‘Turning Israelis Into Settlers After Death’: Israel to Build Cemetery In Ecological ‘Hotspot’ in Palestine

KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank—More than 70 years after being expelled from the Naqab Desert, Bedouins in the occupied West Bank may become refugees once again.

This month, Israel’s Supreme Court gave the government until April 2 to respond to pro-settler Israeli NGO Regavim’s request to demolish the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. In 2018, the High Court green-lighted Khan al-Ahmar’s destruction, but the government has yet to formulate a plan for carrying out the ruling.

More than half of the village’s approximately 280 residents are children attending Khan al-Ahmar’s primary school, which could soon turn to rubble if the village is razed.

Khan al-Ahmar’s students aren’t the only Palestinian children whose academic futures are under threat, however. According to the Arab Campaign for Education for All, 58 Palestinian schools serving 6,550 children, including Khan al-Ahmar’s, are currently at risk of demolition.

“When our students face the challenges of occupation, it’s not only the damage of the schools, it’s not only the arrests of teachers and students, but the psychosocial part, which reflects in the [students’] attitudes and well-being,” Sadiq Al-Khadour, spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority’s Education Ministry, told Toward Freedom.

Israel Undermining Palestinian Education

Students face a myriad of obstacles while attempting to earn an education in Palestine. In addition to school demolitions, students experience detention or arrests by the Israeli army, military raids into their school, delays in their commutes due to checkpoints, and violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers on their way to school. According to the UN, students in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem experienced a more than 150-percent increase in education-related violations from 2021 to 2022.

Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem have had their licenses revoked for refusing to teach the Israeli narrative in their curriculum, while those who comply have received a boost in funding. According to the Education Ministry, Jerusalem schools are also the most overcrowded in Palestine, with an average of more than 37 students packed into a classroom. The average student-to-teacher ratio in Palestine is 24-1.

In the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli missiles have destroyed academic institutions and killed teachers and students.

“This undermines students’ and teachers’ right to access the appropriate educational process,” said Tamam Mohsen, advocacy officer at Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. Mohsen’s organization, which focuses on Gaza, explained that more than 571 educational facilities were wiped out by Israeli bombs from 2008 to 2021.

A School Born Out of Necessity

With April’s court deadline fast approaching, the Khan al-Ahmar school and the surrounding community are on edge.

“We’ve heard the news and this has put students in an unstable mood,” said Isra Zahran, who teaches mathematics to students from 7th to 10th grades. Zahran explained constant visits from NGOs and the press have distracted students.

Built in 2009, the school has become essential for Khan al-Ahmar’s children.

Headmistress Halima Zahaike explained that before the school’s establishment, children would take the arduous journey to Jericho for school while some—especially girls—would merely forgo their education.

“Today, girls who are 22 years old or more don’t even know how to write their name because they used to stay home with no education,” Zahaike said. With this clear need, the idea for a school in the heart of Khan al-Ahmar was born.

Like the majority of Palestinian villages in the Israeli-military-controlled Area C of the West Bank, Khan al-Ahmar doesn’t have a zoning plan. Therefore, any construction is deemed illegal. In order to circumvent Israeli military regulations, the school was built as a temporary structure using tires, clay, and mud. The project was built with the support of Italian non-profit Vento di Terra and the European Union.

Yet, even during the school’s construction, classrooms were razed by Israeli authorities.

‘I Will Keep Studying Atop Rubble’

With demolition looming, Khan al-Ahmar’s students are losing their will to learn.

“Many of the students say, ‘Our school will be demolished and we’ll have to go to Jericho. I know that I can’t go to Jericho, so let’s skip,’” Zahran said. “We try to encourage them, but there’s this feeling of not being motivated because they ask themselves ‘what I’m going to do after [the demolition].’”

With these barriers to education, 25 percent of Palestinian boys drop out of school by age 15. Despite this figure, the youth literacy rate is over 99 percent in Palestine.

The feeling of resilience is palpable among Palestinian students. While Zahran appears apprehensive, past school demolitions prove Palestinians’ determination to learn.

In November, Israeli forces demolished Isfey Al-Fawqa elementary school in Masafer Yatta, a collective of rural hamlets in the southern West Bank. Days later, students were studying in tents erected above the crushed cement.

The Ministry of Education provided the tents to Masafer Yatta’s students and said they will do the same for Khan al-Ahmar if dismantled.

“If you ask any one of them, they will say, ‘We will never leave our school,’” Zahaike said of her students. “They say, ‘If it gets demolished, I will keep studying atop the rubble.’”

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.

Afghanistan is teetering on the brink of universal poverty. As much as 97 percent of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line unless a comprehensive response to the country’s multiple crises is launched, according to a September 9 report the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released.

In his video message to the 21st Summit of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that was held on September 17, Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres addressed the group: 

“You come together at a pivotal time. Troubling developments in Afghanistan are causing profound political, economic, security and humanitarian challenges. The situation is rapidly evolving and unpredictable. But it is clear that the Afghan people want extreme poverty to be eradicated, jobs to become available, health and education services to be restored, and their lives and basic rights and freedoms to be protected. They want their country free of insecurity and terror.”

 

Two Factors for Economic Crisis

Guterres’ words carry enormous significance. The UNDP report, which analyzed four potential scenarios of escalating intensity and isolation, indicates that real GDP could contract by as much as 13.2 percent, leading to a nearly 25 percent increase in the poverty rate.

Two factors have caused Afghanistan’s economic freefall. First, even before the escalation of conflicts, a highly dysfunctional neoliberal kleptocracy—with limited writ over a narco state, dependent on foreign aid and rentier economics for its survival—was pillaging the country with the help of the United States and its European accomplices. The result: Cruelty and callousness became the mode of governance. COVID-19 devastated Afghan society: The coronavirus is believed to have infected millions, with the impact helping drive an increase in the poverty level from 38 percent in 2011 to an estimated 47 percent in 2020. At the beginning of 2021, as many as 14 million people could not obtain sufficient food, meaning more than one-third of the population of roughly 38 million was going hungry. Food insecurity is a result of constant droughts. Afghanistan is highly vulnerable to climate change, having witnessed a mean rise in temperature of 1.8° Celsius (or 35° Fahrenheit) since the middle of the 20th century, compared to a global average of 0.82° C (33.4° F). Droughts are likely to become an annual occurrence by 2030. A severe drought caused more internal displacement between 2017 and 2018 than the conflict itself. The country now is suffering from another prolonged dry period.

The second factor that caused Afghanistan’s economic freefall is, since the Taliban takeover, the imperialist bloc led by the United States has forced Afghanistan into economic isolation. The World Bank has halted funding for new projects, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has suspended payments to Afghanistan and the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has frozen the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank, which are held in the United States. Thus, Afghanistan has been faced with the absence of liquidity (cash), spiraling prices of food and medicine, currency depreciation, unemployment, and the collapse of services and construction. No money is available for public finance and administrative operations—that means no prospect of salaries for government workers. Eighty percent of Afghanistan’s last approved annual budget of $5.5 billion was funded by external aid.

 

Regional Shifts

UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi—after concluding his three-day visit to Afghanistan on September 15—commented: “The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan remains desperate… if public services and the economy collapse, we will see even greater suffering, instability, and displacement both within and outside the country… The international community must therefore engage with Afghanistan—and quickly—in order to prevent a much bigger humanitarian crisis that will have not only regional, but global implications.” 

The SCO countries have heeded Grandi’s advice. Instead of implementing measures that punish the Taliban in ways that exclude Afghanistan and adversely impact the country’s citizens, the organization is trying to actively promote a smooth transition in Kabul. In the latest SCO gathering in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Central Asian countries—which had previously accepted their roles as mere doormats for U.S. ambitions in Afghanistan—voiced concerns about the bellicose attitude of Western countries toward Kabul. 

“Considering the humanitarian situation, we propose looking into the possibility of lifting the freeze on Afghanistan’s accounts in foreign banks,” Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev remarked. 

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, too, reiterated these viewpoints, adding “the entire burden of negative impacts” following the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan “will be placed on Afghanistan’s neighboring countries.”

Central Asian countries’ implied criticism of U.S. foreign policy is important. From the 2000s onward, the U.S. stance toward Central Asia was an extension of its war in Afghanistan. The region became a base for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a conduit for International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) supply routes. Economic agendas were relegated to the back burner. A half-hearted attempt was made to create a regional energy market in Central Asia, Afghanistan and South Asia. With the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) as a starting point, the New Silk Road (NSR) was supposed to facilitate trade and transport corridors, ease customs and border procedures, and promote economic links.

However, these grandiose ideas were all for naught. Apart from profiteering from the ISAF bonanza and fleecing Afghanistan and its donors, Central Asian countries gained nothing substantial from U.S. initiatives. These benefits also came to an end with the decrease in the tempo of the Afghan war—beginning from the NATO drawdown in 2014 and ending with the U.S. exit in 2021. Failed regional cooperation, widespread corruption and disproportionate enrichment of elite insiders serve as relics of Western involvement in Central Asia.

 

China’s Role with Afghanistan

Growing disillusionment with the U.S. strategy on Afghanistan has pushed China—an SCO heavyweight—to the forefront of global diplomacy. For China, Afghanistan is not a passive unit in a geopolitical struggle against its rivals; it is a bridge between Eurasia and South Asia, and between East Asia and West Asia. It lies between two of the main Belt and Road corridors—the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to the south and the China-Central Asia-Western Asia Economic Corridor to the north. Thus, Sino-Afghan ties are built on tangible geo-economic connections, not on opportunistic geo-political aims.

On September 8, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced $31 million in aid for Afghanistan, saying the funds were a “necessary step” to restore order and “end anarchy.” A week later, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing the United States had no legitimate reasons to freeze Afghanistan’s assets. Asked about the Taliban’s demand that the United States should unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets, Zhao said: “I think that the [Taliban’] spokesperson is right.” He went on to say, “These assets belong to the Afghan people. They [United States] should respond to the legitimate requests of the Afghan people and stop the wrong practice of sanctions and stop making obstacles for Afghanistan’s peace and reconstruction.”

In his speech to the SCO Summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping provided the regional context to his country’s evolving Afghan plan: 

“We SCO member states need to step up coordination, make full use of platforms such as the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group and facilitate a smooth transition in Afghanistan. We need to encourage Afghanistan to put in place a broad-based and inclusive political framework, adopt prudent and moderate domestic and foreign policies, resolutely fight all forms of terrorism, live in amity with its neighbors and truly embark on a path of peace, stability and development.”

In a meeting convened on September 16, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi proposed the following to his contemporaries in Russia, Iran and Pakistan: 1) the United States should be urged to provide economic and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan; 2) the Taliban regime should be encouraged to make a clean break with terrorist forces; 3) concerted efforts should be made to moderate Afghanistan’s domestic and foreign policies and promote the basic rights of ethnic minorities, women and children; 4) pathways should be opened for the regional economic integration and development of Afghanistan; and 5) the spillovers of security risks should be systematically prevented. These five suggestions are sensible and should be supported by the international community to ensure stability in Afghanistan.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India, and can be contacted at [email protected].

On May 6 and 7, Instagram users in India noticed that some of their posts were starting to vanish. Gone were their COVID-19-related posts that demanded improved conditions for overworked crematorium workers, publicized volunteer-led relief efforts, and linked coronavirus deaths in the country to “abject callousness” of the government. Stranger still was the removal of private chats on the matter.

“There is a growing trend of internet shutdowns, takedown of social media content, particularly around political speech in India over the last few years,” said Vidushi Marda, global AI research and advocacy lead at ARTICLE 19, an international freedom of expression organization that has been tracking the deleted content.

In India right now, whether or not people have access to COVID-19 information on social media is a matter of life and death. Such censorship, however, is not unique to the country. Over the past month, activists and researchers have also collected numerous examples of suppressed content related to unrest in Palestine and Colombia, as well as posts related to the National Day of Awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the U.S. and Canada.

On May 7, Instagram said that “this is a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic” and that the issue had been “fixed.”

But the following day, the company acknowledged that there were issues with posts relating to unrest in Colombia and Palestine.

“We are so sorry this happened,” Instagram noted in a statement. “Especially to those in Colombia, East Jerusalem, and Indigenous communities who felt this was an intentional suppression of their voices and stories — that was not our intent whatsoever.”

But Instagram failed to acknowledge reports of censorship in India.

A representative of Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in response to questions about why dissent in India, Colombia, and Palestine seemed to have been disproportionately impacted: “This was a widespread global technical issue that affected users around the world, regardless of the topic of their Stories. We fixed it as fast as we could so users around the world could continue expressing themselves and connecting with each other through Stories.”

Despite the company’s claims that the takedowns were automatic and universal, Marda said there was “overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent.”

In India, she noted that ARTICLE 19 observed “significant overlap between posts about activism, COVID-19 relief and government critique.” All of this, she said, points to “a significantly larger problem than just a single automation tool,” and noted “the opacity of content moderation practices” means that there are gaps in accountability.

Such digital suppression isn’t simply a matter of being able to speak freely. In each of these countries, thanks to government failures and limited media coverage, people have come to rely on social media to share information, track resources, and protect themselves from violence.

Part of the problem is automated content moderation, which uses machine learning to filter content. The systems are blunt instruments that often misunderstand context and remove too much or too little content, noted a report by the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. These developments, adds the report, can negatively impact minority groups because these tools are often trained on English-language datasets, so they have trouble properly parsing dialects and rarely-used languages.

“[There is] overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent,” said Marda. “[This is] precisely why… human rights organizations and defenders around the world have pointed to the dangers of automated content moderation for years.”

 

India’s History Of Digital Censorship

Because of the Indian government’s monumental failure in tackling the coronavirus, people in the country have come to rely on social media to seek and provide COVID-related help like oxygen supplies and vaccinations. Many people have also used social media to collate lists of supplies into a larger, searchable database.

Silicon Valley-driven censorship in India, therefore, has become a matter of survival, despite the fact that Instagram has yet to acknowledge it.

“Despite documented instances of censorship [in India] and Instagram users highlighting them very prominently, there was a complete lack of recognition [by Instagram] of what’s happening in India,” said Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based organization that seeks to ensure that technology respects fundamental rights.

Digital suppression in the country isn’t new, despite the fact that the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression.

In 2020, India had the highest number of government-instigated internet shutdowns in the world. The digital crackdowns were one of the reasons Reporters Without Borders recently ranked India 142 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedoms.

On April 28, Facebook temporarily hid posts critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that included the hashtag #ResignModi for “violating its community standards.” A Facebook spokesperson later said that the posts were hidden “by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to.”

“Silicon Valley platforms have a very natural interest in keeping governments happy in the regions that they operate,” Gupta said, pointing to the fact that India is Facebook’s biggest market.

The lack of institutionalized free speech protections is further compounded by laws and regulations in India that allow the Ministry of Electronics and Information to not disclose censorship orders sent to social media companies, said Gupta.

Users are therefore often given no official explanation why their posts were suppressed.

 

Content Moderation In Colombia

There have also been numerous reports of censorship related to ongoing protests in Colombia over proposed tax increases and the resulting police crackdowns.

“We identified a specific problem with Instagram,” said Carolina Botero Cabrera, a researcher with Karisma, a Bogotá based civil society organization that works on technology and human rights. “We have over 1,000 reports of censorship, around 90 percent of it was by Instagram and the content was overwhelmingly about the [ongoing] protests,” she added.

Deleted posts reportedly related to the national unrest, unemployment numbers in the country, and the death of a protester.

For Colombia, a country with a long-lasting civil war, such automated content moderation is all the more contentious because journalists and human rights activists often find that their content is removed, their reach is diminished, or their accounts are blocked because their content is deemed too violent.

Jesus Abad Colorado, an experienced Colombian photojournalist, recently had his Twitter account blocked after he posted photographs of an armed dispute in the Chocó Department in Western Colombia. A few days later, when an independent media outlet livestreamed an interview with Colorado about the dispute, their account was blocked, too.

Another challenge, said Botero, is that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army (FARC), the longtime leftist guerilla group that disarmed and became a political party in 2017, “was flagged as a terrorist organization [by social media companies at the time] even though they were in peace negotiations.”

The peace process spanned about four years, culminating in a peace agreement in 2016. “Any research about the peace process will have to deal with important problems to [understand] FARC’s position, actions, and voice,” said Botero, noting that blocked social media accounts and deleted content hamper documentation of the process.

 

Suppressing Palestinian Voices

As tensions escalated in Israel and Palestine, digital suppression in the region also appeared to increase.

“We have over 100 reports of censorship on Instagram,” said Alison Carmel Ramer, a researcher at 7amleh, a Haifa-based digital rights organization based in Haifa, Israel.

Ramer’s research and other reports found that most of the censored content was related to Israeli forces storming Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Other censored content was related to the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Muslim, a media publication, also documented blocks on Instagram livestreams related to Palestine.

According to ِRamer, Facebook told 7amleh that a majority of the Instagram takedowns were mistakes because they did not violate community standards and that they have restored the content.

“This means there is a problem in the way content is moderated,” said Ramer. “Why is content which is not against community standards being taken down? [Facebook] also did not tell users under which policy the content was taken down.”

In general, Palestinian content is “over-moderated” Ramer added, noting posts are often suppressed either because they are considered hate speech, or the posts appear to be connected to terrorist organizations. Many Palestinian leaders are designed as terrorists by the United States, meaning Facebook censors content related to them. Ramer also explained how hate speech in the region written in Hebrew is not censored to the same extent as hate speech in Arabic.

A March 2021 report by 7amleh which analysed 574,000 social media conversations in 2020 showed that one out of every 10 Israeli posts about Palestinians and Arabs contained violent speech, a 16 percent increase compared to 2019. “We have sent reports like this one to Facebook for several years and every year, [but] we find that this content just remains online,” Ramer said, adding that Facebook has not informed them of what, if any, actions it intends to take.

A recent report in The Intercept also noted how Facebook censors the word “Zionist.”

“Zionism is a political ideology,” Ramer said. “Political speech must be protected. Words like ‘Zionist’ and ‘shahid’ [martyr in Arabic] should be protected.” Censorship in the region is especially concerning because of the longstanding lack of transparency around Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, political activist Noam Chomsky told The Daily Poster.

“Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians for many years, with strong support from the U.S. particularly, is a shocking crime in itself and has ominous international repercussions as well,” said Chomsky. “There have been extensive efforts to block efforts to bring the facts and their significance to the general public. These efforts amount to direct participation in the crimes.”

When asked about social media companies’ ability to freely censor content, Chomsky replied, “Their enormous power should not be tolerated.”

 

The Path Ahead

At ARTICLE 19, Marda said that in order to align itself with international human rights standards, Facebook “must publicly and transparently acknowledge the reasons for recent takedowns” and “provide information for the substantive and legal reasons for takedown.”

Marda added that Facebook should also “restore all blocked content” and “publicly commit to not bowing to governmental or judicial pressure that requires it to act in violation of international human rights standards and jurisdiction-specific standards on freedom of expression.”

This article was originally published in The Daily Poster.

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.