aramaic but follows the pope in Rome.

During the 1948 war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, and their villages were either destroyed or left to deteriorate. Most fled to neighboring Arab countries, but some, like those of Biram, remained within Israel's borders and became citizens.

Israeli forces expelled Biram's 1,000 villagers during the fighting, according to Adoram Schneidleder, an Israeli postdoctoral student studying the area's history. Some left for nearby Lebanon, but most stayed within Israel's newly created borders, mostly in the nearby Arab-Israeli village of Jish.

For decades, the villagers have lobbied successive Israeli governments to return, meeting only rejection _ except for a short-lived effort in the 1990s. Then, the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin offered restitution to a few of Biram's descendants on a small chunk of their ancestral lands.

As they tried to negotiate a better deal, Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish ultranationalist. Discussions were frozen, said Ran Cohen, a left-wing parliamentarian involved in government discussions.

They have largely shelved their attempts in recent years as Israel lurched toward right-wing governments unsympathetic to their cause. But they say there's a chance to revive their issue if the pope leans his significant diplomatic weight on officials here.

In 2000, the pope's predecessor, John Paul II, asked then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to resettle them in Biram, villagers say they were told by local Catholic officials at the time.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry official, Yigal Palmor, said the issue should be pursued in the country's courts, and not through political lobbying.

In 1952, the high court ruled that the eviction from Biram was not "entirely legal," but military authorities then retroactively issued eviction notices, according to historians. Biram residents argue that the ruling opens the door for their return.

In 1953, Israeli warplanes bombed Biram in an attempt to discourage the villagers from returning. Surviving residents said they wept and wailed as they watched bombs smash their homes from a nearby hilltop.

Biram's church and the 3rd-century synagogue's ruins are now part of a national park that is a popular hiking destination. A sign at the park's entrance provides information on the synagogue but makes no mention of the Christian village or the area's modern history.

In the nearby graveyard, Biram's dead are buried in crypts, fenced off from nearby grazing cows. Some are built like homes, with red-tile roofs overlooking blue-green hills. Israeli authorities have not objected to their quiet repossession of the cemetery, said a villager, Kamel Yakoub.

"It's the liveliest place in Biram," Yakoub said.

Love Connection: Hamas gets into matchmaking biz

In this photo taken Sunday, May 3, 2009, Ashraf Farahat, 36, left and his wife, Rania Hijazi, 28, who married in May 2008 after they both applied to find spouses through the Tayseer Association for Marriage and Development, talk to a reporter in Gaza City. Over 270 women have applied through the association to try find husbands. Many single women in Gaza say it's becoming more difficult to find a husband as a economic hardship in Gaza increases amid a harsh Israeli blockade of the territory. They are relying more on matchmakers, and the Tayseer Association, run by Hamas loyalists, is the best in the business. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

Love Connection: Hamas gets into matchmaking biz

GAZA CITY , Gaza Strip -- At 29, Tahani is considered a spinster by the standards of deeply conservative Gaza. So in her search for a husband, she turned for help to the best in the marriage business: the Islamic militant group Hamas.

"I gaze at all the men on the street and think, 'Oh God, isn't there just one for me?'" said the young woman with dark skin and honey-colored eyes, set off by a maroon headscarf.

Her application is among 287 from single women in the files of the Tayseer Association for Marriage and Development in Gaza. Photographs stapled to the files show Muslim women in headscarves, some wearing makeup, some smiling, others looking startled. They all want a husband, and the Hamas loyalists running the association are intent on finding a man for each.

Despite its fearsome reputation elsewhere, Hamas is known here for its cradle-to-grave welfare programs for the poor. It is a cornerstone of its political support in Gaza, where poverty is deepening as Israel and Egypt maintain an almost two-year blockade of the Hamas-run territory. Now, the group is branching out into matters of the heart.

"This is our vision of humanitarian work," said Wael Zard, director of the Tayseer association. "This makes people close to Hamas and makes Hamas close to the people."

While Tayseer's matchmaking service helps both men and women, it is particularly important for women since staying single is a cruel fate for them in Gaza. They are are often treated as unpaid maids by their extended families and, says Gaza sociologist Naser Mahdi, increasing economic hardship has made the marriage market even harsher.

The dwindling number of middle-class men with steady incomes can have their pick of the prettiest women, leaving others to work hard to find a suitable husband. Meanwhile, poor families are reluctant to marry off working daughters, hoping to keep their salaries.

About 40 marriages have been arranged since Tayseer opened its matchmaking department in 2007. Most women apply in secret because it's taboo for women in Gaza to seek husbands outside the traditional route. Most girls are married in matches set up by their mothers. Dating is nearly nonexistent and love marriages are a novelty.

Tahani, who spoke on condition that only her first name be used because she is using the service without her family knowing, said she turned to Tayseer a year ago. Her mother died when Tahani was young, and none of her relatives were helping her find a groom.

The young woman said she became more determined to find a husband after Israel 's three-week war on Hamas, which ended in January. Israel 's assault killed hundreds of civilians, and Gaza's residents hunkered down in homes and shelters during the shelling, not knowing where bombs would fall next.

"My brothers held their wives when they were scared. I felt lonely," said Tahani, a university graduate in social work.

Most women are shy when they first come in the door, said Tayseer matchmaker Nisrin Khalil, 21.

"I tell the girls, be like Khadija!" said Khalil, referring to the Prophet Muhammad's first wife.

Muslim tradition says Khadija proposed to Muhammad - and was years his senior. It's a powerful message to women: Islam's first lady bucked conservative Arab tradition more than 1,400 years ago and they can defy Gaza tradition now.

The applicants, who pay a fee of $10-$70, are divided into categories according to their eligibility. Women under 25 are easiest to marry off; more challenging are women over 30 and divorcees.

But in a nod to Gaza 's grinding poverty triumphing over its conservative culture, there is a special file for women with jobs. Bringing home a salary in Gaza can trump any other category, matchmakers say.

In the women's application, they describe their ideal man. Most ask for a devout Muslim with a job and his own apartment, a top find in crowded Gaza.

Women also must describe their appearance and answer a killer question: "Do you consider yourself pretty according to Gaza standards?"

The ideal of beauty in Gaza means tall and fair-skinned with blue or green eyes and light-colored hair - and that's what men usually ask for. But most Gaza women have dark hair and bronze skin.

"If we see a girl that appears to match (a man), but she's not physically what he wants, I'll call him and say, 'Well, she's pretty, but she's dark.' Or 'she's short, but she's white.' We encourage them to be a bit more realistic," Khalil said.

The one other matchmaking service in Gaza is little used. The Tayseer association was originally founded to fund and organize mass weddings, a service for poor or disabled Gazans who often can't afford the costs of a ceremony. Next month, a mass wedding is planned for more than a dozen blind Palestinians.

While Hamas is considered a terrorist group in the West because of its attacks on Israel - including suicide bombings - it also provides Gaza's poor with food coupons, medical care and other services. Its social network helped make the group popular, gaining it victory over its Palestinian rival Fatah in 2006 parliament elections. The following year, Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in clashes with Fatah.

Around 40 men a month turn to Tayseer in search of a wife. When association employees think there's a match, they quietly organize a meeting, with employees acting as chaperones in compliance with Islamic law. If the couple like each other, Gaza's traditional courtship kicks in.

The man's relatives visit the woman's family, saying that a well-meaning stranger told them of a girl wanting to marry. The matchmakers are not mentioned, because their role is still taboo, said Khalil.

If the woman's family accepts, a wedding is planned. Often women bully their families into agreeing, Tayseer workers said.

Rania Hijazi, 29, applied to Tayseer in March 2008 and two months later married Ashraf Farahat, 36. She said she went to the service because she feared her family's matchmaking efforts were going nowhere.

"I felt embarrassed when I applied," said Hijazi, who has since become a mother. "But then I said, 'I won't find a man any other way' and I tried to be strong."

Plenty of other women are waiting.

"I want to have a man, a husband," said Tahani. "I don't think that's a selfish request."

IMF: Arab donor shortfall to blame for Palestinian Authority's cash crisis

By DIAA HADID

Associated Press Writer

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) _ The Palestinian Authority faces a serious cash crisis after receiving only half of the aid money it needs to function every month, the International Monetary Fund said Monday, blaming delinquent Arab donors.

At risk are the salaries of around 150,000 Palestinian civil servants, who support most families in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Many economic analysts say Arab donors are reluctant to pay up because of Palestinian infighting between Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah, which controls the West Bank, and the Islamic militant Hamas, which overran Gaza two years ago.

Arab donors believe if they withhold cash, it will pressure the two parties to reconcile, said Samir Hazboun, head of the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce.

But IMF official Oussama Kanaan warned that everyday Palestinians are getting caught in the middle.

"Arab donors should be aware that if they don't pay, they are not punishing one party or another. The average Palestinian will be hurt," he said.

The Palestinian Authority needs around $120 million dollars in aid to balance its monthly budget, but is receiving only around $66 million.

At a summit in 2000, Arab countries pledged to give around $50 million a month to the Palestinian Authority, but they have sent only $77 million altogether this year, Kanaan said, or a little more than a quarter of the amount they promised.

European countries and the United States have largely fulfilled their aid pledges, economists said.

The Palestinian Authority owes around $530 million to local banks in loans to make up the shortfall, said Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in a statement.

Kanaan said it was unlikely banks would keep extending credit to the Palestinian Authority.