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Editorial

When six foreign ministers of the Persian Gulf met last week with their colleagues from Jordan, Egypt, and the USA they spoke also about a need to bring peace to Palestine.

A joint statement from the so-called six-plus-two ministers and the USA Secretary of State serves as a documentary reminder that there is no peace in Palestine and that the refusal of USA authorities to grant amnesty to Palestinian families in Texas is cruel and unusual punishment that criminalizes children born into Palestinian heritage.

The USA bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is therefore contributing to the scope and cruelty of the Palestinian conflict by inflicting imprisonment upon Texas children.

In this regard, we think especially about 8-year-old Maryam Ibrahim who nearly died from chemical warfare when she was a toddler in Palestine, who has since lived in fear of uniforms, and who is now being subjected to mental torture every evening at 10pm when she is taken by uniformed officials to a cell that she cannot share with her pregnant mother.

Nothing about this situation at the T. Don Hutto prison camp is tolerable. In light of the recent pleas jointly spoken with Persian Gulf diplomats, the USA Secretary of State should intervene directly in behalf of Maryam Ibrahim and signal the intentions of the USA to make peace for Palestinian children wherever they live. Notes

Excerpt from the Gulf Cooperation Council-Plus-Two Ministerial Joint Statement, Jan. 16, 2007, copied from USA State Dept. web site.

The participants agreed that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains a central and core problem and that without resolving this conflict the region will not enjoy sustained peace and stability. The participants affirmed their commitment to achieving peace in the Middle East through a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and noted that the foundation for such an outcome includes the Arab Peace Initiative, UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338, 1397 and 1515, and the Road Map. The participants called on the parties to abide by and implement previous agreements and obligations, including the Agreement on Movement and Access and to seek to fulfill their obligations under the Sharm el-Sheikh Understandings of 2005. The participants expressed their hope that the December 2006 meeting between the Palestinian President and the Israeli Prime Minister will be followed by concrete steps in this direction. The participants welcomed the resumption of the Palestinian-Israeli dialogue, and hope that it would lead to a full resumption of negotiations aiming at reaching a comprehensive peace agreement between them as a step towards achieving comprehensive peace in the Middle East. The participants affirmed their commitment to support development of the Palestinian economy, building and strengthening the institutions of the Palestinian state.

Excerpt from Salaheddin Ibrahim’s plea for asylum, archived at the Texas Civil Rights Review.

During summer 2000 the Israelis attacked Al Fandaqumiyah with tanks, airplanes and gunfire. I was away from the house when the attack started, and ran home. I went up on the roof. The Israelis fired gas bombs and one of them broke the window of my kitchen and fell inside the house. I came down from the roof and threw the bomb back outside. It was hot, but not too hot to scoop up and quickly throw out. The children were sick and Hanan and I ran with them out of the house. Maryam, who was two years old, was overcome by the gas and unconscious.

I ran with the children and my wife with shooting all around us, and the children were crying and my wife was crying. We stayed outside in the olive grove until the Israeli troops left the village. Then we went back in the house. Maryam had awakened but she was very sick. She had great difficulty breathing. I called my neighbor and asked him to come with me to the pharmacy to buy medicine for Maryam. I was afraid and wanted the neighbor Abdel Ba Set Raba to come just so I would feel safer. I intended to explain the problem to the pharmacist so that he could provide what Maryam needed.

I drove to the pharmacy. There were two others from my village in the pharmacy, but while we were in the pharmacy the Israeli soldiers came in and ordered us out. When we went out they confiscated our identity cards. The soldiers told me to go remove an object in the street, but I told them I had to take medicine to my daughter. They thought the object might be a mine or a booby trap. They cursed me and told me to do what they ordered me to do.

I refused and they shot near my head and demanded that I go. I went and recovered the object that was in the street. It was just a bag. Then they forced us to sweep the street clean. After about 45 minutes the soldiers left. I went into the pharmacy and got some pills that were supposed to enable Maryam to breathe. I gave her the medicine and she recovered. . . .

Maryam is 4 years old [in the year of the statement, 2002]. She is afraid of policemen in uniform, but the older children understand that they are safe in the United States. In Palestine, when the older children heard shooting or saw helicopters or Israeli soldiers, they would cry and run into the house and pull the bed clothes over their heads. They often were afraid to go to school, and, if they were too terrified to go, we would let them stay at home.

In November 2000 the Israelis attacked our village, while Hanan and the children were in our olive grove harvesting the olives. The children began to cry. Our neighbor had a small boy, Muraweih, 12 or 13 years old, and the Israelis caught him in the street. He was just about one meter tall. He did not run because he was afraid the Israelis would kill him. When Hamzeh heard that they had caught Muraweih, he was terrified, because he thought they would capture him, too.

Al Fandaqumiyah has a main street that runs the length of the town from the entrance. Our house was behind the entrance. The school was at the other end. Some of the Israelis remained at the entrance, and others stormed down the street. The Israelis took Muraweih toward the entrance to the town. The child was crying pitifully. His father Yousef, a man with white hair, tried to wrest his son from the soldier who was holding his arm. An Israeli officer saw what a little boy he was and ordered the soldier to let him go.

On another occasion, the Israelis came down the mountain behind the town, near the school. When they started shooting, all the children ran from the school. The young ones, including Hamzeh and Rodaina, ran crying toward home. I went toward the school and met them in the middle of town. They clung to me and would not let go, and begged me not to leave them, and I took them home. When they reached home, they said they never wanted to go to school again.

I was hoping the situation would improve. It did not improve, however, and the Israeli occupying forces continue to kill and dispossess the Palestinian people just for being Palestinian. My son Hamzeh, who now is 11, has nightmares and wakes up in terror in the night. Rodaina, who is 9, also wakes up in the night. They are fascinated by the news on television, and know the Israelis have killed many children. Hamzeh is terrified at the possibility of having to return home.

Sometimes the children cry while watching the television news. When I was told I could apply for asylum I decided to try to keep my family in the United States.

Of course, we would usually treat news from Gaza as, well, not Texas. But as Ibrahim family attorney John Wheat Gibson says: “This is what Israel plans for the Ibrahim children in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Therefore, we post this report from John Pilger–gm

New Statesman
Terror and starvation in Gaza
John Pilger

Published 22 January 2007

Pilger on the genocide that is engulfing Palestine as bystanders silently look on

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. “Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide,” wrote the former senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then foreign minister of Sweden, in Le Figaro. They described a people “living in a cage”, cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.
Egeland and Eliasson wrote this four months ago in an attempt to break the silence in Europe, whose obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year’s Palestinian elections. The horror in Gaza has since been compounded: a family of 18 has died beneath a 500lb US/Israeli bomb; unarmed women have been mown down at point-blank range. Dr David Halpin, one of the few Britons to break what he calls “this medieval siege”, reported the killing of 57 children by artillery, rockets and small arms and was shown evidence that civilians are Israel’s true targets, as in Leba non last summer. A friend in Gaza, Dr Mona el-Farra, emailed: “I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms [a collective punishment by the Israeli air force] and artillery on my 13-year-old daughter. At night, she shivers with fear. Then both of us end up crouching on the floor. I try to make her feel safe, but when the bombs sound I flinch and scream . . .”

When I was last in Gaza, Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable survey. “The statistic I personally find unbearable,” he said, “is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 per cent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed.” Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30 children, all of them traumatised. He gave each a pencil and paper and asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and of women streaming tears.

The excuse for the latest Israeli terror was the capture last June of an Israeli soldier, a member of an illegal occupation, by the Palestinian resistance. This was news. The kidnapping by Israel a few days earlier of two Palestinians – two of thousands taken over the years – was not news. A historian and two foreign journalists have reported the truth about Gaza. All three are Israeli. They are frequently called traitors. The historian Ilan Pappe has documented that “the genocidal policy [in Gaza] is not formulated in a vacuum” but part of Zionism’s deliberate, historic ethnic cleansing. Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are reporters on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In November, Levy described how the people of Gaza were beginning to starve to death: “There are thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people, unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions.” Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “[She] saw these German women looking at the pris oners, just looking,” she wrote. “This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”

“Looking from the side” is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many western Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism and say, “Not in our name!” are abused as “self-despising”. Looking from the side is what almost the entire US Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist “lobby”. Looking from the side is what “even-handed” journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.

http://www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/200701220021

forwarded by
John Wheat Gibson

Dallas, Texas

The following statement dated August 13, 2002 was provided via email by attorney John Wheat Gibson, so that readers may make up their own minds “whether the immigration judge Carey Copeland was right or wrong to deny asylum to the family that is in prison now in Taylor, Texas.” Hanan is pregnant with the family’s sixth child.–gm

STATEMENT OF HANAN ALHAJ IBRAHIM

WITNESS-CHRONOLOGY INDEX

I was born Hanan Alhaj Hamamri on April 15, 1972 in Jaba’a, Occupied West Bank. My father Nayef Hamamri was born in 1937. He is about 65. He is a farmer, with an olive grove, growing olives for olive oil. The Israelis confiscated some of his land for a military camp.

The Israelis arrested my brother Emad Hamamri several times when I was young. He received chemotherapy for a cancer in his neck, and died in 1987 when he was 28 years old. On one occasion, in about 1983, the Israelis came to the door at about 3 a.m. shouting and banging on the door. When my father opened the door, they demanded Emad. My father told them Emad was very ill. They dragged him out of bed and took him away blindfolded anyway. After more than three weeks he came home, I think because my father took them his medical file and convinced them that he was harmless because he was so sick.
The Israelis also arrested my brother Tarek Hamamri in about 1987, when he was 17. The Israelis came to the house and kicked on the door. My grandmother, my father’s mother, who was 85 years old, opened the door and some of the soldiers came into the house. Others remained outside. They searched the house. They blindfolded Tarek and took him away. He was gone 40 days. He came home with others who had been arrested at the same time. He looked very tired and there were bruises on his face. He said he had been beaten very hard. Another time the soldiers came and asked for Tarek, but he was not at home.

I also remember when the Israelis attacked our village that same year. I was at home when they began their assault. The people had no way to defend themselves from the Israelis. My friend Nea’am was about 20 years old, and she was very brave. Nea’am went into the street to search for her little brothers, and encountered two Israelis just in front of our house. I was up on the roof of our house with my brothers and sisters, but I was afraid to watch. They told me what happened.

One of the Israeli soldiers grabbed Nea’am’s relative Amin, a boy about 15 years old. The other screamed at Nea’am to go home. Nea’am pulled Amin from the grip of the soldier, and he ran away. The soldier started to shoot Amin, so Nea’am tried to hit him with her shoe. The other soldier shot her dead on the spot. Nea’am’s family did not let the ambulance take her body because they were afraid the Israelis would remove it from the ambulance. Sometimes the Israelis took the corpses of their victims from ambulances, apparently to prevent emotional funerals.

On the same day, the Israelis killed a 14 year old girl in her home, Shefa’a. I knew her, too. The Israeli soldiers broke in the door of her home and seized her brother Mohammed, about 25. Shefa’a tried to fight with the soldiers to keep them from taking her brother. Mohammed tried to run, but the soldiers shot him down there in the house. Shefa’a’s sister, who was about 16, brought out a knife and attacked the soldiers, who then shot and killed Shefa’a and arrested the sister, whose name I forget. She was in jail for three years.

They took the wounded brother Mohammed away. I saw him in Jeba’a about five years later, and heard he was released from an Israeli prison. He was walking with a limp.

The family also had a 4-year-old boy, and he was hiding in the closet while the Israelis were murdering Shefa’a, and the Israeli soldiers tried to kill him, too. They shot him in the stomach, but he did not die. An ambulance took him to the hospital. The children’s parents still live in the house in Jeba’a.

On July 25, 1989 I married Salaheddin Ibrahim, and went to live with his family in Al Fandaqumiyah. He worked in Kuwait, but he was visiting home. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, he came back to Palestine to live.

Although I do not remember the dates very well, I do remember that he came home several times badly bruised and feeling miserable. I have learned that there were many occasions when the Israelis abused him that he did not tell me about, since he did not want me to worry, and maybe he was ashamed that they would beat and humiliate him just for sport and he could do nothing about it. Once when Salaheddin came home beaten and feeble we took him to Dr. Ahmad, and on another occasion the doctor came to our house. I also remember that, some time after the Israelis attacked us with gas, he stayed at home for about 10 days because the Israelis had taken away his identity card and he was afraid to go out without it.

After Salaheddin opened his clothing wholesale store, I sometimes helped to clean it, but mostly I kept our house. On February 22, 1991 our son Hamzeh was born in Jordan. We went to Jordan because the medical facilities are better there than in the Occupied Territories, and the doctor told us that sometimes the birth of the first child could be a problem. We also knew that the occupying soldiers in Palestine sometimes enjoyed preventing Palestinian women in labor from reaching the hospital. They are bullies to women as well as to men. We were in Jordan less than a month.

On September 17, 1992, our daughter Rodaina was born at the hospital in Nablus. In 1997 Salaheddin built a large house on his family’s land, and his parents lived there with us. Maryam was born on May 6, 1998 at the hospital in Nablus.

During summer 2000 the Israelis attacked Al Fandaqumiyah with tanks, airplanes and gunfire. When the attack began I was in the bedroom with the children watching television. When we were aware we were being attacked, I closed the windows tight and sprinkled perfume around to mask the stink of the gas, and returned to the bedroom. We thought also that the perfume might alleviate some of the toxic effects of the gas. The children were crying and they were afraid. I told them not to be afraid, that the Israeli soldiers would leave.

The Israelis were firing gas bombs in the street, and some of the gas was leaking into the house and making the children ill. The gas made them drowsy, also. The Israelis fired a gas bomb through the window of my kitchen and it fell inside the house. Salaheddin came in to throw the bomb out. We all ran out of the house together. The children were sick and we had to wait in the olive grove on our land near the house until the gas cleared.

Maryam was two years old, and she was overcome by the gas. The other children were crying and I was crying. I tried to make Maryam smell the perfume I had brought out. We stayed outside in the olive grove until the Israeli troops left the village and the stink had subsided in the house, maybe half an hour or an hour. Then we went back in the house. Maryam had partially revived, but she was very drowsy and sick. She had great difficulty breathing.

Salaheddin drove to the pharmacy. I started the electric fans to blow the gas out of the house. I was worried about Salaheddin because it took him so long to get back from the pharmacy. The children cried and then I would talk to them and they would stop for a while, and then later they would start crying again. I tried to comfort the children until Salaheddin returned. We gave Maryam the medicine he brought, and she recovered. The children would not sleep in their own room that night, but slept with my husband and me.

A month or two after the gas attack, the Israelis attacked our village with tanks and soldiers in trucks. The soldiers knocked on the door of our house and Salaheddin’s father let
them in. The children and Salaheddin’s mother began crying with fear. The Israeli soldiers went about inside the house breaking our plates and cups and smashing potted plants. They kicked a can of olive oil around, splashing it all over the carpet and furniture. The soldiers took Salaheddin away. He came back later that day.

My last daughter Faten was born on April 29, 2001. I told Salaheddin it was time to go to the hospital, because I was in pain. He was driving me to the hospital at Nablus. His mother was with us. I was in great pain. At a checkpoint between Nablus and Al Fandaqumiyah, near a Jewish-only town, the Israeli soldiers delayed us about an hour, and then would not let us through. After an hour they told us to go back home, so Salaheddin tried to reach Nablus by a different route. There was another checkpoint and the soldiers would not let us through. The soldier said it was not his problem and ordered us to go back. My mother in law told them I was in pain and she was angry that the Israelis were indifferent to my suffering.

But then Salaheddin tried another route, an unpaved road, behind and over the mountain. I was afraid I would deliver the baby in the car, and I was frightened. My mother-in-law had brought scissors and string to tie up the umbilicus if necessary. But eventually we reached the hospital in Nablus. The doctor gave me two injections. Faten was delivered about half an hour or less after we arrived. She was blue. The doctor said she had ingested some fluid during the bumpy trip, and he suctioned out her nose. Afterward the baby was fine.

Before we left Al Fandaqumiyah, sometimes the children would be too upset to complete their homework. Hamzeh still has nightmares, and wakes up in the night afraid. Rodaina has sleeping problems, too, but Hamzeh suffers more. He is afraid of the prospect of going back. He knows that the Israelis kill children and he does not know the reason. He and Rodaina know that the Israelis killed a two-month old Palestinian child and they are preoccupied with it. They found out about it by watching the television news. Sometimes they cry while watching the news on television.

I first knew we were going to the United States when we obtained visas before Faten was born. We wanted to rest and let our children forget at least for a while the horror of daily life for Palestinian children under the Israeli occupation. I first knew that Salaheddin had decided to apply for asylum a month or so after we arrived, when he talked to an attorney.

HANAN ALHAJ IBRAHIM

Sworn to and signed before me this August 13, 2002 by Hanan Alhaj Ibrahim, to which witness my hand and seal of office:

Notary Public in and for Dallas County, Texas

Email from Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Jan. 22, 2007

Hola y’all…

The fate of the children incarcerated in the Hutto prison camp is in the hands of the Williamson County Commissioners Court. As of last week, the Commissioners did not realize that they would have such a crucial decision to make this coming week.

The County’s lease with the Correctional Corporation of America , (CCA) the private company that makes obscene profits off of incarcerating the children and their mothers…expires next week…on January 31st. Now, thanks to the efforts of our investigations and opposition, the Commissioners do know. They know that they can refuse to renew the lease and put an end to the Hutto “ Residential Center ” prison camp.
There is a growing group of Williamson County citizens that … are shocked that little children are in prison cells for 22 hours a day. They are outraged that such an immoral and criminal act is being committed, not only in America , let alone in the great State of Texas …but right in their county. It is even more repugnant for many of the Williamson County residents that live right in Taylor …not far from the prison camp.

Many of these citizens will be present [Tuesday] morning at 9:30am at the Commissioners Court in Georgetown. They will be there to oppose the renewal of the lease with CCA and the cancellation of the contract with Chertoff and the ICE Company. So, there is an outreach taking place within the fellow Williamson County residents to attend this meeting.

Jane Van Praag, will be making a presentation to the Commissioners Court. Jane says the following about when and where the Commissioners Court will meet:

The Williamson County Commissioners’ Court meets every Tuesday at 9:30 in the Precinct 3 Justice of the Peace Courtroom at the County Annex Building, 301 SE Inner Loop, in Georgetown. [Tuesday] (23rd) I make my appeal not to renew T. Don Hutto and on the 30th they will discuss whether or not to renew once the contract expires on 01-31-07.

It is the hope and confidence of the Williamson County residents such as Jane that the Commissioners they elected to represent their citizens’ voice, will do so on this most crucial matter, and especially to have the courage to do the just and moral thing regarding the children. The right thing being…to stand up to a powerful government that would incarcerate children, give the required 120 day notice to Chertoff and ICE, while cancelling the lease with CCA. By doing so, the Commissioners can make a statement with national and international force, that it is an immoral and un-American act to exploit the women and children…let alone for profit.

As for the rest of us…from all over Texas , the USA and other parts of the world…we are solidly behind Jane Van Praag and the citizens of Williamson County …in their fight to restore a sense of sanity and dignity at this crucial time of American history. We also hope that the Williamson County Commissioners, instinctively champion the children…and force Chertoff and ICE to discontinue something so immoral, repugnant…and even criminal…as to treat these little innocent ones as they are doing.

To the Williamson County Commissioners, the fate of these children is in your hands. You can champion them. You should champion them…as if they were your own children or grandchildren.

For a take on this situation from Williamson County residents…here is the link to the Eye on Williamson County. http://www.eyeonwilliamson.org/

You’re always encouraged to go to http://www.texascivilrightsreview for the most complete accumulation and up to date information regarding the Hutto prison camp.

Jay

P.S. Don’t forget the Vigil this coming Thursday evening, January 25th…at 5:50-6:30pm…right in front of the Hutto prison camp. We are holding this third vigil…to encourage the Williamson County Commissioners to choose the children over Chertoff and the ICE Company. Here’s the mapquest map.

jjj

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The Border Ambassador

Connecting.the.dots…making.a.difference…

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Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.

Del Rio, Texas, USA
Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila , Mexico