ring the bells that still can ring

Human Rights Watch denying Palestinians the right to nonviolent resistance - Jonathan Cook

2006-12-08T02:27:00.000-08:00

The Electronic Intifada, 30 November 2006

If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.

Despite the "Man bites dog" news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly -- it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only on the destruction of Israel.

It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.

Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the "disengagement", the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.

Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.

Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family's lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.
Western observers, and the organisations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber

Yet Western observers, and the organisations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.

Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its lastest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organisation, complacent Western societies and Fatma's memory.

In its press release "Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks", which was widely reported by the international media, HRW lambasts armed Palestinian groups for calling on civilians to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military.

Noting almost as an afterthought that more than 1,500 Palestinians have been made homeless from house demolitions in the past few months, and that 105 houses have been destroyed from the air, the press release denounces Palestinian attempts at nonviolent and collective action to halt the Israel attacks. HRW refers in particular to three incidents.

On November 3, Hamas appealed to women to surround a mosque in Beit Hanoun where Palestinian men had sought shelter from the Israeli army. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the women, killing two and injuring at least 10.

And last week on two separate occasions, crowds of supporters gathered around the houses of men accused of being militants by Israel who had received phone messages from the Israeli security forces warning that their families' homes were about to be bombed.

In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, one of the world's leading organisations for the protection of human rights ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians' right to security and a roof over their heads and argued instead: "There is no excuse for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack. Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm's way is unlawful."

On HRW's interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.
There is good reason to believe that this reading of international law is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured. Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing nonviolent means. On HRW's interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.

HRW also applies a series of terrible double standards in this press release.

It refuses Palestinians the right to protect homes from attack, labelling these civilians "human shields", even while admitting that most of the homes are not legitimate military targets, and yet it has not said a word about the common practice in Israel of building weapons factories and army bases inside or next to communities, thereby forcing Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army.

And HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law by the Palestinians -- their choice to act as "human shields" -- and to demand that the practice end immediately, while ignoring the very real and continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families.

But let us ignore even these important issues and assume that HRW is technically correct that such Palestinian actions do violate international law. Nonetheless, HRW is still failing us and mocking its mandate, because it has lost sight of the three principles that must guide the vision of a human rights organisation: a sense of priorities, proper context and common sense.

Priorities: Every day HRW has to choose which of the many abuses of international law taking place around the world it highlights. It manages to record only a tiny fraction of them. The assumption of many outsiders may be that it focuses on only the most egregious examples. That would be wrong.

The simple truth is that the worse a state's track record on human rights, the easier ride it gets, relatively speaking, from human rights organisations. That is both because, if abuses are repeated often enough, they become so commonplace as to go unremarked, and because, if the abuses are wide-ranging and systematic, only a small number of the offences will be noted.

Israel, unlike the Palestinians, benefits in both these respects. After four decades of reporting on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, HRW has covered all of Israel's many human rights-abusing practices at least once before. The result is that after a while most violations get ignored. Why issue another report on house demolitions or "targeted assassinations", even though they are occurring all the time? And, how to record the individual violations of tens of thousands of Palestinians' rights every day at checkpoints? One report on the checkpoints once every few years has to suffice instead.

In Israel's case, there is an added reluctance on the part of organisations like HRW to tackle the extent and nature of Israel's trampling of Palestinian rights. Constant press releases denouncing Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is being singled out -- and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism lies behind the special treatment.

So HRW chooses instead to equivocate. It ignores most Israeli violations and highlights every Palestinian infraction, however minor. This way it makes a pact with the devil: it achieves the balance that protects it from criticism but only by sacrificing the principles of equity and justice.

Israeli soldiers use a Palestinian man as a human shield to plant an automatic shooting machine in a besieged house, in contravention to the Fourth Geneva Convention, during a military operation in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, 3 November 2006. (MaanImages/Magnus Johansson)

In its press release, for example, HRW treats the recent appeal to Palestinians to exercise their right to protect their neighbours, and to act in soldarity with nonviolent resistance to occupation, as no different from the dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli army of abducting Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its troops.

Women vounteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.

According to HRW's approach to international law, the two incidents are comparable.

Context: The actions of Palestinians occur in a context in which all of their rights are already under the control of their occupier, Israel, and can be violated at its whim. This means that it is problematic, from a human rights perspective, to place the weight of culpability on the Palestinians without laying far greater weight at the same time on the situation to which the Palestinians are reacting.

Here is an example. HRW and other human rights organisations have taken the Palestinians to task for the extrajudicial killings of those suspected of collaborating with the Israeli security forces.

Although it is blindingly obvious that the lynching of an alleged collaborator is a violation of that person's fundamental right to life, HRW's position of simply blaming the Palestinians for this practice raises two critical problems.

First, it fudges the issue of accountability.

In the case of a "targeted assassination", Israel's version of extrajudicial killing, we have an address to hold accountable: the apparatus of a state in the forms of the Israeli army which carried out the murder and the Israeli politicians who approved it. (These officials are also responsible for the bystanders who are invariably killed along with the target.)
Palestinians carrying out a lynching are commiting a crime punishable under ordinary domestic law; while the Israeli army carrying out a "targeted assassination" is commiting state terrorism, which must be tried in the court of world opinion

But unless it can be shown that the lynchings are planned and coordinated at a high level, a human rights organisation cannot apply the same standards by which it judges a state to a crowd of Palestinians, people gripped by anger and the thirst for revenge. The two are not equivalent and cannot be held to account in the same way. Palestinians carrying out a lynching are commiting a crime punishable under ordinary domestic law; while the Israeli army carrying out a "targeted assassination" is commiting state terrorism, which must be tried in the court of world opinion.

Second, HRW's position ignores the context in which the lynching takes place.

The Palestinian resistance to occupation has failed to realise its goals mainly because of Israel's extensive network of collaborators, individuals who have usually been terrorised by threats to themselves or their family and/or by torture into "co-operating" with Israel's occupation forces.

The great majority of planned attacks are foiled because one member of the team is collaborating with Israel. He or she not only sabotages the attack but often also gives Israel the information it needs to kill the leaders of the resistance (as well as bystanders). Collaborators, though common in the West Bank and Gaza, are much despised -- and for good reason. They make the goal of national liberation impossible.

Palestinians have been struggling to find ways to make collaboration less appealing. When the Israeli army is threatening to jail your son, or refusing a permit for your wife to receive the hospital treatment she needs, you may agree to do terrible things. Armed groups and many ordinary Palestinians countenance the lynchings because they are seen as a counterweight to Israel's own powerful techniques of intimidation -- a deterrence, even if a largely unsuccessful one.

In issuing a report on the extra-judicial killing of Palestinian collaborators, therefore, groups like HRW have a duty to highlight first and with much greater emphasis the responsibility of Israel and its decades-long occupation for the lynchings, as the context in which Palestinians are forced to mimic the barbarity of those oppressing them to stand any chance of defeating them.

The press release denouncing the Palestinians for choosing collectively and peacefully to resist house demolitions, while not concentrating on the violations committed by Israel in destroying the houses and using military forms of intimidation and punishment against civilians, is a travesty for this very same reason.

Common sense: And finally human rights organisations must never abandon common sense, the connecting thread of our humanity, when making judgments about where their priorities lie.

In the past few months Gaza has sunk into a humanitarian disaster engineered by Israel and the international community. What has been HRW's response? It is worth examining its most recent reports, those on the front page of the Mideast section of its website last week, when the latest press release was issued. Four stories relate to Israel and Palestine.

Three criticise Palestinian militants and the wider society in various ways: for encouraging the use of "human shields", for firing home-made rockets into Israel, and for failing to protect women from domestic violence. One report mildly rebukes Israel, urging the government to ensure that the army properly investigates the reasons for the shelling that killed 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.

This shameful imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued against each party and in terms of the failure to hold accountable the side committing the far greater abuses of human rights, has become the HRW's standard procedure in Israel-Palestine.

But in its latest release, on human shields, HRW plumbs new depths, stripping Palestinians of the right to organise nonviolent forms of resistance and seek new ways of showing solidarity in the face of illegal occupation. In short, HRW treats the people of Gaza as mere rats in a laboratory -- the Israeli army's view of them -- to be experimented on at will.

HRW's priorities in Israel-Palestine prove it has lost its moral bearings.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, is published by Pluto Press.

Village punished for successful olive harvest - checkpoint closed indefinitely

2006-12-08T02:14:00.000-08:00

As I get out of the taxi, bullets fly over my head. It is dark and the soldiers are jumpy. The checkpoint commonly known as “Sabatash”, named after the Palestinian security forces that used to maintain a presence there, has been closed indefinitely for all civilian traffic bar humanitarian transportation such as ambulances and medical supply deliveries. This turn of events was suddenly announced a little more than two weeks ago to the residents of Asira Ash-Shamalia, located on the far side of the checkpoint from Nablus city.

The checkpoint is located in a sharp bend in the main road to Nablus; a thoroughfare used daily by- and crucial to university students and workers. It has developed from a makeshift checkpoint consisting of a muddy trench and a few cement blocks to a permanent terminal with a watchtower, walls and two vehicle lanes. Palestinians have been humiliated, stripsearched, made to stand in a meter of cold ditch-water, beaten and shot here every day since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada. Although notorious for its extremely violent soldiers, the checkpoint has still been the preferred route for most Palestinians, as walking around over the mountains is even more treacherous. If spotted by Israeli soldiers, one runs the risk of being shot or detained for many hours.

One villager was detained by soldiers a rainy winter day a couple of years ago. He can hardly hold back his tears as he tells the story of how he ventured over the mountains in order to buy warm winter clothes for his son. On his way back, soldiers ambushed him from behind some bushes, very nearly shooting him dead. After making sure that he was not carrying any explosives, the soldiers calmed down and their commander started talking politics for over three hours, all the time in a civil manner. All of a sudden, the commander’s attitude changed and he ordered the man to be handcuffed. The soldiers then proceeded to beat, spit and pee on the man as he lay defenceless on the ground. The commander ordered the Palestinian man to undress, produced a video camera and told the man that he would be let go if he said on tape that he is a dirty Palestinian who does not deserve to live, to breathe oxygen or to drink water.

The man agreed to testify on tape and, shivering in the cold, proclaimed that “I am proud to be Palestinian and to be walking home to my family in my village breathing my air. I was under the impression that you were a civil man, commander, but I am afraid I was mistaken for you have lost your humanity and therefore lost everything.” The commander then attacked him, thrusting the butt of his rifle into the man’s naked stomach. The man was then forced to lie down on the ground with his head ten centimeters away from the chains of the tank. Revving the motor, the commander explained to the man that they will now run him over. The Palestinian man asked for one last favour before he was to be killed – for the soldiers to deliver the warm clothes to his son and wife. The soldiers then took the clothes and burned them in front of the man as he lay naked on the ground.

After more than 12 hours of humiliation, the soldiers pushed the handcuffed man down a steep slope, cutting his skin on thorns and rocks. Nearby villagers rushed out to take care of him as the soldiers left and he eventually returned home, with both arms broken. This is but one horrific story out of many experienced by the citizens of Asira Ash-Shamalia. About one month ago, 25-year old Haithem was shot with live ammunition at close range for daring to protest against the soldiers’ treatment of a group of young women at the checkpoint – forcing them to run their hands tight along their own bodies. He is still in hospital being treated for the wounds sustained that night.

Now, the checkpoint has been closed indefinitely. Instead, the villagers are forced to travel in a 40km arc around the checkpoint to get to Nablus. Flying checkpoints are set up by Israeli military along this road, meaning the journey can take anything from 40 minutes to several hours. Despite contacting various human rights organizations, legal experts and military commanders, the villagers have not been able to find out why the road has been closed.

It could be an incidence of collective punishment due to the village’s successful olive harvest campaign. A committee of ten dedicated villagers spent the autumn months encouraging villagers to tend to their lands, even those close to the nearby military base and to stand their ground in case of confrontation with the military – “just try to have a calm logical conversation with the soldiers. The words will come naturally to you. After all, it is your land!” They also organized the removal of close to one hundred roadblocks scattered within and around the village, so as to allow for the passage of tractors and other heavy equipment needed during the harvest.

Greatly empowered by the committee’s work, the people of Asira Ash-Shamalia have this year harvested olives from land that has lain idle since the beginning of the first intifada. Furthermore, there has been a revival of old harvesting traditions, with young and old congregating in the fields to work, sing and eat together. In the past, a couple of adults from each family used to sneak to their fields and hurriedly pick as many olives as they dare before rushing home - almost as if “stealing” their own olives. This year, the harvest has been an open, joyous event, despite repression in the form of teargas and gunfire from soldiers manning the military base on the mountain Ebal.

The Israeli military have tried all sorts of measures to control the village’s newfound sense of self-determination. In the evenings, they would come and try to grab individual villagers from the olive press factories. After wrestling men to the ground and dragging them out of the building, the soldiers were forced to see themselves defeated as villager after villager struggled to get free and returned to the press. Whatever the reason for the sudden and unexplained closure of Sabatash checkpoint, this will not quench the spirit of inventive resistance that thrives in Asira Ash-Shamalia.

The checkpoint generation - Amira Hass

2006-11-29T00:41:00.000-08:00

Article published in Haaretz concerning Haitem Yassin, 25, who was shot by Israeli soldiers at "Sabatash" checkpoint in Nablus a few weeks ago. Please see http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/11/06/sabatash-shooting/ for report on the incident.

For nearly a month now, a young Palestinian has been hospitalized at Beilinson Hospital; soldiers shot him at a checkpoint in northern Nablus on Saturday, November 4. Haitem Yassin, 25, is conscious now, but he is still hooked up to a respirator. In recent days, he has been suffering from a high fever, apparently caused by an infection in his abdomen, which was wounded in the shooting. His family is still waiting for a report from the hospital about the number or type of bullets that caused the serious injury.

At the Samaria Brigade, they are still investigating what happened that day at the fortified and isolated Asira al-Shmaliya checkpoint, through which only the inhabitants of several villages are permitted passage. However, according to testimonies taken by a researcher for B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, it emerges that Yassin had irritated the soldiers. He dared to suggest to them that their demand of women to feel their own bodies to carry out a "security check" was inappropriate. So annoying was he that a soldier shoved him.

Yassin, who had returned from overseas a few months earlier, had apparently not yet internalized the fact that it is dangerous to remind a soldier that a Palestinian is a human being. When the soldier shoved, Yassin shoved back. The soldier, according to the testimonies, started to scream and curse and hit. He quickly received reinforcement from two other soldiers, who fired into the air and at the ground. Even though Yassin fell to the ground after the shooting, the soldiers, relate the witnesses, threw him onto a concrete block, handcuffed him and kicked him. They also kicked him in the head, according to the testimonies, and beat him with their rifles.

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In a village in the Nablus area, S., another young Palestinian, is recovering from the trauma he suffered from a harsh beating at the hands of a soldier at the Jit checkpoint, midway between Nablus and Qalqilya. The office of the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman has stated that it was the young man who had shoved and hit a soldier who told him to return to his vehicle, whereas the soldier only fended him off, but the testimony of S. is completely different. He, like many others on that day, November 9, had got out of his vehicle while on the way to the Jewish settlement where he works, in order to find out why, just when everyone was hurrying to work, the line of cars at the checkpoint wasn't moving.

According to one taxi driver, the soldiers announced that the cars would not be able to go through until noon. S., according to his own testimony, intended to return to his vehicle when the soldier approached him and looked as though he was going to hit him with his rifle. S. grabbed the rifle and pushed it aside. This apparently really bothered the soldier, who grabbed him, pulled him away from the rest of the people, flung him to the ground, and proceeded to him in all parts of his body. Including his head.

Other soldiers, at the Beit Iba checkpoint west of Nablus, also got annoyed: At a student who felt he was suffocating among the mass of people who flocked to the checkpoint on October 9, and who felt the only way he could get some air was to climb a pole. When he refused to obey the soldiers' orders to come down, because there was no room and no air, they fell upon him and beat him with a rifle. According to the testimony of a friend, who spoke to an activist from Machsom Watch, the soldiers also broke his glasses and punished him: They detained him in "solitary confinement," in a kind of punishment cell into which the soldiers and the commanders throw Palestinians who "misbehave." The cell is intended for security suspects, but all too often people who dare to argue with the soldiers are thrown in there, or held in another sort of punishment cell at other checkpoints.

In tens of thousands of homes in the West Bank live others, who may have not ended up in the hospital, but who every day accumulate harsh impressions of the nature and behavior of almost the only Israelis whom they encounter - the soldiers at the checkpoints. The non-Palestinians who pass through the checkpoints can also reach a similar conclusion - that most of the soldiers stationed at them are crude, arrogant, boastful and definitely hardhearted. All too often it appears that the soldiers intentionally cause the line of cars and people to dawdle at a checkpoint for a very long time. All too often they are seen laughing and grinning at the sight of the hundreds of people jostling and crowding in the slow line behind the narrow inspection turnstile.

The Palestinians are not interested in, and do not need to be interested in, the explanations that Israel will give: It's a difficult mission; the soldiers are afraid; maybe someone will come bearing an explosive belt; they're young, still children; they're defending the homeland; if they weren't posted at checkpoints in the middle of the West Bank, suicide terrorists would be free to enter Israel.

The truth is that even the soldiers' parents should not be interested in these explanations. They should, however, be very worried about their country sending their sons and daughters on an apartheid mission: to restrict Palestinian mobility within the occupied territory, to narrow the Palestinian expanse in order to enable Jews to move freely within that same occupied territory and in order to increase their expanse within it. In order to carry out this mission in full, facing the natives, the soldiers must feel and act like "superiors."

Breaking the fast - Ramadan under occupation

2006-11-15T12:14:00.000-08:00

Hardly anyone I know lives up to her legends like Al-Quds (Jerusalem) does. The grand old lady of violent faith - chalky and inviting in daylight, golden and shimmering at sunset, forbidding yet enticing at night. I sit up in a garret-hole above Damascus Gate, where Israeli taxis will not normally take you. The call for prayer will sound in about ten minutes and already the crowd below my feet is starting to move as one body toward the dome of Al Aqsa. The gate opens up to a marketplace and a small amphitheatre-like arrangement of steps, with street vendors perched along every row. It is the next to last Friday of Ramadan and I cannot believe that I am here. It is wrong. It hardly means anything to me except what I can superimpose on the event from my own holy days. The matted shine from the bauble-shaped lights hanging on crisscrossed wires above the streets remind me of Santa Lucia with candlewax dripping onto her hair. The shooting star hung up next to where I’m sitting makes my mouth water after hot spicy wine and saffron buns.

I have climbed over a fence to get here, walked along the perimeter of the Old City wall in order to enjoy the sight of Muslim women and men flowing through the streets to their prayers. But I already know that there will be no familiar faces in the crowd. Earlier today, I hung around Qalandiya checkpoint for a couple of hours before midday prayers. Qalandiya looks like an air terminal. It is a huge complex of parking-lots, taxi-stands and automated turnstiles, x-ray machines with conveyor belts and metal detectors, obnoxious signs asking people to “empty their pockets”, wait their turn “patiently” and to “enjoy a safe and pleasant stay”. The letters of these signs are gradually being removed, the yellow plastic scratched and unintelligible. Orders are barked out by way of a loudspeaker system that continuously breaks down and soldiers rarely leave their booths.

Sometimes, the turnstiles are left open or malfunction, allowing people to run through the checkpoint. The week before, Israeli soldiers and police gassed and beat people with batons after about 300 people had made their way through the terminal in this way, desperate to reach Al-Quds before the prayers. This week, police were standing in two lines outside the terminal, refusing people entry into the waiting-area and even the parking-lot. Checking IDs, they claimed that the checkpoint was closed to all men under the age of 40, even if they had wasted hours in queues to obtain permits issued by the District Coordination Office (a civil administration division of the Israeli Occupation Forces). There was very little resistance this week. Only sighs and suppressed anger.

Beating their batons on the metal sheet walls of the terminal and shouting into the ears of people with their megaphones, the police quickly dispersed the crowd. An hour later, a row of abut 15 men stood facing the same white metal sheets with their heads bowed down. Thinking that they had been detained, I rushed toward them, only to realize that they were praying. No one could bare to look at them as they prostrated themselves in front of the terminal, renamed to the Israeli Atorot, not even the policemen themselves.

I thought of my friends who right at that moment were probably waiting in line at Huwarra or Beit Iba checkpoint, places just as ugly and disgusting as the terminal in front of my eyes. Of how arguments would probably start to simmer among the fasting, tired people and how that would break the spirit of Ramadan so carefully kept since the morning. I have seen how soldiers take care not to insult people during Ramadan, instead lounging around their post, closing the checkpoint at will, wasting people’s time even more than usual. I have heard how Israeli commanders admit, not without pride, to enjoying the sight of so many suffering irritable people, to purposefully making them wait a couple of more hours in the blistering sun. I have seen how they smile as two old women start to yell at- and beat one another with their bags, arguing about who jumped the line. The generosity and forgiveness of the holy month that are now revealed to be sullied and fragile, without any relevance to the lives led here in the wretched corners of the earth.

I know that many people, men and women, would risk many years of imprisonment and even torture in order to be able to reach the Al-Aqsa mosque. They dream of sneaking around checkpoints and falsifying permits – all desperate strategies at last foiled by their concern for their loved ones, the urgent demands of family life. With thousands of extra border police milling about the Old City and setting up checkpoints at every street corner, it would be almost impossible for a Nablusian without a permit to pass unnoticed.

That is why I am sitting here, marveling at the beauty of rooftops at nightfall, hoping that at least someone will be able to relive this night vicariously through my words when I return to Nablus, and trying to block out the cold. A cold I imagine that my friend Azem would not be able to feel, were he able to get here. As one more man is turned back by a garish blonde policewoman at his last checkpoint, I wonder how far he has traveled, looking for clues as to his origin from his style of dress. Looking at his face, her small manicured hands waving nonchalantly in front of it, it feels like something just broke that cannot be fixed.

Saying goodbye

2006-11-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

The day before yesterday, I was talking to my mother on the phone, trying to persuade her to come visit me in Palestine. She was tempted. And I started planning what we would see in the week she would spend here, who we would talk to, where we would sit down and have tea. My mother and I were talking on the phone, in a bubble of first-world assurance that we would see each other again. Yesterday, only a few hours after we had hung up the phone, I woke up to a completely different reality. Sharp cracks and screams had rung throughout the night, as Israeli forces invaded Ein Beit El Ma refugee camp in the early hours of the morning.

As soon as they entered, the Israeli military started to fire teargas, concussion grenades and live ammunition into the streets and narrow alleyways of the camp. Returning fire, a group of seven or eight resistance fighters were quickly pinpointed and surrounded. 20 or more houses are occupied around them, the families evicted downstairs to sleep on mattresses behind frontdoors. An elderly lady and her daughter are woken up at half past 4 in the morning by a concussion grenade right outside their window. Unable to go back to sleep, they move into the livingroom and wait for things to calm down. Ten minutes later, 12 Israeli soldiers make a hole in the wall between their neighbours and them with a sledgehammer. While entering the home with large black dogs on leashes, they push a heavy wardrobe onto the bed where the two women had been sleeping only moments before. After locking mother and daughter into the kitchen, they proceed to shoot from their bedroom window for over five hours.

Another elderly lady a couple of blocks away is worried about her three year-old grandson who is being held by soldiers upstairs along with his parents and siblings. As I knock on the door I am surprised to hear a reply. A soldier is telling me to fuck off or he will kill me by blowing up the door. The same door that he is standing behind. At last he opens the door but I can’t see him, only his gun. A second soldier is standing in front of him, his arms shaking and sweat streaming down his temples. Ten minutes, he says. Ten minutes and we will be gone. After three minutes, they evacuate, leaving a large hole in one of the outer walls, punching a hole in the top of a martyr-poster where the head is supposed to be. Other houses exhibit greater devastation – shards of glass hanging from broken window-frames, half-empty tin cans of Israeli sweetcorn and yoghurt stuck in vases and fruit baskets, overturned beds with rubble piled on top of them, childrens’ stuffed toys sliced open and sullied.

The resistance fighters want to leave. I watch as they pull flimsy leopardprint and flowery dresses over their black and green, recognized worldwide as the uniform of the streets. One of them forgets his mendil, and his sister runs after him with it clutched in her hands. It is light purple and looks soft, like she has just wrenched it off her own head. I hope it still carries some of her scented warmth in its fabric as he wraps it around his bearded face. The tall, gangly frames look awkward in the dresses, even with the soft padding of the military style jackets underneath. Some of them are wise and take the time to laugh and adjust each other’s headscarves. One looks like a young girl, serious and heartbreakingly earnest. One of their little brothers stands holding dresses and long coats over his arm, afraid for his older friends and heroes. The guns lay wrapped in the swaths of hiked-up skirt as they dash through the alleyway one by one, live ammunition overhead, the last one triumphantly shooting down the street at the soldiers before making his way out of the camp.

They survive, the quiet fear in their eyes gradually replaced by rowdy gratefulness. Allahu akbar. And they are gone.

One of their companions had been shot in the waist a few hours earlier while patrolling the streets. His name was Baha’ and he was 26 years old. A doctor tried to get to him in an ambulance but the Israeli soldiers would not let him enter the camp so he bled to death in a relative’s home. As I enter the camp at 7 o’clock in the morning, the mosques are announcing his death, and the cries of grieving defiance ring out. Rocks, bottles and pieces of wood are hurled in the direction of the soldiers. This time they do not return fire.

Teargas lingers in invisible clouds outside Baha’s home, off the main street leading out from Nablus city. I walk with Baha’s mother and little brother through the camp. I know she is behind me because I hear her stifling her sobs as best she can. Finally, we arrive and enter into the kitchen. Baha’s body lies outstretched on a mattress, his shoed feet sticking out at the bottom and his jaw tied up with gauze. He appears to be sleeping, a duvet carefully tucked over him up to his shoulders. His cheeks look smooth and gaunt, a babyface. We have the same chin, jutting out in a slight underbite. He looks determined. Like he is in pain but does not want his mother to notice. Better not to say anything. The feeling in the room says that he was a good loving son. At least that will make the goodbyes a little easier.

His mother is crying freely now, running her hands through his cropped hair and along his shoulders and arms, kneading his knuckles between her palms. She is reminding him of something funny he said last week, bowing down her head close to his so that only he can hear her whispers, occasionally overcome with frantic grief and offering it to the world, to anyone who will take it. She beats her cheeks and rocks to and fro. The women are soon joined by neighbouring men, stamping their feet and shaking their heads at the tragedy like horses at flies. Soon they are shooed out and told to come to the funeral instead. There are still soldiers in the camp and we do not wish to attract too much attention to the place.

They abduct two young volunteers with the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC). They were standing at the outskirts of the camp waiting for permission to enter in their ambulance, when they are snatched, handcuffed and blindfolded, bundled into a jeep. There are crowds of young boys on the streets and they start to hurl rocks and big boulders onto the military vehicles, rocking the jeep with the two young men in it. I wonder what they are thinking. They are later released, none the worse for wear except for chafed wrists, after lots of phonecalls have been made to various military units. Alhamdulillah for friends in high places and with white faces.

We leave to find a stretcher for the funeral, sneaking through the camp only to find that the soldiers have left. It is 11 o’clock and the children pouring out onto the streets on tired sleepless legs look grey and drawn. There is a car dumped upside down on the refuge between the car lanes, a pole sticking up through one of its side-windows. A dear friend tells me later that the pettiness of the violence disgusts her. It is devoid of all meaning, good or bad. Other cars are turned upside-down, smashed or thrown into ditches. Two bulldozers have been charging up and down the camp all morning, narrowly missing one of the ambulances, letting their blades hover above people’s heads and homes before crashing onto the tarmac below. I do not know why.

The funeral takes place half an hour later. PFLP flags are unfurled and duets about mothers and sons blare out of a car stereo. Men shoot into the air and everyone chants. The body is carried on a stretcher high above people’s heads and Baha’s mother faints as she says a second, more hurried goodbye among the crowd. I retreat to a couch in one of the post-occupied homes, drinking a cup of tea with Lubna, an 11 year-old girl now propped up against me trying to keep awake. Her brother and I read a text message from a mutual friend, congratulating us on Palestine’s independence day, the 14th November. It is sad enough to warrant a smile. Lubna’s father has spent the entire night waiting at a checkpoint in the freezing cold, worrying about his children in the camp but unable to reach them. He speaks about his life in such poetry and saves my day without even trying. Two of his sons are in prison, four outside. He turns to my friend and says, for the tenth time, that he is not attacking her. Only her government. He has nothing but love for the American people. If he did not, he would say so, for his words flow directly and unmediated from his heart.

We are welcome to share his tears and his laughter. His words sit in my ears like cotton wool as I walk through the narrow alleyways of the camp one last time. Friendly eyes peer out from behind lace curtains, people are still up and busy tidying the mess left by the soldiers. Muddy footprints on floors and mattresses are scrubbed away, glass scooped up into cardboard boxes and lifted out onto the streets, holes in walls stuffed with towels and bedlinen. Stories are shared and compared, the morning’s heroes appointed. Words and cutlery all tucked away into history - the bustle of everyday existence must be allowed to continue quickly, the children must be allowed to feel that they are alive amongst the living. And so life is jumpstarted once again.

Tales of the prophets: harvesting in the shadow of the settlements

2006-10-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

“He turned his walking-stick into a giant snake that swallowed up all the others’ tiny snakes. And so the Pharoah knew that Moses was a prophet and not just a simple magician.” Rada, 29 years old, is telling us stories while we kneel along the edges of the tarpaulins picking up stray olives from the ground. Her voice is soft and soothing, almost like song, even though her English is taken directly from North American sit-coms. She especially likes Seinfeld and Friends.

Rada’s family are spread out along a mountain ridge some 300 metres from the Israeli settlement of Itamar, just west of Rujeeb village outside of Nablus city. The village is effectively an expansion of Balata refugee camp, built by families wishing to escape the insecurity and cramped environment of their former home. Perched on branches and standing on the ground pulling the olives off of the boughs with nimble fingers, we are cheerful but guarded. Despite the pretty surroundings and the spring-like weather, it is difficult to forget that the settlement houses and the perimeter fence with its alarmed gate loom menacingly behind our backs.

A settler militia van comes driving along the road and an armed settler steps out, opens the gate and looks around. A military jeep hurries behind it, screeches to a halt and soldiers step out to converse with the, seemingly self-appointed, settler deputy. After five minutes, both vehicles drive off and we discover that we have been holding our breaths all the while.

The day proceeds quietly. We finish picking the trees closest to the settlement and move on to a second plot of land adjacent to the settler by-pass road. In the morning, soldiers tell the international pickers present to get out of the area as it is a so-called “red zone”, implying that only people officially residing in Rujeeb may be there. Their will to enforce this rule, however, seems halfhearted and we are not interrupted again.

As we walk back toward the village, with Rada singing a Sami Yusuf tune written in ode to his mother, we pass through a valley flanked by the main settlements and outposts of Elon Moreh and Itamar. Rada’s husband tells us about how settlers planted a bomb under the car of the mayor of a nearby village, crippling him for life, after he had brought the settlement’s claims of land ownership to the Israeli Supreme Court and won.

We decide to meet tomorrow at the same time and wave goodbye to the children, wishing them a goodnight in the village accent that they have tried to teach us all day. It has been a good day, promising plenty of good days to come. Welcome to the olive harvest in Nablus, where harvesting is resisting.

Hate does not come easy

2006-10-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

“I tell my children it’s my fault that our house was demolished. I say that because daddy didn’t have a building permit, I broke the law and so they had to tear it down. I would rather they believe this than that they be angry about the truth. I want them to grow up without being full of hate so that they can concentrate on school and on building a future for themselves.”

The 15-year old house of Hani Totah, proud father of six children and one Arabian thoroughbred mare, was demolished upon orders by Israeli police in November 2005. A year later, he now sits in his brother’s living-room explaining why he feels compelled to lie to his own children. “I want a good life for my children. But how can we have peace when the Israelis want their own house, but won’t let me have one? And the Israelis want their children to grow up to be doctors and engineers, but want my children to be homeless criminals?”

Totah’s house is but one of about one hundred family homes in the East Jerusalem district of Wadi Ij-Juus that have been targeted for demolition. The reason offered for this is that the houses are built too close to the Jerusalem Wall, although Totah and his neighbours are certain that the Israeli authorities simply do not want Palestinian communities to erect buildings within the confines of the city. Yet with rents prohibitively inflated, there is little other choice than to build one’s own house, especially for families with children.

Having earlier been forced out of the rather exclusive inner-city neighbourhood of Qatamon, Totah’s family are now once again being chased off their land. A former rubbish-dumping site, Wadi Ij-Juus is now seen as increasingly attractive for expansion of the Old City’s tourist facilities and contractors have long been eager to exploit the area. Israeli police and judiciary have also long tried to pressure Totah into relinquishing his land – a decision that he says would not be up to him alone but to the entire family as they are all old Jerusalemites and intimately connected to this “the most beautiful” of Palestinian cities.

Tired of waiting, the authorities then decided to take the issue into their own hands. As Totah summarised it; “If we sell, they buy. If we don’t sell, they take the land anyway.” Without prior notice, they arrived in the middle of the day in order to tear the house down. Upon receiving a phone call from his frantic wife who at the time was home alone, Totah had to force his way through the police barricades blocking all the entrances to the valley and the doorway to his own home.

Confused and angry, he attempted to dissuade the police and demolition workers present from going through with the demolition, explaining that they had received no warning. It was explained to him later on that what the authorities usually do is go to homes at times when they assume no one will be home, stick a notice on the door, take a picture, remove the notice and then leave. Totah hurried to the Israeli court in order to have the demolition order overturned. With the help of a lawyer, his emergency petition was successful and a court official informed the Israeli police at the scene of their decision to halt the demolition.

As soon as the police heard this, the bulldozer was put to work, eating away at the red-tiled roof. By the time Totah’s eldest son arrived home from school all that remained of the former family home was a large pile of cracked walls and tangled wires. His father, up until then having channelled his sorrow and anger into action, could no longer contain himself as he saw the tears roll down his son’s cheeks. Occasionally stopping to salvage some belonging identified among the rubble, Totah stumbled about blinded by tears and disbelief.

As if this was not enough, Totah and his family are now forced to pay 420 NIS every month until year 2012 to cover the municipality’s expenses for the demolition and the massive police presence. The thick stack of bills and receipts is a constant reminder of the violent injustice of the Israeli legal system visavis Palestinian citizens.

Israeli media were quick to cover the story, an American embassy official was there to witness the destruction and all the Palestinian political factions expressed their vehement condemnation of the act. Although comforted by these expressions of support, the family were in dire need of practical help. After having spent two weeks crowded into a small canvas tent donated by the Red Cross, one of Totah’s brothers insisted that they move in with him. The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, ICAHD, has since taken upon itself to locate funding for rebuilding the house and in helping with the construction.

The rebuilding has, however, not been easy. The municipality has repeatedly warned the Palestinian construction workers that if they proceed with the work, they might be arrested and two workers have indeed been detained and later dropped off outside of a Jerusalem checkpoint. International volunteers from Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) and International Solidarity Movement (ISM) today joined in the work in order to act as some sort of deterrence against police interference. As wooden rafters were being hammered into place overhead, internationals cleared the broken tiles and other rubble from off what will eventually become the floor of the house.

Totah’s young boys eagerly joined in, shovelling stones and shards of glass into buckets with their bare hands. Every once in a while, they would stop to listen to their father explaining how beautiful their home used to be, snuggled in between friendly neigbours and with lovingly tended flowerbeds at the back – now a pile of rubble, a home, a crime-scene. As they sifted through a pile of sand, one of the boys found a collection of shiny stickers which he carefully dusted off and put in his pocket. He glanced up at one of the international volunteers, flashing a shy little smile, as if embarrassed over his sudden nostalgia.

In the afternoon, a cement truck arrived and the construction workers proceeded to guide a giant hose spitting out wet cement at high speed around the roof. Half-way, the cement supply ran out and the second truck had not yet arrived. A few tense phone calls later, it was explained that the missing truck was stuck at a checkpoint somewhere in Jerusalem. Totah sat himself down on a rock to wait. “I look calm but my heart is beating hard in my chest. They have to hurry, the police could be here at any minute and that would be it.” Fortunately, the truck arrived only moments later and the work could continue. Now, the cement must be let to dry for at least five days and so work is suspended until after Eid.

It is estimated that the house, which when finished will be about half the size of the original home, will take a couple of more weeks to complete. Until then, Totah and his family are still living with one of his brothers. For two of his other brothers, the home demolition proved the last straw. Afraid for their families’ safety, they now live in the USA and have no plans on returning to Palestine in the near future. “You must understand”, Totah says. “We are from Jerusalem, not Nablus or Ramallah or Bethlehem. We have more then 300 years of history in this very area. If we cannot live here, we would rather move to somewhere completely different.”

Grateful for the fact that no one was injured during the demolition operation and that his family is still united and strong, Totah seems determined to face the future with the careful optimism of someone who has decided once and for all to overcome every obstacle. “Hate does not come easy”, he remarks as we are watching the video footage of his house mercilessly being torn down, “but these kinds of things make people so angry they lose their minds. I do not want this to happen to my children. And it does not have to happen to them. The only way to win is through love. When you love people and people love you, there is no one who can beat you. When you rule by force of power, you are always under threat.”

Today

2006-10-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

Today was a day not much different from any other day in Palestine. You could be forgiven for feeling that there is not much need to distinguish between today and tomorrow, today and yesterday. You would be wise to forgive people for crumbling under the weight of a relentless present. Yet the days are separable through the little spaces of joy created by people here. People determined to live. And lives are organized in a chronology of sorrows. In this way, the meeting is 14 days after the old man from Kafr Qallil was shot in the leg while enjoying the early evening breeze on his veranda. And the baby was born two months after the death of his uncle.

Today was different in so many ways. This morning, two young resistance fighters were given a knapsack filled with bread, boiled eggs, fresh thyme, cucumbers and bags of tamarind juice. An elderly woman took pity on the men, who are unable to sleep at their families’ homes for fear of arrest, and decided to treat them to a Ramadan breakfast worthy of kings. They savoured the flavour of friendship seated on the cool stone slabs of a beautifully arched Old City doorway, laughing at sugar–saturated boys throwing fire-crackers under the feet of sleepy-eyed and irritable early risers.

An hour later, a bunch of sleepy-eyed international solidarity activists joined a family in the eastern village of Azmut in picking olives. They climbed trees, so old they have names, which have remained untouched by Palestinian hands for more then 10 years due to harassment from Israeli colonists from Elon More settlement. They giggled and joked as they worked, a fine film of dust lining their nostrils and lending all the world a faint fragrance of summer rain on dirty tarmac. They sewed up big white bags full of olives and packed them onto a surly donkey, its thin little legs stumbling over rocks and bracken. They ignored tired young soldiers on ridiculous missions, finishing when they wanted to finish and not a minute before.

As the group worked, thousands of Palestinian men and women stood held up at checkpoints straining their shoulders and their minds to keep their young children and valuables above their heads to avoid them being crushed by the soldiers’ fervour to subjugate. Young men were detained while trying to go around, their faces beaten and their plans for the afternoon shattered as the soldiers decided to set an example and keep them there for 6 hours. After 45 minutes an off-duty settler cop in an orange kippa arrived to gloat and smoke cigarettes in front of the fasting men. Students, budding farmers, shopkeepers and bankers – all this besides the point, all reduced to men sitting cross-legged on the ground opposite a truck parking-lot.

As the men waited, a Hamas city council member was shot by Fateh gunmen and hospitalised. Palestinian society was seen internally combusting in the pressure-cooker called occupation and armed guards swarmed around the municipality building. Women told their taxi drivers to speed past the site and even the teenage boys stayed out of sight for the first few hours.

As the Hamas politician struggled to survive, a 12 year-old boy from Beit Furik was fatally shot in the stomach by one of a gang of Israeli colonists come down to steal sheep from the village or deal out some other blow to the Palestinians people’s chances of survival. The boy was playing with his pet dog in a field when the bullet killed him. A police report was filed and an investigation is to start tomorrow. But we can already say today that this investigation will lead absolutely nowhere. This is how the days here intertwine, this is how we travel through time, this is how the future is held and foreseen today. Time makes sense and is given meaning here only when projected through the prism of hopeless pragmatism.

Early afternoon, a father and his daughter were told that their trip to Salem was in fact a waste of time and money as their son/brother had already been given his verdict two days prior. They returned to Nablus in dismayed silence, not having seen even a glimpse of their loved one. They bought steaming and sweet knaafe for the son’s mother on their way home but then threw it away in the doorway, the contrast to her red-rimmed eyes turning their stomachs. As the soldiers entered the camp that same night, the youngest sister sat bolt upright in her bed near the window willing the soldiers to see her and shoot her dead with one bullet to the brain. Her big sister saw her craning her head out of the window and read her mind, pulled her inside and turned the radio on ever so quietly. Together they danced and embraced in the night, until the sadness had ached out of their limbs and they could go to bed once more.

As Israeli officials carelessly delivered the news to the imprisoned son’s father, a group of Palestinians and Israelis were chopping away at a roadblock, dust and contrary orders flying through the sticky air. Soldiers arrived. They were ignored. Shovels were wrangled out of people’s grips. They used their hands and feet. Arms were grabbed. The group was united. At last, an opening could be seen among the multi-ton cement blocks, glaring like the gap of promise in the mouth of a six year-old who has just yanked out his front tooth. His gums still bleeding, the six year-old triumphantly walked up the hill with the rest of the villagers, their victory accentuated by loud chants and clapping of hands.

Meanwhile, a recently arrested man was put into isolation. Unable to stand up straight or lie down in the tiny cell, he crouched and prepared himself for the fortnight to come. A second man, arrested 11 days ago from his bed, was let out of isolation only to be beaten unconscious by five prison guards. On this his 20th day, a third man was locked into the fanciest hotel room he has ever seen on TV to recover from his wounds. A beautiful voluptuous woman unlocked the door and entered the room. She walked toward him and smiles, slipped behind him and began to massage his shoulders, sore from fear and determination. She pulled her fingers through his hair and kissed his neck lightly. He clenched his fists and prayed aloud to Allah while a camera silently took pictures of the scene. A fourth man was shown pictures of himself sitting on a double-bed with a woman. He was told that if he didn’t talk these pictures would be sent to his mother and father, his boss and his principal. The man thought for a while and then asked if he could have a copy for himself as well. He does not remember what happened next.

Late afternoon, the streets were left without human company. The trash flew about unhindered and the cats prowled without danger. An occasional taxi-car screeched and swerved around corners, carrying hungry dry-mouthed people laden with sweets. It is Ramadan and time to break the fast. The last remnants of the day’s sunlight were reflected in shop-windows and billboards. Everything was bathed in a golden shimmer and I loved the Nablus of Ramadan with its rumbling stomachs and its prayers to the extra-ordinarily attentive divine.

This evening, hundreds of children went to bed with good food in their stomachs and sweet words in their ears. And hundreds of other children went to bed still hungry despite their mothers’ best efforts. Teenage girls read romantic novels hidden under their pillows to calm themselves enough to be able to succumb to sleep. Young boys, their futures still clearly staked-out and devoid of the dilemmas of adulthood, fall asleep before the woolly blankets with the giant flower motifs have even been tucked around them.

Today was a day not much different from any other day in Palestine. Yet it was special in all its joys and sorrows and it will be remembered by all of us who survived it.

Settlers try to break us

2006-09-24T05:59:00.000-07:00

As we walk away down the craggy biblical landscape, she turns around to wag her finger at him and say “Remember… it is no defense to say you were only following orders.” The soldier looks perplexed and puts his hands out, letting his gun hang down from its strap. He looks like he’s struggling to find an appropriate reply - the insult of her words, echoing the Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, hitting him hard.

The soldier, an Officer, is guarding a military outpost adjacent to Susiya settlement. The woman, a representative of Ta’ayush, an Israeli anti-occupation group, is visiting the Palestinian villagers in the area with activists from Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP). On Monday, soldiers from this outpost accompanied seven young armed settlers to the home of an elderly couple where they watched as the settlers pushed, taunted and beat the old man and woman with sticks.

This happened four days ago but the officer on guard says that it is impossible. “It could not have happened. If I find out about any of my soldiers are doing a thing like that, I will beat his ass. I will break his bones.” Nevertheless, Haj Khalil’s legs are now sore and swollen from the beating, one of the bones in his calf fractured. His wife buries her head in her hands as he talks, punctuating his sentences with nods and sighs of despair.

“It is very important for us to have internationals here. They must be here always. Otherwise they will come again,” says Haj Khalil. Ta’ayush, PSP and Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron are planning to collaborate on creating a permanent international presence in the area. The villagers, dotted about on the barren slopes of the Susiya valley, with solar cell panels and home-made TV antennas breaking off from the otherwise traditionally Bedouin homesteads made up of tents, goat pens and snarling watchdogs, all regularly fall victim to settler aggression and military complicity.

Furthermore, the villagers have been unable to tend to or even visit their olive groves for several years. The trees surround an Israeli military base, one grove right next to a field used by the soldiers for shooting practice. Among the trees, lie discarded result charts, shot-through pieces of paper showing how soldiers learn how to “zero in” on their targets. The military wish the entire area from Susiya settlement to the large town of Yatta to be evacuated of all Palestinian civilian populations, to make it what Israel calls a “free fire zone.” This process has been frozen due to stern non-violent resistance on the part of the Palestinians living in the area, but is legally difficult to challenge since Israeli courts generally do not meddle with what they regard as being ‘professional assessments’ by military experts on issues of security.

The settlers from Susiya, established in the mid-80s around the same time that many Palestinian families were forced to move from their cave homes nearby to make way for Israeli archeological excavations, did not approach the villagers today. The settlers stood by the soldiers, their white clothing breaking off from drab military wear and red earth. Their little girls wore long skirts and colorful ribbons in their hair, playing with a pet dog as they skipped back to the settlement. Haj Khalil, leaning on his walking-stick, shook his head in silence.

The villagers of Susiya all have their own stories to tell about the fathers and brothers of these little settler girls. Most of them have bruises or scars to support their accounts of hooded men setting their tents on fire in the middle of the night, cracking their skulls open with the butts of their rifles or slashing their arms with a knife. All of them have learned that the official Israeli military policy stating that soldiers should protect both Palestinians and Israeli settlers is a sham – that while the Israeli military may sit and bond over a glass of wine with the settlers, they come to Susiya only to watch the oppression unfurl.

Devoid of protection from both the legal and military institutions of Israeli society, the Bedouin of Susiya are left to fend for themselves, and therefore invoke the support of Palestinian, international and Israeli solidarity initiatives. The villagers remain determined to continue living as they have always done, and each new breath, each stone overturned, each drop of goat’s milk bears witness to the steadfastness of their resistance.

Anarchists from Lebanon & Israel in roundtable discussion - by Qursana

2006-09-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

www.qursana.blogspot.com

According to the Lebanese and Israeli governments (though more applied in Lebanon), communication between Israeli and Lebanese citizens is prohibited and in some cases punished with a court-martial. For this, this is an illegal roundtable – part of it was a defying, challenging and painful conversation that did not go smooth without tears, rage, apologies, pain, guilt, affinity, discussion, smiles, and tight embraces. This conversation is not representative of the mass majority of both populations; it is rather an anarchist worm-eye view of the latest Israeli war on Lebanon. Taking part are anarchists who had direct contact with this war on both sides of the border, their meeting was facilitated by networks of global solidarity within autonomous spaces in Europe, and also through the growing global anti-capitalist anti-authoritarian movement. A movement that is witnessing crises, but also signs of life! Anarchists who took part are Eyal and anat, holding Israeli passports; and Hazem and Imad holding Lebanese passports.

Hazem “We have been at war with Israel for as long as I can remember. We lived in an era of fear where each time something goes wrong it’s either the Mossad’s fault or an international Zionist conspiracy (though now it’s the turn of Syria). It is the same story with every totalitarian regime, the never-ending need for an enemy, an enemy that is different from us - with a different culture and different looks. This enemy was always and still is the strongest tool in the hand of such totalitarian regimes in order to install fear and paranoia to shift people’s attention away from the real problem and the meaningless of war. One of the best examples would be the US; at first there was the “commies” and now there is Al Qaeda and “terrorism”, and as a result, US citizens are willingly being stripped of their liberties for “security” while supporting state terrorism. The funniest thing about it is that we as Arabs endlessly criticize U.S. generalizations and ridiculous stereotyping; but when it comes to our “enemy”, we stereotype and let ourselves be blinded by fear and hate.

Do I believe that working with Israeli anarchists is wrong? Hell no! As an anarchist I believe in neither borders nor nations, but not only that; I believe that everyone should know that the road to peace and justice starts locally with people connecting with each other, and only if people knew their rights and practiced their responsibilities through direct democracy. Many Arab regimes have established contact with Israel, Lebanese traitors collaborated with Zionists, and even members of our government did that. So if our oppressors on both sides could arrange among themselves ways to divide power; I do not see a reason for us as militants who are not restricted by borders and nations not to join hands to destroy both of them. I rather see that as a responsibility.”

Imad “Back during the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 , Israel said it wanted to uproot the Palestinian resistance, and the result was severe damage to everything from humans to the environment to infrastructure to the economy. Today, I am 26 and I still do not know what to say about the war. You cannot explain war especially if you have lived it. It is these little moments of mixed feelings of rage, fear, burning urge to fight back, helplessness, nausea, nasal congestion from crying too hard, a driving anger to kick back and as hard as possible. It is all this. This is war for me. The hardest about being away this time was the moment I hang up the phone with my family knowing that in this moment my life goes back to normal and their life goes back to war. My cousin who lives in the southern suburb of Beirut told me on the phone "We know what is coming next; we have our suitcases packed and ready by the door. I am sleeping with my clothes on (she laughed here)! Do not be worried, we have done this before. It is just that sometimes its hard to remember what to do, I mean after such a long time (laughed again)!”

I will never forget the feeling of helplessness that took over me when she refuted my desire to go back by saying “what will you do to help us here? You will be another burden, another person in the car, another person to worry about! There we know you are safe! I told you we have our suitcases ready and just waiting… anytime we will have to move. Stop this nonsense.” This is war for me!

My mother refusing to leave her house in the south at 65 years old, though she was alone with no car nor electricity nor phone, because as she said “I’m too old to move around, there is no electricity anywhere, at least here in my house I know where everything is - even in the dark. I promise if things go really bad, I will leave, I promise. For now they will not drive me out.” This is war for me, this moment of empowerment that my mother felt in staying put despite the danger. It is a rage that this is happening to you again. My family left, and now they return to find property damage, but as they say in the village, thank god it is just the house, good that no one got hurt! This is war, this is the game with Israel, you always try to leave with the least damage and be grateful for it; this is what outrages me the most.”

Eyal “This was the second time that I was in a war in which I actually had some chance of getting hit - the first time was the first war on Iraq in 1991. I was 11 years old then and there was this big public scare. Everybody would wear masks and huddle in sealed rooms for fear of a chemical warhead attack – which fortunately did not occur. This time it was less scary because it was just usual ordnance, though it should have been scarier, since this time more rockets fell. Strangely enough, I sort of blocked that, and didn't feel very afraid. My brother would ask me whether I thought it would be better if he stayed in the hallway near the elevator in our apartment building, and I would tell him "yeah, you go there" so that he would leave me alone. However a lot of other people I know got pretty scared, and some even left town for a while. Unfortunately for them the war dragged on for almost a month and most had to come back without the rocket threat being over.

It was also the first 'actual' war Israel initiated that I experienced, since the conflict with the Palestinians isn't much of a war, it's more of a continuing colonial policing operation with some occasional military campaigns. It was very weird for me to see how the government can simply, like, 'push a few buttons' and people actually just go and fight for it, invade for it, and support it. That was kind of depressing.”

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Why is this war being waged? And what did it mean for you?

Imad “why!!! does it matter? Nothing from this equation will ever make sense! what matters is how! How can Israel after all that it is doing in Palestine, continue to go as far as it did in Lebanon and do it without even a slap on the hand?”

anat “Million reasons, the military always wants to wage wars and especially now that they were planning to make a cut in the defence budget, this was an opportunity to prove the need for a strong military rule over our lives. Olmert and Peretz come from civilian backgrounds, unlike the mass majority of the political strata in Israel, they did not have a military history. They were always criticised about it, and they wanted to prove they are strong. Basically, having taken part in wars is an important key to political jobs in Israel. I also think they were trying to get Syria involved and have an excuse for a US attack on it. They also thought they can terminate Hezbullah and Hassan Nasrallah , as if terminating Hezbullah will kill the chance for another party rise against Israel. To be honest, it is hard for me to see why they did it. It is so ridiculous that it is hard to imagine that anyone could even think of doing that. I feel that this war is about who has the biggest dick. I am being shot at and people are killing in my name and with my money all for this patriarchal honour shit. This war made me sick, and as a woman even sicker.”

Eyal “Actually, I can't say for sure. On one hand, you could say this war got Israel some limited political achievements. Such as an obligation, at least on the official level, of the Lebanese army to go into the south of Lebanon and make it appear as though it was the only armed force there... but otherwise, the war was quite a disaster: Hezbullah was quite effective in many of its forms of attack - in hitting infantry, tanks, and even in some cases special forces and a helicopter. It was shown that Israel could make Hezbullah stop firing rockets - the Israeli leadership made a lot of ridiculous claims when the war started, such as "Hasan Nasrallah will never forget the name Amir Peretz" and I think Olmert said something about wiping Hezbullah off the face of the earth, although maybe it was not as absolute sounding as that. And now there's quite a fallout in Israel on the political level. There's a lot of recrimination amongst the higher-ups, many people are calling for the resignation of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz. Many people see them and this government as a failure.

An important question here is why the U.S. did not restrain Israel - it didn't prevent it from starting the war, nor did it make any effort to curb Israeli military actions or to bring the war to a speedy conclusion - they basically cheered Israel on. Should all this be seen, then, as some preliminary proxy war between the U.S. and Iran? I can't say. I have more questions than answers on this matter.”

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What about Hezbullah , how do you see them?

Eyal “Well, for a fundamentalist Islamist, pro-Statist and not anti-Capitalist organization, you could say Hezbullah is kind of neat.

No, seriously, I definitely agree with the policy of actively resisting the Israeli military presence in Lebanon, including the use of guerrilla warfare. The fact that a lot of the military and probably also financial and logistic support is coming from the Iranian regime doesn’t sit all that well with me; but had I been a deeply religious Shiite I wouldn't have had any trouble taking Iranian aid. I object to most of Hezbullah’s policies - reinforcement of traditional social relations and especially the family, support for the continued existence of the state of Lebanon (albeit not necessarily in its current form) and states in general, but to be honest I don't really know that much about Hezbullah’s position on internal social issues, so maybe they're better (or worse) than I think.”

anat “I support Hezbullah in the way I support the people who are oppressed, but if the current division of power changes I am not going to be able to support them because they are a hierarchical patriarchal power who want to maintain the oppressed and oppressor dichotomy. They want to be the oppressors; because of this I am against them as much as I am against Israel being run with the same dichotomy. But they are very different from Israel, because here it is clear who are the oppressed, and I am always with the oppressed. Israel is different, Israel is not worse than any other capitalist state, the difference is that it is my problem. As someone from an Ashkenazi Israeli background, it is my fucking responsibility”

Imad “Despite my strong ideological and structural disagreements with Hezbullah; it is impossible to condemn the capturing (not kidnapping as mainstream media reports) of the two or put any blame on them concerning the Israeli-waged war. Hezbullah is a religious fundamentalist patriarchal party that I am against like any other. We might meet on using armed struggle against the Israeli war machine, but still we have serious disagreements on numerous levels that¨were manifested during my activism in Lebanon in various political confrontations with them. Even at a personal level, as a person who comes from a Muslim Shiite family, we have had our rounds of conflicts. I can criticize Hezbullah endlessly, and also some of the strategies they used during this war, but I cannot condemn the capturing of the two soldiers, nor their armed struggle against the Israeli military force as much as I will not support any calls for their unconditional disarmament. The capturing was declared as a maneuver to exchange the Lebanese prisoners still held in Israeli prisons since as far back as 1975. What was Israel’s “reaction”? More than 1000 civilian casualties, more than 4000 injured, around a million displaced, estimates of 15000 tons of heavy fuel oil spilled in the Mediterranean , and damage to the infrastructure exceeding 2.8 billion euros… and the meter is still rolling. The amount of damage is unbelievable and the reaction is ridiculously outrageous. And on top of that, because of this war, Hezbullah, unfortunately, were given more public sympathy than they ever had - and funnily enough, it was well deserved to a certain extent. ”

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Can you give us some first-hand overview of the anti-war movement that took place in your respective countries? And what can you say about the responses to the war?

Eyal “What anti-war movement!? It was just the non-Zionist left like it usually is – along with the Palestinian parties, the various progressive NGOs, the miniature Marxist groups, and assorted anarchists, pacifists, LGTBQ activists… etc. (some of the above categories overlap of course). Maybe after the 3rd week some people started to become disillusioned with the war, but there wasn't really any spontaneous mass anti-war activity.”

anat “I want to start with the hardships; the major hardship in these actions was that the amount of hate skyrocketed in the face of not-so radical slogans. We were a very small and mixed group of people, though we were trying to make a committee as wide as possible and have as wide support as possible against the war. We were trying to find the minimal consensus and find the minimum base lines that we could all agree on; so we decided to use an “anti-war” message, Stop the Bombing, Stop the War, Release All Prisoners, Cease fire now with no preliminary demands; very bland message not the most radical thing to say like anti-Zionism. It was a very simple message to stop the war and that Israel is responsible. For example this basic message was a legitimate political opinion at the end of the previous war on Lebanon not a majority opinion but part of a legitimate mainstream political discourse. Suddenly it became the most treacherous thing to say, the most offensive thing you can say to an Israeli. The majority of the people who stopped to react to our actions where wishing we would die. People were coming ready with eggs to throw at us. One of the demonstrators who parked her car near the demo was followed home by some right wing people who beat her mother with sticks when she opened the door. Some received phone calls threatening to throw a grenade at the demonstration reminding us of a previous incident in 1983 where they actually killed an anti-war demonstrator in that way. This was the amount of hate shown against a mere anti-war statement; they saw it as a real threat. The mainstream was narrowed, the people understood the Stop the War slogan as kill all Jews. The reactions were ridiculous. For them everything in this war, that they think Israel got caught in, was justified. If there is a doubt that some civilian area is linked to Hezbullah, this is enough to bomb it. Everyone acted with the mentality of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD (Soviet secret police) during Stalinism, who said in response to the news about the terrors of the Stalin regime that “better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away, when you chop wood, chips fly.” For Israel, everything was and still is, when you chop wood, chips fly.

The police were real bastards but it also depends on where the action was. In Tel Aviv for example they were beating people. But in Haifa, where it has always been the case that the police there are less violent than those in Tel Aviv, they did not beat us, but rather they encouraged the right wing demonstrators to beat us. In Haifa they were excessive in detaining people and trying to put them under house arrest just for holding an anti-war vigil. Later they started to protect us more and not let the right wing attack us much; on the other hand they escalated the violence in Tel Aviv where for example during the demo at Dan Halutz’s (Israel´s chief of staff) house they were beating the demonstrators and violently chasing them. There were several fainting cases and people who needed to go to a hospital.

The Israeli media had it all the same, this was a justified war and Israel was caught up in it. They wanted it to appear as a war against Israel and that Israel was forced to react. That was the common discourse, no discussion on whether the war was right or wrong just technicalities: such as if they go into Lebanon as far as Litany or where they were later, or if they let infantry troops in or not. It was o.k. to be critical about how the frontline fighting was handled but not talking about an end to this madness. When we did get some coverage it was very little, for example we had a demonstration almost everyday, and the media would tell us that they cannot cover today’s demo because they covered yesterday’s demo. We got more interviews from foreign media, and even Arabic media which was something we really wanted. We were mentioned several times on LBCI (Lebanese satellite TV channel). I even heard that Hezbullah’s Radio, El Nour, mentioned that they condemn the brutal treatment of the demonstrators in Tel Aviv.

In Haifa, on what the Haifa people call the first day of war, when a Katyusha hit the train station and killed 8 people, on the 16th of July four days after the war started for the Lebanese, a group of women who decided to start a women anti-war group went to the train station to protest and send a message through the mainstream media that was present. They were told by channel ten that they cannot report this action because there is no such thing as an anti-war movement. They had the nerve to deny us even when we were there. In Tel Aviv there were 4000-5000 people in one demo , and in Haifa maybe 300, not to mention other places, but still they acted as if we did not exist.

What was inspiring was that the weekly demos at the Apartheid Wall continued, organised by Palestinians along side with the ISM , Anarchists Against the Wall and others; and so did the repression even though Israel managed to shift the world’s attention from what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon. Just recently, on the 11th of August, they shot an Israeli lawyer and activist Lymor Goldstein in Bil’in with rubber-coated bullets at close range, sending him into coma. We cannot forget what is happening in Gaza and also that the wall is continuing its path! During the recent war on Lebanon they killed around 23 people in Gaza in one day but no one was talking about it. The people of Gaza are being starved and denied urgent medical care. It is completely crazy - Gaza is a huge concentration camp where they are slowly killing people.”

Hazem “I remember having a great laugh listening to my dad asking himself where are the Arabs while we are being bombed? Wondering where is the whole world and how can they accept this? Well they accept this and do not react the same way we did not react to the war on Iraq or the way we don’t give a flying fuck about people starving to death in Africa. Most of the Lebanese anti-war movement was based on nationalist and/or economical/political interests. As for the small amount of leftist activists or pseudo-parties they were too weak to make a real statement or take a proactive position without taking into consideration the reaction of the blinded population.

The Lebanese anti-war movement’s work focused on the relief efforts that in majority did not differ from the mainstream political mentality. The mainstream political parties did their usual routine by sending their members to show face in refugees’ centres bargaining on more public support for their party. These same parties that forced their presence and flags on independent relief centres started their work a week after the war started. They began spending big amounts of money on their publicity while asking people to donate before they even started doing work on the ground. For example the World Food program donated 10 tons of food to one of the relief centres who had paid employees delivering the food with more than 20 camerapersons filming the food distribution on refugees.

Many mainstream organisations said they cannot reach south of Lebanon and thus cannot deliver aid. We proved this wrong with our actions. 7 activists from RASH managed to get to the south and deliver food on their feet. The parties did not want to risk their lives. At first everyone took us as a joke especially when we refused to take donations unless it came from individuals or radical organisations and still managed to deliver around a ton of food to people in the south who were under siege. I have to note all respect to the Samidoun(stemming from the Sanayeh relief centre) that managed to create a grassroots coalition for people whose intention is to help out.”

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On the Lebanese side, there was a communiqué issued recently by the so-called “Libertarian Communist Alternative” from Lebanon that was circulated on certain anarchist/anti-authoritarian websites/lists and created a stir, what do you think about that?

Hazem “I find it shameful. It describes the current government that recently took power as pre-revolutionary, which is crap. This government is based on the common interest of - strangely enough - extremely different parties on the ideological level; parties that feed on anti-Syrian racism. I’m not discussing the retrieval of the Syrian troops, but about the forms of violence that faced Syrian civilians in Lebanon who anyway were already being exploited and discriminated against. The Libertarian Communist Alternative never showed up to any actions, we never saw them anyway on the field, and they refused to meet with us. I can write pages criticising them, but I will not waste my time, they are insignificant, it is not the brand of your organisation that makes you an anarchist.”

Imad “Have to say I never heard of them as a group, for example the name of the group was new to me. I heard about one guy in Beirut who is part of this so-called group but I do not know if it is for sure, nor who the rest are… that is if there is a rest. As for the communiqué, it does not represent me nor the politics I define as libertarian or anarchist. On the local front, it sees hope in the 14th of March alliance which is a capitalist alliance between the ruling class in Lebanon which is corrupt, capitalist, and feeding on people’s misery and actively contributing to it. Many from this alliance can be easily linked to parties and political currents responsible for crimes against humanity, not just during the Lebanese civil war, but also against the Palestinian population in Lebanon. Such an alliance, so-called “movement”, can never be something to look forward to nor see any hope in but rather fight against. This communiqué reminds me of the Iraqi opposition outside of Iraq that was supporting that US war, those were the same ones that opposed the Ba’ath regime from their air-conditioned homes in Europe and North America, and now installed their ruling class in Iraq collaborating with every state and multinational to plunder and terrorise the Iraqi people just like Saddam did.”

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Though that this war is clearly not over, it seems that the whole world shifted attention away from what just happened, and is now focused on the positioning of the UN “international peace force” in the south of Lebanon as the saviours of the day, how do you see that?

anat “It all seems ridiculous to me, what are they going to do? It is some kind of a media thing, Bush and all these leaders want to show that they are doing something, but obviously the agenda is for war not for peace. Obviously what we are dealing with here is the foreplay for the next U.S. war in the Middle East. The U.N. forces will not stop anything, they were there when Israel was occupying Lebanon for 18 years and their headquarters have been bombed by Israel several times.”

Imad “Ridiculous, the least to say! What for? Even if they are meant to do something, why in the south of Lebanon? Israel is the aggressor, why not position themselves in the north of Israel/Palestine. To protect who and from who? Israel bombed a UN base in 1996 in Qana , Lebanon , massacring over a 100 refugees, that took refuge in that base believing that the highly visible UN post would be spared the Israeli attacks; and what happened, an apology and some political charade. They did it again in this recent attack killing four UN personnel by bombing a UN base in the south of Lebanon. The "international peace troops" are like the UN, a hypocritical lie and another way to waste money and efforts. The UN is a hierarchal body, used to domesticate the world and one that supports state-terrorism and the plundering of impoverished people. It´s worthless and needs to be held accountable. I would not expect any good from them nor their troops.”

Eyal “They are foreign Imperialistic invaders who should leave immediately; I will not have any reason to complain if somebody puts bullets through their heads. Really, if those asshole European states had any concern for the lives and the safety of people in this region they could have sent some anti-aircraft batteries and stationed them in Lebanon to prevent any attack on Lebanese villages and towns.”

Hazem “After all, what is the United Nations other than a tool in the hands of the powerful to make the weakened weaker. I refuse any sort of cooperation with this structure. It’s like stopping to smoke on your death bed.”

The questions stopped here, but they did not end. This was the beginning - the beginning has been happening for a while now and this is the first written discussion between us. It is reflections, rage and solidarity; it is nothing but the beginning for a deeper discussion, wider reflections and louder rage. Many is still left to be answered and discussed. The war had just begun… again!

They who once were warriors

2006-09-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of weeks, at least four Palestinian resistance fighters have been killed in Nablus alone. The city has the blues. This is no song, there is no melody to it except the screams of bereaved mothers and sisters punctuating the night. Bewildered daughters speak on the radio about their dead fathers. A girl recounts in the muddled but solemn words of a five year-old that soldiers used to come to her house at night, give her sweets and ask her where her father was. She tells listeners how proud her father always was when he got home because she hadn't told them a thing. And she prays the Lord will watch over her father now that he is dead.

The girl's father was shot by a sniper on his way across an Old City square. His good friend carried his broken body to safety, smearing his hands with the dead man's blood and writing his name, Fadi, on the wall. Fadi had only one arm with which to carry his gun. But he was famous enough to be memorialised in the form of a brigade carrying his name.

Seven other fighters were injured the night Fadi was killed. These are the men that defend their city in the dead of nights ripped apart by rumbling tanks and nightmares, who patrol the streets and return Israeli fire whenever possible. They are the armed resistance who try to guard against the unpredictable, who keep the last vestiges of security alive in this part of the world. They know they are heroes of the old-fashioned kind but do not do it only for the glory. This is not a game.

Last week, two fighters were killed in Balata. Israeli soldiers forced themselves into their home at two o'clock in the morning and the two men returned fire, slightly injuring two soldiers. They then attempted to escape up onto the roof, perhaps thinking that they could jump from house to house and get away. But there was an Apache helicopter waiting for them, hovering outside. After backing the two men up against a wall, the soldiers in the helicopter fired several missiles at the men, finishing off with rounds of machine-gun fire. The bodies of Hani and Ibrahim, the latter a proud father of a three-month old baby, were ridden with bullet-holes, their blood spilled onto the roof like that of sheep after slaughter.

A few days ago, an 18-year old was blown up when planting a street bomb in the way of the jeeps. Thousands of little pieces of his young body splattered around the site, horrifying the neighbors the next morning. I wonder whether his mother knew where he was and what he was doing. I wonder if she was awake and felt the impact of the explosion as he died.

And what do we do? It is our fault that young men, and in some rare cases women, still have to strap weapons on them and brave the night's battles. It is our fault that they must learn to embrace death instead of making plans for life. It is our fault that non-violent resistance has people killed without consequence. It is our fault that five year-old girls have to go on the radio and be proud of protecting their fathers from being killed. We should be ashamed and we should be busy thinking of ways in which their struggle and their deaths can be allowed to stop. We need to shout louder and we need to take risks. If speaking the truth and acting on our knowledge means being slandered as anti-semitic or fanatic, then we need to get our hands dirty. Because steadfastness really is not the easiest of Palestinian virtues to maintain. I wish no more struggle on Palestine. I wish no more strength. My wish is simply for us to awaken and face up to the fact that our knowledge makes us deeply complicit in this slow genocide, and for Palestinians to sleep without stirring.

www.electronicintifada.org
www.palsolidarity.org
www.miftah.org
www.iwps-pal.org

The Case for Boycotting Israel - Virginia Tilley

2006-09-06T05:09:00.000-07:00

The Case for Boycotting Israel
Boycott Now!
By VIRGINIA TILLEY

Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is finally time. After years of internal arguments, confusion, and dithering, the time has come for a full-fledged international boycott of Israel. Good cause for a boycott has, of course, been in place for decades, as a raft of initiatives already attests. But Israel's war crimes are now so shocking, its extremism so clear, the suffering so great, the UN so helpless, and the international community's need to contain Israel's behavior so urgent and compelling, that the time for global action has matured. A coordinated movement of divestment, sanctions, and boycotts against Israel must convene to contain not only Israel's aggressive acts and crimes against humanitarian law but also, as in South Africa, its founding racist logics that inspired and still drive the entire Palestinian problem.

That second goal of the boycott campaign is indeed the primary one. Calls for a boycott have long cited specific crimes: Israel's continual attacks on Palestinian civilians; its casual disdain for the Palestinian civilian lives "accidentally" destroyed in its assassinations and bombings; its deliberate ruin of the Palestinians' economic and social conditions; its continuing annexation and dismemberment of Palestinian land; its torture of prisoners; its contempt for UN resolutions and international law; and especially, its refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. But the boycott cannot target these practices alone. It must target their ideological source.

The true offence to the international community is the racist motivation for these practices, which violates fundamental values and norms of the post-World War II order. That racial ideology isn't subtle or obscure. Mr. Olmert himself has repeatedly thumped the public podium about the "demographic threat" facing Israel: the "threat" that too many non-Jews will - the horror - someday become citizens of Israel. It is the "demographic threat" that, in Israeli doctrine, justifies sealing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip as open-air prisons for millions of people whose only real crime is that they are not Jewish. It is the "demographic threat," not security (Mr. Olmert has clarified), that requires the dreadful Wall to separate Arab and Jewish communities, now juxtaposed in a fragmented landscape, who might otherwise mingle.

"Demographic threat" is the most disgustingly racist phrase still openly deployed in international parlance. It has been mysteriously tolerated by a perplexed international community. But it can be tolerated no longer. Zionist fear of the demographic threat launched the expulsion of the indigenous Arab population in 1948 and 1967, created and perpetuates Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, inspires its terrible human rights abuses against Palestinians, spins into regional unrest like the 1982 attack on Lebanon (that gave rise to Hezbollah), and continues to drive Israeli militarism and aggression.

This open official racism and its attendant violence casts Israel into the ranks of pariah states, of which South Africa was the former banner emblem. In both countries, racist nationalist logic tormented and humiliated the native people. It also regularly spilled over to destabilize their surrounding regions (choc-a-block with "demographic threats"), leading both regimes to cruel and reckless attacks. Driven by a sense of perennial victimhood, they assumed the moral authority to crush the native hordes that threatened to dilute the organic Afrikaner/Jewish nations and the white/western civilization they believed they so nobly represented.

A humiliated white society in South Africa finally gave that myth up. Israel still clings to it. It has now brought Israel to pulverize Lebanon, trying to eliminate Hezbollah and, perhaps, to clear the way for an attack on Iran. Peace offers from the entire Arab world are cast aside like so much garbage. Yet again, the Middle East is plunged into chaos and turmoil, because a normal existence -- peace, full democracy -- is anathema to a regime that must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify the rejectionism that preserves its ethnic/racial character and enables its continuing annexations of land.

Why has this outrageously racist doctrine survived so long, rewarded by billions of dollars in US aid every year? We know the reasons. For too many Westerners, Israel's Jewish character conflates with the Holocaust legacy to make intuitive sense of Israel's claim to be under continual assault. Deep-seated Judeo-Christian bias against Islam demonizes Israel's mostly Muslim victims. European racist prejudice against Arabs (brown-skinned natives) casts their material dispossession as less humanly significant. Naïve Christian visions of the "Holy Land" naturalize Jewish governance in biblical landscapes. Idiot Christian evangelistic notions of the Rapture and the End Times posit Jewish governance as essential to the return of the Messiah and the final Millennium (even though, in that repellent narrative, Jews will roast afterwards).

All those notions and prejudices, long confounding international action, must now be set aside. The raw logic of Israel's distorted self-image and racist doctrines is expressed beyond confusion by the now-stark reality: the moonscape rubble of once-lovely Lebanese villages; a million desperate people trying to survive Israeli aerial attacks as they carry children and wheel disabled grandparents down cratered roads; the limp bodies of children pulled from the dusty basements of crushed buildings. This is the reality of Israel's national doctrine, the direct outcome of its racist worldview. It is endangering everyone, and it must stop.

Designing the Campaign

Much debate has circulated about a boycott campaign, but hitherto it has not moved beyond some ardent but isolated groups. Efforts have stalled on the usual difficult questions: e.g., whether a boycott is morally compulsory to reject Israel's rampant human rights violations or would impede vital engagement with Israeli forums, or whether principled defense of international law must be tempered by (bogus) calls for "balance". Especially, recent debate has foundered on calls for an academic boycott. Concerns here are reasonable, if rather narrow. Universities offer vital connections and arenas for collaboration, debate, and new thinking. Without such forums and their intellectual exchange, some argue, work toward a different future is arguably impeded.

But this argument has exploded along with the southern Lebanese villages, as Israeli university faculties roundly endorse the present war. As Ilan Pappé has repeatedly argued, Israel's universities are not forums for enlightened thought. They are crucibles of reproduction for racist Zionist logics and practice, monitoring and filtering admissible ideas. They produce the lawyers who defend the occupation regime and run its kangaroo "courts"; the civil planners and engineers who design and build the settlements on Palestinian land; the economists and financiers who design and implement the grants that subsidize those settlements; the geologists who facilitate seizure of Palestinian aquifers; the doctors who treat the tortured so that they can be tortured again; the historians and sociologists who make sense of a national society while preserving official lies about its own past; and the poets, playwrights, and novelists who compose the nationalist opus that glorifies and makes (internally, at least) moralistic sense of it all.

Those of us who have met with Jewish Israeli academics in Israeli universities find the vast majority of them, including well-meaning liberals, operating in a strange and unique bubble of enabling fictions. Most of them know nothing about Palestinian life, culture, or experience. They know strangely little about the occupation and its realities, which are crushing people just over the next hill. They have absorbed simplistic notions about rejectionist Arafat, terrorist Hamas, and urbane Abbas. In this special insulated world of illusions, they say nonsense things about unreal factors and fictionalized events. Trying to make sense of their assumptions is no more productive that conversing about the Middle East with the Bush administration's neo-cons, who also live in a strange bubble of ignorance and fantasy. Aside from a few brave and beleaguered souls, this is the world of Israel's universities. It will not change until it has to - when the conditions of its self-reproduction are impaired and its self-deceptions too glaring.

The Real Goal: Changing Minds

The universities represent and reproduce the bubble world of the Israeli Jewish population as a whole. And no people abandons its bubble willingly. In South Africa, Afrikaners clung to their own bubble - their self-exonerating myths about history, civilization, and race -- until they were forced by external sanctions and the collapsing national economy to rethink those myths. Their resistance to doing so, while racist, was not purely vicious. Many kind and well-meaning Afrikaners simply didn't believe they had to rethink ideas that manifested to them as givens and that shaped their reality. (One valued Afrikaner friend here recalls her life during apartheid South Africa as being like The Truman Show, a film in which a man unknowingly grows up in a television show, set in an artificial dome world designed to look like a small town.) When their reality fell apart, suddenly no one would admit to ever having believed or supported it.

The Zionist worldview is an even more complete system. All historical and geographic details are provided to create a total mythical world, in which Jews have rights to the land and Palestinians have none. It is a fully realized construction, like those Hebraized maps carefully drawn by the Zionist movement in the 1930s to erase the ancient Arabic landscape and substitute Hebrew biblical references. It is also very resilient. The "new historians" have exposed the cherished national historical narrative of 1948 and 1967 as a load of fictions, but the same fictions are still reproduced by state agencies to assure Israeli and diaspora Jews of their innocence and the righteousness of their cause. The vast majority of Israelis therefore remain comfortable in their Truman Show and even see any external pressure or criticism as substantiating it. We need no more graphic evidence of that campaign's success than the overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for the present catastrophic assault on Lebanon, reflecting their sincere beliefs that nuclear-power Israel is actually under existential threat by a guerrilla group lobbing katyushas across the border. Staggering to observers, that belief is both sobering and instructive.

To force people steeped in such a worldview to rethink their notions, their historical myths, and their own best interests requires two efforts:

(1) Serious external pressure: here, a full boycott that undermines Israel's capacity to sustain the economic standards its citizens and corporations expect, and which they associate with their own progressive self-image; and

(2) clear and unwavering commitment to the boycott's goal, which - in Israel as in South Africa - must be full equality, dignity, safety, and welfare of everyone in the land, including Palestinians, whose ancestral culture arose there, and the Jewish population, which has built a national society there.

That combination is essential. Nothing else will work. Diplomacy, threats, pleading, the "peace process," mediation, all will be useless until external pressure brings Israel's entire Jewish population to undertake the very difficult task of rethinking their world. This pressure requires the full range of boycotts, sanctions, and divestment that the world can employ. (South African intellectual Steven Friedman has observed wryly that the way to bring down any established settler-colonial regime is to make it choose between profits and identity. Profits, he says, will win every time.)

What to Target

Fortunately, from the South African experience, we know how to go forward, and strategies are proliferating. The basic methods of an international boycott campaign are familiar. First, each person works in his or her own immediate orbit. People might urge divestment from companies investing in Israel by their colleges and universities, corporations, clubs, and churches. Boycott any sports event that hosts an Israeli team, and work with planners to exclude them. Participate in, and visit, no Israeli cultural events - films, plays, music, art exhibits. Avoid collaborating with Israeli professional colleagues, except on anti-racist activism. Don't invite any Israeli academic or writer to contribute to any conference or research and don't attend their panels or buy their books, unless their work is engaged directly in anti-racist activism. Don't visit Israel except for purposes of anti-racist activism. Buy nothing made in Israel: start looking at labels on olive oil, oranges, and clothing. Tell people what you are doing and why. Set up discussion groups everywhere to explain why.

For ideas and allies, try Googling the "boycott Israel" and "sanctions against Israel" campaigns springing up around the world. Know those allies, like the major churches, and tell people about them. For more ideas, read about the history of the boycott of South Africa.

Second, don't be confused by liberal Zionist alternatives that argue against a boycott in favor of "dialogue". If we can draw any conclusion from the last half-century, it is that, without the boycott, dialogue will go nowhere. And don't be confused by liberal-Zionist arguments that Israel will allow Palestinians a state if they only do this or that. Israel is already the only sovereign power in Palestine: what fragments are left to Palestinians cannot make a state. The question now is not whether there is one state, but what kind of state it comprises. The present version is apartheid, and it must change. However difficult to achieve, and however frightening to Jewish Israelis, the only just and stable solution is full democracy.

Third, be prepared for the boycott's opposition, which will be much louder, more vicious, and more dangerous than it was in the boycott of South Africa. Read and assemble solid documentable facts. Support each other loudly and publicly against the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism. And support your media against the same charges. Write to news media and explain just who the "Israel media teams" actually are. Most pro-Israeli activism draws directly from the Israeli government's propaganda outreach programs. Spotlight this fact. Team up to counter their pressure on newspapers, radio stations, and television news forums. Don't let them capture or intimidate public debate. By insisting loudly (and it must be sincere) that the goal is the full equality of dignity and rights of everyone in Israel-Palestine, including the millions of Jewish citizens of Israel, demolish their specious claims of anti-Semitism.

Finally, hold true to the principles that drive the boycott's mission. Don't tolerate the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism in your own group or movement. Anti-Jewish racists are certainly out there, and they are attracted to these campaigns like roaches. They will distract and absorb your energies, while undermining, degrading, and destroying the boycott movement. Some are Zionist plants, who will do so deliberately. If you can't change their minds (and don't spend much time trying, because they will use your efforts to drain your time and distract your energies), denounce them, expel them, ignore them, have no truck with them. They are the enemy of a peaceful future, not its allies - part of the problem, not the solution.

Boycott the Hegemon

This is the moment to turn international pressure on the complicit US, too. It's impossible, today, to exert an effective boycott on the United States, as its products are far too ubiquitous in our lives. But it's quick and easy to launch a boycott of emblematic US products, upsetting its major corporations. It's especially easy to boycott the great global consumables, like Coca-Cola, MacDonald's, Burger King, and KFC, whose leverage has brought anti-democratic pressures on governments the world over. (Through ugly monopoly practices, Coke is a nasty player in developing countries anyway: see, for example, http://www.killercoke.org.) Think you'll miss these foods too much? Is consuming something else for a while too much of a sacrifice, given what is happening to people in Lebanon? And think of the local products you'll be supporting! (And how healthy you will get).

In the US, the impact of these measures may be small. But in Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Arab and Muslim worlds, boycotting these famous brands can gain national scope and the impact on corporate profits will be enormous. Never underestimate the power of US corporations to leverage US foreign policy. They are the one force that consistently does so.

But always, always, remember the goal and vision. Anger and hatred, arising from the Lebanon debacle, must be channelled not into retaliation and vengeance but into principled action. Armed struggle against occupation remains legitimate and, if properly handled (no killing of civilians), is a key tool. But the goal of all efforts, of every stamp, must be to secure security for everyone, toward building a new peaceful future. It's very hard, in the midst of our moral outrage, to stay on the high road. That challenge is, however, well-known to human rights campaigns as it is to all three monotheistic faiths. It is what Islam knows as the "great jihad" - the struggle of the heart. It must remain the guiding torch of this effort, which we must defend together.

Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.

"The land speaks Arabic"

2006-09-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

Today

Around fifty kids are milling around the mosque in Al-Khadr near Bethlehem, holding Palestinian flags and big banners proclaiming "The apartheid wall imprisons Palestinians in GHETTO!". It's Friday and demonstration time. Everyone is waiting for the men to leave their prayers so that we can all march together to the construction site for the wall and have our say. Of course we do not get close to it. A large force of soldiers meet us some 20 meters away from the site and refuse us passage. The kids won't let this ruin their Friday spirit. They chant and jeer at the soldiers, ten year-olds wiggling their hips and swearing at the armed men in front of them. One of the soldiers takes a camera out of his pocket and the children pose in front of him, careful to keep their flags in full view. A child's resistance, in all its heart-wrenching sobriety, reduced to a snapshot? Who is winning here? Does it matter? I do not really know what to think.

A group of Palestinians and foreign citizens wander off toward the back of the demonstration, through the cemetery and toward the 500m barrier of razor barbed wire that marks the planned route of the wall. We pull the stakes out of the ground and roll about 150m of wire down the steep hill in the other side of it, when we hear soldiers approaching and leave. A small act of resistance, perhaps merely symbolic, only changing the facts on the ground for a few hours or a day. But important all the same. Because, as one man tells me while we are walking back, it is more beautiful to see razor wire lie tangled at the bottom of a hill, where only soldiers can cut their fingers on it, than it is to see it tightly secured by stakes around a place that used to be a home but feels increasingly like a ghetto. "The occupation is closing life. But today we give the land a chance to breathe, to speak. And the land speaks Arabic."

For a report on the protest, please see http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/09/01/protestors-managed-to-remove-a-fence-in-bethlehem/ .

Yesterday

We are walking among grapevines and plumtrees, listening to an old man's voice break with sorrow. The day before yesterday six settlers came onto his land and let their four dogs loose to savage him. He made a lucky escape up the mountain slope but was bitten badly in one of his legs. Today he is surveying the damage done by the settlers. They have picked whole bunches of grapes and thrown them on the hot ground to spoil, they have thrown big dirty boulders into his well, they have shaken the branches of his plumtrees to make the ripe fruit fall and then herded their sheep onto the stoney expanse under the trees and let them eat their fill. They have picked at least thirty cartons of olives to sell and profit from, leaving the bottom branches completely barren.

The old man and his brother are afraid to tend their land. The settlers, who live on the mountaintop overhead, often come down to chase them away with their guns and dogs. They are two old men, unable to defend themselves against a gang of thugs. They own and love this land, and should not have to fight to care for it. We sit in the shade and crack open moist walnuts between two stones, talking about everything at once. Where does one start when describing losses too great to bear? Should we measure it in blood, in dignity, in sweetness of sleep? As it was, our conversation was anger and embittered, a much easier feeling to share your life with than the tearing of grief. We talked about lost income, dunums and costs of fencing. Not about the language of the land or the milky inside of the olives that he squeezed out to sooth our dry hands. As I trudge up the hill, the old man's solemn goodbye squeezing my heart, I secretly thank him for biting back his tears.

If you have any money to spare, however little, please get in touch with me at ajnabiyye@gmail.com. Our friend the farmer is in the process of contacting a lawyer to ensure that the rights to his land are respected but, as you may imagine, this is a long, arduous and expensive process with no garantee of success. Not all of the land "speaks Arabic", so to speak. In the meanwhile, he has a family to feed and would greatly appreciate any help! Thank you.

Can you really not see - by Amira Hass

2006-09-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Can you really not see?

By Amira Hass

Haaretz
30 August 2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756413.html

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the
dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us."
Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of
killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who
knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls,
fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding
projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted
among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the
designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors,
media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not
support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of
hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And
what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet
gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws?
Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be
compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish
neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law
that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own
home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the
demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood
and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling
and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?

Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the
Jordan Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all
side with an Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of
Palestinians who have obtained foreign citizenship from returning to
their families in the occupied territories?

Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used
to forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at
Bethlehem and medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from
Rafah from receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you
find it easy to hide behind the explanation "we had no idea": we had
no idea that the discrimination practiced in the distribution of
water - which is solely controlled by Israel - leaves thousands of
Palestinian households without water during the hot summer months;
we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it
also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.

But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344
in the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian
villages it passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the
access of thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that
you support the quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of
medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity and water
supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to the
world for months.

Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from
your faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the
system in which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the
West Bank, are letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for
hours upon hours under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents
of Nablus and Tul Karm are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and
under - yallah, back to Jenin, residents of the Salem village are
not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who skipped the line must
learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for hours. Machsom
Watch's site is available for all; in it are countless such
testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that
those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave
in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local
newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will not
be appalled and outraged.

As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us
all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in
an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a
dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a
petition and tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its
Jews. We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in
concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and
recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us.
Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is
immeasurably heavy.

My neighbours

2006-08-28T08:02:00.000-07:00

In bed

This morning I woke up from a tiny rock-hard wrist scratching the calf of my leg. Lubna, her soft wispy hair all sweaty and tousled, suffers from violent nightmares. She bears a 5cm long jagged scar of occupation - reminding her of that day a month ago when a rubber-coated metal bullet seared the flesh of her arm. In the same invasion, 3 men were buried under the rubble of the municipal authority building, known as the Muqata, as bulldozers and tanks smashed and shelled it into oblivion. Just as they did in 2002.

But Lubna is too young to remember that far back. And as she dances herself into oblivion, her hips racing to the sound of her brother pounding his tough palms on the Palestinian drum, nothing else seems to matter. Sitting down in front of the fan to let her blank cheeks dry, she eats the cookies her doting big sister brings her and has her hair pulled by her boisterous big brothers. Almost like a normal kid. But then once in a while she directs her big-eye gaze directly at me and I am reminded that she is special in what could have been all the right ways, if it wasn’t for the distorting effect of the occupation.

Yesterday she came knocking on the door as usual, the skin under her right eye all swollen and sore. “Jeish, jeish” she said and pointed at it, explaining that Israeli soldiers had come into the camp half an hour earlier and hit her. It seemed very improbable seeing as the camp was half-asleep in the proper Friday afternoon manner. It seemed more like a ploy to get me to come over and drink tea with her super-model-like big sister. A nine year-old girl’s imagination overshadowed and stopped in its tracks by “jeish”.

Down the street

It’s eight o’clock and the morning procession is in full motion. Vegetable vendors are shouting out their daily offers like they were celebrating creation. Ramsi, the kind of man who manages to be endlessly friendly without a single sexual innuendo, greets me with a steaming cup of tea and saintly patience. He deals out falafel, always with a sad tinge to his smile. The frying oil is fresh and fragrant. There is hope in the air, is there not? Balata camp - a 17 000 strong fortress of steadfastness and will – is alive and kicking. A little boy has locked himself into his father’s car and is rocking to the latest Egyptian pop music in the front seat. A group of toddlers are throwing invisible stones onto a hostile squadron of goats. A woman leans out of the window with beautiful blue shutters underneath an olive tree and pours a bucket of water onto the street. I dodge it and get into a car.
Each taxi-drive is an encounter and each driver has a story to be told, often sad and funny at the same time. Each bump in the road holds a memory and each photo is a loved one lost to the insanity of the powerful and the apathy of the powerless. I sit squeezed between women’s thighs, flowery scents and flowing fabrics, and men’s jeans, cigarettes and musky cologne. The friendly furrowed faces behind the wheel read my face each morning, invite the god’s peace to be upon me, and I feel safe. Then follow the familiar rattles and shakes of the journey, the dust flying through the window and the silence as we hurry past that monument of senseless violence – the Muqata.

The next village

Asira Ash Shamalia is full of prowling cats. Not the skinny, flearidden kind of cats that you can find in Balata and that sometimes end their days with a firework stuck up their ass, but the lean, trusting kind that have been given a home. They sleep in the shade offered by the arrangement of vines, bunches of grapes carefully tied into colourful cloth bags, or they meander past the stone oven constructed to prevent a bread shortage when the Israeli army prevents gas from being transported into the village.

Beside Asira Ash Shamalia towers Ebal, the highest mountain on the West Bank, from where one can see all of Palestine. Children like to climb the slope during their summer break and fly their kites. Under them, under the ground on which they play, lies the second most important Israeli military base.

During the olive harvest the people sweat together under the trees on the holy ground. They work, sing, pray, play, make fires and assemble. Neighbours work together and share their food. But the military want to destroy this. They want to divide the people. And so they make a widow with her five children, dirty and happy after a day in the fields, unload their harvest from the donkeys, open the sacks and lay them on the ground. And then they drive a tank over the sacks, spinning around and crushing every last olive. Or they kill a 75 year-old man’s donkey with a bullet to his head and then shoot through the 160kg of oil he was carrying in barrels on his back. And they don’t care that the relationship between an old man and his donkey is one so close that the man walks home to his village heartbroken, suffers a heart attack and spends the next couple of months in hospital.

The people of Asira Ash Shamalia resist. They smuggle fruit and vegetables from Jenin, collecting boxes and cartons dropped between the trees on the outskirts of the village, sometimes chased by hummers forcing their way through grapevines and crushing the fruit. They sleep through the night in spite of soldiers driving around playing loud music through their jeeps’ loudspeakers. They refuse to ask permission from the DCO in order to go to their land and harvest their olives. They mend their old people when they beat the soldiers with their walking-sticks and are shot in the legs, and then listen to their stories about trees so ancient that they have names.

But the people of Asira Ash Shamalia also sometimes despair. Only in whispers, so as not to let the children hear. But despair all the same.

The village makes the best olive oil in Palestine and even the Israeli soldiers want to buy some to take home for their mothers. It is said to have medicinal properties and people used to come from all over to place their orders. After the Al-Aqsa intifada, the situation is very different. The connections with Jordan, Gaza, Israel and even the rest of the West Bank have been broken. In order to bring the oil into Nablus, you have to travel 10km over the mountains – a perilous journey with a high risk of being shot or arrested. There are 20 roadblocks on the path, making it almost impossible to bring even a donkey. The result is that a lot of the precious oil ends up being stored in cellars and outhouses, or being used as currency by desperate farmers. Asira Ash Shamalia is impoverished and isolated. The water-pipes need replacing but the material needed can’t get through the checkpoint, even with international and Israeli activists perched on the roof of the truck.

The other Israel

Bil’in is still fighting. A tiny village outside of Ramallah, it is not yet surrounded by wall and has three pending appeals in the Israeli Supreme Court regarding the building of the wall and settlement expansion. Every Friday the villagers demonstrate, welcoming Israeli and international anti-occupation activists into their fold. After a rumour campaign about Israelis spreading AIDS, most probably started by the Israeli secret service Shabbak and spread by collaborators, it has been requested that Israelis not come for social visits but only for direct actions. It is felt that joint struggle is ok and desirable, but not a normalization of relations. A couple of weeks ago, Limar, a young Israeli lawyer was shot in the head with a rubber bullet. It passed through his brain, lodging itself at the back of the skull, right next to the sight cortex. He is, miraculously, alive and well with sight intact but will have to undergo further surgery.

I was there to demonstrate last week and got soaked in blue paint and tear gas - a painful combination! I was bossed about by “hard-core Israeli anarchists” but didn’t mind so much. I am intrigued by the dynamics of the meeting between Palestinian and Israeli activists. Friends from different sides of the Green Line embrace tenderly in the shade of the garden's olive trees, but the Israelis do not share in our debriefings. They assemble in the next room, dreadlocks afloat in the tense air of pre-demo anticipation. I wish to draw close to them but cannot bring myself to as they do not seem to welcome it. I have a million questions that I wish to work up the courage to ask someday soon.

For an interview with Palestinan and Israeli activists involved in the struggle in Bil'in, please see http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/09/03/the-only-place-where-there%e2%80%99s-hope/ .

You

You, the last of my neighbours, are in my heart always. Take care of yourselves, please. And hope to see a couple of you very soon! All my love,

lina

Up the North mountain - appeal for help!

2006-08-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

On the AP newswire it says that Nablus today hosted a "stand-off" between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants, and that a "terrorist hide-out" was demolished. There is also a picture of an old man with his hands behind his head being used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers. The caption reads that he is "escorting" the soldiers through the area. If you have time, here is what really happened...

A young man's life was cut short today. His name, now being shouted from the rooftops by tired men holding banners, was Muntasir Sulaiman Muhammad Ukah. He was 15 years old and from Askar refugee camp. He and a few of his friends were throwing stones, in an attempt to regain some of the control and dignity that is stolen from them and their families daily. Disempowerment is easy. Empowerment is harder. I was going to ask him if he felt that throwing stones was a good way of regaining control, or if he felt that it was sort of futile. I was going to be sceptical and obnoxious, implying that I think he should learn how to make and plant good bombs instead. I was going to offer him a drink of water. But he was shot in the back and died before we were even introduced. He and his friends were throwing stones at a gigantic armoured personnel carrier (APC) that no stone, however determined the fist from which it was launched, could ever penetrate. The soldiers inside decided to fire round after round of live ammunition straight into a crowd of young men. Muntasir died from wounds sustained from the bullet that pierced his back. Twelve others were injured and taken to hospital.

Behind the APC, the Israeli occupation forces were busy demolishing people's homes. They arrived in the area, Jabal Shamali, at one o'clock this morning and immediately set to work. When a person is murdered, like Muntasir was today, the sorrow of a life lost takes over, at least for me. It totally blurs my vision of what this means in the larger scheme of things. Today, there is nothing larger than Muntasir and his last breath and it's like I cannot allow myself to think otherwise, because anything else would be less than honouring him. There is so much more to a life than the way it ended, you know. The fury and the cold calculation come afterwards, if at all.
When a building is demolished, its insides spilling out onto the street, the sequence of events is much clearer. The utter indifference and hatred with which it is performed becomes more apparent. When the captain of the military operation drops by the exiled houseowners' hiding-place just to tell them how much he is enjoying destroying Palestinian homes, we are not surprised. When the driver of the bulldozer drops three mangled cars onto the balcony of a nearby house, we nod in recognition of what we already knew. When a soldier shouts at us that he understands that there is a paralysed man in a wheelchair left in the building but that he just doesn't care, we feel stupid we asked before walking past him with tingling spines.

Standing behind the bulldozer today, watching it peel off layer after layer of house, was like watching a stranger being stripped. Electric cables and suspension wires stuck out at all angles, broken pipes leaked water onto the rubble below. Like a doll's house, the building was pried open revealing the small spaces that we live and feel safe in. A furious man was yelling at me, telling me to "look,look and tell the world" but I had to lower my eyes for a moment, ashamed at staring at the carefully arranged chairs around the dining room table and the perfectly folded blankets in the linen cupboard, its mirrored door flung open for all to see. Two pet canaries, perfectly yellow, were flying to and fro, lost in their sudden and violent liberation. They finally landed on a military jeep, parked near their old home, now smouldering and falling apart. A first aid volunteer picked them up and put them in his big pockets, sheltering them from the strange mix of dust, explosives and tear gas that lingered in the air.

One man was arrested today. He was not one of the wanted men that the military claimed to be looking for but gave himself up all the same in a desperate and touching attempt to appease the soldiers and save his home. His family owns 12 of the 20 apartments in the biggest house to be demolished today. The army took him, and all the information he could possibly provide them with, and then destroyed his house all the same. His relatives offered to serve as human shields, escorting the soldiers into the house to look for the wanted men that they insisted were hiding in the building. The offer was refused. Instead, the army took six of the family's men as hostages in a house across the street, holding them there while they shot bullets and fire grenades over their heads and into their home.

The army left the demolition site at around eight o'clock this evening and people literally poured in to inspect the damage. Just as each room was furnished differently, some adorned with flowers and others with simple murals,each person reacted differently to their losses. Some were frantic, cried and beat their cheeks. Others were dry-eyed, silently surveying the damage. Still others were angry, their pupils dilated and furious, their voices loud.

"Look at these people! Look at their faces! What can you see? Are these the terrorists that the world is afraid of? Look at them and tell the world what you see! Only what you see" These are my instructions. And so I will tell you what I saw. I saw how neighbours, up since one o'clock this morning, immediately started climbing up the remaining floors of the building, wrapping valuables into blankets and handing down refrigerators and TV-sets through the open walls. I saw how young men in medic vests who had been escorting people in and out of the area all day long now stood around the rubble holding hands to prevent children from climbing in and hurting themselves. I saw how families sat down together to wipe their tears, gather strength and carry on. I saw a relief effort this evening that was breath-taking in its indefatigability and generosity. I tell you only what I saw.

For pictures please see www.flickr.com/photos/pockets23/.

The family whose 12 apartments were demolished today is one of Nablus's poorest, according to the word on the street. So, if you have any money to spare, please put it into my account and I will make sure it gets to them in some appropriately roundabout way...Thank you!

2006-08-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

Dear everyone,

This is in no way a coherent report, just some personal reflections for friends and family (and a few others, please let me know if you do NOT wish to receive e-mails from me in the future) after a little more than two weeks in Nablus. I sincerely hope that you are well and strong, whichever struggle you might be waging inwhatever part of the world. I am thinking of you all.

It has been more than three years since I was last here and, needless to say, a lot has changed... I am still surprised to see how busy the streets are, seeing as Ispent most of my time here under 24-hour curfew characterized by a noisy,bone-shattering and blood-spilling military presence. It was difficult for me then to imagine that Nablus was the financial capital of the West Bank, but now thethought no longer seems so strange. Especially as I walk past the newly builtshopping mall with pizza parlors, popcorn stalls and exclusive-looking furnishing retailers.

The bustle of the day, however, is seriously misleading. Israeli military enter oneor more parts of the city almost every night, either just driving around with abulldozer aimlessly grazing sidewalks and shop fronts or carrying out undercover operations set out to assassinate or arrest particular people. Last night, sleep wasonce again ripped apart by the sharp sound of unfriendly fire and jeeps roaring backand forth on the narrow main street of Balata refugee camp. Two young men, 18 and 21 years old, were kidnapped by Israeli forces - joining the 1 000 other Palestinians held in administrative detention without trial. This is a recurring event thattakes place almost every night - leaving distraught mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and lovers trying to fill the void, breathe, move on.

There is so much that I would like to convey, but that I don't yet know how to in words. The occupation contaminates every minute of every day and I will give you but one example. I have made a new friend. Her name is Zara and she owns this rare combination of regal composure and child-like enthusiasm that is completely disarming. Two of her brothers are wasting away their young years in Israeli prisons, trying to make the time pass by constructing magnificent cardboard ships and Al-Aqsa reliefs in multicoloured pebbles that nowadorn the family's salon. The youngest was supposed to be tried last Sunday but thehearing was postponed until October, since his Israeli defender had not taken the time to read through his papers. His mother can barely hold back her tears of fear and fury as she tells me how gaunt and tired her child looked as he silently mouthed his love to her from the far side of the courtroom.

Zara's oldest brother Amir is a "wanted" man since a few weeks back because theIsraeli military claim that someone in the camp has used one of his café's computers for communicating with Lebanon(!). Because of this, the military have harassed the family several nights in a row. Amir's father, Balata camp's first political prisoner in his time, was taken away for a 12-hour interrogation atHuwarra military base just south of Nablus about two weeks ago, after which he was released under threat of further harassment and violence. Amir has attempted to give himself up to the Israeli authorities, but the surly girl soldier at thecheckpoint said there was nothing on him in the computer files and threatened to shoot him then and there if he didn't "quit wasting her time".

And so we wait… We usually watch Tom & Jerry in the late evening before going to bed. Partly as an anti-serum to the graphic images of slaughter broadcast on theAl-Manar news channel, partly as a morale booster in case the soldiers do decide to come knock on the door on that particular night. As Tom the cat, dressed in Frenchknight uniform, slices through the door with his sword, Jerry the mouse ducks, turnsaround and hangs his beret on the sword tip. I watch it with Habib, 10 years old and shot twice with rubber bullets, and wonder if the allegory hits him as hard. He's a lonely boy who nowadays runs his big brother's internet café in an exemplaryfashion, winking the foreigners in to their booths without a word of English, and waiting for me outside the gate to his mother's well-kempt garden each night. Most of the other boys in the camp are too rough for him and every budding friendship ends withtwo mothers yelling at one another. It's a hard life but someone's got to do it and Habib braves every day with a smile.

So, back to Zara, who doesn't always sleep so well at night knowing that Amir is lying awake in some other corner of the camp. But still she gets up early every morning to catch the service to town where she works at a medical company supplying infant incubators, delivery beds, baby cots etc. to several hospitals in the region. Before landing this job, she worked briefly at the office of the Popular Committee of Balata as a translator. They arrange three months of work for the long-term unemployed, i.e. the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Balata camp. You write your name on a list and then the committee finds you a suitable placement according to your experience and formal education. For most people, this means living on a three month salary for a very long time!

Anyway, Zara, with her winning smile and piercing eyes, is now empress of a two-storey office near Rafidia Hospital, its shelves packed with syringes, IV-bagsand gauze bandages. She writes e-mails in English pretending to be her boss, sometimes even wrapping the end of her headscarf around the phone so as to muffle her voice and pass off as a man. The company has to import lots of stuff from abroad and one particular order of supplies was recently held up in Israeli customs for two months. All in all, the company was forced to pay an extra ILS 23 000 (about$5 000) before the goods could be delivered. And then they still got held up again at Huwarra checkpoint.

Zara is cornered by the occupation day and night, but says that she won't give in to the temptation of an individual solution (i.e.getting the hell out of here) to what is ultimately a collective problem. "We have to stick together, however hard it is for people to trust one another these days. You know, my own sister could be a collaborator. But division is just what they want. We have to show we're strong and united." I sit opposite her and can't believe that I, after two weeks here, am the one being pep-talked out of a state of suffocation.

My father wants me to describe what I am doing. Well, so far, a lot of my day revolves around children – trying to swerve past the surprisingly generous gobs of spit expertly launched by the little five year-old upstairs on the way to our morning meeting; carrying feverish babies in my privileged white arms through checkpoints, feeling only slightly less complicit by knowing that their mothers are right behind me giving soldiers the evil eye all the while; negotiating with the neighbour's little demons about what you can and cannot say to strangers, however weird they look; painting red crescents and flowers on soft girlie faces in Askar refugee camp during the last week of their summer camp. The jargon among the crowds of boys hanging out on the street in Balata is notably rougher than before, or is it that my Arabic is actually getting better? Whichever it is, little boys are being told to fuck themselves and their mothers as regularly here as in anyother shell-shocked and abandoned location in the world. I guess home to these kids has proven to be a very restricted, very scary place and it's showing in all sorts of ways. Many of them have eyes older than mine, and I imagine it's heartbreaking for their mothers not being able to tell them with any sincerity to come here, here's a hug, everything will be ok.

On Sunday night there was a children's rally against the Israeli war on Lebanon inthe city center, and a small crowd of adults gathered to cheer it on. The kids sangsongs in aid of Hizbullah's victory and held up signs denoting the villages where the already numerous massacres have been committed. As four Israeli warplanes flewnorthward in formation, the children's chants grew so loud that I could almost seethe blood dripping off their wings. There are many here who cry with Lebanese mothers that we see on TV, wading through rubble to uncover the stiff limbs and singed flesh of their babies, and many more who rack their brains to find ways of expressing the solidarity of one oppressed people to another.

As for ISM-related work, the general feeling, if such a thing can at all bediscerned, is that what traditionally is meant by the term non-violent direct actionis far too risky an enterprise right now to be worthwhile. Not only is the world media's attention directed at Lebanon, but the assumption is that many Israelisoldiers are feeling the losses of their country's war on a directly personal level– in the increasing insecurity of their families in Haifa and Tel Aviv, in the death of their military colleagues, and in the shadow of the possibility of being draftedto go fight up north. From what I gather, the feeling is that a surprise demonstration at the notoriously nasty Huwarra checkpoint, for example, could at this particularly trigger-happy moment in time easily end in a massacre and if forced tochoose, most people would of course prefer to die armed and knowing that they haveat least taken some Israeli soldiers with them in death, rather than be mowed down by an angry 18 year-old with a machine gun.

Moreover, an overwhelming number of my Palestinian friends here have told me that they fear that Palestine will be forced to ultimately pay the price for the Israeli defeat, or non-victory, in Lebanon, even though this defeat will most likely turn out to be spiritual rather than strictly military. They argue that a ceasefire in Lebanon will mean retaliation by Israeli forces on an increasingly impoverished and vulnerable Palestinian people, asthe Israeli leadership desperately needs to demonstrate at least some amount of military strength and capability in the face of internal criticism.

This overhanging fear, combined with the Israeli policy of humiliation and randomclosure at checkpoints – permanent and temporary – strategically dotted around theWest Bank so as to have the most crippling effect possible, is the rotten soil of despair and hopelessness. The energy and the stamina, the sense of meaning thatbrought colour to cheeks however malnourished, well you catch my drift - the generalsource of life afforded by the Intifada - seems to have run out a long time ago. To my ears at least, the Palestinian vocabulary has changed. Inshallah has replacedindividual determination, tomorrow is the new today, and even the children are tired.

I don't wish to be defeatist or misrepresent reality - of course there are acts of resistance going on all over the place all of the time – men under 40 years of age try tocharm/sneak/argue their way through checkpoints even though they know they will be turned back day after day, an occasional stone is seen flying through the air,people get out of bed and eat and pray and get married and make love and study andargue and bake bread and paint their toenails. Yesterday, an angry crowd of about 300 people at Huwarra checkpoint were literally pushing their way through lines of soldiers attempting to close the road, despite the fact that there had been shots fired into the air only ten minutes earlier.

I'm not saying that these types of acts of resistance are no longer happening. It's just that the oppressor to a significant degree dictates the terms of the struggle and right now people here are struggling to survive - to feed themselves and their families, to get themselves through the checkpoint before it closes so as to arrive on time for at least one appointment that day, so as to be able to feel that planning ahead is sometimes possible, if only for the coming hour. Many are absolutely exhausted by poverty and feelings of abandonment and it's painful to see. Imaginations shrink to fit into the frame of occupation, young people are killed long before they have had time to outgrow their space in the world. Women and men who used to have the patience and energy to go along with the extravagant ideas of corny foreigners wishing to play the hero amidst the necessities of their struggle now just smile wearily and change the subject. Attention-spans are shorter and less intense, while meetings grow ever longer and more conflict-ridden.

On the positive side, Balata camp, where I am staying right now and which should by all accounts be reeling from grief borne in the form of people killed and imprisoned, hosts astrong and active community against all odds. Despite the constant risk of placing your trust in the hands of collaborators, people seem to stick together and even though I understandably am not accepted straight away by everyone, folks are generally veryfriendly and generous with their time and space.

I had breakfast at the local women's centre last week, gathering testimonies (which hopefully will start being published in different languages in blog-form pretty soon, will keep you allposted). Most of the women working there are employed on the type of three-month contract that I described earlier. They have a small library and organize classes inembroidery, hairdressing, computer skills etc. One young mother was telling me how she was afraid to take the anti-depression pills that the UNRWA doctor had given her, as they made her drowsy and she was afraid of falling asleep while at home with herchildren and waking up to find one of them injured. All the women present seemed to have their own tales to tell of dodgy medication and the scarce health resources in the camp. One of the younger women suffers from a severely distended belly as a result of constant stress and nothing the doctor gives her seems to help. "Of course we need justice and peace, rather than medicine, but in the meantime we would appreciate good doctors" one of the women exclaimed and they all laughed.

Sometimes they sit on one of a number of friendly rooftops, slumped down in white plastic chairs - gazing at the stars and letting their minds drift. "Where are we?" one of them will ask and the others start replying "Africa. Can't you smell the sand and the camel dung?". "No, stupid, we're in Russia. Don't you feel the scent of arrack on that man's breath?" And so on…have you ever heard of a healthier form of escapism? It seems there is no stronger drug than very sweet tea. But yet it isn't strong enough for me. Because I still step down from the rooftop in time to get home before the snipers come out and wonder how people can bear the thought of living like this, of perhaps always having to live like this.

I know a lot of you want to know what you can do to help. Apart from the obvious but hard work of creating a sustainable, serious boycott campaign against Israeli goods, I think one of the more useful things to do right now is fundraising. People here are growing ever poorer, unemployment is skyhigh, many public employees have not been paid for more than six months and it is seriously demoralizing not being able to feed yourself or your family! Also, the displaced people of Lebanon are of course in dire need of emergency assistance. Therefore, I would recommend sharing your wealth with any one of the many organizations working in Palestine
and Lebanon. Here are a couple

MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians) Emergency Appeal for Lebanon and Gaza, see www.map-uk.org and click donate!

Sanayeh Relief Center in Beirut, www.sanayehreliefcenter.blogspot.com

I would write out the account details and names of more places, but my computer keeps crashing so I will leave you all to finding them by yourself, sorry. Good place to start is www.electronicintifada.org (news and links to lots of places).
Or, if you want to support Nablus specifically, you can decide to trust me to find a suitable project/organization and put money into my account (get in touch at ajnabiyye@gmail.com for details). Thank you!

Well, that was it for now, sorry for the long e-mail. I hope to hear all your news,so yalla write! Please take good care of yourselves and one another. All my love.