Image: Composite of photos
“ Dear Europe,
Sorry about that cloud of ash over your heads and that you can’t travel any more. We feel just the same.
Sincerely,
Gaza ”
A sign in Gaza
Many things have happened here since I last wrote to you: almost a complete change in the house team, two days off for me to visit friends in Hebron and Bethlehem,
a shock telephone bill, several visits to our house of men caught up in day-to-day violence from soldiers, the discovery of a delicious pizza place in Salfit, a visit to a mosque daubed with inflammatory graffiti by local settlers, and lots of visiting in the village. But I will focus down on two series of events that have made a big impact on me:
My Visit to Bil’in
Bil’in is a small village of less than 2,000 souls but it’s on the front line of the Occupation and has made a truly remarkable impact on the Palestinian resistance movement since its organized grassroots campaigns began six years ago. It was in 2004 that the Wall came to the village which is some 4kms from the Green Line (the internationally recognized border), west of Ramallah. It sliced the village lands in two, depriving the people of 60% of their land and livelihoods. There followed extension after extension of the nearby illegal settlement bloc of Modi’in Ilit so that now, when you crest the brow of the hill in the bus that drops you down into the village, the serried ranks of red-roofed apartment blocks and semi-detached housing look so close they could be part of Bil’in itself. But between the two runs the scar of the Wall, snaking its monstrous way through the olive groves. It is to this Wall and its agricultural gate, where soldiers are supposed to let through the farmers who have what bit of land is left on the other side, that the villagers and their Israeli and international supporters have come to demand unrestricted access every single Friday these past six years. This is the physical Wall they challenge, but they are challenging even more the mental Wall of fear, hatred and greed and ignorance that has built it. Based on principles of democratic, non-violent, non-partisan, non-hierarchical organization and working together as a matter of policy with Israeli and international activists, it has now built up a truly inspiring national movement which has spread to other villages under threat which organize on the same principles to protect their own land and way of life.
Liverpool Friends of Bil’in (LFOB) have been twinned with the village of Bil’in since Iyad, the Chair of the Popular Resistance Committee, came to Liverpool 2 years ago and requested the link. Bil’in is also twinned with the small village of Fosse in northern France.
I’ve been to two conferences in Bil’in recently, staying several nights with a family and getting to know some of our twinning partners. It was a wonderful heart-warming experience and I have made some sincere friends, but at the same time I felt the weight of a grave responsibility. The first conference was a Britain-Palestine twinning conference when representatives of several British groups that are twinned with Palestinian cities, towns and villages, as well as their Palestinian partners, were present. If your community or your organization would like to start such a twinning link there are communities here who are waiting for a British partner and I could give you some information and link you up to the British National Twinning Network.
The second conference was a much bigger affair and lasted 3 days. It was the Bil’in International Solidarity Conference at which I was a representative for the IWPS and also for LFOB. It would have been much larger in size except that events in Iceland prevented many Europeans from travelling. I have written about this conference elsewhere and I am attaching that document to the same email in case you are interested to learn more about the nature and impact of the non-violent resistance movement and its international dimension.
Here I want to describe the demonstration at the end of the conference after Friday midday prayers in the village mosque. It followed a well-worn pattern but was this time swollen more than usual with international participants including Luisa Morgantini, Italian ex-MEP and recent Vice President of the European Parliament, who is very committed to the cause of justice for Palestine. Another prominent politician present was Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Secretary General of the Palestine National Initiative. We all gathered in the main village street outside the mosque and set off to walk the half mile or so to the Wall which at this point is not a concrete wall as in urban areas but a huge electrified fence protected by razor wire on both sides, electronic censors, military control towers, a military road for patrols and a strip of no-man’s land. This Wall scours the landscape and its agricultural land, dividing urban and rural communities all over Palestine as it encloses both the West Bank and Gaza, stretching some 500 kms. In all but 10% of its length it is built inside Palestinian territory, and sometimes (as in our own Salfit region) it projects into the heart of the West Bank; it completely encircles some communities (eg. the town of Qalqiliya) and even individual houses; and it runs through Jerusalem and Bethlehem suburbs dividing, not so much Jewish Israeli from Palestinian Arab, but Palestinian from Palestinian and the Palestinian economy from the outside world. It is an incredible fete of faustian imagination, conceived in 1923 well before the founding of the Israeli State, by the giant of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who spoke of the necessity of erecting “an iron wall” to separate Jews from Arabs. Now the engineers and planners of Israel have converted this pipe-dream into reality and it has become the nightmare that Palestinians live in. Israel has created its own ghettoes for another people as well as a mental ghetto for itself. It is illegal for Jewish Israelis to enter into Palestinian towns and it is against military law for them (and us) to be in Bil’in on a Friday. They come regardless and they suffer injury and arrest alongside their Palestinian friends. Internationals who go run the risk of deportation and refusal of future entry visas.
The Friday march to the Wall starts off jauntily with crowds of people, men and women, children and old men, able-bodied and disabled, singing to the beat of drums, dancing and clapping in defiance, flags waving. This time there are lots of French flags with various Palestinian ones, peace flags, EU flags and even a Scottish one. It’s the one time in my life I would be happy to carry a union jack to represent all the British people who support a free Palestine. Next time . . .
We walk through the olive groves and those who are brave keep going right up to the Wall whilst large numbers of us hang back in a variety of positions which give a good view of the front line confrontations, for the soldiers are waiting in this well-rehearsed drama. We can hear the rattling of the agricultural gate and we can see people handling the coils of razor wire. Very soon we hear a sound bomb and begin to follow the projectiles of tear gas canisters flying through the air in all directions. Plumes of teargas arise from the ground, sometimes coming from unexpected directions, for soldiers are lined up in many different places along the Wall, sometimes hidden by olive trees. We keep a wary watch-out especially when the soldiers burst through the gate and start running along the road towards us in a phalanx of riot shields and teargas. A great shout goes up from the front line and the nearby waiting ambulance of the Palestine Medical Relief Committee roars up to the front and after a flurry of activity roars back at top speed through the crowds. We quickly learn that a middle-aged Palestinian man from Jaffa who comes here regularly with his wife has been hit at close range by a tear gas canister. The wound is in the middle of his forehead and he’s pouring blood (the photo is the third attachment). We learn later from hospital that his skull is fractured but that his injury is not life-threatening.
The demonstration continues. Luisa Morgantini and Mustafa Barghouti are in the crowd nearby and then I notice that Mustafa has changed his role – from leader of a national political party to medical doctor, for he is binding up the wounds that some men have sustained to their back and their limbs. It’s a moving sight. Having done that he is speaking in front of the many video and TV cameras present about the injuries. They are externally small injuries but very painful and they seem to come from a new type of weapon, an explosive that showers tiny metal shards into any flesh around. It is known that the West Bank and Gaza are a most convenient live laboratory for the Israeli and American cutting edge weapons R&D industry. We seem to be witnessing an example today. Then the teargas gets us and we cower and move quickly away covering mouth and nose and screwing up our painful eyes. I am biting like crazy on my trusty friend, the raw onion in my pocket, and it helps.
I am surrounded by young men and older with heavily wrapped faces in black and white or red and white kaffiyehs. I know a few of them and we chat in a lull. One of them is Mohammed al Khatib who had played a prominent part in the conference, chairing some of the sessions with skill, diplomacy and humour, sometimes negotiating patiently through to a difficult decision, and also taking huge delight in the brief session of male dabka dancing we had had the night before. He had left the conference shortly before the end this morning explaining he was under a restriction of signing at a police station in a settlement the far side of Ramallah to ensure his non-participation in future demonstrations. But here he was, smiling a boyish grin beneath his smothering kaffiyeh. I shall never look at masked demonstrators in the same way again for I know they need some small protection from the choking gas they face, and I know they use the kaffiyeh, the symbol of resistance, to protect their identities from the army that will subsequently come and snatch them in the middle of the night from their beds.
The demonstration came to a sudden close. A group of Israelis decided to sit down across the road down which the soldiers were advancing, to protect the village from invasion. But the soldiers continued advancing and arrested 3 of them. At the same time they grabbed a Palestinian journalist and Marisol, one of my IWPS colleagues who happened to be standing close by. Then I saw that my other colleague, Marie, was slowly advancing towards the line of soldiers alone in the road, hands in the air. I’ve seen her do this before and it is a heart-stopping sight. She is alone facing a line of fully armed soldiers who are clearly trigger happy, but she is demanding why they have taken her friend. I stand by and watch helplessly as both sides continue to advance. When the soldiers shout to her to stop, otherwise they will shoot, she stands still and then very slowly starts to retreat. I breath a huge sigh of relief.
But Marisol has been taken and we’re not sure what to do. Will she be released in a few minutes and come walking back towards us? Will she be held a few hours far away and then released into the night in a strange place? Will she be deported? As we wait undecided a young Israeli man comes up and asks us some questions about the arrest. He is in touch with the Israeli lawyers they use who will be in touch with their people who have also been arrested. She’s likely to be held with them for several hours, and then released. She’ll be taken to a police station in a local settlement and she may have conditions laid upon her. He is quietly assured and this re-assures us. It turned out that he was dead right in every respect: we were woken up at 1.30am that night by Marisol who had indeed just been released in a strange place but she was arranging to go to Tel Aviv not far away with the Israelis. She was released together with all the others, even the Palestinian, which is very unusual, and they were all bound over not to go to Bil’in for 15 days. This was no big deal as she wouldn’t be doing that anyway. But by insisting on sticking firmly together during their 10 hours in detention the group had managed to protect the Palestinian and he received the same treatment as they did. They must have been a formidable group for soldiers and police are not prone to regarding Palestinians as equal to others; they usually come in both for extremely rough treatment amounting to abuse and even torture whilst in custody and for harsher punishment for their actions.
While we were in Bil’in we received information about another of our IWPS colleagues in Gaza. She is there in a different capacity and is also active with those people who have organised to resist the Israeli takeover of land in the newly restricted “buffer zone” (see my report from the Bil’in conference) along the whole border. Whilst in a demonstration she was shot in the thigh and had to be hospitalized. We have subsequently heard that she was able eventually to go home and that the Maltese ambassador in Israel (for she is Maltese) has made the strongest of protests to the Israeli authorities. Somehow I very much doubt that British citizens in the same situation would enjoy that degree of support from our government – more likely a slap on the wrist for being in a place not recommended by the Foreign Office!
The second series of events is still unfolding as I write and I do not know their outcome:
Last Thursday there was a knock on our door at about 8pm and an elderly man was standing there asking for our help in tracing his son. We sat him down in our courtyard, served him with sweet black tea in a small glass and tried to garner a few facts though with no interpreter it wasn’t a great deal. His 22 year old son Ali, had been arrested by soldiers that afternoon and the family had no idea of his whereabouts. Could we help trace him? Fortunately he had brought some documentation about Ali so we could get his full name, date of birth and, most important, his ID number. With that information we could begin to make phone calls: to the army’s “humanitarian” office, the DCO (District Coordination Office of Israel’s “civil administration” in the West Bank), the DCL (the Palestinian District Liaison Office which does all the liaising work with the Israeli occupying forces), Hamoked, (the Israeli NGO Centre for Prisoners’ Rights), the International Red Cross and a few others. But at 9pm on a Thursday evening it was not very hopeful and we promised to be in touch with him the following day. Friday and Saturday are the weekend here and many offices are not staffed. Friday and Saturday are also Shabbat in Israel. In addition this is what we would call a bank holiday weekend because Sunday is a public holiday for International Labour Day. The army chose the right day to cause the maximum amount of stress.
The following day, Friday, we learned a lot more about what had happened and it was pretty shocking. There was not one but five arrests and four of them happened when an estimated figure in excess of 50 soldiers invaded Deir Istiya. They took minors and young men between the ages of 16 and 22 from their beds at gunpoint between 2 and 4 in the morning. With the co-operation of the mayor and with an excellent young interpreter from the village who had himself been utterly humiliated at a checkpoint the day before as he returned home from a university exam, two of us spent 4 hours visiting each family, listening to their stories and taking notes of all relevant details so that we could write up our human rights reports. These reports have widespread circulation to western counties, the UN, Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, governmental bodies and the media. It was a painful afternoon for clearly family members were very distressed. In each case it was both parents who spoke with us, usually in the presence of young children and other family members. And by the 6.30pm I had drunk so many cups of tea and coffee I was full to bursting both with emotional information and with liquid.
A common pattern emerged as we went along: none of the young men had been involved in any particular incident recently and some had never been. Papers were in order. Reasons for the arrest were never given and none of the families knew why they had been taken. In each case the military had banged on the door, surrounded the houses and demanded that everyone assemble before them, even tiny children. They knew precisely whom they were looking for, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then left them to stand whilst they searched the house, room by room. They were often foul-mouthed and highly abusive. In one house they went on the rampage over-turning and breaking household belongings and furniture because they couldn’t find their victim. They threatened that if he didn’t give himself up the next day they would return to destroy the family home – a threat not to be taken lightly. (By the way, the Israeli policy of destroying and demolishing the homes of detainees as a collective punishment is copied from a previous occupying power, Britain.) In each case the men were taken to an unknown destination and 36 hours later no-one had any information.
For us too in the IWPS house it was a very sombre time, for one of the families lives opposite us: we know them as friendly neighbours whose kids are often around, and these events had taken place at spitting distance from our bedroom windows. Four of us had slept through it all – and no-one had phoned to tell us while it was happening. We are here to witness these human rights violations at whatever time of the day or night they occur, and by our presence to show our solidarity with those affected, and hopefully to act as some sort of a constraining influence on the worst excesses of violence by the army. We had failed miserably and it was difficult to face our neighbours when they described what had happened to them as we slept soundly.
There are issues here to be followed up, but they held no grudge against us. In fact they went out of their way to invite us round the following evening and we had a wonderfully life-affirming couple of hours with their large family, playing ball with their little boy, taking photos in the stable round the back while the mother and older children were milking the sheep and feeding the hens, and then sitting around the stove in the yard while the mother shaped her dough into loaves and patted them skillfully into the thinnest of large “pancakes” before putting them over hot coals in the furnace-like structure to make delicious khubus bread. Eating hot bread dipped in olive oil and za’atar herbs, accompanied by chopped tomatoes and cucumber that the other women were preparing as we ate, was the sort of experience I will be able to savour for a very long time. The moon was nearly full and I was looking out in the darkness over the wide rolling hills with yellow settlement lights dominating the far crests. Visitors from the extended family were arriving and I knew the women were describing what had happened the night before. Then I was aware that the 12-year old daughter standing next to me had turned her back and was crying silently to herself. I put my arm around her, and she did not object. . . . When the three of us decided eventually to leave this enchanted female family circle it was to loud objections and insistence that we take bread and salad home with us. It was a humbling experience.
It is now five days since the men were taken. Various Israeli and international organizations and Palestinian authorities are involved in trying to trace them. We and their families now know where they are but no information at all about charges. One was admitted to hospital because of stomach ulcers, two are still in the holding centre near Nablus where everyone is held incommunicado, and two have been transferred to Jelami prison near Jenin.
* * * * * * * * * *
This may well be my last newsletter for I now have only two and a half more weeks in Deir Istiya and there are inevitably 101 things to do in this run-down time. It will be very difficult to walk out of the village for the last time but I plan to be back next year. Top priorities are to say proper goodbyes to friends here and to have more discussions with our mayor about the possibility of inviting him to Britain for a speaking tour which he has requested. I must also pack up and post off one or two boxes of all the “stuff” I have acquired here: my new books and pamphlets, my precious notebooks, a few kaffiyehs and the fabulous piles of women’s craftwork from Bil’in that occupy a corner of my bedroom. All this is incriminating evidence of support for illegal (terrorist) activities which must at all costs not fall into the hands of my interrogators and luggage searchers at Ben Gurion airport. Fortunately I don’t have a laptop to wipe ‘clean’.
I shall also be taking a bit of time off that’s due to me to visit three friends in Israel and to spend a last day in Bil’in. So, a busy time ahead.
Gwen
Image: Conference Picture
General Comments
The Bil’in organisers were expecting up to 600 internationals at the conference but because of severe travel problems due to airport closures across Europe caused by the Icelandic volcanic eruption there was only a relative handful, eg. there was expected to be about 100 from France alone and in fact there are about 20. The biggest delegations were from France, Spain and Italy, with individuals from Canada, Britain, Germany and Ireland. There were also several activists such as myself who are resident in the West Bank. I spoke to the conference on behalf of both the Liverpool Friends of Bil’in and the International Women’s Peace Service as part of a panel of international speakers.
The Popular Committee Movement
The conference is an annual one organized by the Popular Committees Against the Wall and Settlements, a growing movement of Palestinian, Israeli and international non-violent activism in an increasing number of communities, including a very new popular committee in Gaza, organizing determined, co-operative, grass-roots, non-violent resistance. Bil’in was one of the first, now into its 6th year of unbroken weekly demonstrations, and has been a driving and supportive force around which many other communities have organized their own resistance.
To make clear the nature of this unique and powerful movement I will quote some passages from an excellent little booklet that was provided to all conference delegates:
“The Popular Committees are local grassroots groups. We are not affiliated to any faction or political party. Our loyalty is to our people and our land. We believe that creativity and hope are our most effective tools to break the shackles of occupation and oppression and live in freedom. We are civilians, ordinary people, who are engaged in a Palestinian-led struggle of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists for life and freedom, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law.
Our struggle is gaining momentum and achieving victories but, because popular resistance threatens the sustainability of the occupation, our victories also intensify the repression as the occupation authorities try to crush our movement. In an attempt to destroy us Israel is targeting activists and members of the popular committees with arrests and violence. During recent years of struggle against the Apartheid Wall 20 unarmed demonstrators have been killed, 100s imprisoned and thousands injured.”
Side by side with this movement is now the International Network formed at last year’s Bil’in conference in order to:
1. Raise awareness and visibility among worldwide public opinion and policy makers about the daily life of the Palestinian people living under occupation;
2. Improve co-ordination among international civil society groups working in solidarity with this movement and establish a permanent channel of communication;
3. Strengthen advocacy and lobbying capacity towards governments and parliaments world-wide to defend the objectives of the Palestinian movement, and call attention to these goals by international media;
4. Promote international initiatives to send civilian peace teams to the OTs, work to maintain a constant presence of international volunteers in the villages and organise field visits by politicians, lawyers and journalists;
5. Foster non-co-operation and divestment from settlements in the OTs including E. Jerusalem and from the Israeli war economy that profits from the occupation.
The Conference
Day 1
The first day of the two and a half day conference was long – far too long – and very behind schedule, so instead of starting at the scheduled time of 9am it was more like 10.30. With 2 short breaks it then went on until 9.30pm with speakers or panels talking to plenary sessions all day. How the simultaneous interpreters in English, Arabic, French and Italian kept going I do not know. Certainly the English interpreter couldn’t have been better. Conference members became restless and many drifted off well before the end of the day and as for myself, (who normally has a long attention span) I simply had to take my earphones off and stop trying to concentrate. I therefore believe I missed some important discussions from representatives of the many Palestinian political parties and factions about the extent to which they support non-violent resistance versus the armed struggle, and how the popular committee movement links into and influences the political process. I apologise that I cannot adequately report on these very long sessions in the evening. Concentration was also affected by the fact that I had been awoken at 4am the previous night to witness the end of an army invasion of the village when they were unsuccessfully looking for a teenage boy. All of these factors have an influence on the adequacy of this report, for which I apologise in advance.
The first morning was dominated by big speeches and big names as well as by contributions giving full recognition to the debt owed to those who have died in this long and bitter struggle, especially to Bassem Abu Rahme, killed by a tear gas canister hitting his chest at close range exactly one year ago; and also the five men from Bil’in and many others from elsewhere who languish in Israeli prisons, some in indeterminate detention, because of their non-violent resistance. There are still more than 10,000 political prisoners.
The Italian ex-MEP and Vice President of the European Parliament, Luisa Morgantini, chaired these morning sessions and her total commitment at the centre of the international support shone through. She is a wonderful humanitarian and activist. So, it seems is Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, the Palestinian medical doctor who is also Secretary General of the political party of al Mubadara (the Palestinian National Initiative). A perfect English speaker, he too is an inspirational orator and a man of the people. I have seen him several times in the field (literally) these last few weeks and I was particularly moved to watch him on Friday in the middle of the Bil’in demonstration binding up the wounds of men who were injured in minor ways. He spoke about regaining the spirit of the first intifada, of community non-violent resistance; he spoke of the need to seriously challenge Israeli takeover in Area C (more than 60% of the West Bank taken for the settlement blocs and military infrastructure) by taking initiatives and making projects in those areas; and of the need to implement the rulings of the international court in the Hague declaring the Wall illegal. In particular he spoke of the imperative of supporting and organising the Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) call world-wide and of strongly resisting the accession of Israel to the OECD.
Perhaps the main draw of the morning session however, and certainly the politician who brought most additional numbers to the session in terms of police, security and even army and roof snipers, together with a train of diplomatic representatives from various Arab and EU country delegations and from the EU itself, was the Prime Minister, Salam Fayed, who came to voice his support for the non-violent resistance movement. The most important form of resistance is to remain on the land, he said, echoing the words of our mayor in Deir Istiya: easier said than done when the might of the Israeli state is right behind the continuing takeover of land for settlement expansion whether here in the areas close to the Green Line, or in the Jordan Valley which we visited the next day, or in the semi-wilderness of the South Hebron Hills or in the heart of the West Bank in the Salfeet region where I live. Everywhere the land is being stolen - daily.
Prominent in three different sessions today was the rather dramatic figure of Archbishop Dr. Atallah Hanna, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem in full robes. How refreshing and invigorating to hear a leading churchman proclaiming loud and clear that this occupation is evil; that Palestine is in danger; that Jerusalem is in danger; that the suffering and pain of the Palestinian people is one, whether Moslem or Christian, whether in Gaza or the West Bank; and that he will be on the Gaza Fleet next month as a whole group of boats will again break the criminal siege. He denounced Israeli aggression and racism and he declared that resistance to the occupation is both a human and a spiritual task. But he made a clear distinction between the Zionist policy of the state and the Jewish faith itself: these policies have nothing to do with the Jewish faith as such – they are a perversion of it; no religion condones oppression of a whole people. Oh that our own church leaders in Britain spoke with that conviction and courage!
The 3rd session was something of a breakthrough as it was a live video-link with an audience in Gaza, and we heard a number of speakers from there including a man who represented the newly formed Popular Resistance Committee Against the Buffer Zone. This “buffer zone” has recently been declared by Israel and extends right around the land border. It is a “closed military zone” on the Gazan side of the Wall, half a kilometre wide with a shoot-to-kill policy if farmers attempt to continue working their land within it. Already several non-violent attempts to reach and work this land have been made with the support of the few internationals who remain in the territory. This video link was a symbol of breaking the siege and overcoming the isolation of the imprisoned Gazans and was an important contribution to keep communication open with the West Bank.
There followed sessions to hear of the non-violent resistance in Jerusalem to the intense process of judaisation of Palestinian neigbourhoods including the Old City and the hitherto entirely Arab “Holy Basin” of the inner eastern suburbs. There was a call for the PA to prioritise Jerusalem and not abandon it; to develop a long-term strategy of resistance throughout the city, and to work with the governments who have their diplomatic missions to Palestine there (including the British Consulate) to take a stronger stand internationally to pressurise Israel more effectively to obey international law as it applies to Occupied East Jerusalem. The inner city areas of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan are particularly badly affected by militant and violent takeovers by settlers using archeology as their spurious weapon of advance.
Conference members were given copies of an unpublished 16 page report from EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem dated November 2009 making it crystal clear that they are fully aware of all that is going on, that they condemn it and that Israeli Occupation policy is illegal and intolerable. But what happens to that report??
The fourth session before a delicious and plentiful lunch (which was eventually served at 2.30pm) was a report-back from the various popular resistance villages all over the West Bank (from Nablus in the north to At-twani in the south, and from the Jordan Valley in the east to Beit Jala in the west) and the delivery of calls for greater resistance and co-operation. But by the time that this session was held there was hardly anyone left to listen in the hall and the last speaker refused to take his slot and speak to an empty space. Clearly the organization needs to take more heed of human frailty next year to avoid the bad feelings engendered.
The first afternoon session was particularly interesting to me with its 3 speakers: the British journalist resident in Nazareth, Jonathan Cook (always clear, concise and worth listening to and reading) speaking about the apartheid system of laws inside Israel itself (30 pieces of legislation to ensure separation); Professor Noura Erakat speaking about the choices ahead for both Israelis and Palestinians and also about the BDS movement in the States and its potential influence on those choices; and Dr. Hind Awwad the Boycott National Committee Co-ordinator making a strong call for the intensification of the BDS movement world-wide, including in Palestine itself. Israel has both recognized the threat that this movement poses and has started a counter-offensive to it. All were excellent and powerful speakers and it was particularly convenient for myself as all spoke in English.
There followed a chilling exposition from Jonathan Pollock of the Israeli activist group, Anarchists Against the Wall, (again in English) of the increasing repression of the non-violent resistance movement by the Israeli state and summarized briefly as follows: Since Operation Cast Lead Israel has seriously escalated repression of the non-violent resistance movement:
a) on the ground by the negligent, overwhelming and often illegal use of arms;
b) by covering up the extent and depth of their repression to the outside world, and
c) by ‘legal’ measures of imprisoning Palestinians, banning and otherwise controlling Israeli activists and deporting internationals.
For those who had the stamina for late night concentration there were shown 2 really unmissable films, one on each night which, because they were shown so late, did not receive the attention and recognition that was their due. The first one, “Life on Wheels” (about 25 minutes long) is the amazing story of Bil’in as seen through the eyes of a remarkable 19 year old Londoner, Jodi Mcguire, who spent 6 months in the village last year participating at the very forefront both of the demonstrations and the night raids in his wheelchair, for he is a sufferer from cerebral palsy. It is a touching and remarkable film made by Bil’in film-maker Haitham Al Khatib who is just back from film festivals in Italy and Switzerland where he won prizes for it. The second and longer film is simply called “Budrus” and is the human and completely gripping story of the development of community resistance to the loss of their land by the building of the Wall in one village in the northern West Bank. Both films are very human stories which cannot fail to move and shock anyone but the most indifferent or hard-hearted and I strongly recommend their showing.
Days 2 and 3
The second and third days were linked in that each was only half a day, the main purpose of which was to break up into 3 workshops run by internationals on Thursday morning and for feedback from those workshops brought to the plenary on Friday morning. Again Luisa Morgantini played a key, hands-on role in all of this as she chairs the international solidarity Network of support for the Popular Committee movement since it was formed at last year’s conference. There is a clear structure in place with very active and articulate members in Italy, Spain, France and also Switzerland (the latter not present). Britain is not represented as yet and I came away with the intention of publicizing this gap in our campaigning in Britain. It was hard for me to make the choice of one of the three workshops to attend as all were very important: international law and how it can be used; BDS and its strengthening; and refining the work and structure of the International Network. I chose the latter because of my involvement in the twinning movement and it convinced me of the importance of Britain (which has such a strong reputation for BDS campaigning and for its solidarity movement generally) joining this network and supporting the resistance movement on the ground in co-ordination with our European partners. Below are the outcomes of all three workshops which were presented in full on Friday morning to the final plenary session. They provided the basis for the final statement from this 5th international conference as follows:
BDS
1. Israel must be excluded from international institutions until such times as it behaves in accordance with international law. The EU-Israel Association Agreement must be put on ice and Israel must not be allowed to join the OECD.
2. The role of international banks in support of Israel and the true nature of the Jewish National Fund (which enjoys charitable status in western countries) must be exposed.
3. Cultural and sports boycotts of artists who represent or are funded by the Israeli state must continue. This is a relatively effective face of boycott and one to which Israel is sensitive.
4. Tourism to Israel should be a prime and high profile target.
5. We must work world-wide to create Israeli product-free zones and local boycotts of Israeli goods can be very eye-catching and significant in propaganda content.
6. However we still need far more research and information gathering, exchange of contacts and increased lobbying of governments to impose sanctions.
International Law
1. Support the Russell Tribunal and encourage the formation of national committees in Europe to extend the jurisdiction of this Tribunal looking into the legality/illegality of Operation Cast Lead.
2. Legal actions against corporations such as the Canadian court case against the 2 construction companies building Mod’in Illit extensions on Bil’in land. More sharing of information and experience where industrial corporations have been prosecuted (eg. Veolia in France). Delegates heard an account of the case in the Canadian court from the lawyer, Emily Shafer, who is leading the case. The latest is that last Sept. the court ruled, significantly, that the case could be heard in Canada but recommended that it should be heard in Israel. As Israel refuses such a step, they are now awaiting the outcome of an appeal against that recommendation on 23rd June.
3. Raise awareness of the support that corporations give the apartheid IsraeIi state.
4. Implement international agreements and laws relating to human rights.
International Networking
Actions to be taken in the next 3 months:
1. Promote the website to make it an effective working tool
2. Begin to co-ordinate sending activists to villages from different countries
3. Prepare a Global Day of Action on 10th June in support of the Popular Committees eg. by organizing demos outside Israeli embassies
4. Appeal for monthly donations to support the work
5. All actions abroad should be in response to calls from within Palestine
6. All actions should include an awareness both of the BDS campaign and the need to work for the release of political prisoners.
End of Conference
After valedictory calls from Luisa that we go forward as partners in the non-violent struggle for justice and freedom in Palestine and with new hope for our unity of purpose, 2 significant reminders of the repression and the injustice were given to us:
News had just been received of violent actions near Bethlehem in the villages of Beit Jala and Al Walaja where the army and bulldozers were at that moment uprooting olive groves and gardens and invading houses to begin work on the extension of the Wall. A group left the conference immediately to go there. The second reminder were the last words to us of one of the Bil’in organizers, Mohammed Al Khatib, who had chaired some of the conference sessions with skill, diplomacy and humour and had also demonstrated his energies in dabka dancing the night before. He had to say farewell as the weekly witching hour was upon him when he had to get out of the village and travel to a settlement the far side of Ramallah to sign at the police station there. He had been banned from Friday demonstrations. We gave him a roaring farewell – but the next time I saw him it was in the crowd in the thick of the teargas, his face smothered in a kaffiyeh.
* * * * * * * * *
On Thursday afternoon we had the choice of several trips and I chose to go to the Jordan Valley (the lowest place on earth) to see the takeover of the vast majority of that most fertile agricultural land by settlers and the squeezing of the few Palestinian communities and farms that are left. We were joined by several Bil’in families and young people and most of the internationals were French who had a particular interest in one of the few commercial Palestinian date plantations left as they had supported the farmer financially to build it up.
After the final session on Friday there was of course the usual weekly demonstration swollen this week by almost all the internationals from the conference, including Luisa Morgantini and Mustafa Barghouthi. I am writing separately about this.
Gwen Backwell 26.4.2010
Image: Men's night at village wedding party
A Night to Remember
Thursday last week was a day of unexpected and extreme contrasts and the two events that we were caught up in during one evening illustrate well the traditions and complexities of life in a land where two peoples and two histories exist cheek by jowel. This newsletter will span just eight hours and two villages.
We are now coming into the season of weddings and I have been told to expect many, because most marriages are crammed into the summer months. And with them come the invitations, for weddings here are open community rejoicings that you crowd into and dance, sing and clap the evening away. Each wedding lasts three evenings – a women’s party, though not necessarily with the bride present but primarily I think for the female relatives of the bridegroom as it was in this case; a male party for the bridegroom and his male relatives and village friends; and an evening for both sexes with the men and women in different spaces and only the bridegroom comes to dance with the women together with his new wife. The women’s events are always in a house, either in the enclosed courtyard or a large room. I have been to two of these now and I could write a description of my trials and tribulations in getting into the swing of things that would provide you with much amusement. But to save my own blushes I won’t! I want to tell you a little of the male event I observed – for male events are meant to be observed by women. This one was in the village square here in Deir Istiya and we were assured it was OK to go and watch. So we did.
Marie and I could hear the amplified music wafting through the village streets to guide us to the right place but just as we got there the square emptied in response to the nearby call to prayer. However, within 20 minutes the men came drifting back to resume their party. Eventually the square was full of men of all ages with little boys chasing around, drinking pop and eating ice-lollies. As my eyes began to take in the scene I could see women and girls hanging out of windows and on balconies and terraces overlooking the square, and I placed myself on a plastic chair at the back of the men though raised up so I could see everything that went on, and kept company with a lone elderly woman who had beckoned me to join her. Marie went off to find a vantage point from which to video the event. It is a rich film.
To traditional wedding songs being sung by two men through the loud speakers I watched as the men’s snaking dabka dancing began to emerge. I could see various lines of men in different parts of the square moving rhythmically across, joining up and then breaking away from other lines or meeting them face to face. Primarily it was the younger men and their dancing ranged from slow dipping movements to strong energizing stamps and leaps, all beautifully held together in long lines by arms around shoulders. Little boys had sporadic goes at developing the techniques of working co-operatively to make these rhythmic, undulating lines, and then the older men formed their own line and started moving around the square to meet up with the younger men. Then I was able to single out the bridegroom himself – a smartly dressed man in a light grey suit and tie who was being carried shoulder high around the arena for everyone to acknowledge him, and he was twirling a long stick twisted with mutli-coloured tinsel above his head. His family live in the village but he works as an engineer in Abu Dabi, and his wife comes from Tulkarm and works in Nablus. Although traditionally the wife would move into the man’s village and family, and this is still usually the case in the villages, clearly this society has had to accommodate to its own diaspora which is very significant in the Gulf States. We constantly meet village men who have returned from years earning their living and supporting their families from abroad. Clearly this young man with a university degree is doing just that and no doubt his new wife will join him.
Everyone that night seemed to be laughing, chatting and in high spirits. It was as if they would dance and celebrate the whole night long – and without a drop of alcohol passing their lips. But we had reports to write, and Marie and I left long before it ended. I was told that when the summer nights get warmer it will go on until 3 or 4am. This sight of spontaneous, living, traditional village culture of superb dancing and wonderful high spirits was enough to keep me warm for a long time. And I needed it . . .
For within half an hour of returning to our house the mood changed. A phone call from Abu Nawab, our mayor, at 10pm informed us that the next village, Kifl Hares, was surrounded by the army and cut off. Would we come with him to try to get through to support his mayoral colleague there who had rung him? We should expect to be there all night because there was to be an invasion of settlers. Of course, we dropped everything and jumped into his car. Our story to get through the road blocks was that Marie had bad toothache and needed a dentist immediately. It worked! After much peering into the car and checking the boot, we cleared 2 roadblocks barring entrance to this steep hill village and abandoned the car under orders at its edge. We walked slowly up to the square, stopped again numerous times and questioned, to the mayor’s house just off it. It was about 11pm and there were still a few local families with young children on their balconies watching. The last young men were being cleared off the street by soldiers – but the first men of another kind were beginning to enter the space. Bespectacled men in black garb and side ringlets were coming in carrying tables and all sorts of items. Vans with yellow number plates (Palestinians have green number plates) were parking in the side streets and unloading more street furniture and palettes of bottled water. The village was being transformed and completely taken over in front of our eyes – it was like a change in a stage set when there is no curtain and you see all the manoeverings going on on-stage. People scurrying like stage hands, lugging loads, some strolling around, everyone talking as more and more came onto the stage set – women and children, babies in pushchairs, purposeful, swaggering teenagers in black wide-brimmed trilbies – hundreds, thousands of characters. The stage was being set for a grand opera with a vast cast and all under the protection of their army who had prepared the way for this grand and uninterrupted entrance and would allow no-one else to move. We ourselves were soon confined to the edge of the square behind army lines and the settlers were kept strictly away from us, though many tried to manoevre themselves beyond their boundaries and stray into side streets. Some managed to sneak around and relieve themselves up against the walls of the houses.
Kifl Hares has the great misfortune to have been identified from a description in the Old Testament as the site of the tomb of Joshua, one of the greatest of Israel’s national heroes, and these “worshippers” were here on the anniversary of his death. It was a big occasion, not only for settlers but for people coming in from Israel too. But they come at all sorts of times throughout the year and each time the villagers have to get out of the way and watch a takeover. The mayor, another man with excellent English, showed us a slash in the metal shutter of his window where a bullet had penetrated on just such a night as this in 1989 and had killed his 19 year old sister in her own living room.
You will know that Joshua was the man chosen to lead the Israelites out of their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness after their bondage in Egypt and into the promised land of Canaan, which he entered triumphantly by winning the famous battle of Jericho so that “the walls came tumbling down”. Here is a commentary based on a book entitled The Bible and Zionism by Nur Masalha to enlighten you about Joshua:
The principal method Joshua employed to secure the conquest of Canaan ('The Promised Land') was genocide. When cities fell to him his usual practice was to slaughter everyone in them - men, women, children and animals. However, had he been arrested and brought before the International Criminal Court he would almost certainly have pleaded that he was only obeying orders, and he was - Jehovah's orders. These orders are very explicitly conveyed to the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy which precedes the Book of Joshua.
Ben-Gurion was a great fan of The Book Of Joshua and frequently used it to justify Zionist attitudes to the Palestinians. He believed there was an unbroken line of continuity from the days of Joshua to the IDF. He was instrumental in making it a major component of the school curriculum in Israel and central to Zionist politics. Needless to say Joshua's destruction and subjugation of Canaan is seen by Jewish fundamentalists as a model for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
Apart from the obvious objections there is another problem with all this. All the evidence suggests that Joshua is a mythical or literary figure not a historic character at all, and it is known that some of the cities he is described as destroying were in fact destroyed hundreds of years before he is supposed to have lived. Here is an interesting quote -
"This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. . . ."
Zeev Herzog, Professor of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University.
According to the Book of Joshua he was buried in Tim-nath-serah; presumably the Hebrew name for Kifl Hares.
Poor Kifl Hares!
The two mayors, ourselves and a couple of other men kept watch for several more hours, sustained by the occasional tiny cup of strong black coffee or glass of mint tea. The invaders had erected a wall around the tomb to divide women from men worshippers, like a mini wailing wall against which heads bobbed back and forth, prayers murmured incessantly and prayer books studied hard. On the edge of the constantly moving female crowd some women were boisterously dancing and singing. Meanwhile candles were lit by the men on a large stand and some men were on the domed roof of the small Islamic tomb, praying, as a soldier paraded around pointing his gun at the houses on the square. All this I observed from the corner to which the soldiers were confining me and I could only partially see things. It was a long night but eventually around 4am Abu Nawab deemed it safe to leave as families and all the women left the square to the men who were tidying up their tables and rubbish. This year the invasion had gone off without incident and Kifl Hares was free to sleep for whatever was left of the night. We shook hands with its mayor and walked back to our car past groups of soldiers who were still guarding all roads.
A night to remember indeed.
Gwen
Image: Newsletter 4 top
Image: Collection of Photos
Village Life
A discernable pattern is emerging in my life here in Palestine:
The climax of most weeks is an action every Friday when there is a confrontation with the army. That possibility isn’t far from anything we are called out to or choose to participate in, but Friday actions are organized in many villages in order to demand their right to go to their own lands that have been stolen by settlement expansion – and it is the core of Israeli state policy to maintain this expansion. There are now regular determined non-violent attempts to reach confiscated village land in the central West Bank villages of An Nabi Salih (the one we usually attend), Bil’in (the village that Liverpool is twinned with), Nil’in, Beit Ummar, Al Masara, Bitunya, Budrus, and others. All such demonstrations are met with force. You may not hear about them very much although there are sometimes western, including British, news media journalists and photographers in attendance; but it is important that people back home know of this strong Palestinian spirit of sumud – steadfastness in the face of direct and severe oppression, and after 43 years of illegal occupation. Ghandi’s grandson is around here at the moment and is visiting some of these communities.
Outside this framework of Friday demonstrations there are other actions, events and responsibilities that form the fabric of my life here. Chief and least newsworthy of the latter is the daily checking of our inbox and removal of all the spam that clogs it before we can reach the relevant stuff that pours in. Efficient working of our computer systems is still an elusive dream in spite of the installation of a new computer with the house move in February, and a volunteer who is also a computer geek would be a godsend. Also, the writing of reports on all incidents and keeping in regular contact with our international support team on all kinds of organizational matters are central parts of our work. We network with a wide variety of local organizations and individuals, both in the villages of the Salfeet region and wider afield. We keep in regular contact with some Israeli peace groups, working together with their activists and with those of the international presence here such as the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and Ecumenical Accompaniers. We also look after the house and garden and of course keep the finances and pay the bills!
You might be interested in an overview of the actions I’ve been involved in during the 6 weeks I’ve been here:
Presence at 4 olive planting occasions; participation in demonstrations at 2 agricultural gates near Qalqiliya; accompanying our mayor and others in Wadi Qana where settlers threaten attacks on village farmers working on their land; participation at 4 weekend solidarity demos where we have a regular presence, in An Nabi Salih and Iraq Burin where we returned for the tragic funerals; solidarity visits to a family whose house is totally entombed by the Wall and to Jerusalem families who were violently evicted from their homes so that settlers can move in, now living on the street outside their own homes together with a 24/7 protective Israeli/international presence; participation in 2 Israeli demonstrations in support of the evicted families; attendance at a Jerusalem court hearing for the evicted families and to the ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) office in Jerusalem; social visits to friends in Bethlehem and to an activist teacher in a town near the Green Line near Qalqiliya; and visit to Beit Jala to see the latest attacks on the land. On Saturday I shall be visiting the village I feel a special affinity towards, Bil’in, for a twinning conference, and on my list of social visits to make is a man in the next village who has spent the last years in a wheel-chair, paralysed by a soldier’s bullet, who wrote a deeply moving open letter to the Israeli who changed his life forever.
But our lives here are not totally “work” and as I indicated in my first newsletter we have a regular interaction with people in Deir Istiya – which in itself is an important background to our presence here as well as being a necessary expression of friendliness and acceptance in the community. It definitely gives us a “feel-good” factor about being here which is important to us personally, as human beings. So in this newsletter I’d like to tell you a bit about the many interactions and kindnesses that come our way every day.
Shopping in the many scattered local small shops is often a pleasure with unexpected conversations struck up at some level of language competence. It isn’t so uncommon to bump into a perfect English speaker who is over here visiting his family. We bumped into one who lives within a couple of miles of Marie’s home town of Clearwater in Florida so he came round to the house for a more in depth chat. The diaspora of Palestinians from this village, as from all, is very numerous.
Shopping for our eggs is different: we get them from Zainab, who is so friendly and eager to communicate, but we don’t have many words in common. When I last went round to her tiny shop that sells everything from toothpaste to shoe polish she took me round the back through a dark opening and there before me was an area I can only describe as being like the imagined stable of Jesus’ birth – though with concrete, not wooden rafters. This was a classic animal stable and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I could slowly make out the divided pen areas with their piles of straw, numerous chickens that lay our eggs, with their fine cocks, a few large, lumbering sheep, some brown and white doves fluttering from upper ledges, and – Zainab’s pride and joy – a family of goat kids with their mother. They squealed loudly as she yanked them into her arms to present them to me for some close-up photography. Every time I eat a delicious soft-boiled egg for my breakfast now, I am back in that stable. Since then I have noticed that several houses in the village are built on the same ancient principle – that the ground floor is where the animals live, with the humans above them.
Last week we had a funny series of incidents revolving around the burgeoning vine in our garden, for it’s the time for the picking of young vine leaves for stuffing and we have a big rambling plant that will provide shade over an extended area at the back by our well. There was a determined series of taps at our metal door one morning while I was in on my own. It was one of the women we sometimes have coffee with over the road. She’s quite a character and a forceful personality. With no language in common, she led me to what she had come for and, seeing no problem, I joined her to cull the succulent tender leaves. She indicated she wanted a large container so I brought one from the kitchen and we proceeded to stuff layer upon layer into it. If I hadn’t got a small vine myself in Liverpool and hadn’t known how rampant their growth is, I would have been very concerned at the rate at which she stripped the plant. But I was philosophical about its ability to recover. She then led me back into our courtyard, sat down at our little plastic table, and whilst I served her a glass of sweet mint tea on a silver tray, she quickly stripped each leaf of its stem, piled them neatly into a plastic bag, and went on her way, indicating with expressive body language that she would be inviting me to eat the results. I looked forward to that – and I only had to wait 2 hours. I had just finished my lunch when her children came round to drag me off to their place where, under the long and heavy washing line, we devoured a huge plateful of steaming stuffed vine leaves. They were absolutely delicious and I did them full justice. She came round again later that afternoon, this time with her friend (or a relative) and together they stripped the other vine in the courtyard. Socialising 3 times in one day with someone you can’t understand does rather stretch the ingenuity and it does hold up essential computer-communing time!
Next day there was another, more circumspect tapping at the gate and another woman standing there. I did not know her but she seemed to know what she wanted. When she walked round to the back and saw the stripped vine she was very displeased and wanted an explanation. She named some women whom she suspected, and very fortunately I did not know the name of the cheeky imposter so I couldn’t confess it. For all I knew, both of them were imposters – I was just facilitating the sharing of the bounteous fruits of our wonderful garden. Already the children come regularly to strip the lower branches of the escadenia, and the limes, lemons, oranges and almonds, not to mention prickly pears, are coming along nicely. Even the tiny figs are forming shyly among the fresh green on the branches which were so bare when I first arrived. Later on there will be the grapes as well. Our bounteous generosity will know no bounds this summer – it’s just a matter of first come, first served! This house has been empty and closed up for so long that clearly some villagers are taking full advantage. However, our visitor that day left, most displeased, making a mobile phone call. Oh dear – where had my naivety led me?
All was revealed shortly after when I next popped my head around Abu Nassr’s shop door and he took me round the back into his house to meet his wife. Now I knew who I had displeased. It was explained that as he and his wife care for the grounds of our house in the owner’s absence, they also have first claim on its fruits – indeed they also pick them for the owner, his cousin, in Nablus. If anyone else comes to ask, please will I send them round to him to discuss it; after all, if they take the vine leaves, they will be back for the grapes! We had a tiny cup of strong black coffee and I believe that all is now forgiven.
Our walks along the long road from one end of this extended village to the other to try to catch a bus, or a yellow servees minibus or thumb a lift or (as a last resort) get a taxi along the main road, can be a social experience in itself. Sometimes a friendly person will stop and offer us a lift or another stranded person will offer for us to join in his lift; many villagers along the way greet us warmly and try out their English; yesterday we found ourselves accompanying a huge herd of goats to the main road. It was down at the bus stop on the main road that I met Muhammed for the first time – the teenage son of the local doctor whose excellent English enabled us to have a friendly chat for ages whilst waiting for a lift that never came. We eventually shared a taxi that we called and he went out of his way to stay with me all the way to the remote house I mentioned earlier that’s surrounded by the Wall in the village of Mas’ha. At the far end of our village the other day we were invited into a new house for tea and coffee and delicious iced lemon and mint drinks (both ingredients straight from the garden), by a man whom we had accompanied in Wadi Qana. He got out his laptop and showed us many photos taken on his land there of numerous happy family occasions in the valley. He had taken them he said just in case one day he is stopped from going to his land forever.
The village is both a noisy and a peaceful place. There’s always the sound of children playing in the streets and calling from roof tops and terraces. They come knocking at our gate demanding we go and visit or asking for fruit from the garden or just to say hello. Often I can’t determine where exactly they live or who their immediate families are because their lives are so inextricably bound with their extended families who live in the next house or round the corner or down the lane, and they seem to eat and play all over the place. The same child, even very young ones, will turn up in several houses as if they live there – and in a real sense they do. Their noisy street life takes me right back to the intensity of my own childhood street playing and reminds me what a huge loss that is to western kids nowadays. There’s a school playground just over the back wall so during the mornings when the streets are relatively empty, the collective sounds of children playing are often to be heard through our windows.
Then there are the noises of workers: the tractors that go past from early morning to evening time; the builders who are building upper storeys onto houses which is a sure sign that a young man is thinking of marriage and must first prepare for it by building a home on top of his parents’ home to receive his bride. The house of our most friendly family opposite is undergoing this transformation so it can be very noisy at times, but when we ask who the young man is going to marry his sister insists that the bride is not yet chosen. Large vans and lorries delivering all kinds of wares to the shops and which may also go house to house, publicise their wares on a loud hailer to the whole neighbourhood. There are always the donkeys being driven or ridden along the road, sometimes laden with panniers of crops or building materials, and their braying is an enormous bellow especially at night when things are relatively quiet. Then there are the goats and the sheep that make quite a commotion at times, including a small herd that appears on a neighbour’s roof from time to time. Crowing cocks are of course a constant background sound. Calls to prayer from the 3 mosques are so loud they sometimes make me jump and they stop all conversation. I must be very deeply asleep when the first one of the day goes off for I rarely hear it – for which I am truly grateful.
And then there is the silence which descends upon this God-fearing community late in the evening. Between the occasional cocks and donkeys keeping up their daytime conversations it’s a deep silence that I listen to as I watch the night sky. Its myriad stars and bright moonshine light up our secure, enclosed courtyard casting deep shadows. I am often most grateful for this place and I feel it particularly at this time of day. It feels like a true home.
But it wouldn’t be Palestine if I didn’t end on a note of harsh reality. When I entered the village on Easter Sunday afternoon after getting off the bus that brought me back from Jerusalem (a right denied to almost everyone in this village though it is their capital city), I stepped straight into a road block and flying checkpoint with 2 soldiers checking all who passed. I thought I could sneak past as they were concentrating on a driver, but their persistent calls at my back brought me to a halt. They checked my passport and wanted to know what I was doing here of course. When I said I was visiting friends one of them looked at me with concern and said, “Don’t you know this is a dangerous village – very dangerous?” “That’s because you’re here” I answered, eyeing his nasty weapon slung over his shoulder, and went my way. Later, when I went up to the baladiya to ask the mayor about this, he told me that the checkpoint and a tent had been set up on Thursday afternoon, just hours after Marie and I had left the village for a long weekend. They had arrested 2 people, a man of 40 and his 16 year old cousin and even now, 4 days later, there is no news of them. He will take me to meet and interview their families. Simultaneously there was email news of a night raid by 20 or so soldiers using sound bombs on a house used by the Michigan Peace Team in the village of Huwara, south of Nablus, not too far away. The house is unoccupied right now but furniture was broken and property taken. That follows some recent illegal arrests of ISM members in Ramallah which have resulted in deportations.
Our enclosed courtyard suddenly doesn’t feel so safe. We are nervous.
Gwen Backwell
Gwen adds in her covering e-mail -
In view of the last paragraph I should reassure you that I have just received news from the mayor that the roadblock has been lifted so for the time being we feel safer. I personally am fine and am surviving well. At times it does feel like surviving but most of the time it is so much more than that.
Image: General Photos
Image: Newsletter 3 Bottom
A Double Tragedy for Nablus Villages
When Marie and I responded to a call from the mayor of the village of Iraq Burin on Thursday (18th Feb.) to visit his village to see for ourselves the situation vis-a-vis the local settlement, little did we know that we would be going there 3 times in the next 4 days and would witness a terrible tragedy – much less that we would witness another village fall victim to the same tragedy at the same time.
Abu Haitham, the mayor, met us in Nablus and took us to a viewing point in his village of Iraq Burin (IB) from where he described the situation to us. IB sits perched on a high rock outcrop in a prominent position in the mountains that surround the dramatically situated city of Nablus. It is a deeply plunging terrain with steep twisting mountain roads giving fantastic views all the way to the distant blocks of Tel Aviv – a world away. Nablus is surrounded by Israeli settlements on all sides and the checkpoints on all roads leading in and out of this city of over 320,000 have been among the most restrictive in the country until fairly recently. The ancient city of Nablus (Shechem in the Old Testament where Joseph is said to be buried) with its 3 refugee camps has long been a centre of armed resistance to the Occupation.
IB’s populace of 1,000 has watched with dread the growth of the settlement of Bracha since 1992 when it first took land from 2 neighbouring villages. About 40 Jewish families of American and British origin live in the settlement. For the last 8 months IB’s own lands have been targeted as the settlement expands as part of the projected strategic plan to link all settlements in the Nablus area with Ariel, the huge settlement in our own region of Salfeet. Forget the demands of the outside world to stop building.
And so a familiar process ensues: settlers start coming down the hillside towards the village on a regular basis, threatening, injuring and generally terrorizing the landowners and any animals they may have grazing. The army move in to keep the 2 sides separate and declare areas taken by the settlers as “closed military zones”. The villagers take their complaint to court and win an agreement in their favour. But on the ground it doesn’t make a scrap of difference except that it emboldens the villagers to take symbolic action and move their Friday prayers out of the mosque and onto their land where a well stands. They get driven off that by settler attacks and the settlers start praying each Saturday at the same well. If villagers can be terrorized off their land for 3 years then the land can be “legally” taken by the Israeli state because it can be declared “absentee land” under an ancient Ottoman law which was also used by the British and now comes in very handy for the Israelis. Every human rights violation that happens here is “legal”. But the settlers don’t leave it there – they make the well unusable by filling it with stones and even by bathing in it; 15 villagers have been injured so far defending the land. So a Popular Committee to resist the takeover is formed in the village and, following the pattern in many West Bank villages, weekly demonstrations begin: “We don’t accept that we need their permission to be on our own land”. Abu Haitham would like us to support these because they have recently become violent and soldiers entered the village for the first time last week. We therefore agree to attend this Saturday’s demonstration, along with activists from the ISM (International Solidarity Movement) and the EAs (Ecumenical Accompaniers).
It is a re-run of the demonstration, which I described in my first newsletter, at An Nabi Salih - the same choreography of soldiers versus the stone-throwing young men down a steep hillside and the same tear-gassing of the village as the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) drive the youth, the village men and their accompanying internationals back to the centre. On this occasion they then entered the village swiftly and forcefully from 2 directions, on foot and in jeeps. Those in jeeps leapt out and in formation marched off to start searching houses. Marie, Aaron (from ISM) and myself closely followed this group of about 10, photographing them at close quarters as they invaded gardens and houses. The only time they stopped us physically was when we tried to enter a house with them – we could see only women and young children inside. What an odd reversal of roles this was: I had come here to accompany Palestinians, not Israeli soldiers! When they reached the end of the row of houses, they retreated back up the hillside towards the settlement.
We then became aware that there was a huge commotion out of sight in the centre of the village and we hurried towards it. We arrived on the scene to see the tail-end of army jeeps retreating, ambulances wailing and screeching round the corner, a crowd of agitated women and groups of young and older men standing silently or talking in low voices. 2 teenagers, Mohammed and Osaid aged 18 and 19, had been shot at close range – one in the head, the other in the chest and had been rushed to hospital in Nablus. Soon the taxis were organized to take the families in hot pursuit. This was around 3 o’clock. We received a phone call later to say that one young man was dead. The other died during the night. They had both been shot with live ammunition it was confirmed by the hospital – weaponry that the IOF are forbidden to use in crowd control and which they continue to deny. The news was accompanied by a funeral time of 10.30am the following day.
We arrived back in Nablus by bus at 8.30 this morning and were taken to the hospital where a huge silent crowd of men was gathering in the car-park together with just a very few women. It was full to bursting with lots of huge yellow, orange and red flags of various political parties and factions. Hundreds stood silently in the street, all mingled with yellow taxis and cars that were bringing people in and waiting to take everyone away. We internationals (from the US, Britain and Denmark) each carried a simple home-made placard we had written out in the offices of the Women’s Committee earlier on. Suddenly a small door in the hospital compound opened onto the car-park and a tremendous roar went up as the bodies of the dead youths were brought out, strapped to stretchers and wearing the insignia of their political struggle. For all the world they looked as if they were simply sleeping peacefully through all the hubbub. They passed very close to us as they were rapidly taken through the crowd to their funeral vehicles and driven off. Hospital staff were standing on balconies and at windows to pay their last respects – including no doubt those who had tried to save their lives. There followed the most almighty scramble and traffic jam as cars, taxis, minibuses, and truckloads of men all jostled to get out of these confined streets and away up the hillside and out of Nablus. Our taxi was towards the end of the scrabble and as we topped the first hill we could see an endless stream of vehicles slowly and now in very orderly fashion snaking right through the valley before us and up the opposite mountainside right up to the escarpment of Iraq Burin – a phenomenal sight like a giant snake twisting for a couple of miles below us.
The funeral lasted almost 2 hours, the sun beating down hotter and hotter. It started outside the mosque and later moved for a ceremony performed in the grounds of a school where we passed a large sign saying it had been built with USAID. As my American colleague Marie said bitterly: we pay for the schools and the bullets. (The US has just announced next year’s package of billions of dollars of military aid to Israel.) The crowd here was joined by many local women and children, including uniformed school children who were carrying home-made wreaths and bunches of flowers – a whole community gathered in an outpouring of grief and no doubt, of hatred. These 2 young men, cut down so shockingly in their prime, were the first martyrs this village has suffered. Their deaths will have a profound effect. From the school everyone processed again down the main street of the village to the final resting place. From here I could see that there must be thousands rather than hundreds at this funeral – numbers hugely swollen by men from Nablus. I couldn’t see the details of the various rituals – these were exclusively the preserve of men. What I could see were the tears, not only of the women and children but of young men who had clearly been the friends and relatives of Mohammed and Osaid and I was caught up powerfully in the overwhelming grief of a whole community. A Nablus man, standing close to me engaged me in long conversation. He pointed out to me a group of smartly dressed men who were walking by in a phalanx who he said were among the leadership of Hamas. Then his mobile went off and he told me that it was news that 2 more young men had been shot dead as we were standing there, in the village of Awarta the other side of Nablus. It was numbing - but Marie and I had to decide what to do. After much discussion the ISM people went to the hospital in Nablus where the bodies would be taken and we two decided to make our way to the village to try to ascertain some facts. It is one of our jobs to write reports on all human rights abuses that we either witness or can get information about from an eye-witness. When we eventually found the home we were kept away by men and boys outside, and our journey there was not only fruitless (as no-one we met spoke any English), it was also an embarrassment. The bodies were still in the family home and they were waiting for an ambulance to arrive. We retreated, regretting our decision to come.
We do not have any firm news to clarify the circumstances in which the IOF shot dead the two young men from Awarta because of the lack of eye-witnesses, though it is clear they were shot whilst going to their land and at close range whilst already in custody. And we know that the 4 deaths last weekend have reached the international news. We also know that the American Consulate here did not believe the army whitewash denial of the use of live ammunition, and that these 2 tragic incidents are adding in a small way to the general build-up of open tension between the American and Israeli governments over settlement building.
Nits breed lice
By: Nurit Peled-Elhanan
23 March 2010
In memory of four Palestinian children killed this week
Here in Israel our treatment of Palestinian children has long been guided by the adage “nits breed lice.” Some say it openly, others share that view in silence. Not a month passes in which several Palestinian children are not killed under unclear pretexts that no one understands, until a Swedish journalist tried to guess, and all the big guns were deployed to silence him. For the most part, the Occupation authorities manage to fake the ages of the little victims and to attribute criminal or subversive intentions to them, and when none of that works they excuse themselves
like ping-pong players by saying “oops, sorry.” And this time too the IDF killing experts said “perhaps it could have been dealt with differently.” Perhaps, indeed.
In reports in the Israeli press the Palestinian children turn into a terrifying threat from above, below or in front of the shooting soldiers – who, we must remember, are armed from head to toe like robotricks – but are described in news reports as lost youngsters who are struck with terror when confronted with children in t-shirts on their way to work in the fields with a hoe, or faced with 10-year-old children who attack them with slings; roaring Goliaths confronting tiny, agile, steadfast Davids who stubbornly insist on continuing to live despite what we have
already explained to them a thousand times. The smoke over slaughtered and bleeding Gaza had not yet dispersed and here they are again going out into the fields. Again they attack or want to attack or dream of attacking or make attack-like movements when they raise a pitchfork in order to harvest hay, or just irritate our soldiers by their very presence. Our heroic, adult, responsible soldiers, who walk around with intimidating weapons on the streets of the city and in every public place, are described in articles that report the killings as lacking in judgement, as terror-struck, or as heartless, conscienceless, mindless murderers who do not know how to explain and do not think it is necessary and do not know what to do and in short do not know.
Like in the movie Waltz With Bashir, Like in the movie To See If I’m Smiling, as in countless testimonies of traumatized soldiers, they are just wondering why they were put there. They put me there so I shot, so I bombed, so I “verified”, so I broke up demonstrations, so I obeyed, so I killed. Because I was afraid, I was terribly afraid, in the distance they look like they are holding stones, slingshots, pitchforks or something like that, how can you know, how can you see with this helmet that covers your eyes, with the sweat that gets into your eyes, but I am not guilty, because why did they put me there???
And the dead children whose blood soaks the fields? Whose blood cries out from the clumps of soil? Whose death-cries will not be silenced by a thousand settlements, in whose honour no one will move buildings but on the contrary, it is a near certainty that their bodies will be covered by large buildings for settlers who are unlikely
to know their stories but who will certainly sing and dance on their blood again and again and again in order to silence it. Only those dead children, who have joined my daughter in the underground kingdom of children above which this country of concrete is continually being built, only they know that Satan has not yet created revenge
for the blood of a small child.* Only they know that all the dancing and the singing and the marches and the flags, the tanks and the bulldozers and the silencing and the racist laws that appear every day, will not wash the blood off our hands, the blood of burnt children in t-shirts, thin children, nearly starved, who get up every morning to look for work, to look for their daily bread, to look for a little dignity without giving up. That is their revenge. May their memories be blessed.
* “Such revenge, revenge for the blood of a small child / Satan has not yet created”. From the poem “On the Slaughter” composed by the Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik to commemorate the victims of the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 - trans.
Translated from Hebrew by George Malent
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"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Voltaire
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Image: Newsletter 2 Bottom
A Walk in the Wadi
Last Friday I was involved in one of the most extraordinary walks I’ve ever been on – a happening that I shall always remember, so let me share it with you. As well as giving a glimpse into “realities on the ground” (literally) of what the Occupation means, it will I hope open a window onto the essence of the Palestinian character which is deeply moving.
My walk into Wadi Qana was at the request of the mayor of Deir Istiya, the village where we live. We know the mayor, Abu Nawab, quite well by now as he was instrumental in setting us up here with our house and he oversaw the repairs etc that urgently needed to be done to make it liveable in. His office in the “baladiya” or village municipality building is just up the lane from our house, a series of small rooms situated right next to one of the 3 beautiful mosques that dominate the village skyline and its airwaves 5 times a day. When you pop your head around the door, Abu Nawab is always busy sorting something or other out, on the phone or computer, often with an assortment of men around him. I have been there several times as all services flow from the baladiya, but I have never once seen a woman there – even the servers of endless glasses of tea and coffee are young men. There’s usually a little gang of boys kicking a football around in the dusty street outside the ever open door and there’s always a few donkeys ambling past. I went in today with a list of queries about payment for water and electricity bills, information about village medical services and a request to get us into the four village schools to talk to the children, rather apologetic that I was taking up his time yet again. I was obviously on edge because, after calling me into his office and introducing me to the local imam, his cousin, he told me to sit down, slow down, relax - and did I want tea or coffee. Then I knew it was OK to hang around like all the rest of the men and chat as long as I liked. Abu Nawab speaks excellent English, is able to cut through all the bureaucracy associated with my queries, and deal with everything on the spot. What a breath of fresh air!
The village of Deir Istiya has suffered considerable loss of land to settlements ever since 1992 when the first one, Emmanuel (the irony of the name shouldn’t get lost), was built on the line of hills that overlook the long, deep and beautiful valley of Wadi Qana, a few miles from the village itself, but the home back then of some 70 extended families during the summer months, tending their herds on the hillsides and their citrus groves in the valley bottom. In the intervening years 7 settlements have mushroomed so that most of the tops of the hills that form the wadi are now crowned with the sprouting roof-tops of linear settlements and the valley itself has been cleared of all but two or three houses and huts where the local owners still venture and hope to be able to work their land and tend their flocks. Settler violence, aided and abetted by the army, has stripped this wadi of its population. Only 2 weeks ago an elderly man was taken to hospital after being hit by a thrown rock. It is the tale of hundreds of remote places inside the West Bank.
Last week Abu Nawab was getting messages that settler activity was hotting up again and that on Friday there would be a large gathering of them because of a religious festival, which the few villagers who are there right now very much feared would turn against them. The area was declared a “closed military zone” this morning by the army and no-one other than settlers are allowed in or out. Indeed there was a general closure declared of all roads in the surrounding area this morning. The mayor was determined to make his presence felt to protect his villagers and he invited us to join him. We got to his office as planned at 9am and already it was full of men supping tea. Eventually, on looking around, I realized that 2 of them were in the distinctive khaki jackets of Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) who had come over from their own base in the village of Jayyous the other side of Qalqiliya. EAs are part of a programme run by the World Council of Churches which places small teams in 5 centres throughout the West Bank to accompany Palestinians in difficult confrontations, to be observers at demonstrations and to report on human rights violations to the international community and especially to the churches. Their work has many similarities to our own though we are more activist in approach. Jonathan is an Anglican clergyman from Dorset and David is from Taiwan. Abu Nawab obviously felt the difficult mission of the morning would have more chance of coming off if there was an international presence.
After a lot of hanging around about 10 of us piled into a mini-van and drove off. Marie and I were the only females – and that’s how it remained all day. We soon pulled off the road at an easy path down into the valley, guarded by a couple of military jeeps whose soldiers immediately sprang out to stop us. We all got out of our van and moved slowly towards our armed barricade with cameras, our only weapons, at the ready. For the next 45 minutes we stood, listening and watching, as the men discussed endlessly with the soldiers. It was in a mix of Arabic, Hebrew and English with Abu Nawab very definitely using his fluent English so that we knew what was going on. In all that time there was hardly a raised voice on either side and very few raised hands or wagging fingers – only endless stating and restating of positions. The soldiers wanted us out of the way: it was a closed military zone that we had illegally entered and we had to leave; there was no question of going into the valley, not even for the mayor. The mayor on the other hand was certainly not going to leave until he had carried out his duty and satisfied himself that his people were not in danger.
“Closed Military Zones” are declared wherever and whenever the army wishes. They can last for a couple of hours or forever; they can extend over a single street or over the whole of the West Bank; they can and do happen at any time of the day or night. No-one knows when they will happen and no-one can move in or out – not for any reason, however urgent. The soldiers just have to produce a scrap of paper signed by the local army commander (and all but 10% of the West Bank is under direct Israeli army control as a result of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s) to prove the legitimacy of the order, though today they couldn’t produce it when demanded. But it didn’t make any difference; how could it? We were a little huddle of unarmed civilians against a growing array of more and more jeeps that kept rolling up and soldiers sidling out of them, soon joined by male settlers roaring up the wadi in their cars and jumping out adding their weaponry to the general display of strength and chipping in with advice to the soldiers. And all the time Abu Nawab stood his ground. He just stood, hands at his side, in his shirt sleeves, as if rooted to the earth beneath him – his earth – a small solid figure in utter simplicity and dignity, repeating that he would not go away, he would not desert his people, he had heard they were in potential danger and he would go and see them. I was in awe. This man did not need us, but I needed to see his courage and conviction to stand my ground. Everyone waited on him and no-one made any step to do the soldiers’ bidding.
Eventually one of them made a phone call and soon a senior military officer appeared from out of another jeep. This man, it was immediately clear, was the very essence of suave urbanity, of sweet reasonableness, and he would have passed entrance into the officer corps of the British army with flying colours. Here was the ‘acceptable face’ of the occupation, the nice guy who’s just doing his job to the best of his ability. Yes, of course the mayor could go to see his people, yes of course we could all go with him, either in the van or on foot, but we must be escorted – for our own security!
Steadfastness had won the day and we shall never know whether our presence inhibited the soldiers early on from man-handling the men, or worse. We set off on foot into the wadi. At this point we also had no idea when, where or whether we would come face to face with hoardes of settlers and I have to confess to being somewhat grateful for the apparent protection that the army jeeps at our back and front afforded us, for settler violence is fully armed, is driven by hatred and fear and is not to be under-estimated. Eventually, after the first kilometer or so the army either lost interest or patience and faded away. We ambled slowly along, enjoying the spectacular scenery of this most beautiful of valleys as we went deeper and deeper into it, surrounded by birdsong and swathes of wild flowers of every colour in the hot morning sun. It was Friday – holy day and holiday. The words from the Song of Solomon which we had been singing in my choir just before I left home, kept coming into my mind:
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree ripeneth her green figs,
And the vines are in blossom,
They give forth their fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
As we walked the effects of the occupation on this valley were described to us: the complete de-population of the valley, driven out by settler violence over the years leaving houses, wells and livelihoods in ruins. The stream that had always flowed here even at the height of summer was virtually dried up even now in March because of the plunging of the water table due to over-exploitation of the underground water resources. Water is a major battleground of the Occupation as Israel has expropriated all the major water sources of the West Bank, selling it back to the Palestinians at hugely inflated prices and rationing it to about one tenth of settler consumption. This Salfit region, we were told, has the largest underground aquifer in the West Bank – a major prize for the colonists. In this valley alone there are 11 major springs. In addition, Wadi Qana is a prime example of another huge environmental problem – the pollution of land by settlement effluent and by industrial pollution, for there are some large settlements on these hilltops and 2 major industrial zones but the most minimal of environmental standards governing waste disposal. Parts of Palestine, as in this region, are merely cheap dumping grounds. Only a court order has forced the Israelis to install a sewage treatment plant but this was proving to be inadequate. Surface outlet pipes down the hillsides ending above the ground in the valley bore evidence of that.
To my relief we never did come across hoardes of settlers. Our walk was entirely peaceful and we ended it after about 3 hot kilometres at one of the few dwellings still in tact, where a group of 2 generations of men were temporarily camping out tending their orange groves. We scrambled up to their little terrace and were handed whole oranges just gathered off their trees. And here too was another surprise - the only settler we actually spoke to that day – a middle-aged jovial man leaning as large as life against their terrace wall engaging anyone who would talk to him. No, he didn’t wish his Palestinian neighbours any harm, he wanted to be friends with them; he was a regular visitor here and he enjoyed their company; he was sure the two communities could live side by side; the problems were caused by the government not by the people, and no, he wasn’t at all political – he didn’t get involved in political problems. Another ‘acceptable face’ of the Occupation, this one based on denial. In all honesty I don’t know how the Palestinian men in this house tolerate his regular presence. I left him to others in our group to engage; I couldn’t even begin to argue with his rationalisations.
We ended our walk in the wadi under the shade of a beautiful orange grove where the trees were thick, not only with ripe fruit that was constantly being fed to us, but with blossom too. I have never seen this phenomenon before. We reclined on mats in a circle on the ground while the young men lit a fire in the orchard and made us sweet mint tea served in small glasses on a tray. I found myself engaged in a political discussion with our local dentist and I told him I hoped I would never have to meet him in the dentist’s chair. We were sitting near the edge of one of five pools in the wadi, and groups of boys were constantly plunging into it to enjoy its cool water; not Palestinian boys but groups of settler lads in kippa caps and swimming gear come down off the tops to enjoy, as any children would, the freedom and beauty of this place. What a surrealistic situation to be in: sitting in the orange grove owned by one nation but surrounded by the youth of another, not interacting at all and treating it as their own rightful playground under the watchful eye of an army to ensure they could swagger around safely. And indeed I believe they would be most welcome to come here in safety, welcomed by the Palestinians who live here who are happy for their land to be appreciated and enjoyed. They are a most hospitable people and justly proud of their countryside. Palestinians say constantly that they have nothing against their Jewish neighbours per se; they are willing to live side by side with Jewish Israelis within their pre-1967 borders. What they cannot live with is the dispossession these colonial settlers have brought to the West Bank and Gaza, which has driven the people from their rightful land by force and which would forever deny the simple pleasures of swimming and picking oranges to the children of Palestine.
Image: PIctire of Sheikh Jarra & An Nabi Saleh
Baptism of Fire
I’ve been here in the West Bank just one week now and each day feeling, as they say in another context, more and more “embedded”. It’s easy to feel like that in our village of Deir Istiya as it’s impossible to step foot out of the house to walk to a shop or the communal rubbish bins or simply to take a stroll, without the siren calls of Chai, or Carfee or simply “ahlan-wa sahlan” (welcome), together with a beckoning hand from a female neighbour luring you into a private space, either interior or exterior to enjoy their hospitality and a chat, the intensity of which of course depends on their degree of English since I speak no Arabic. However, I’m pleased to report that my self-made vocabulary book is getting its pages filled up nicely. Yesterday it took us 2 hours and 3 coffee stops to buy a dozen home-laid eggs from a tiny shop not more than 200 yards from the house. We could, if we wished, spend all our time becoming “embedded”.
The “we” I refer to are myself and Marie from Florida who cut her teeth in this type of activism as a member of Voices in the Wilderness who stayed in Bagdad throughout the shock and awe bombing of the city. Both of us are here as volunteers with IWPS (International Women’s Peace Service www.iwps-pal.org ). IWPS have had a permanent presence in the Salfeet Governerate of the northern West Bank for about eight years, carrying out their mandate to “support non-violent resistance to the Israeli Occupation”, using exclusively “non-violent policy, practice and methods”. Only last month they moved house for the first time so both of us are still feeling our feet in the village. We rent a spacious and rather beautiful house from a man who is a considerable land-owner in the area, whose father built it in 1939 but who has spent all his life away from his ancestral village and has recently retired as a senior figure in the Department of Education at Nablus An Najah University. Yesterday he paid us a visit together with his wife and future daughter-in-law, bringing with them a magnificent feast of a lunch, freshly prepared and cooked, and I had my first meal al fresco in our private courtyard where the flowering jasmine tumbles and perfumes the space at night and the vine is about to burst into leaf and cover us with shade.
But we are not here to spend our time socialising though this is an essential part of our presence if we are to be accepted as a permanent feature in this remote conservative Moslem community. We are here to work alongside Palestinians who of necessity are resisting the cruel confiscation of their land, demolition of their homes and whose everyday lives in every aspect are blighted by the illegal and brutal Occupation. Standing on our little balcony it is almost possible to imagine oneself in an idyllic land of rolling hillsides whose lower slopes are stabilised by the olive terraces, maintained over hundreds of years with hard and loving labour, that bind these people to their land and shape their whole traditions and way of life. From here my eye roams over miles and miles of folding hills with similar ancient villages dotted on their slopes. But if I look at the village from a different angle, or if I take a bus down the road I become aware immediately of the reality of this land deep inside the West Bank – that it is a patchwork of Arab villages and Israeli settlements – standing cheek by jowel with each other on the hillsides and along the roads. For this most beautiful part of Palestine lies in the shadow of one of the biggest settlement blocks – Ariel - whose presence in the form of housing, industrial zones, agriculture, settler roads, checkpoints and the Wall with its military roads, dominates and controls every aspect of Palestinian life. I hope to illustrate this point throughout the reports that I send out whist I’m here. Strangely, this domination of a foreign occupying power was brought home to me even more clearly tonight as we were driven home in the dark after a demonstration, when the lights of all these villages and settlements were glowing in the darkness, for Israeli settlement lights are yellow and Palestinian village lights are white. It was horrifying to see the pattern they formed because yellow lights are so clearly in dominance; and I ask myself “where will all this end?” It is a grim picture indeed and particularly heartbreaking when set against such a very beautiful and historic pastoral backdrop.
Our main work here is to travel to local villages and towns in support of Palestinian actions of resistance, to stand as witness to the attempted destruction of a people who will not give up, and to attempt to influence the outside world into support for justice and peace in this crucible of trouble and conflict in the wider world. So far this week we have been to two actions in the Qalqiliya area and one nearer to Ramallah. Qalqiliya is a town just east of the Green Line (the 1949 ceasefire line that is recognised by the world as the international boundary between the West Bank and Israel but which Israel has never recognised as a border). Its very existence was threatened in 1967 when the Israeli conquering armies wanted it flattened and only international pressure prevented that. Unfortunately that pressure has wavered and collapsed as Qalqiliya itself has now been strangled by the Wall with only one checkpoint outlet into the West Bank leaving a population with an unemployment rate of 95% . Our objective was to support a demonstration for International Women’s Day at a gate in another Wall – a section of the Wall that makes a secondary enclosure of 3 villages so that everyone and all goods and services have to pass through a checkpoint even in order to get to the Qalqiliya side. So they live in double jeopardy. During the hour or so that we were there we watched a steady stream of donkey carts, lorries, vans, cars, teachers and children pass through, a primary school being situated adjacent to the gate and the Wall. This month’s edition of “Palestine”, an informative magazine for visitors and tourists, is on the theme of education and here is what the Queen of Jordan has to say in an article: “Too many little boys and girls (in Palestine) begin their school day negotiating hurdles no child should have to: lengthy queues to be let through checkpoints, brusque demands for their identity papers, armed soldiers searching their school bags. All they want to do is learn. But their day begins with divisions and segregation, insecurity and fear.”
The “Baptism of Fire” came today, Friday the 5th March. Maybe I should say “baptism of fire power”. My IWPS colleague and I took a taxi to another remote village – An Nabi Salih where there has been a regular Friday demonstration now for many weeks which draws an international and an Israeli presence to swell village numbers. IWPS has given support here several times though in doing so it has had to neglect supporting other Friday actions that are happening on a regular basis in several villages where settlers have taken land. With only two of us here at present we have to make difficult choices.
For us this demonstration is a social occasion as well because we know a couple of families where the wife in each case has a suspended one year prison sentence hanging over her since being arrested a few weeks ago and spending a week in prison. With young children this is a very difficult situation to be in. They do not fear prison but they do fear the damage done to their young children. From them we learned that An Nabi Salih, a small village of some 400 people, is fairly unusual in that everyone is from the same family – the Tamimis. Not only that, but the next village, a much larger one, also consists only of Tamimis. It was rather mind-blowing as the relationships of each of the dozen or so people sitting round the dinner table were explained to us: they were all either brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews or nieces of everyone else – and so on throughout the village. Whilst we were waiting for the fabulous spread of food to be prepared I was given a really thorough lesson in basic Arabic vocabulary and pronunciation.
The village is on a hillside directly facing the settlement of Halamish on the other side of the wadi or valley (and facing also a large complex built in the 1930s by the British as a police station). A settler road runs at the bottom of the valley and the action is played out in an amphitheatre onto which the balconies of the houses give a prime viewing position. Halamish is built on the land of An Nabi Salih and we watched as a settler ploughed up and down the land in front of the houses with a tractor. Actually there is a recent court ruling that the land in front of the settlement houses does indeed belong to the rightful Palestinian owners and also that neither Settler nor Palestinian should go to this land on a Friday. Here, as the soldiers tear-gassed the villagers for attempting to reach their own land, a lone settler was provocatively breaking the court orders, ploughing his lone furrow in front of them. Friday demos always start after midday prayers outside the village mosque and make their way along the street and then straight down the hillside and into the wadi towards the road. No-one knows what to expect and this week the teargas began to be lobbed into the air very quickly, driving most participants back a bit – at least temporarily. If I tell you at this point that this demonstration went on for 6 hours you will not find it difficult to appreciate how many times these waves of forward and backward movements swung to and fro. An onion is a real help against the effects of the gas and I have to say that the one I grabbed from our kitchen vegetable rack before we left home became my unexpected friend for those anxious hours. It was a comfort to hold it in my hand and you won’t believe how welcome was the taste of raw onion bit into hard to mitigate the effects of the gas – that combined with a plastic bag to put over your head. (Health and Safety would have freaked out seeing the young kids use these bags.) Another comfort was the proximity of the first row of houses we retreated to where the villagers not taking an active part were lined up on their terraces and roofs with their babies and little ones watching the drama unfold below them. We could always take shelter in them if necessary – though recently the soldiers had surrounded some of the houses and fired teargas at close range into them, trapping women and children inside. It had been a desperate situation. What happened today was another development: after nearly 3 hours of sound bombs and teargas the police intervened with a vehicle that sends a huge blue-coloured spray of the most foul chemical that mimics an overpowering sewage-like smell and caused 2 young people to run into the dark house where I was sheltering with eyes, nose and mouth streaming. That brought the main demonstration to a close. However, the “shebab” or stone-throwing young men continued their war of attrition, so we were eventually eating our feast of an evening meal with the family against a background of sporadic firing and distant plumes of gas until about 6pm when we got the news that a teenager had been shot in the head by a rubber-coated bullet and had been rushed to hospital in Ramallah. Just now at midnight we have received a text from the family that he has undergone surgery but is in a serious condition.
There are 2 issues that I find myself pondering having now been on several of this type of action over the years I’ve been coming here:
The first is the role of the stone-throwers which is decidedly violent. Of course the roles of David and Goliath are switched round this time and undoubtedly these young men, whilst finding an outlet for their anger, hatred and impotence after a brief lifetime knowing nothing other than the oppression of the Occupation, also feel they are doing what they can to protect their communities against the relentless onslaught. There is no Palestinian army to protect these people. I am not here to make a judgement on that but nevertheless I do not personally condone it as my presence and that of IWPS is firmly grounded in the belief and practice of non-violence. I found it particularly uncomfortable today watching little pre-school boys honing their skills with the sling for later use.
Secondly, there is a certain pattern that these demonstrations follow, almost a choreography of confrontation and violence: a united marching front partially dispersed by teargas, followed by the greater risk of rubber-coated bullets and in the case of today, by the “skunk” machine which effectively causes a retreat. Eventually it becomes a stand-off between the shebab and the army. It makes me question why the whole thing is allowed to go for so long; why not shoot with live ammunition straight away? And then I realise that Israel is playing a clever game – as always. If these acts of organized resistance, which occur every single week and in many places around the West Bank, were to cause loss of life or extensive injury especially of Israelis or internationals, Israel would risk them reaching world headlines and world reaction. Keeping them relatively low-key they are keeping them out of the headlines and therefore ineffective in terms of rousing world opinion against this injustice which is crying out to be condemned by the so-called “democratic” governments of the West. With infinitely superior firepower, the Israelis can safely play these games and continue to take the land – easy. It is all part of the drip, drip, drip of colonizing land seizure and the slow, insatiable taking of the land which has gone on for 60 years. So long as Israel can go on hoodwinking the West into believing it is the everlasting victim of Palestinian violence, it can take its own time to achieve its imperative of conquering and controlling the rest of the space of Eretz Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan. Slowly, slowly, piece by piece, the land is being stolen and the people on it displaced. All these small acts of resistance by ordinary people all over the West Bank testify to this apparently unstoppable logic. They will not give up.
The weekend continued with two more dramatic events which I will now try to describe more briefly:
The first was on Saturday evening when a major demonstration was called in Jerusalem in support of those extended families who have been forcibly evicted from their homes in the district of the city known as Sheikh Jarrah, within spitting distance of the British Consulate and the American Colony Hotel frequented by Tony Blair when he puts in an appearance as the Middle East envoy for the Quartet. For more background information on this dire situation where around 70 Palestinians have been forced out of their homes in recent months by violent settler groups in their mission to Judaise East Jerusalem please go to the website of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions at www.icahd.org . To give the background here will make my newsletter far too long. Suffice to say that these hapless families, who range in age from elderly grandparents to tiny children, are living on the street and in one case, in a tent which leans against their own house wall in their own front garden, with the settler family walking backwards and forwards between them all day long. It is so incredible it is perhaps beyond comprehension – but I have witnessed it with my own eyes! The Sheikh Jarrah evictions have roused the conscience of many Israelis anew and the revulsion enabled this large end-of-Shabbat demo to take place, bringing busloads in from all over the place, with an estimated turnout of between 3 and 6 thousand people.
Marie and I arrived early and went down the road to sit a while with the families on the pavement because Marie knows them and IWPS does the occasional stint of sitting and sleeping with them in the 24 hour international /Israeli presence that stays with them. But eventually we had to decide what to do. As a team we have strict guidelines we should follow about all kinds of things, and one of them is that we should always do things in pairs. On this occasion we took a deliberate decision to break the guidelines and to our great relief, by the end of the night, it turned out to be OK. Long before the demonstrators arrived for their rally there were 2 other groups getting themselves positioned: busloads of army/police in full riot gear, receiving their orders in small sub-groups and positioning themselves in strategic positions, which involved keeping control not only of the small road into the wadi where the houses are and the surrounding areas of waste ground, but also a busy main road into Jerusalem. The second group were a huge massing of orthodox settlers and their supporters in their black garb, bespectacled, with large-brimmed hats and side ringlets, gathering for their own counter demonstration. As darkness fell I had to decide whether to stay with the families and activists by their homes inside the circle of riot police and settlers or move up to the main road to join the main rally. A violent confrontation was anticipated either way. Marie and I decided to cover both aspects in the knowledge that both of us were with other activists whom we trusted. It had been arranged between the police and the organizers that 300 people would be allowed down into the wadi to meet the families so eventually, after many speeches, music and entertainments, those 300 approached the police barrier. They never did get through and the peace was kept by their willingness to retreat empty-handed. But when they had all gone home, leaving still plenty of police, a small group of settlers physically attacked the sitting family and their protectors. The first I knew about that was seeing a man from the International Solidarity Movement, the main international activist organisation in the West Bank, staggering up the road and collapsing onto the pavement in front of me, having had his head severely kicked in the incident. Reprisals are always taken out on Palestinians after such a show of support in the wider community, so as much as possible activists seek to continue to protect, in some cases for days or weeks, according to their own very limited human resources.
My final description is of a visit that Marie and I made to Beit Jala, a town which is an extension of Bethlehem and has the highest proportion of Christian Palestinians in the West Bank. The physical restrictions and the utter environmental destruction caused by the building of the Wall and of settler roads and tunnels has in the past taken a heavy toll here, including the lands of the ancient wine-producing monastery of Cremisan. When I first visited Beit Jala in 2005 there was a checkpoint at the entrance to the town which caused awful hold-ups and disruption on its steep roads. With the development of other more sophisticated control points that major irritation disappeared, as things do when the Israelis develop and refine their means of control over the years. Now trouble has suddenly erupted again and three days ago when we were in Jerusalem, the army and police appeared on a steep hillside of olive-groves that stands high above the settler road as it emerges from a long tunnel through the hills, together with bulldozers to rip out a further section of the hillside in the back gardens of a row of houses. About 70 ancient trees were torn apart and all the septic tanks carrying the sewage of this row were smashed. Foul smelling effluent was in pools everywhere. Again, local activists and people from ISM had placed themselves in the path of the bulldozers and a lawyer had successfully rushed to court for a stay of execution. The bulldozers were found to be acting without a valid order and an injunction was placed on further destruction for 45 days. We were taken to this precarious hillside spot by Marwan from the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem who explained everything to us, extremely distressed and weary after being part of the confrontation. He introduced us to the suffering families. And the purpose of all this? To continue with building a huge specially designed wall with an overhanging concrete canopy along the settler highway that runs through the olive groves of Beit Jala to protect Israeli settlers, as they zoom along into Jerusalem for work and pleasure from their illegal settlements deep inside the West Bank, from stones being thrown along the way. The Wall had been stopped a few years ago making a nonsensical segment of a gigantic scar on the landscape of this wadi of olive groves. But now the inevitable is going to happen for it has to be completed. We were told by a dignified elderly man who has always lived in one of the houses that in all the 18 years since the settler road has been there he has never known a stone-throwing incident.
The areas of olive grove that remain intact alongside the ripped up land were alive with bright red anenomies and birdsong in the morning sun. I couldn’t help crying when I looked at the contrast in this most unholy of lands.
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