Monthly Archives for February 2004

A History of the Kibbo Kift

A History of the Kibbo Kift 

by Professor LP Elwell-Sutton, Chief Executive Officer, Kibbo Kift Foundation


On August 18, 1920, a group of young men met in a London hall to formalise the foundation of a new movement to be known as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. The aims of this movement had been written down two months earlier in the form of a seven-point Covenant, which ran as follows:Open Air Education for the Children. Camp Training and Naturecraft.
Health of Body, Mind and Spirit.
Craft Training Groups and Craft Guilds.
The Woodcraft Family, or Roof Tree.
Local Folk Moots and Cultural Development.
Disarmament of Nations – Brotherhood of Man.
International Education based on these points.Freedom of Trade between Nations.
Stabilisation of the Purchasing Power of Money in all countries.
Open Negotiations instead of secret treaties and diplomacy.
A World Council.

The Founder-Leader and moving spirit of this new movement was the 26-year old John Hargrave, who at this time was still Commissioner for Woodcraft and Camping in Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout Movement founded in 1908, though his temerity in challenging the establishment earned him “excommunication” from that body in the following January. The son of an artist and Quaker, Hargrave had joined the newly-founded Boy Scouts at the age of 14, and had progressed rapidly in the movement, writing a series of articles and pamphlets that showed his early recognition of the importance of the open-air life. His first book, LONECRAFT (based on the work of the Lonecraft camps, which he started in 1912), was published in 1913, and was intended to encourage boys who were too distant from organised scout troops to become “Lone Scouts” – a theme that must have been near to his heart, stressing as it did the importance of the individual standing on his own feet. Increasingly he was to feel that this close contact with the reality of the earth was missing from the official movement. His ideas were further reinforced by his experiences as an RAMC sergeant in the Gallipoli and Salonika campaigns (he was invalided out in 1916). In 1919 appeared his first major work, THE GREAT WAR BRINGS IT HOME, in which may be found the seeds of all his future thinking. “The Great War brings home that our great disorganised civilisation has failed,” he wrote, and called for Outdoor Education and Open Air Camps, a programme of regeneration. “Only a few under our present system will be able to carry out such a training,” he concluded. “But, never mind – Let us at any rate have the few, and hope that by their example others will follow the lead.” The prescriptions were detailed and wide-ranging; present day followers of the Maharishi’s cult of Transcendental Meditation will be surprised to find in this book written more than sixty years ago “a chapter on Yoga – the art of meditation”, in which Hargrave anticipates, but with ice-cold logic, the teachings that have now become so popular in a woollier form.
 

Procession of Kibbo Kift children at the annual Althing

Though these ideas were further developed in his novels, notably YOUNG WINKLE (1925), the formation of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift gave him the chance to put them into practice. As can be seen from a reading of THE CONFESSION the purpose of the Kibbo Kift Kindred was to train a body of men and women who, having drawn apart from the mass, would fit themselves to act as a catalyst on a corrupt and directionless society and lead it back to health and wealth. The movement was firmly rooted in English tradition and indeed might rightly be described as the only genuine English national movement of modern times. But this did not mean that Kibbo Kift teaching was applicable only to England. Kibbo Kift ideas and Kibbo Kift branches took root and flourished in Scotland, in Holland, Belgium, even in Russia. The influence of Hargrave’s views and methods on the German youth movement of the twenties has been acknowledged by several authorities.
 

A Kibbo Kift Camp – early 1920s
The aims and ideas of the Kindred are fully described in THE CONFESSION OF THE KIBBO KIFT, and the main purpose here is rather to outline the subsequent development of the movement from 1927 onwards. During the years that culminated in the publication of THE CONFESSION, John Hargrave had been growing in stature as a novelist and artist, and had also solved the practical problem of earning a living by taking employment as a copywriter and lay-out draughtsman in a London advertising agency. It was the head of this firm who in 1923 set Hargrave’s fertile mind moving along a new track by putting him in touch with another thinker whose ideas were to influence world events. Hargrave himself wrote later, “I was introduced to C.H. Douglas by a very erudite student of Social Credit, who suggested I should call at his home in Fig Tree Court, London. This I did. He was a little reluctant at first, but on hearing from whom I came and that I wanted to ask a few questions on Social Credit, willingly gave me an interview.”
Probably neither of the two men at the time realised the fateful nature of this interview. Major C.H. Douglas (then in his forties was a retired army engineer who, round about the time that Hargrave was writing his first major book, had published a series of tautly composed, even obscure, articles in the weekly New Age, which set out to show that the root cause of all economic and therefore social problems was a shortage of purchasing-power, and that this shortage was caused by a flaw in the pricing system that ensured that there could never be enough money in the hands of consumers to buy all the goods produced for sale. Hence arose the tragic absurdity of “Poverty in the midst of plenty”. Douglas showed clearly that this “gap” existed because money was treated as a commodity to be bought and sold, and therefore to be kept in short supply by the banking system which had a monopoly of its creation and issue. Instead, he and his followers argued, it should be looked on as representing the National Credit, and allowed to increase step by step as real wealth increased. This increment was not to be regarded as the property of any individual or group whether worker or employer but, because it arose out of the inherited knowledge and expertise of the whole community – the “increment of association”, belonged to all and should be shared by all.
Douglas’s second major innovation was the recognition, years before the arrival of cybernetics, computers, silicon chips, that the modern revolution would be the replacement of human labour by machines. “Unemployment” was inevitable; it was not therefore to be feared as a problem, but welcomed as an opportunity, the opportunity to free man from wage-slavery. The solution was the National Dividend, a living income paid to every man, woman and child, whether employed or not, and financed out of the national credit – in other words, the Wages of the Machine. These theories came in due course to be known as Social Credit. Hargrave saw immediately that here might lie the clue to something that had been troubling him. How was it possible for men and women enmeshed in the modern urban life of “getting and spending” to break away into the free, open-air life that for him was the only healthy one? As long ago as 1915 Hargrave had been alerted to the irrelevance of money to real wealth, when on the scorching Suvla Bay beaches he saw a man, with a glass of precious drinking water, refuse a sovereign for it. Now, it seemed, he had found someone else who, from quite a different angle, had come upon the same truth, and had found the answer. Now it was possible to see the way into the Machine Age. Hargrave began to study Social Credit, and urged his Kinsmen to do the same. Many were reluctant to do so; what had economics to do with the outdoor life? But others were able to follow him along this new path. All the same, when Hargrave wrote THE CONFESSION, in 1927, he still found it politic to omit the disturbing words “Social Credit’ even though the economic passages in this book are clearly recognisable to any Social Credit advocate, and indeed that at the 1927 Al-Thing (National Assembly) of the Kindred in June the seven-point Covenant was amended to incorporate Douglas’ Social Credit.
 
Booklet
Social Credit Booklet by Hargrave 

The adoption by the Kibbo Kift of Social Credit as official policy presaged fundamental changes in its organisation and methods. On January 3, 1931, Hargrave spoke at the Annual Kinfest, showing how it was the duty of the Kibbo Kift to break the power of the money-mongers. Parliament was useless, and the people themselves lacking hope and courage; but they would follow the Kin if the Kindred could show “that absolute, that religious, that military devotion to duty without which no great cause was ever brought to a successful issue.” In this speech Hargrave mapped out a new road not only for the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, but also for the Social Credit Movement, which up to that time (and indeed long afterwards outside the membership of the Kindred) had limited its activities to the formation of “study-groups”. This passive introverted technique was helpless against the almost total boycott of Social Credit by press and wireless, but from now on Social Credit was to be taken on to the streets, to be brought to the people directly. The next few years saw the fashioning of the Kindred into a new type of human political instrument, still based on the principles and ideals of the Kibbo Kift, but now placing Social Credit in the forefront of its aims. The Kibbo Kift “habit” was replaced by a simplified uniform (the “Green Shirt”), and a disciplined paramilitary technique with marching, drums and banners cut through the barrier of suppression and brought the message direct to the people. The basic principles of Social Credit were pared down to the Three Demands:
Open the National Credit Office!
Issue the National Dividend!
Apply the Scientific Price!

Corps of Drums
The Green Shirt Corps of Drums.
These were tough years for the Kindred and the newly-joined Green Shirts. They found themselves exposed not only to the jeers and misrepresentation of the “media”, but also to the open violence of the extreme left (the Communists) and the extreme right (the Fascists). At the same time the Green Shirts showed their community with the victims of the “Economic Crisis” by joining, and often leading, hunger marches, demonstrations by the National Unemployed Workers Movement, public mass meetings in London’s Trafalgar Square, Coventry’s Corn Market, Birmingham’s Bull Ring, as well as street corner meetings and local marches in cities and towns throughout the country, Astonishingly, these activities gained them the hostility, not just of rival political groups, but even of sections of the Social Credit movement, who seemed to regard such conduct as undignified and in some way sullying the purity of the Social Credit message.

Green Shirts on the March
Women Green Shirts marching in Downing Street
In 1935 the time seemed ripe for a further change. Without abandoning its “direct action” techniques, the Green Shirt Movement, spurred on by its growing popularity with the public, as well as by the overwhelming victory of William Aberhart’s Social Credit Party in the Canadian province of Alberta, decided to enter the orthodox political field by changing its name to the Social Credit Party of Great Britain; by this action they made it impossible for any bogus Social Credit party to arise in Britain. Then, in a lightning three-week campaign, the SCP candidate for South Leeds in the General Election of November 1935 gained nearly 4,000 votes – an astonishing result for a new and untried party.
But new shoals loomed ahead. The Abdication Crisis of 1936 threw British politics into chaos. On January 1, 1937, the Public Order Act came into force, banning the wearing of political uniforms – a measure ostensibly aimed at the Fascist Blackshirts, but which also conveniently (for the authorities) struck at the Social Credit Party, increasingly seen by the Money Power as the real danger to their established order. And in September 1939 war broke out and scattered the membership to the four corners of the world. For the next six years all overt political activity ceased.
 
Green Shirts in Birmingham
Green Shirt demonstration in Birmingham

Hargrave himself was far from idle during these difficult times. In 1935 he had published his great novel SUMMER TIME ENDS, a dramatic kaleidoscope of English life and attitudes, exposing the insanity of the contemporary social-economic system, the hypocrisy of politicians and financiers, and the helpless apathy of the “man-in-the-street”. In 1937 he perfected the first version of his Automatic Navigator for Aircraft (the “moving map” device , which was destined thirty years later to be installed in Concorde and thereafter in many other fast-moving military and civil planes, but for which the talented inventor was never to receive a penny in recognition. During the winter of 1939-40 he published two more important books, a study of Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, and a crushing expose of the feebleness of Britain’s wartime propaganda. For thirteen years from the spring of 1938 he wrote an unbroken series of weekly “Messages” to all members of the Party which served to hold together the “hard core” of the movement. In 1944 he became aware of his possession of the power of healing by radiation from the hand, and for many years thereafter he held meetings for healing and achieved many remarkable results both publicly and privately.



With the ending of the war and the return of members from national service the time had come for the revival of the party’s activities. But the situation in Britain was not favourable to the propagation of unorthodox ideas. A war-weary electorate sought refuge in passive acceptance of a paternal “Labour” government happy to relieve them of personal responsibility. Under Hargrave’s leadership the Social Credit Party, still robbed of its visual appeal and without access to the “media”, strove to break through the prevailing political apathy. A National Social Credit Evangel sought to re-create the emotional appeal that had previously been achieved through the pageantry of the uniforms, banners and drums. The development of “solar propaganda”, the formation of the Agriculture and Husbandry Group with the message “Britain Can Feed Herself’, even Hargrave’s unsuccessful candidature in the 1950 General Election, showed that there was still much vitality in the movement, small though it had now become. But the tide of affairs was against them, and on April 29, 1951, an extraordinary meeting of the Party resolved “to dissolve as an organisation.”
So passed into history a movement that came within an ace of changing the whole course of Britain’s political and social life. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift no longer exists as an organised body. Hargrave’s Green Shirts no longer march through the streets with drums playing and banners flying; the Social Credit Party has not contested an election since 1950. But the ideas and ideals of the Kindred remain as alive and vigorous as ever, and many in all walks of life acknowledge the debt they owe to their early training in the Kibbo Kift and the Green Shirts.
The re-issue of THE CONFESSION after fifty years is sufficient evidence of its enduring vitality.

 

COURTESY: ANDREW M.

WORSE THAN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA.

Human Rights in Israel/Palestine   

From OccupiedPalestine.org 

September 29, 2003 

Jon Elmer, FromOccupiedPalestine.org:
Three Jewish settlers from the West Bank settlement of Bat Ayin were convicted
on [17 September] of plotting to bomb a Palestinian girls school in the
East Jerusalem neighbourhood of At-Tur, as well as a hospital. Judges said
that scores of school children would have been slaughtered if the attack
had not been foiled. Back in April a group calling itself Revenge of the
Infants hurled grenades into a high school in Jenin, injuring 29. Can you
discuss the threat of Jewish settler terrorism?

Jessica Montell, B’Tselem
– Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:
Over the past three years we have seen an increase in violence against
both Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It seems that
as part of this intifada, people on both sides are taking the law into
their own hands and committing acts of violence against the other community.

    From
a human rights perspective, we are more concerned with the response of
the Israeli authorities, and the responsibility of Israel to enforce the
law and to punish people who violate the law. The Israeli authorities are,
on the whole, much more lenient toward Jews who break the law – including
acts of violence – than they are toward Palestinians. 

    
The intensive investigations, arrests, interrogations, and prosecutions
in the case [of the settlers from Bat Ayin], stand in stark contrast to
what we see as very lax law enforcement against the routine violence by
settlers toward Palestinians. 

    We‚ve
issued three reports in this intifada, and several before that, about the
lax law enforcement [toward settlers]. The findings are that in contrast
to incidents of violence by Palestinians, where law enforcement is extremely
severe – to the point of collective punishment and violations of the human
rights of innocent Palestinians – in the case of violence by settlers,
the Israeli authorities tend to be overly forgiving. They turn a blind
eye, and do not take enough measures to protect Palestinians and their
property.

 Elmer: In B‚Tselem‚s
report Land Grab (2002), you conclude: “Israel has created in the Occupied
Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two
separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals
on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world.”
Is that not a textbook definition of apartheid?

Montell: Apartheid has symbolic
value because of the South African context. You can draw plenty of similarities,
and you can also see lots of differences between apartheid South Africa
and Israel‚s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I think the word
apartheid is useful for mobilizing people because of its emotional power.
In some cases, the situation in the West Bank is worse than apartheid in
South Africa. For example, the roads network in the West Bank,
where Jews are allowed to travel on roads that Palestinians are not allowed
to travel on, or the separation fence, which Palestinians call the Apartheid
Wall.

    I
was recently at a conference with John Dugard, who is now the Special Rapporteur
of the UN Commission on Human Rights for the Occupations Palestinian Territories,
and is originally from South Africa. He was (jokingly)
offended that apartheid was being maligned [by its comparison the Israeli
occupation]. In South Africa you didn‚t have apartheid on the roads,
you didn‚t have walls being constructed?

   There are,
however, clear similarities between apartheid South Africa and Israel‚s
policies in the West Bank, and over the past three years they have become
even clearer as the separation has intensified. Every
area of life – legal rights, benefits, privileges, allocation of resources,
the justice system, criminal prosecution – now has two separate tracks,
one for Israelis and one for Palestinians.

Elmer: Current figures estimate
that over 6,000 Palestinians are now in prison, roughly a quarter of whom
are in “administrative detention” without charge or trial. Can you discuss
Israel‚s policy of illegal detention and the violations of human rights
therein?

Montell: Our figures are
4,000 or 5,000 people in prison, and about 700 people in administrative
detention. Administrative detention has been used by Israel since the
beginning of the occupation in 1967, and even earlier. It is a remnant
of defence regulations in the British Mandate period, when even Jews, such
as Menachem Begin and others in the Jewish movement, were put in administrative
detention by the British. 

    
Beginning with the first intifada in 1987, Israel used administrative detention
on a massive scale, with up to 5,000 people in detention – without trial,
and with no allegations against the person that they have committed an
offence. It is supposed to be used as a preventative detention; if they
know that you are about to commit a crime, they put you in detention to
in order to prevent that crime.

    
Obviously, this is hugely problematic: on what basis do I know you are
about to endanger security? Also, given that all the information against
you is secret, there is no meaningful way that the detainees can appeal
their detention. People are detained for a six-month period, and the period
can be extended indefinitely. So we have had people
in detention for five years with no charge, no trial. 

Elmer: In North America the
term Œhuman shield‚ is generally used pejoratively to discredit international
solidarity activists whose passports allow them a certain protection and
level of humanity that the Palestinians are clearly denied by Israeli soldiers.
But the term means something far more shocking in the Israeli army‚s lexicon.
Here is one soldier‚s testimony: “Before searching a house, we go to a
neighbour, take him out of his house, and tell him to call for the person
we want. If it works, great. If not, we blow down the door or hammer it
open. The neighbour goes in first. If someone is planning something, he
is one who gets it.” (Operation Defensive Shield: Soldiers’ Testimonies,
Palestinian Testimonies, B‚Tselem journal, p. 10) Can you discuss the IDF‚s
use of the so-called “neighbor procedure” and the use of Palestinians as
human shields?

Montell: Beginning with Operation
Defensive Shield we got testimonies from Palestinians that we initially
thought were not credible, given that they were so shocking: physically
using people as shields, forcing them to walk in front of soldiers, even
resting a rifle on their shoulder, hiding behind them when going into houses?
Together with six other human rights organizations, we petitioned the High
Court of Justice. As a result of this appeal the State said that [the IDF]
would cease using human shields, with the exception of what they call the
“neighbor procedure,” which they refuse to give up, and remains before
the High Court. 

    
The “neighbor procedure” is when a Palestinian is recruited to do various
sorts of missions for the army, such as to go knock on the door of a neighbour
and say that the army is here and if you don‚t come out they are going
to shoot at you, or blow up your house. What the army claims is that Palestinians
volunteer for these missions ˆ perhaps if it‚s a family member, to prevent
the house from being demolished. It is clear that if a Palestinian volunteers
to get their son out of the house before it is demolished, they are free
to do that. That is different than, in many cases, what the soldiers‚ testimonies
show.

    
Despite [the military‚s] declarations before the High Court that this is
only done on a volunteer basis, we continue to take
testimonies from Palestinians, even after the decision of the High Court,
of people being used in the original definition of human shield ˆ as a
shield to protect [soldiers] from gunfire, as well as in the neighbour
procedure. 

Elmer: Another concern about
Israel‚s blatant violations of civilian protections that B‚Tselem has addressed
is the use of live ammunition to enforce curfew. In one four-month period
you cite at least 15 Palestinians killed by live ammunition used to enforce
curfew: 12 of those 15 were children, and the eldest, 60 (Lethal Curfew:
The Use of Live Ammunition to Enforce Curfew, October 2002). Can you comment
on this?

Montell: We have not been
able to receive official confirmation from [the IDF] that the use of live
ammunition to enforce curfew is in fact the rules engagement being given
to soldiers. All we know are the consequences. This connects to two problems
we have identified in general about the rules of engagement. Number one,
it does not appear that soldiers are being given written rules of engagement,
[such as] open-fire regulations.

     
This is in contrast to the first intifada and during the Oslo years when
soldiers carried around a little booklet that said when they were allowed
to use rubber bullets, when they were allowed to use live ammunition, the
rules for apprehending a suspect, the rules of stopping someone at a checkpoint
ˆ all of these things were very regularized. 

    What
we have taken from testimonies from soldiers is that all of these regulations
apparently are conveyed to soldiers orally from Commanders who have themselves
received their orders orally ˆ so what you have is a broken telephone.
It is not clear that what the higher-up levels of the army and the Judge
Advocate General have determined to be the rules of engagement are in fact
what is being carried out in the field. 

    
[The second problem] has to do with accountability. Contrary to the situation
prior to this intifada when the Judge Advocate General opened a military
police investigation into every case of a Palestinian killed by the IDF,
today that is not the case, and the vast majority
of Palestinians killed go uninvestigated.So what that means
is that there is no learning a lesson from previous tragedies.

    
Now this is aside from, say, assassination cases where they intentionally
want to kill the person. I think in the vast majority of cases, and there
have been over 2000 Palestinians killed since the beginning of this intifada,
there is no intent to kill Palestinians. I don‚t think that the IDF has
an intentional policy to kill unarmed, innocent Palestinians, and yet we‚re
talking about over 2000 people killed.

    So then
the question is: what lessons are being learned in order to prevent these
tragedies, accidents and needless deaths from happening in the future.
The fact that they are not investigating these cases thoroughly indicates
that they are not learning lessons – it‚s extremely severe negligence when
you look at the number of people killed. 

Elmer: Does B‚Tselem have
a position on the Israeli assassinations? 

Montell: Assassinations are
one of the more complicated cases, because it gets into the grey area of
the definition of this conflict from the point of view of international
humanitarian law. Israel defines the conflict as an armed conflict short
of war, which is a meaningless definition because war is armed conflict
– they are the same from a legal perspective. In an armed conflict obviously
combatants are legitimate targets: that is the case with IDF soldiers,
and that is case with combatants on the Palestinian side. 

    
From B’Tselem’s perspective, it’s clear that the entire situation in the
West Bank cannot be defined as an armed conflict. There may be isolated
incidents of clashes that reach the level of an armed conflict, but most
of what the IDF is doing in the Occupied Territories is normal policing
functions: carrying out arrests, staffing checkpoints, and other sorts
of functions that are police functions under international law. Even in
the case of an armed conflict, who [is considered] a combatant on the Palestinian
side is a very complicated legal issue. 

    Certainly
the way the assassinations are currently being carried out, using massive
firepower in very densely populated areas, with a very large number of
innocent civilians killed in the course of the assassination, is unacceptable.
And there is a big question mark about the way Palestinian targets are
chosen. 

Elmer: Because it is clearly
political leaders that are being targeted, especially of late – Ismail
Abu Shanab? 

Montell: Right, it‚s political
leaders and the leaders of military wings of Hamas, people who Israel itself
no longer claims are on their way to carry out assassinations. It‚s also
not clear that Israel could not arrest these people if it wanted to. In
area A of Palestinian cities it would be a much greater threat to civilian
lives to launch a campaign to arrest people, but in some cases we know
that people have passed through IDF checkpoints in the days or weeks prior
to their assassination, and at least in these cases Israel could have arrested
them if it wanted to. 

Elmer: Escalating from „ticking
bombs‰ to „ticking infrastructure‰?

Montell: Right. 

Elmer: The so-called separation
fence will annex significant parts of the West Bank to Israel, while leaving
tens of thousands of Palestinians on the west side of the fence between
the fence and the Green Line, and thousands of Jewish settlers on the east
side. That doesn‚t seem much like separation.

Montell: Very few Palestinians
will be living on the west side of the barrier. As of Stage 1, between
12 and 13,000 Palestinians live in the villages to the west of the barrier.
The main problem is Palestinians who are living in enclaves entirely surrounded
by the barrier, often cut off from their farmland, and all of the problems
of freedom of movement for Palestinians who need to cross back and forth.
That‚s another 70-75 thousand just in the first stage that has already
been constructed.

    
Again, as you said, it‚s not a barrier that is separating Israel from Palestine
along the 1967 border. And that‚s primarily because of the presence of
settlers and settlements in the Occupied Territories, many of whom have
launched their own lobbying campaign so that individual settlements will
be included to the west of the barrier. As a result, Palestinians are either
living in enclaves, or are themselves on the wrong side of the barrier. 

     
At this point we‚re all in suspense about the future stages of the barrier
– whether or not it will include Ar‚iel and other settlements, and equally
significantly [the route of the barrier] in Jerusalem, which is obviously
a very densely built up urban area. The fence is apparently just going
to go right down the middle of a street, separating the neighbourhood of
Abu Dis [for example], separating a family from their daycare, grocery
store, doctor, work and everything else. So it‚s a really devastating measure.

    
And again, contrary to Israel‚s claim that it can always be moved and that
it‚s not permanent, it is in fact a fairly massive structure being built
at a huge cost to the Israeli economy, and something that is not easily
going to be moved. My fear is that we will be living with the implications
of these bad decisions made by the government in terms of the route of
the fence for a very long time to come.

Elmer: Can you describe the
physical presence of the wall?

Montell: In most areas of
construction it‚s not a wall, but a series of measures about 60-100 meters
wide. It starts with an electronic fence in the middle that will sense
anyone touching or trying to tamper with it, then a series of roads on
either side including a trace road and a patrol road, followed by a barbed
wire fence and then a trench. So even the amount of land taken for the
actual construction is very significant.

    In a
few places, on the west side of Qalqiliya, and then going through Abu Dis,
it is actually a massive concrete wall up to four meters high. So again
it‚s a very large structure taking up a lot of land, costing a lot of money,
and not easily moved.

Elmer: Predictions are always
problematic, but what does B‚Tselem see the future holding for Palestinian
human rights, given the apparent death of the Road Map peace process and
the escalation of the conflict?

Montell: To the extent that
the armed conflict continues, it‚s clear that civilians are the main ones
paying the price. That‚s true on the Israeli side with Palestinians mounting
suicide bombings and other attacks that primarily target Israeli civilians,
and it‚s also true on the Palestinian side, where the civilian population
is really paying an unbearable price ˆ the restrictions on movement that
are devastating all aspects of Palestinian life, and obviously the destruction,
injuries and deaths. At this point we are stuck in a cycle that Israelis
and Palestinians are not able to get out of. It‚s clear that without
a very concerted effort by the international community, which until now
has not been forthcoming, there isn‚t a lot of optimism in terms of the
short-term future. 

——————

Jessica Montell is the Executive
Director of B‚Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in
the Occupied Territories.

Jon Elmer is a freelance
journalist currently reporting from Israel-Palestine and is the editor
of FromOccupiedPalestine.org.