Anna's Eyewitness Reports from Palestine

New Flash Mob Video & 2012 Delegation to Palestine!

2012-01-03T10:00:00.003+02:00

Dear friends,

I hope you have enjoyed some rest and time with loved ones as the year comes to a close. During Christmas shopping peak, I joined with friends for a…

Wedding Flash Mob at Bed Bath & Beyond!
http://youtu.be/LEMygqMI-fg -- Check out the video and please pass it on!
(You will see I prioritized projecting the message over staying on tune :-).)

Looking into 2012, I am excited about the growing global BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaigns and an upcoming trip to Palestine to reconnect with the heart of the struggle. Being in Palestine always grounds me in why we all do this work -- why it must succeed and why it absolutely will succeed.

Want to join me? I am co-leading another delegation with the Interfaith Peace-Builders in May 2012 -- my third year in a row! (Last year, many of you donated to the St Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee to help us send my colleague and friend Colleen Kelly to Palestine. Your generosity meant so much to both of us. You can read Colleen, my, and another of our colleague's dispatches from Palestine at http://www.pscinpalestine.blogspot.com/ .)

If you're interested, below is some information on the trip, as well as information about youth scholarships.

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(Preface: I send this out with consciousness that travel to Palestine is not an option for everyone, especially for Palestinian-Americans who are routinely banned by Israel's practices of denying them entry. May these delegations no longer be necessary someday when Palestinians have the access to visit or live in their homeland that is their right.)

May 2012 Delegation to Palestine/Israel

An Environment Under Siege: Occupation's Effect on People and Nature

May 19 - June 1, 2012

Delegation Leaders: Anna Baltzer & Philip Farah

This delegation will explore current realities of life for Israelis and Palestinians, including settlements, the occupation, and the peace process—by learning directly from those living there. We will also explore issues pertaining to the intersection of environmental justice and human rights, delving into the ways in which the occupation has affected the environment and therefore the livelihood of Palestinians and Israelis. Topics may include freedom of access to land and water, sanitation and pollution, and deforestation. The itinerary will feature meetings with leaders of civil society groups, grassroots organizers, religious leaders, organizations with projects focused on the environment and more.

Join the Email List for This Delegation: http://tinyurl.com/7e5qjej

DEADLINE TO APPLY: Please apply by February 10, 2012 to ensure we'll have space and be able to arrange your flight. Our last several delegations have filled up several months before departure, so please apply as soon as possible to reserve your space. If you've missed the deadline, we might still be able to add you, but please contact us ASAP to see if this is a possibility.

Download Application for the Delegation here: http://www.ifpb.org/documents/delegations/IFPB%20application.doc

Leaders:

Philip Farah is a Palestinian born in Jerusalem, four years after his family lost their home in the 1948 War—the Nakba. Upon graduating from the American University of Beirut in 1968, he returned to occupied East Jerusalem and taught at several schools as well as Birzeit University in the West Bank. Before emigrating to the US in 1978, he was active in the first Palestinian-Israeli dialogue group opposed to the occupation. He is currently Vice President of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace. He lives with his wife and three children in the Washington Metro area where he works as an economist.

Anna Baltzer is an award-winning speaker, writer, and organizer for Palestinian rights. Since she began volunteering with the International Women's Peace Service, documenting human rights abuses and supporting Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance. Anna has appeared on television more than 100 times and lectured at more than 400 universities, schools, churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world. She is the author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories. Currently, she is also the National Organizer with US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Anna previously co-led two IFPB delegations in 2010 & 2011.

Logistics:

The cost of the delegation will be around $2100. This includes 13 days of the delegation, hotel and home stay accommodations, breakfasts and dinners, local transportation, guides, speaker/event fees, basic tips and gratuities. Partial scholarships may be available for those with demonstrable need.

The cost does not include domestic and international airfare. Interfaith Peace-Builders works with a local travel agent in Jerusalem to secure the best group rates for the delegation to travel together on the same flight from Washington, DC to Israel/Palestine. Therefore, delegates do not need to book their own international airfare.

Delegates will be expected make arrangements to be in Washington DC by 2pm on May 19, 2012.

Click on the link to learn much more about delegation specifics, including who we meet, cost, and application information: http://www.ifpb.org/delegations/default.html

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE! (for the above or later delegations)

IFPB is offering two $1,000 scholarships for students and recent graduates. In addition, applicants will also be considered for smaller financial aid packages from IFPB, ranging from $250 - $500.

Apply at www.ifpb.org/1000scholarship

SCHOLARSHIP APPLICATION DEADLINE: January 20, 2012

Scholarships will be applied towards delegation cost of $2,100 (Includes accommodations, breakfasts and dinners, guides, sustained support upon your return, and more). Cost does not include international or domestic airfare.

***

Thanks for reading this far! Best wishes for a new year full of fun, light, justice, and freedom for all. As I continue my work with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, you can receive more frequent emails from me by signing up for our email list on our homepage here: http://www.endtheoccupation.org/.

Warm wishes,

Anna

PS. Here's a quick petition for Professor Marc Ellis -- one of the most prominent Jewish theological voices against Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people -- whose job at Baylor University seems to be in jeopardy as a result of his political outspokenness. Sign here.

PPS. Social media: And as always, you can catch me on Facebook here and on Twitter here.

Also, the International Women's Peace Service, with which I volunteered in Palestine for many years (my time with them is the subject of my book), is now on Facebook and posting updates daily. Join their page here!

Exciting Events & Conferences Coming Up!

2011-08-26T12:45:00.004+03:00

Dear friends,

Long time no talk/type! As national organizer with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, I now send most of my updates out on that email list. If you're not already on it, please subscribe by clicking here. (And you can click here for an action alert that I sent out yesterday.)

Below you'll find information about the following events I'll be a part of for the next few months:

Sept 16-19: National Organizers Conference, Washington, DC
Oct 2: Receiving AFSC's Inspiration of Hope Award with ALICE WALKER, Chicago
Nov 11-13: Friends of Sabeel - North America Conference, Atlanta
Nov 25-27: American Muslims for Palestine Annual Conference, Chicago

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The US Campaign's 10th Annual National Organizers conference is coming up September 16 - 19 in Washington, DC! From California to Wisconsin to Hawaii, activists and representatives of member groups from around the country are joining us for this special event.

The conference will be held at the historic Thurgood Marshall Center featuring a fantastic lineup of presenters, including:

Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian civil society call for BDS
Dalit Baum, founder of the Israeli research group Who Profits From the Occupation
Rami Khouri, whose writing has informed public opinion throughout Europe, the Americas, and the Arab World
Cindy Corrie of the Rachel Corrie Foundation
Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies
Simon Shaheen, internationally renowned violinist and `oud player
… and wonderful speakers from American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Codepink, American Friends Service Committee, Students for Justice in Palestine, and more!

Early registration ends this Friday… Register now at a discount! Click here for more information.

**********************

I am extremely honored to be receiving the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Inspiration for Hope Award in October, along with the amazing Alice Walker (who will hopefully be there).

It will be at the AFSC Middle East Program's Annual Benefit, "Creating Connections, Renewing Commitments," open to all. Please save the date and join us on Sunday, October 2nd.

Alice Walker is a renowned author, poet and activist. In 1983, she became the first African-American woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple. She is author of more than thirty books, including her latest, Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine-Israel. Recently, she joined an international flotilla of boats sailing to Gaza to challenge the Israeli blockade.

The third award recipient will be Palestinian-American student activist Sami Kishawi, the third award recipient. There is limited seating, so please reserve your tickets today!

AFSC Middle East Program Annual Benefit
WHEN: Sunday, October 2, 1 - 4pm
WHERE: Columbus Park Refectory; 5701 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL

TICKETS: $50 - General Admission; $25 - Students

Please RSVP by September 20th to Miryam Rashid at mrashid [at] afsc.org or [three][one][two]-427-2533 x18 to reserve tickets. (Checks can be made out to AFSC - Middle East Program and mailed to: American Friends Service Committee; Miryam Rashid; 637 S. Dearborn, 3rd Floor; Chicago, IL 60605.)

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I will be speaking at the upcoming Friends of Sabeel - North America Conference entitled:

"From Birmingham to Bethlehem: Jesus' Third Way of Nonviolence in Israel/Palestine"

November 10th-12th, Atlanta, GA

Details will be posted here.

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Finally, I will be speaking at the American Muslims for Palestine Annual Conference Thanksgiving Weekend (but I won't be speaking on Turkey Day itself!) in Chicago.

Click here for lots of info about lodging, speakers, etc.

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Hope to see you soon at one of these events. Thanks for reading!

Yours,

Anna

PS. If we aren't already connected on Facebook but you'd like us to be, please click here and "Like" me :-).

Why I Am Fasting Today

2011-06-13T19:25:00.000+03:00

Shane Bauer & Josh Fattal, who have been held in Iranian detention for almost 2 years

Today, I am fasting in solidarity with my friends Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer, and Josh Fattal, who were arrested and imprisoned in Iran almost two years ago. Sarah was freed last year, but Shane and Josh continue to suffer in Evin Prison, separated from their families and loved ones. Shane and Josh have gone on numerous hunger strikes in an effort to receive communications from their families, giving up the little food and comfort they have. It is likely they went on a hunger fast after their trial was postponed last month. I am fasting to remember and shed light on Shane’s and Josh’s plight, with hopes that they will soon be freed to come home to their families, who miss them terribly.

I have just returned from Palestine, where I met with Palestinian men, women, and children unjustly imprisoned for struggling nonviolently for freedom and equality. When I met them two years ago in Syria, Sarah and Shane were also working tirelessly for a better world, a dream I know they share with Josh. All those who support peace and self-determination for all people should keep Shane and Josh in their hearts and minds. Their struggle is our struggle.

For more information about Shane, Josh, and their fight for freedom, visit www.freethehikers.org

For more information on the fast, click here.

A Request from Anna, and Opportunities to Support/Visit Palestine...

2011-04-07T23:30:00.002+03:00

Dear friends,

I have an announcement and a request.

First, the announcement: I will be co-leading a delegation to Palestine next month with Interfaith Peace-Builders! My co-leaders will be the fabulous Adam Horowitz (co-editor of Mondoweiss) and our Palestinian host on the ground, Said. The dates are May 21st – June 3rd, and there are still a few spots open! I've pasted the details below and encourage people to apply.

My request:

One of the delegates will be a dear friend of mine named Colleen. Colleen is one of the co-founders of our local group, the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee (STL-PSC). She works tirelessly for the group and the cause, dozens of hours a week, but she has never been to Palestine because she cannot afford to go.

Colleen is committed to trying to live a life of intentional poverty, in solidarity with those unable to live the lives of privilege that most of us do (and that Colleen could if she so chose). She also chooses poverty so that she is not in a position of having to pay taxes that support US-sponsored wars and the occupation of Palestine. She divides the majority of her time between working for the St Louis Palestine Solidarity committee, the local antiwar coalition "Instead of War," and Karenhouse where she lives, which is a volunteer-run Catholic Worker house that provides hospitality to homeless women and children.

Colleen is conflicted between her deep desire to visit Palestine and living a modest life. I and others at STL-PSC have encouraged her to go to Palestine because it is a dream of hers, and I know it will ground and strengthen her continuous local work here at home for justice in Palestine.

STL-PSC would like to send Colleen to Palestine but to do so we need to raise money. I don't know that I have ever sent a request for donations in the 5 years that I have had this list, but I would be grateful if people would consider contributing to STL-PSC to help us send Colleen to Palestine. If you are moved to do so, here is how you can:

* Tax-deductible: Send checks made out to "Instead of War" with "PSC – Travel" in the memo field to: Anna Baltzer; P.O. Box 2687; St Louis, MO 63116.

* Donate by PayPal or credit card by clicking the "Donate" button on my donations page. (Note: This is not tax-deductible but I will forward all donations this month to STL-PSC.)

* To make a tax-deductible donation online, email me at anna.baltzer@gmail.com for directions and I'll send you the steps.

The total needed for all her expenses is around $4,000 (airfare, delegation, food, and a week after the delegation traveling/working on the ground with me).

If the funds are raised, I will put an announcement on my donations page and return any checks received, unless you indicate that you would still like it to go to support STL-PSC's work—which is always very, very appreciated!

Thank you in advance for those of you who can contribute (and I understand that it's not an option for everyone).

Here's the delegation announcement…

- - - Please Forward - - -

May Delegation ~ only a few spots left!
Voices of the Peacemakers
May 21 – June 3, 2011

This delegation will explore Palestinian and Israeli efforts to achieve peace and a resolution to their conflict based on justice. The delegation will feature meetings with Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers – leaders of civil society groups, grassroots organizers, religious leaders and more. IFPB's May-June delegation also traditionally focuses on the annual commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and the founding of the State of Israel.

Leaders: Anna Baltzer & Adam Horowitz will be leading this delegation. Anna has just returned from a European tour and continues her important work as National Organizer at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Adam continues his work through Mondoweiss and has also been on the road, presenting his co-edited book, The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.

Deadline to Apply: Applications will be accepted until the week of April 18th, when applicants will be notified of availability. Spaces are already filling up, so contact IFPB if you would like to travel with us. Apply soon to reserve your space!

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MAY DELEGATION

- - - Please Forward - - -

Other opportunities to travel to Palestine…

In case you want to go on a delegation but those dates don't work for you, here are some other great options:

June 24 – July 10: Health & Human Rights Project

July 10 – 17: Birthright Unplugged

July 16 – 29: Interfaith Peace-Builders

Oct 29 – Nov 11: Interfaith Peace-Builders

There is also a Palestinian call for people of conscience worldwide to visit Palestine July 8 - 19 for actions. According to the call [which you can read here], visitors "will be accommodated locally and enjoy Palestinian hospitality and a full program of peace work in seven Palestinian towns and villages, networking, and fellowship." I believe this opportunity is for solidarity work on the ground rather than touring as a delegation.

Finally, July 10 – July 25, ICAHD will also be hosting internationals and Israeli to join together with Palestinians in Anata, East Jerusalem to resist the Occupation and rebuild demolished homes of Palestinian families. "We invite you to participate in the incredible opportunity to learn first-hand about life under Occupation [in] `Creating Alternative Facts on the Ground,' ICAHD's 2011 Summer Rebuilding Experience… In addition to construction, there is a full program including field trips, cultural events, films, and much more. Click here for more information.

As you can see, there are many great opportunities to visit or work in Palestine. If you've never been, I promise, it will change your life.

Opportunities to connect with people in Gaza…

A couple months ago, students in Gaza sent out the following letter to connect with students in the US. Contact info is below the letter.

We are students in Gaza from the Palestinian Students Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI), and would like to work with solidarity activists at American universities. We partake in many activities here in Gaza and would like to do whatever we can to support the international student solidarity movements, especially with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns. We frequently write letters out of Gaza… encouraging people to participate in the boycott and thanking people who have supported us.

We would like to share ideas, perhaps have a video conference, hear what activities you're doing, distribute information or narratives from us, as Palestinian university students, or more broadly anyone suffering in besieged Gaza.

In solidarity,
Palestinian Students Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel
Reply by email to Adie Nistelrooy: adie_mormech@hotmail.com

Also, along with boats from many other countries, the US Boat To Gaza (ustogaza.org - but the website is on the fritz), named "The Audacity of Hope," will be sailing to Gaza in late May on the one-year anniversary of the Flotilla massacre. They will carry with them letters from people around the US to the people of Gaza.

You can send letters to the people in Gaza to: Letters to Gaza; 119 West 72nd St, #158; New York, NY 10023

Thanks again to those able to contribute to the cause through supporting Colleen's trip, solidarity work on the ground in Palestine, and/or activism here in the US. It makes a difference.

Yours,

Anna

PS. I know that this is long overdue, but since I haven't sent an email out since the one announcing the Palestine Papers, I wanted to make a correction that they were released by Al Jazeera and The Guardian, not Wikileaks. Sorry about that.

PPS. To get much more frequent (and shorter!) updates from me on Facebook, please click "Like" at the top of my Facebook page.

ACTION ALERT and More on Cultural Boycott of Israel

2011-01-25T03:42:00.003+02:00

Dear friends,

I regret that I've written so little while there is so much going on! (I send out information more frequently on my public Facebook page, if you want to "friend/like" me.) I hope people are doing well. Happy New Year to all.

This weekend's release by Al Jazeera and The Guardian of the Palestine Papers have exposed the utter futility of US-brokered peace talks. I am more convinced than ever that the solution lies with listening to the Palestinian people themselves, civil society, and their call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with international law and respects Palestinians' human rights.

Below is a variation of a piece/action alert on cultural boycott that I recently sent out on the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation listserv (you can sign up here) in my new capacity as national organizer…

But first, a few invitations/appeals:

1. Interfaith Peace-Builders and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation invite you to a Grassroots Advocacy Training and Lobby Day March 6th – 7th in Washington, DC. Additionally, there will be a Campus Organizing Conference Marcy 5th. For more information or to register, click here.

2. Tomorrow is the nation-wide Day of Action to Stop FBI Repression. Since September, 23 antiwar activists have been subpoenaed by the FBI, many of them involved in Palestine solidarity work. Nine of the activists were called to appear at a grand jury tomorrow, so activists will be protesting at federal buildings, FBI offices and other locations around the country in solidarity. Click here to find actions near you!

3. I have a close friend in Palestine who needs help. Due to family issues, she feels she has no choice but to leave Palestine, even though it's the hardest decision she's ever had to make. She is an incredible activist and would be a major asset to any campus or community (she's open to coming to study or to work). Contact me if you think there's a university or employer that might be able to help.

Action Alert & More on Cultural Boycott…

One of the strongest tools of pressure to end South African Apartheid was the refusal of performance artists and other cultural ambassadors to play in the apartheid state. Diverse South Africans of conscience joined with supporters around the world in imploring performers and other public figures not to visit South Africa because to do so would send a public statement of normalization with the apartheid state, thereby implicitly condoning its policies.

Inspired by this example, Israelis of conscience and supporters around the world have joined Palestinians in calling for a similar cultural boycott of Israel until it ends its occupation and discriminatory apartheid policies.

To perform in an apartheid state is wrong, especially considering that those living under apartheid are often blocked from attending performances by checkpoints, discriminatory permit systems and persistent military and police brutality.

In addition, Palestinian artists have been punished for decades. Musical groups have been prevented from performing abroad, they've been arrested based on song lyrics, and they continue to suffer daily under military occupation.

Many artists have responded and cancelled appearances in Israel, including Carlos Santana, Gil Scott Heron, Elvis Costello, the Pixies, Devendra Banhart, the Tindersticks, Meg Ryan, and Dustin Hoffman. These cancelations, along with other boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) victories, send a message that there will be no "business as usual" with an apartheid state; they have caused unprecedented concern amongst Israelis about the growing cost of occupation and apartheid. This is a Palestinian-led nonviolent means of pressure that can work and there's an exciting opportunity to strengthen it right now!

Earlier this week, American R&B/soul singer-songwriter Macy Gray began contemplating the call for boycott and published the following on her Facebook page:

I'm booked for 2 shows in TelAviv. I'm getting alot of letters from activists urging/begging me to boycott by NOT performing in protest of Apartheid against the Palestinians. What the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians is disgusting, but I wana go. I gotta lotta fans there I dont want to cancel on and I …dont know how my NOT going changes anything. What do you think? Stay or go?

Well, Macy, we're glad you asked!

Click here to send an email to Macy Gray and her tour managers, urging her to boycott apartheid.

And, if you've got a Facebook account, you can also leave a comment on her official page and to tell her what you think! (You have to "Like" her page first.)

Cultural boycott of Israel is part of a larger call launched in 2004 by dozens of Palestinian unions, federations, associations, and civil society organizations: the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Read the call and learn more about the campaign here.

Note that cultural boycott applies not only to foreigners presenting or showcasing their work in Israel, but likewise products or events sponsored either by an official Israeli body (governmental, municipal, etc) or by a non-Israeli institution serving to re-brand Israel in a positive or normal light, thereby whitewashing its illegal state actions. Products or events that promote "false symmetry or `balance'" between the occupier and the occupied are also boycottable according to PACBI's carefully explained guildelines here.

Want some examples of other cultural boycott actions? Groups in five cities did some creative street protesting last year when the Israel Ballet came to town. Israeli activists put on this flash mob when the Cape Town Opera performed in Israel.

Confused or conflicted about cultural boycott? You may find it useful to read the letter sent to Macy from Israeli citizens in BOYCOTT!: Supporting the Palestinian Call from Within.

Confused or conflicted about the Apartheid analogy? I strongly recommend reading the excellent booklet, "Is Israel An Apartheid State?," from member-group Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions – USA, summarizing a legal study commissioned by the government of South Africa on Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

Once again, if you haven't yet, click here to send an email to Macy Gray, asking her not to sing for Apartheid!

Thanks for reading,

Anna

Voices for Justice Under Threat from All Sides! Breaking News and Action Alerts

2010-12-23T12:05:00.002+02:00

Dear friends,

I'm writing to you for the first time as part-time national organizer for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation! I'm excited about the road ahead and helping to build the movement for justice in Palestine through our coalition of more than 325 peace and justice groups around the country. If you aren't already a member (as a group or individual), you should join!

Alternative voices on this issue are being silenced more and more every day. In particular, I want to tell you about three recent incidents and ongoing struggles to get the message out, and what you can do about it!

*********** Please distribute widely! ***********

~ FLASH MOB VIDEO SHUT-DOWN ~

Earlier this month, about forty members and friends of our St Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee (STL-PSC) got down to a parody of Lady Gaga & Beyoncé's song "Telephone" in a BDS Flash Mob at Best Buy and AT&T stores, urging holiday shoppers to boycott Israeli apartheid and hang up on Motorola. The action was covered in media around the world and video received more than 35,000 hits on YouTube in less than a week!

Shortly after the count hit 35,000, the video was removed on an apparent claim of copyright infringement by Warner Music Group (WMG). The STL-PSC is firmly convinced, as advised by legal representation, that our video does not infringe copyright, because it constitutes a "fair use" of the song and parodies of songs are protected under a US Supreme Court decision in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose. Furthermore, the song copyright appears to be owned by a subsidiary of UMG Recordings, not WMG at all. The WMG seemingly has no claim to the song; on the other hand, WMG's relationship with Motorola is well known.

STL-PSC believes that this is an infringement on freedom of expression and plans to challenge the take-down. There are more than 1,000 Lady Gaga flash mob videos on YouTube, many using the same song with far more hits. None of them have been shut down by WMG. Why was this video selected? What does WMG not want the world to know about its partner Motorola?

The targeting of our video by Motorola's partner tells me that our action made Motorola and/or its partners uncomfortable… which means we're doing something right! Motorola should feel uncomfortable for complicity in war crimes, and now more than ever we need to keep the pressure on!

Don't let Motorola and WMG silence people of conscience! Tens of thousands of you saw the video and circulated it. My request: IF YOU HAVEN'T SENT IT TO PEOPLE WHO SHOULD SEE IT, PLEASE CONSIDER DOING SO NOW! As we've seen, this is exactly what Motorola and WMG don't want.

If you haven't seen the video yet… take a look! It's less than 4 minutes long and really fun.

It was reposted here: www.stl-psc.org/?p=149

Finally, CLICK HERE to quickly send a letter to Motorola management and sign a pledge. If you're unaware of the campaign to boycott Motorola, our video explains the company's complicity in Israeli occupation and war crimes.

By the way, we were inspired in part by an excellent flash mob in a Philadelphia local grocer using the same Lady Gaga song (it hasn't been shut down). The group, Philly BDS, is calling for a boycott of Sabra and Tribe hummus, which subsidize Israel's human rights abuses.

~ FBI REPRESSION AGAINST PALESTINE SOLIDARITY ACTIVISTS ~

Yesterday morning, the FBI delivered subpoenas to another four anti-war activists involved in Palestine solidarity work. This brings the count to 23 in less than three months since coordinated FBI raids in Minneapolis and Chicago targeted an initial 14 activists in late September. Their computers, passports, documents, family photos, and even children's artwork were taken away.

The people targeted are well-known and beloved organizers and outspoken commentators around the country. It is critical that we protest this attempt to silence and criminalize anti-war activism.

Here's what you can do:

Sign and Circulate this petition: http://www.iacenter.org/stopfbi/

Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to stand with the 23 subpoenaed activists. Dial 312-353-5300, then dial 0 (zero) for the operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk (paralegal). Possible wording: "My name is __________, I am from _______. I am calling U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to demand that he call off the Grand Jury, stop FBI repression against the anti-war and international solidarity activists, and demand the immediate return of all confiscated personal materials." (Then, send a short message to stopfbi@gmail.com to let them know that you called.)

Organize or attend events/actions at your local FBI office or Federal Building. Email stopfbi@gmail.com with questions or to get an event listed on the website.

You can visit www.stopfbi.net for more information, to sign up for action alerts, to join the Facebook page, to donate to legal expenses, and more.

~ SEATTLE BILLBOARD CAMPAIGN ~

Recently, the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign purchased signs on public buses to educate the public about Israel's war crimes. The local Jewish Federation mobilized to stop it. King 5 News conducted a poll about whether to allow the signs or not. The vote was neck and neck until a major surge in support yesterday (good work!), after which King 5 closed the polls.

The Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign will be sending out action alerts periodically. Visit their website for information about the group, and read this article to learn more details about the campaign.

I will be posting related action alerts as they come in on my Facebook page. I mostly distribute information on Facebook these days, so for more frequent updates from me, please join (click "Like" at the top of) my Facebook page here.

Thank you everyone for reading, and thank you especially if you're taking action in some way (that's the most important thing)!

Peace,

Anna

PS. I don't usually forward articles but the following is a letter written from prison by my close friend Abdallah Abu Rahme, a wonderful human being and an inspiring leader of popular resistance in Palestine. His ongoing imprisonment certainly fits in with the theme of this email…

A year ago tonight, on International Human Rights Day, our apartment in Ramallah was broken into by the Israeli military in the middle of the night and I was torn away from my wife Majida, my daughters Luma and Layan, and my son Laith, who at the time was only nine months old.

As the coordinator of the Bil'in Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements I was convicted of "organizing illegal demonstrations" and "incitement." The "illegal demonstrations" refer to the nonviolent resistance campaign that my village has been waging for the last six years against Israel's Apartheid Wall that is being built on our land.

I find it strange that the military judges could call our demonstrations illegal and charge me for participating in and organizing them after the world's highest legal body, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, has ruled that Israel's wall within the occupied territories is illegal and must be dismantled. Even the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Wall's route in Bil'in is illegal.

I have been accused of inciting violence: this charge is also puzzling. If the check points, closures, ongoing land theft, wall and settlements, night raids into our homes and violent oppression of our protests does not incite violence, what does?

Despite the occupations constant and intense incitement to violence in Bil'in, we have chosen another way. We have chosen to protest nonviolently together with Israeli and International supporters. We have chosen to carry a message of hope and real partnership between Palestinians and Israelis in the face of oppression and injustice. It is this message that the Occupation is attempting to crush through its various institutions including the military courts. An official from
the Israeli Military Prosecution shamelessly told my Attorney, Gaby Lasky, that the objective of the military in my prosecution is to "put an end" to these demonstrations.

The crime of incitement that I have been convicted of is defined under Israeli military decree 101 regarding the prohibition of hostile action of propaganda and incitement as "The attempt, verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order" and carries a 10 year maximal sentence. This definition is so broad and vague that it can be applied to almost any action or statement. Actually, these words
could be considered incitement if they were spoken in the occupied territories.

On the 11th of October of this year I was sentenced to 12 months in prison, plus 6 months suspended sentence for 3 years, and a fine. My family and I, especially my daughters, were counting the days to my release. The military prosecution waited until just a few days before
the end of my sentence before appealing against my release, arguing that I should be imprisoned longer. I have completed my sentence but remain in prison. Though international law considers myself and other activists as human rights defenders, the occupation authorities consider us criminals whose freedom and other rights must be denied. In the year that I have spent in prison, the demonstrations in Bil'in, Naalin, Al Maasara, and Beit Omar have continued. Nabi Saleh and other villages have taken up the popular struggle. Within this year, the International campaign calling for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel until it complies with International law has grown considerably, as have legal actions against Israeli war crimes. I hope that soon Israel will no longer be able to ignore the clear condemnation of its policies coming from around the world.

In the year that I have spent in prison, my son Laith has taken his first steps and said his first words, and Luma and Layan have been growing from children to beautiful young girls. I have not been able to be with them, to walk holding their hands, to take them to school as they and I are used to. Laith does not know me now. And my wife Majida has had to care for our family alone.

In 2010 children in Bil'in and throughout the West bank are still being awakened in the middle of the night to find guns pointed at their heads. In the year that I have spent in prison, the military has carried out dozens of night raids in Bil'in with the purpose of removing those involved in the popular struggle against the occupation.

Imagine if heavily armed men forced their way into your home in the middle of the night. If your children were forced to watch as their father or brother was blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken away. Or if you as a parent were forced to watch this being done to your child.

This week the door of our cell was opened and a sixteen year boy was pushed inside. My friend Adeeb Abu Rahmeh was shocked to recognize his son, Mohammed, whom Adeeb had not seen since he himself was arrested during a nonviolent demonstration 16 months ago.

Mohammad smiled when he saw his Father, but his face was red and swollen and it was clear that he was in pain. He told us that he had been taken from his home two nights previously. He spent the first night blindfolded and shackled, being moved from one place to another. The next day after a terrifying, disoriented, and sleepless night he was taken to an interrogation room, his blindfold was removed and an interrogator showed him pictures of people from the village. When questioned about the first picture he told the interrogator that he did not recognize the person. The interrogator slapped him hard across the face. This continued with every question that Mohammad was asked: when he did not give the answer that the interrogator wanted, he was slapped, punched and threatened. Mohammad's treatment is not unusual.

Young boys from our village have been taken from their homes violently and report being denied sleep, food, and water and being kept in Isolation and threatened and often beaten during interrogation.

What was unusual about Mohammad is that he did not satisfy his interrogator and with competent representation was released within a few days. Usually children, just because they are children, will say whatever the interrogator wants them to say to make such treatment stop. Adeeb, myself, and thousands of other prisoners are being held in prison based on testimonies forced or coerced out of these children. No child should ever receive such treatment.

When the children who had testified against me retracted what they said in interrogation and told the military judge that their testimonies where given under duress, the judge declared them hostile witnesses.

Adeeb Abu Rahmah and I are the first to be convicted with incitement and participation in illegal demonstrations since the first Intifada but, unfortunately, it does not seem that we will be the last.

I often wonder what Israeli leaders think they will achieve if they succeed in their goal of suppressing the Palestinian popular struggle? Is it possible that they believe that our people can sit quietly and watch as our land is taken from us? Do they think that we can face our children and tell them that, like us, they will never experience freedom? Or do they actually prefer violence and killing to our form of nonviolent struggle because it camouflages their ongoing theft and gives them an excuse to continue using us as guinea pigs for their weapons?

My eldest daughter Luma was nine years old when I was arrested. She is now ten. After my arrest she began going to the Friday demonstrations in our village. She always carries a picture of me in her arms. The adults try to look after her but I still worry for my little girl. I wish that she could enjoy her childhood like other children, that she could be studying and playing with her friends. But through the walls and barbed wire that separates us I hear my daughter's message to me, saying: "Baba, they cannot stop us. If they take you away, we will take your place and continue to struggle for justice." This is the message that I want to bring you today. From beyond the walls, the barbed wire, and the prison bars that separate Palestinians and Israelis.

Great Resources! New Interview…

2010-10-15T16:50:00.002+02:00

Dear friends,

Here are three fantastic resources that everyone in the movement should check out and take advantage of!

Below them is an invitation to an important fundraiser for Rep. Donna Edwards, who has come under harsh criticism for speaking out against Israel's attacks on Gaza and for even attending the fundraiser sponsored by the pro-justice PAC, New Policy.

Finally, at the end, you'll find an interview I did published on PULSE and Huffington Post. See below…

EXCELLENT NEW RESOURCES

1. "Is Israel an Apartheid State?" is a highly recommended booklet summarizing a legal study by the South African Human Sciences Research Center. It systematically outlines criteria of the crime of Apartheid and analyzes Israeli laws in the West Bank and Gaza as they relate to it (it acknowledges its limitations of not having pursued the same analysis of Israeli laws towards Palestinians within Israel). This is an illuminating (I learned a lot!) and energizing tool for organizing. You can view the PDF here but purchasing paper copies here puts it in a much more reader-friendly format.

If you email me back with your address I will send you a free printed copy.

2. There's a great new website and billboard campaign by the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine. It launched in Chicago on Oct 4th with billboards on the city's mass transit system that read "End U.S. Military Aid to Israel." The campaign website, www.TwoPeoplesOneFuture.org, is full of well-documented information and talking points. I consider myself well-versed and I was taking lots of notes! Take a look...

There are lots of photos and updates on the campaign's Facebook page.

3. A comprehensive list of global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) actions in recent history can be found here—88 pages worth! The list has doubled since the Flotilla attacks. Listed are BDS actions by governments, unions, churches, universities, artists, Israelis, and more.

It includes the exciting action in Oakland, California where dock-workers refused to cross a picket line to unload Israeli cargo. Read article here.

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NEW POLICY FUNDRAISER FOR DONNA EDWARDS

Rep. Donna Edwards was one of 25 members of Congress to vote against HR 34, a resolution defending Israel's Winter `08-`09 attacks on Gaza that left 1,400 Palestinians dead (most of them civilians). She also voted against HR 867, a resolution to dismiss the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report. She has co-signed a letter highlighting the devastating effects of Israel's blockade, and has even visited Gaza herself.

Needless to say, Edwards has come under increasing criticism from the Washington Jewish Week and pro-Israel lobbies, including J Street, for her work and for agreeing to attend an event hosted by New Policy PAC, which supports a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In light of the increasing criticism, New Policy has decided to extend an open invitation to all to attend the reception on Saturday, October 16 at 1pm, held at the Sheraton North Hotel in Washington, DC.

Please note there are no minimum contribution requirements for the invitation. Come and bring friends and family. Show your support for an open debate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States.

RSVP to info@newpolicy.org. Make a contribution to Edwards' campaign or send a check to New Policy PAC at PO Box 73526, Washington, DC 20056.

Click here for more info on New Policy PAC and Donna Edwards Fundraiser.

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INTERVIEW

Prior to my visit to the area, Christian Avard of Vermont's Deerfield Valley News and iBrattleboro.com conducted the following interview with me. It was published on PULSE! (full version) and the Huffington Post (abridged version).

The full interview is pasted below…

Anna Baltzer: Palestinians "come second" at peace talks

Tell me about your experience on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Getting on mainstream television shows and talking about Palestine is incredibly difficult. What made that episode a reality and did your appearance on The Daily Show indicate that the mainstream media is beginning to explore the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

Someone with a contact at the show found my DVD transformative and sent in a press release for Mustafa Barghouti and me to be on. Barghouti was accepted immediately, and eventually they invited me too because I am Jewish and they thought therefore I would be a moderating influence. I don't believe it was their intention to have a Jewish Palestinian rights activist on and much of what I said of substance was cut out of the aired version, but they put the full version online and it went viral. I do believe that Stewart is sympathetic to the cause. I don't think it indicates a substantial shift in mainstream media trends, but given that I don't watch much mainstream media, I could be wrong! There seems to me a bit more openness than before to criticize Israel, thanks in part to Israeli atrocities that are growing too difficult to ignore.

How much of an impact did the atrocities of Operation Cast Lead and the Mavi Marmara flotilla have in opening people's eyes to the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

The impact has been huge. The "Israel is innocent and virtuous" narrative is no longer sustainable given these types of crimes, so in its place has been a propaganda campaign to convey how "complex" the issue is. "Yes," the narrative goes, "Israel sometimes does bad things, but it's just a cycle of violence and it's very complicated. We are working on it and you mustn't pressure us." This in some ways is more insidious than the previous narrative because it gives the illusion of balance where there is none and removes Israel's responsibility as the occupier.

Calling it "complex" is a way of obscuring the reality and avoiding responsibility. Jewish emotions surrounding Zionism are complicated; the task of both sides healing in the future from years of conflict is complicated; but the injustice of Palestinians being oppressed and denied their fundamental human rights simply because of their ethnicity and religion is not complicated. The propaganda campaign is not working. Americans are increasingly open to the idea that Israel may not be the righteous, peace-seeking country they thought it was. When I tell people I'm a Palestinian human rights advocate, they express more interest and less alarm than they used to. The shift was already happening before 2008 but has accelerated exponentially since Operation Cast Lead and the Freedom Flotilla attacks. Israeli society is well aware of this shift, and there is a lot of internal discussion and hysteria about the way the Flotilla attacks reflected badly on Israel.

People think that Israelis don't care about the way the world perceives them, but that's not true. They care about the legitimacy of their country, their academia, their science, their economy, and their culture. This is why the Palestinian-led movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel is so powerful. It's their weak spot–the kind of pressure that works, in contrast to the historic futility of vapid diplomatic efforts. By the way, there is little internal Israeli discussion within about the legitimacy of the attacks on the flotilla. The morality of the killings of nine Turks is not questioned. The discussion is tactical–how much can they get away with and shouldn't they have known better? Apparently their calculus is off because they seem to make one atrocious PR blunder over another, always at the Palestinians' (and occasionally their supporters') expense.

You have been traveling to Israel-Palestine for years now. Based on your experience and observations, what are the biggest myths about the occupation? What are the myths and what have you learned?

There are too many myths to name, but many fall into a few categories:

Myth 1: "This is an age-old conflict based on religion and mutual hatred." This is a conflict about land and human rights, not about religion. Prior to the Zionist movement, Jews were better treated in the Arab world than they were in much of the Christian West. There is nothing inherently incompatible about Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but with the introduction of the Zionist movement seeking to–and eventually succeeding to–annex Palestine for European Jews and one segment of the indigenous population while excluding and discriminating against the other segments of the population, you saw the emergence of violence. Israel was created and is maintained at the expense of Muslims and Christians in the area, who are denied their land and their human rights simply because they are not Jewish. This ongoing discriminatory system perpetuates the conflict today and until it is addressed we can expect no just or enduring peace.

Myth 2: "The occupation may be ugly, but it's for security" (note the switch from the previous narrative that "there is no occupation").
The majority of the institutions of Israel's occupation simply cannot be justified by security. Israel pays its citizens to move from Israel to the West Bank to live amidst the so-called "enemy"–does that make them safer? Israel has never declared its own borders, rather it expands them onto more and more of someone else's land–does that make Israel safer? Israel denies Palestinians sufficient water from their own water sources–Does that make Israelis safer? Although the narrative of "security" as motivation is accepted without question in mainstream media, it simply doesn't make sense when you look at the situation on the ground. Cutting Palestinians off from their families, schools, hospitals, and livelihoods will never make Israelis safer. If Israel is serious about ending Palestinian violence, it must acknowledge the roots of that violence.

Myth 3: "Israel has no partner for peace." On the contrary, Palestinians have no partner for peace. No Israeli offer has ever come close to fulfilling Palestinian human rights. Camp David II in 2000, often referred to as former prime minister Ehud Barak's "Generous Offer," would have annexed 10% of the West Bank into Israel, including some of most fertile and water rich areas, home to 80,000 Palestinians. The 10% was spread around the West Bank, separating the "future Palestinian state" into a nonviable archipelago of isolated cantons, separating Palestinians from their land and each other. Finally, the proposal maintained Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem (and some control by Palestinians under that sovereignty) and ignored the human rights of the Palestinian refugees, who represent the vast majority of the Palestinian population.

Offers by Palestinians and the Arab world including significant compromises have been consistently rebuffed by Israel:

In the 1970s, the PLO endorsed a comprehensive peace plan with Israel in exchange for its full withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Israel rejected the offer.

In 2002, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, along with 21 other members of the Arab League, proposed not only peace but normal relations and regional integration with Israel in exchange for an end to the occupation and a "just solution" to the issue of refugees. Israel rejected the offer. The Arab Peace Initiative was reiterated in 2007 and again refused.

Hamas has repeatedly offered a 30-year ceasefire with Israel in exchange for an end to the occupation. Israel has dismissed this possibility and refused to talk to the elected Palestinian government on grounds that it refuses to renounce violence, recognize previous agreements, and recognize the existence of another people's state in historic Palestine. Interestingly, Israel is guilty of all three of the very things for which it faults Hamas.

Myth 4: "An end to the 1967 occupation would be an end to the injustice." This one is more prevalent in the peace and justice community. While an end to the occupation is a condition for peace, it is only one part of restoring Palestinian human rights. The rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel also need to be addressed. What does it mean to be a citizen of a state that does not represent you, and systematically discriminates against you? (Mossawa is a good source for information about discrimination of Palestinians inside the Green Line.)

Moreover, the vast majority of Palestinians are families of refugees from 1948, who were forced to leave their homes in order to create a Jewish majority in a land where most people were Christian and Muslim. Still today, I, as a Jewish American, could go and live on land that was stolen from Palestinians and is now reserved exclusively for Jews. Meanwhile, a Palestinian born on that same land is forbidden simply because of his or her ethnic and religious background. An end to the occupation and a return to the 1967 borders solves the immediate problem of many (but not all) of the 4 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but it does not address the primary grievance of the vast majority of Palestinians, namely that they have been exiled from Palestine and can't go back because they are not Jews. Their right to come home and live at peace with their neighbors is reaffirmed year after year in the United Nations; it is not debatable, it's a right that belongs to all refugees, no matter what color their skin is.

The Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement has been growing on college campuses across the country. How much traction is this movement gaining in terms of pressuring the Israeli government and its policies?

A lot. The successes are too numerous to name, but the Interfaith Peace Initiative compiled a comprehensive list of global actions to date, filling 88 pages. The number of actions has doubled since the Flotilla attacks. They include divestment by universities, churches, unions, and governmental institutions. Musicians and sports teams have refused to play in Israel. The 2005 Palestinian-led call has been endorsed by some Israeli and Jewish groups, among hundreds of others. In five years, the BDS movement against Apartheid Israel has achieved more successes than the BDS movement against Apartheid South Africa had in its first twenty years of existence. The success of these campaigns is evidenced in the mass hysteria presented in Israeli newspapers. This is seen as a great threat to the status quo, which is the goal. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." Privilege is given up only when it comes at a cost.

Many people today are referring to Israel as an apartheid state. Do you agree with this characterization and what evidence have you seen that indicates that apartheid exists in Israel?

The 1973 UN International Convention on Apartheid defines the crime of apartheid as any systematic oppression, segregation, and discrimination to maintain domination by one racial group—`demographic group,' in Israeli parlance—over another, as through denial of basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, education, movement, and nationality; torture or inhuman treatment; arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment; and "any measures designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos,… the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group… or to members thereof."

The definition clearly cites crimes perpetrated by Israel both in the 1967 Occupied Territories—where the situation goes so much further that the Archbishop Desmond Tutu himself maintains that the occupation is worse than apartheid—and within the state of Israel itself. 1948 Palestinians (the descendants of the small number of Palestinians who remained in 1948 in what became Israel), aka "Palestinian citizens of Israel" (or "Israeli Arabs," which many see as an offensive title that ignores their Palestinian national and historic identity), are subject to countless discriminatory laws that deny them many of the same human rights and freedoms as their counterparts in the 1967 Occupied Territories. Although Israel calls itself a "democracy," it does not hide its determination to maintain its demographic domination of Jews over non-Jews. 1948 Palestinians are referred to as the "demographic bomb" in reference to their increasing percentage of the population due to reproduction and the emigration of many Jewish Israelis. Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman openly advocates the forced transfer of 1948 Palestinians out of Israel.

Although 1948 Palestinians are citizens of Israel, they are not "nationals," because Israel is not the state of its citizens but rather the state of the Jewish people. Palestinians were denied the right to work in dozens of jobs reserved for Israelis who have served in the Army (from which Palestinians are excluded). Additionally, 93% of the land in Israel is managed by the Israeli Lands Administration, an extension of the Jewish National Fund, rendering it either very difficult or outright impossible for non-Jews to move to. Most of this land was taken from Palestinians in 1948.

These are just a few examples of apartheid within Israel. The most comprehensive compilation I've seen documenting these cases and many more is Jonathan Cook's article, "The Unwanted Who Stayed," published by Americans for Middle East Understanding.

There is a phenomenal booklet compiled by Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA summarizing a legal study by the Human Sciences Research Center of South Africa. It's called "Is Israel an Apartheid State?" and in 7.5 pages systematically goes through seemingly every one of Israel's laws that discriminate against Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Territories as fits the crime of Apartheid (it acknowledges its limitations of not having pursued the same exploration within Israel—yet). I read examples I'd never even known about. It's very shocking and it's a great organizing tool to draw parallels compelling communities that took the step of divesting from Apartheid South Africa to do the same against Apartheid Israel today.

Peace talks are taking place as we speak in Washington DC. What aspects of these negotiations are people not seeing in the media? What kinds of context and/or issues are getting buried from stenography reporting that we're used to seeing?

One over-arching issue of years of failed US-brokered Middle East "peace-talks" is that the security and ethno-nationalist Jewish character of Israel is considered the first priority, and Palestinian human rights come second. The trouble is, Israel cannot exist as a state only of the Jewish people (as opposed to Israel being the state of the Jewish people and the indigenous population) without the denial of Palestinian rights (because the minute you give Palestinians the same rights as Jews, Israel stands to lose its Jewish majority). So when Prime Minister Netanyahu says "Both sides need to make significant compromises," he is talking about compromising Palestinian human rights. He's saying, "Look, you can have some human rights, but you will have to give up others." But human rights are non-negotiable. They are not up for debate—this is very clear in international law. The basis for peace-talks must be human rights, equality, self-determination, and security for everyone involved.

Because Hamas has refused to pre-conditions that de facto already sign away certain Palestinian rights, Palestinians have been denied representation by their democratically-elected leaders. And while Netanyahu expects Palestinians to compromise their most fundamental rights, he has shown no willingness to compromise on even the most basic issue of freezing settlement construction. Palestinians have again been forced into a situation of compromising with nothing in return. This imbalance is no surprise; a prisoner negotiating with his prison guard cannot expect a fair outcome. Until we see a solution based on justice rather than the normalization of injustice, we will not see a lasting peace in Israel/Palestine.

Despite the on-going Israeli-Palestine conflict, what have you seen or experienced that is positive and does not get mentioned?

The Palestinian-led liberation movement growing on the ground is usually ignored by US mainstream media. Hundreds of Palestinians march every week in protest of Israeli atrocities, often joined by Israeli and international solidarity activists. I am very inspired by the resilience of Palestinians on the ground in the face of tremendous oppression. The BDS movement is also underreported, to put it mildly, but together with Palestinian resistance on the ground will forge, I believe, the path to justice. I am also consistently surprised by the willingness of Palestinians who advocate a democratic one-state solution to live alongside their oppressors once the injustice ends. The one-state solution is always presented as a great compromise for Israel, but it is an extraordinary compromise for Palestinians. It provides a genuine model for peaceful coexistence in the future, which gives me hope.

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Announcements & New Article, "Indigenous Resistance: from Colombia to Palestine

2010-09-29T15:00:00.000+02:00

Dear friends,

I'm so sorry I've been out of touch for so long! I have so much to share with you all.

My most recent article is below the following announcements. It's called "Indigenous resistance: from Colombia to Palestine," the first in a series reflecting on my summer trip to Colombia with a delegation on indigenous movements and human rights.

But first, 5 announcements!…

1. Opportunities to go to Palestine:

* January delegation to Palestine (with two amazing friends of mine facilitating!) through Americans Jews for a Just Peace (open to non-Jews of course). Applications due soon—Oct 1st! Applications submitted later will be considered only if there is still room. More info here.

* November Olive Harvest delegation to Palestine with Interfaith Peace-Builders (people from all backgrounds, religious or not, are welcome to apply). Partiicpating in the harvest is a wonderful way to learn about Palestinians and Palestine. More info here. Delegations next year are listed here.

2. UN Flotilla Investigation finds Israel guilty of violating international law, "brutal and disproportionate" violence, and "willful killing." Full report here.

3. Plans for a US Boat to Gaza are in full force. Donations are desperately needed! Please visit UStoGaza.org to learn more and contribute.

4. The One Nation March is a huge action in Washington DC coming up on October 2nd. Learn more. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has materials for the protests and support for organizing your own community to attend this historic march and protest US $30 billion in military aid to Israel.

5. Finally, I will be touring internationally October 18th – November 23rd! Stops in:

* AUSTRALIA: Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, and elsewhere

* NEW ZEALAND: Wellington and Aukland

* JAPAN: Tokyo, Gumna, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, Nagoya, and elsewhere

The Australia tour will end at the first National Australian BDS Conference in Melbourne! View Speakers, Conference Agenda, and more here.

Check my online schedule for updates on the above and other upcoming events.

As promised, here's my most recent article, originally published on Electronic Intifada…

************ Available for re-publication ************

Indigenous resistance: from Colombia to Palestine

By Anna Baltzer

(Click here for corresponding photographs.)

"They only see our water, our land, our trees. They don't care about us. They want the land -- without the people on it."

These words are not of a Palestinian farmer but of Justo Conda, governor of Lopez Adentro Indigenous Reserve in southwestern Colombia, whose community was repeatedly threatened with displacement under former president Alvaro Uribe Velez. Uribe, recently appointed by the United Nations to investigate Israel's fatal attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, has a notoriously horrific track record on human rights. Less explored are the clear parallels between his government's mistreatment of indigenous peoples of Colombia and Israel's abuses of the indigenous people of Palestine.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world, numbering as many as 4.9 million. According to the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement more than 286,000 Colombians were uprooted from their land in 2009 alone. Approximately ten percent of the Colombian population has suffered forced displacement, many of them indigenous communities, afro-Colombian descendants of former slaves, and campesinos (farmers).

Like Israel, Colombia is the largest recipient of US military aid in its hemisphere. Six billion US tax-dollars over the past ten years have placed Colombia third in the world for US military assistance, after Israel and Egypt. Armed with US weapons and political backing, Uribe's government and other armed actors have forced out millions through extrajudicial assassinations and terror tactics, clearing the way for the exploitation of natural resources by the government and multinational companies. Always in the name of security and the "War on Terror," Colombian soldiers have burned villages, ransacked homes and destroyed the livelihoods of communities who have taken the radical decision of staying on their own land.

For many indigenous communities, this is not the first time they've been uprooted. With the Spanish invasion five hundred years ago and the founding of Colombia three hundred years later, indigenous peoples have been repeatedly forced to flee their fertile valleys rich with water and minerals, moving further and further into the Andes mountain ranges where the climate is harsher and the land less arable. Now the government wants to take even that land, leaving the communities trapped -- community members say if they head higher into the mountains they may be threatened by guerillas who are fighting to maintain control of those areas, while going down into the valleys they will face aggression from paramilitaries, corporations and the army.

There is something eerily familiar about this violent and calculated expulsion and it is no surprise that Israel has now become Colombia's number one supplier of weapons, advisor on military organization and intelligence-gathering and model for "fighting terror" ("Report: Israelis fighting guerillas in Colombia," Ynet, 10 August 2007, as cited in "Uribe's appointment to flotilla probe guarantees it's failure," Jose Antonio Gutierrez and David Landy, The Electronic Intifada, 6 August 2010). But like the Palestinians, the people of Colombia are not prepared to abandon their homes and livelihoods without a struggle. Almost twenty years ago, up against a military armed to the teeth, the indigenous communities of southwestern Colombia developed their own form of protection: La Guarda Indigena (The Indigenous Guard).

Standing before the flag of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca in the indigenous reserve of Lopez, Governor Conda explained:

"The Colombian government does not represent us, so we have constructed our own system of security. In each indigenous community, individuals are selected to serve for one year defending our land. Each indigenous guard receives a staff, passed down by its previous user, which represents the authority and responsibility of the position. Guards carry their ancestral staffs everywhere they go. It is received voluntarily; nobody is paid to defend their people. And although everyone in our communities would fight for our freedom, the staffs indicate those of us who have been physically and psychologically prepared during the year to defend our people and our land."

Governor Conda added:

"In the face of a highly-militarized state that consistently denies us our basic rights, the indigenous guard is the only defense we can exercise. We have declared ourselves neutral, allied with neither the guerillas nor the army. We are offering a peaceful solution based on an end to colonization and respect for life and culture. We have no weapons or guns. We don't need weapons or guns to exercise control. Our guards stand outside our gates, armed only with their colorful staff -- a symbol of our strength and our values. And although we have received many threats, many authorities have also come to respect the indigenous guard."

Conda explained that at the end of each guard's term, he or she chooses a successor and the authority and responsibility rotates. Next to Conda, the current community guards stood up one by one, a diverse group of men and women; young and old; a pregnant woman; a village elder. They held the staffs, each meant to reach as high as its carrier's heart.

Colombia's indigenous communities have a long history of popular resistance. In the 1920s, tribes collectively boycotted taxes imposed by the government on indigenous people to live and work on their own land. Since then, councils have been formed to decide how to recuperate territory and resist expulsion. Although their presence preceded European colonization, indigenous Colombians are often treated as foreigners and invaders.

The response to organized indigenous resistance to displacement has been brutal. Last year alone, four members of the small Lopez Adentro community alone were assassinated ("The Struggle for Survival and Dignity: Human Rights Abuses Against Indigenous Peoples in Colombia," Amnesty International, 23 January 2010 [PDF]). According to human rights advocate Felix Posada, 1,400 indigenous persons were assassinated during Uribe's eight-year tenure, representing one percent of Colombia's total indigenous population. Colombia has the highest rate of indigenous killings in Latin America, numbering 114 last year, reported Posada behind bulletproof doors in his office in downtown Bogota.

Right-wing paramilitary groups are suspected in many of the incidents, despite the Uribe administration's claim of their demobilization in 2006 ("Colombian Paramilitaries' Successors Called a Threat," Simon Romero, The New York Times, 3 February 2010). The "disarmament" was widely seen as a publicity stunt in which individuals dressed up as militants handed over their guns in photo-ops in exchange for a handsome reward. Countless cases have confirmed collaboration between the Colombian army and the paramilitaries (renamed "organized delinquents" these days), the latter often doing the dirty work in exchange for power and immunity.

In October of 2008, following direct action by the Indigenous and Popular Minga (Community Mobilization) of La Maria in Piendamo, soldiers entered the municipality and vandalized cars, forced inhabitants out of their homes with tear gas, stripped men in front of their neighbors and set fire to residents' huts, beds, bicycles and even children's dolls (Video: "La Maria Piendamo," 22 October 2008). A mass march from La Maria was met with soldiers and helicopters, leading to a stand-off of stones, sling-shots and ancestral staffs versus the army's tear gas and live ammunition (Video: "Minga de la Maria Piendamo," 22 October 2008). If Uribe's administration's chosen response to wooden, ancestral wooden staffs was bullets, what could he possibly say to Israel's killing of nine Turks who may have been carrying chair legs?

The gravest threat of all faced by Colombia's indigenous population is cultural destruction and extinction. Of Colombia's 102 indigenous tribes, 32 percent are in danger of disappearance. Eighteen tribes have fewer than two hundred persons remaining. One of the most important forms of resistance for many communities has been the preservation of language, cultural values and traditions.

Until recently, the state-imposed educational system mandated schooling in Spanish, but today native languages are taught in classrooms on the reserves. The people have won other victories along the way as far back as 1991 when the new constitution finally recognized the diverse ethnic identities of the Colombian people and their rights to preserve their land and culture. But too often the constitution and laws are ignored in favor of other interests, notably expanding control over natural resources.

Unwilling to continue waiting after twenty years of unkept promises, the indigenous communities of the Cauca and Valle de Cauca regions of southwest Colombia have joined together on a common platform of four priorities: unity, land, culture and autonomy. The vision is a complete one, with freedom conditional on the fulfillment of each element. Another member of the Lopez Adentro community explained: "Peace is not simply an end to war. Peace will come when indigenous rights to land, culture and self-determination are respected. There can be no peace through the destruction or submission of the indigenous population."

This definition of true peace is a timely one as Israel and the illegitimate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas resume negotiations while ignoring the fundamental requirements of justice for the Palestinian people, including their respective rights to land, culture and self-determination.

It is difficult to imagine a leader as enthusiastic about Israel's repression tactics as Uribe being a fair judge as to the legality of Israel's attacks on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. His former administration's close relationship to the Jewish state alone precludes him as an impartial investigator. And although there are notable differences between the situations in Colombia and Palestine, the likeness of the Colombian and Israeli governments' responses to indigenous resistance is unmistakable. It would be not only out of character but downright hypocritical for Uribe to hold Israel accountable for the same type of behavior that characterized his own presidency.

Meanwhile, the sumoud and resilience of the indigenous Colombian people persists. Governor Conda continued, "Just as we have for five hundred years, we will continue to struggle and move forward. In fact, we are ready to work harder than ever."

This article was originally published on Electronic Intifada.

Click here for photographs related to the article.

Spanish translation available here.

For more frequent updates and articles from me, please join (click "Like" at the top of) my public Facebook page here.

Lara Tries To Go Home

2010-06-09T18:40:00.005+03:00

Our delegation arrived safely in Palestine a couple weeks ago. We exited our plane at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, built on part of a Palestinian town of Lyd, most of whose inhabitants either fled in 1948 during the Nakba and remain in refugee camps in Amman, Jordan or Ramallah, West Bank living under deplorable conditions, or they live as second-, third-, or fourth-class citizens in what remains of town, now part of Israel. The removal of 17,948 of Lyd's population of 19,000 in 1948 was led by former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, hailed as a peacenik by those unfamiliar with his history of brutality that continued through the First Intifada (during which Rabin implemented a policy of breaking the arms and legs of any Palestinian who threw a stone at an Israeli tank, jeep, etc.) and beyond. Rabin wrote the following in his own diary shortly after 1948 attacks driving out almost 95% of Lyd's non-Jewish population:

"After attacking Lydda [Lyd] Ben-Gurion would repeat the question: What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out!. 'Driving out' is a term with a harsh ring, .... Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook." (Soldier Of Peace, p. 140-141 & Benny Morris, p. 207)

His guilt and psychological struggle didn't prevent him from giving orders to do the same to neighboring villages ('Imwas, Yalu, and Bayt Nuba) 19 years later.

The struggle of remaining inhabitants of Lyd (now citizens of Israel) for recognition as equal human beings and their isolation from their fellow Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Diaspora is documented beautifully in one of my favorite documentaries about Palestine: Slingshot Hip Hop, documenting the rising Palestinian hip-hop movement as resistance to oppression through the spoken word.

Anyway, arriving at Israel 's airport, named after Ben-Gurion himself, our delegates waited anxiously in line for passport control, hoping we would not targeted given our desire to meet with Palestinians. Israel recently denied entry to Noam Chomsky, who was on his way to give a talk at a Palestinian university, to name but one example. Those eventually interrogated from our group were no surprise—two Palestinian delegates, simply trying to visit their homeland.

They each told us their stories that night, but I'll focus on the story of just one: Lara.

Lara stood in line next to a large group of young Jewish Americans talking excitedly about coming on vacation to Israel . They were breezed through with a smiling, "Welcome to Israel ." When Lara reached passport control, they didn't bother asking her any questions. Her name was enough. Security escorted her to another room where she was held for over an hour. First, they asked for her phone number in the United States . She gave it to them… What will they do with it? They asked where her parents were born. " Gaza ," she answered. That was all the questioner needed to know. "You will have to visit the Ministry of Interior," he said, and took her into a third room.

"What is your father's name?" Lara answered. "I know," he replied.

"What is your mother's name?" Lara answered. "I know," he replied again.

"What is your father's mother's name?" "What is your mother's father's name?" "What is your mother's mother's name?" She answered each question and with each he replied, "I know."

When the interrogator asked, "What is your father's father's name?" Lara replied that she actually didn't know because he died long before she was born. But he knew, and before her eyes he sketched out the family tree of her own family, most of them uprooted from their homes by the Israeli Army. He said "Your grandfather' s name is Sayyid. And your father's name is not only Ahmad. It is Ahmad Mahmoud Sayyid Elborno."

Lara asked, "If you know the answers to all these questions, why are you asking me?" but he didn't respond. He continued:

"What date did your grandparents get married?"

"I don't know. Do you know what date your grandparents got married?" she challenged him.

"Your grandparents were married on September 3, 1958."

Then he began to show Lara photographs from Palestinian ID cards, asking if she was related to them. She didn't recognize any of them, until the last one: a older man in a grey suit.

"That's my grandfather, " she said, looking into his elderly face blown up on this interrogator' s screen. She was surprised because it was a recent photograph of him, even though he has not been to Palestine in many years. Why and how did they get a photograph of him, carrying on a new life far away after being pushed out?

Finally, he moved on to Lara's sister, explaining that she had been here last year. "Why?" he asked.

"Tourism," Lara replied.

"But you're from Gaza ."

"So Gazans cannot be tourists?"

Lara finished her story to us: "I must have forgotten that being from Gaza is a crime. After an hour and a half, my passport was stamped and I was told to enjoy my stay in Israel ."

We thought as a group about Lara's question as to why she was asked so many questions that Israel already knew the answer to… Was it to stall time to keep her longer? Was it to catch her if she lied? Was it to gather more intelligence about her family? Or was it to show who had the power in her own homeland.

Shortly after our arrival, our group visited Erez checkpoint, the northern crossing into Gaza . Of course, we couldn't enter Gaza, which remains under siege with full Israeli control over the shoreline, airspace, borders (except Rafah, which Egypt itself closed in part due to pressure from Israel and the US), and the land itself with buffer zones and invasions. Fishermen cannot fish to feed their families. If a Palestinian student in Gaza gets a scholarship to study in the United States … Too bad. They mostly likely can't get out. Gaza used to export millions of flowers… no more (once, people in Gaza carried thousands and thousands of carnations to Rafah checkpoint and dropped them there as an act of creative protest). Adequate fuel can't get in. Adequate medicine and medical supplies can't get in. Adequate food and water can't get in. People can't get in. People can't get out. Gaza is an open air prison.

On the way to Erez checkpoint, Lara shared with the group some of the items that Israel prohibits or often blocks from Gaza :

Cilantro, jam, chocolate, French fries, dried fruit, notebooks, toys, coriander, light bulbs, candles, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, pasta, tea, coffee, nuts, shampoo, conditioner, books, musical instruments, and crayons.

[Sources: "Why Won't Israel allow Gaza to import coriander?" (Haaretz Israeli Newspaper) and "Guide: Gaza Under Blockade" (BBC). List of commercial goods allowed only at certain points here.]

Lara has family and land in Gaza that she has never seen, but along with musical instruments and coriander, she's not allowed in. But Lara went to the window to try to go home anyway. She showed the seemingly bored young female solder her passport and said that she wanted to enter to go her family, whom she's never met.

"I'm sorry," the soldier replied, and slid her passport back. "You need a coordination. "

"What's a coordination?" Lara asked.

"You need to call to get permission to go to Gaza ."

"Permission from Gaza ?"

"No, permission from Israel ."

"Why do I need permission from Israel to go to my own land?"

The soldier didn't seem to understand the question.

We hope that the flotilla and upcoming new boats will continue to raise awareness of the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza . But the people in Gaza don't need sympathy. They need freedom, and they need justice. They don't need food; they need the ability to cultivate, catch, export, and import their own food. They don't need our money; they need the ability to thrive and to grow their own economy. They don't need our "help." They need our support, which is exactly what the flotilla was and is all about.

My friend Lara doesn't need permission to visit her land. It is her right—period. The fact that Israel consistently denies the rights of Lara and millions of other Palestinians to access their land in Gaza , the West Bank, or anywhere in historic Palestine does not make their rights questionable or debatable. They are non-negotiable, like any human right. It's as simple as that.

The Aftermath of the Flotilla

2010-06-07T04:02:00.000+03:00

Last night marked one week since Israel's attack in international waters on the Mavi Marmara Turkish humanitarian ship bound for Gaza, killing nine. One by one, the hundreds of witnesses aboard the vessels have been returning home to tell their stories after being stripped of any and all footage. By confiscating all non-military evidence of the incident, Israel has been able to successfully dominate the narrative, at least in the US where news of the attack had begun to dwindle by the time witnesses were released. One wonders, if Israel is conveying the whole story of what happened that night, why eliminate every single other piece of documentation? What does Israel have to hide?

According to hundreds of eyewitnesses, the Navy shot at the boat and threw tear gas and sound bombs before boarding the ship, and then hit the ground shooting. The videos released by Israel show those aboard the ship attacking soldiers with sticks. Israel claims that the deaths were an accident, that the soldiers were startled by the sticks and thus forced to shoot people to defend themselves.

Now let's put things into perspective. In 2005, the Israeli Army removed 8,000 ideological settlers from Gaza, many of them kicking and screaming with sticks and rocks in hand. The Army managed not to kill or even shoot a single one of them. Do sticks from Turks hurt more, or is it not about the sticks at all?

As Dr. Norman Finkelstein pointed out, Israeli officials met for an entire week prior to the flotilla to plan precisely what they intended to do. The Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren himself stated that the Mavi Marmara was simply "too large to stop with nonviolent means." It's hard to believe that this was an accident.

While the world focuses on the flotilla and Gaza, Israel's restrictions on Palestinian rights in the rest of Palestine continue to tighten. On Friday, soldiers surrounded the Old City in Jerusalem to prevent Muslim men from praying at Al-Aqsa mosque. Only those younger than 15 or older than 40 were allowed through. Hundreds of men gathered outside the metal bars installed by the Army around the city gates. Frustrated, many men sat down to wait to pray on the sidewalk, but soldiers on horseback pushed through the crowd, forcing the men to scatter.

It's important to note that many Palestinians wait for years to receive a permit to visit Jerusalem for just one day. Sometimes the permits are valid only for a few hours. I saw a woman in Beit Sahour whom I'd met in Syracuse last Fall. She said it's easier for her to travel to New York than to go 10 miles away to Jerusalem. She said often permits are sent to the wrong village and families fall over themselves to get the permit to the right person in time, often failing. At the gates, some men argued with the soldiers, close to tears, not knowing if they would ever get another chance to realize a life-long dream of praying at their country's holiest site.

Eventually, hundreds of men began to gather next to the wall of the Old City and across the street. If they could not enter, they would pray as close as they could. As the call to prayer rang out (at least sound can overcome walls), a noticeable calm came over the space as they bowed down in unison. The soldiers stood over the group, some filming with cameras. In the middle of the group were an olive tree and a young child who stood by himself, watching.

When the prayers ended, those who hadn't brought prayer mats wiped the dirt off their foreheads and gathered with others across the street where an imam had started to speak. Lara, a Palestinian delegate in our group translated bits and pieces of what he said.

The sermon was about the importance of compassion and justice in Islam. There they were, being denied their religious freedom, and they were talking about compassion. The imam asked that their prayers be accepted even though they could not be in the house of God. At one point, he raised his finger and called out the following: "Someday, we will live in a place where it doesn't matter what color your skin is, or where you're from." With every sentence the group resounded in a collective "Amen."

After the prayers, hundreds of women and older men poured out, one of whom told me he'd seen a man beaten by the Army for calling out against Israel's attacks on the flotilla. This is likely precisely what the Army wanted to avoid by keeping Muslims from congregating at the mosque, and they had been largely successful, at least so they thought.

Just as I was turning to return to the hotel, I heard a chorus of women's voices coming from inside the city walls. Soon a large group of women emerged carrying a Turkish flag and singing out familiar calls for justice and praising those who gave their lives to free Gaza. The soldiers thought that keeping the men out would be enough, but they had underestimated the women.

Israel has also underestimated the international civilian community, which continues to speak out. Day and night, we watch protests around the world unfold one after another, seemingly stronger and larger by the day: Japan, Paris, India, Oslo, Australia, and beyond. This is being called "Israel's Kent State."

Far more significant than protests is the fact that worldwide disapproval has been transforming into concrete rejection of normalization with Israel, including major victories for the Palestinian movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with international law.

This past week, the student body at Evergreen College voted to divest from "Israel's illegal occupation." Before she was run over by Israeli soldiers in a US-made Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza, Rachel Corrie had attended Evergreen. Along with divesting, students have voted for a "Caterpillar free" campus. You can support the students by clicking here.

A week before the flotilla, Italy's largest supermarkets COOP and Nordiconad announced a boycott of the Israeli produce company, Carmel Agrexco. Four days later, Deutsche Bank (Germany's largest bank, worth more than $1 trillion) announced divestment from Elbit Systems, an Israeli firm that supplies technology for Israel's military, settlements, and Wall (as well as the Wall between the US and Mexico). Deutsche Bank was one of the company's largest share-holders.

The next day, it was announced that Sweden's largest national pension funds were also divesting from Elbit. (Norway did the same more than one year ago.) Going a step further, the Swedish Port Workers Union announced last Wednesday that it would temporarily stop handling Israeli cargo in response to the attacks on the flotilla.

On the same day, Britain's largest union, Unite, passed a unanimous motion "to vigorously promote a policy of divestment from Israeli companies" and to boycott Israeli goods and services as in "the boycott of South African goods during the era of apartheid."

Then yesterday, the Pixies canceled their upcoming concert in Israel in response to Israel's attack on the flotilla. Musical artists Klaxons and Gorillaz canceled as well. This on the heels of cancelations by Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, Snoop Dog, Sting, and Elvis Costello.

These are but a few of the BDS victories that have happened just in the last month. The movement that officially began in 2005 crossed its first threshold in 2009 (having gained in four years the same momentum it took the BDS movement against South Africa 20 years to achieve), but 2010 has brought it to a new level.

Last month marked 62 years since 80% of the families in Gaza were displaced during Israel's creation, the Palestinian Nakba. And this week marks 43 years since Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The Occupation has been in place 70% of Israel's life-span so far. It is not temporary. And it is but one part of the problem. Along with Israel's discrimination against Palestinians within Israel's de-facto borders and outside historic Palestine, the Occupation will not be stopped voluntarily by Israel. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." I spoke with a member of Boycott from Within (Israelis supporting the Palestinian BDS Call) paraphrased a common phrase during the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa: We will bring them to their senses, or we will bring them to their knees. For Israel, as was the case for the South African Apartheid government, the former has simply never worked.

A People United Will Not Fall

2010-06-02T05:34:00.002+03:00

As I'm sure you've heard, less than 60 hours ago at least 9 people carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza on a six-ship flotilla were killed by the Israeli army when it attacked one of the ships. Dozens were badly injured. The ships were in international waters and had stopped overnight, expecting to continue transporting more than 10,000 tons of aid to Gaza the next morning. Most of those killed and injured were Turkish.

I am chilled knowing that I was meant to be on the Mavi Marmara boat had I not already committed to this delegation, and I wonder if I could have been as brave as the others on board. I feel a great kinship with Turkish Palestine solidarity activists with whom I worked during my years living in Ankara and although I am no nationalist, I was proud to carry a Turkish flag today.

We here in Palestine are stunned, not by Israel's immorality (Israel has committed far worse crimes), but by its arrogance. Israel assumes it can kill anyone it wants anywhere it wants with impunity. Israel is wrong. And this, like the 2008-2009 War on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead), should be a turning point in international opinion and, more importantly, international action.

Nine hours after the night-time killings, we went to Ramallah and joined with a crowd of hundreds demonstrating (see photos here) in solidarity with their Turkish brothers and sisters who fell for freedom in Gaza. It was a moving scene as people locked their stores to take to the streets waving Turkish flags alongside Palestinian ones, chanting that the profound sacrifice of these martyrs for them would never be forgotten. The crowd's enthusiasm never wavered as it moved through the bustling city of Ramallah, eventually ending at a Turkish International Center.

One of our delegates speaks Hebrew and happened to be at the end of the crowd when she recognized Israeli News Channel 2 cameras setting up pointed away from the crowd (I didn't think Israeli TV went into Ramallah but she's lived in Israel and was 100% sure of what she saw). She translated to us the words spoken in Hebrew by the reporter: "Here in Ramallah, life is going on as usual. People here seem apathetic to what happened at sea, showing that it's really not that big of a deal."

In Ramallah we heard news of a similar protest near Qalandia checkpoint where an American young woman named Emily lost her left eye when she was shot in the face with a tear-gas canister. The story felt all the more real when we met that night with representatives from the popular committee of the nearby village of Ni'lin where a young man from California named Tristan Anderson was shot in the head with a tear gas canister at a peaceful demonstration. For a long time it was assumed he would be brain-dead for life, but it seems he's making progress and has finally begun to speak.

Our meeting was held in Bil'in, where we spent the evening with one of the leaders of the popular committee on resistance in the small village that has lost more than half of its land to the Wall. The last time I was at a demonstration in Bil'in, we were hosed with water cannons. Now I learn that the Army has started hosing people with chemicals or pepper spray in the water, stuff that won't rub off and smells terrible.

Since my last visit, Bassem Abu-Rahme, a warm and energetic friend to many who have marched in Bil'in, died from being shot in the heart with a tear gas canister as he yelled at soldiers that his Israeli activist friend was hurt. We watched a movie about Bassem and I remembered how enthusiastic and glowing he was. No more, although his memory lives on through pictures on every family's wall, and in the minds of the thousands who have come from around the world to confront Israeli Apartheid in this small village.

The resistance in Bil'in has continued every Friday for more than half a decade. I am reminded each time I come of the extraordinary resilience of the people. More than 85 of 1,800 inhabitants have been imprisoned, with many more beaten, gassed, and shot at. The house in which we were staying has been raided eight times in the middle of the night. Our host is wanted by Israel for his leadership in this village known for its nonviolence. He dined with us and left, saying it was too dangerous for him to stay.

Usually when I come to Bil'in, the first place I go is to the home of my friends Abdallah and Majida, and their beautiful girls, Luma and Layan. This time, there was a third child -- Laith, their first boy -- but someone was missing. Abdallah Abu-Rahme, one of the leaders of Bil'in's popular nonviolent resistance against the Wall, was abducted by soldiers in the middle of the night, with Majida and the rest of the family unable to stop it. His crime: Abdallah has been charged for possession of weapons because he gathered empty tear gas canisters that were shot into his village and put them together to form an enormous peace sign (click on the link for the photo... you have to see it to believe it).

In the morning our friend from Jerusalem was late to pick us up. He said they couldn't buy amenities because a general strike was called in East Jerusalem. Later we visited Sakhnin, a Palestinian town in the Galilee. The entire town had been on strike and people were out at night demonstrating and singing "Biladi, Biladi" (My Country, My Country). Our host told us about Israeli efforts to separate Palestinian society, calling Palestinians in Israel "Arab Israelis" and claiming they are separate from the Druze, Bedouins, Jerusalemites, and Palestinians in the 1967 occupied territory and the Diaspora. These classifications serve to undermine the unity of the Palestinian people but, my host smiled, they have not succeeded, as evidenced by so many protests and strikes around Palestine for the people of Gaza and their supporters.

Yesterday, Egypt finally opened Gaza's Rafah crossing to allow Palestinians, food, water, medical supplies, and more in and out. It seems even Egypt has a breaking point. In the United Nations, representatives from multiple countries (including the UK, but not the U.S.) issued harsher words than I have heard from them in the past (albeit not harsh enough). Sadly, ten Palestinian deaths have never prompted an emergency meeting in the UN; Palestinians' lives are considered cheaper than those in other countries. Who knows how long Rafah will stay open or what will come of the UN lip-service, but it shows the power of international solidarity to wake up the world and force people to talk about this issue. Those who fell on the Mavi Marmara were people of conscience with the courage to do what our government and others have not: end the siege of Gaza. Their deaths will not be in vain.

Why You Should Care about the Hikers Held in Iran...

2010-05-13T19:05:00.001+03:00

Dear friends,

Nine and a half months ago, two of my friends, Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd, were arrested along with their friend Josh Fattal while hiking near the Iranian border with Iraqi Kurdistan.

You probably heard about the hikers in the news, but most people don't know much about them personally. They are incredible people I spent a lot of time with while living in Damascus, Syria last year. Shane was doing photo-journalism around the Middle East. Sarah was working without pay for the Iraqi Student Project, teaching English to Iraqi students whose education was interrupted by the war and occupation and helping secure scholarships and spots for them at US universities. She invited me to give a presentation on Palestine to her students, which I happily did. The presentation was enhanced by memorably insightful comments by Sarah that demonstrated clearly her wisdom and experience in movements for social justice and creating a better world for everyone. The last time I saw Sarah and Shane was at a pot-luck they threw shortly before I left.

I was going to write an article about my friends but the article below really says it all. The three hikers' families had asked us not to write anything related to politics about them until now.

Thanks for reading,

Anna

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Why You Should Care about the Three Americans Held in Iran

by Scott Campbell

Watching the news in August 2009, you may have heard about three U.S. citizens being detained in Iran. Arrested for allegedly crossing the Iran-Iraq border on July 31, 2009, they remain in detention nine months later in Iran's Evin prison. Dubbed "the hikers" due to the fact that they were on a hiking trip in the Kurdish region of Iraq when they were detained, in their nine months of imprisonment Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer, and Josh Fattal have had only three visits from Swiss consular officials, have been permitted only one brief phone call to their families, and have been denied access to their Iranian lawyer. Their mothers applied for Iranian visas more than four months ago and have received no response. Though Iranian officials occasionally sputter about "espionage," the only charge they face is "illegal border crossing," punishment for which is a fine, not indefinite detention.

All of this is outrageous enough, but the picture is even bleaker. Thursday, April 22, was the most recent visit to the hikers by the Swiss -- the first since October. Sarah -- who is in solitary confinement -- told them she is suffering from depression and a severe gynecological condition. Shane, originally also held in solitary but now sharing a cell with Josh, told them he is enduring a stomach ailment. The three of them are considering beginning a hunger strike, despite their poor health and isolation.

The three have lamentably become political pawns in the U.S.-Iranian staring contest. The fact is, despite the West's belligerence towards Iran, these three individuals demand our support and solidarity. Though they were simply on a hike, they are much more than hikers -- they are individuals dedicated to working for a better, more just, and more sustainable world. They are comrades, fellow travelers, activists, organizers, whatever you may want to call them.

It is pertinent to mention that Sarah and Shane are good friends whom I've known for several years. I first met Sarah in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005 when we organized locally to support immigrant rights and participate in the historic May Day marches of 2006 and sent groups down to the border with Mexico to confront nativist vigilantes like the Minutemen. She and Shane lived in a house in Oakland that served as the base for the Midnight Special Law Collective, which provides legal support and much more to activists around the country. In 2007 and 2008, we all worked with Direct Action to Stop the War to organize a series of civil disobedience and direct action efforts to mark the fifth anniversary of the war on Iraq.

Before moving to Syria together, Sarah spent time doing solidarity work with the Zapatistas in Chiapas and Shane went to Iraq to document the U.S. occupation, as well as making two trips to Darfur where he covered the rebels fighting the Sudanese army and militias. In Syria, they lived in a Palestinian refugee camp and did Palestine solidarity work, as well as visiting their friend Tristan Anderson in an Israeli hospital where he has been ever since being shot in the head by an Israeli soldier with a high-velocity tear gas canister while protesting against the separation wall in the West Bank. Before heading to Kurdistan, Sarah worked with Iraqi refugees, while Shane reported on the U.S.'s creation of death squads in Iraq for The Nation.

Having never met Josh, I unfortunately know less about him. He spent time at the Aprovecho Research Center working on issues such as sustainable agriculture, food justice, and permaculture. He is deeply committed to issues of ecology and truly democratic politics.

Sarah, Shane, and Josh are not three random Americans. They are allies in the struggle for a better world. And right now they are in a dire situation. In that spirit, I ask for your help. If you're anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-occupation, help free the hikers. If you oppose sexism, racism, and homophobia, help free the hikers. If you believe in environmental justice and ecological sustainability, help free the hikers. We need them out of there so they can be fighting with us here. Please visit www.freethehikers.org to sign the petition, send letters to the U.S. and Iranian governments, and get in touch to help organize actions to protest their detention and demand their release.

3 Jewish Initiatives to Support BDS & the Movement...

2010-05-03T01:00:00.002+03:00

Dear friends,

A lot has been happening over the past few weeks, particularly within the global movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It may not feel like much if I'm the only list you're on, but there are new campaigns and votes all the time (and if you want notification of them, you can join the BDS email list). The most recent vote at UC San Diego last Wednesday was sent to committee. You can read the resolution, sign the petition, and/or send a letter of support.

I want to tell you about three initiatives—a statement, a book, and an assembly—by Jewish Americans supporting BDS. Here they are, in order…

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I. BREAKING THE LAW OF RETURN

Below is a statement I worked on with Hannah Mermelstein, Nava Etshalom, and Amy Kaplan and an accompanying video. I invite others to read, watch, sign, and/or support the initiative. It speaks for itself…

Recommended: Click here to Watch the Video!

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We are Jews from the United States, who, like Jewish people throughout the world, have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel's "law of return."

Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land—a right recognized and undisputed by UN Resolution 194, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, we are invited to live on that same land simply because we are Jewish.

We renounce this "right" to "return" offered to us by Israeli law. It is not right that we may "return" to a state that is not ours while Palestinians are excluded and continuously dispossessed.

In 1947-49, Zionist militias destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages and made more than 800,000 Palestinian people refugees in order to create a Jewish state on land where the majority was not Jewish. It is Palestinians who have the right to return to their own land.

Now in Gaza, where more than three quarters of the people are refugees, the State of Israel not only denies the population its right of return, but also incarcerates the entire Gaza Strip under illegal and inhumane siege conditions.

We reject the notion that Israel is a "safe haven" from anti-Semitism for Jews. No one is truly safe when the price of that "security" is oppression, inequality, and occupation of another people.

Today there is a growing transnational movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, called for by Palestinian civil society and supported by activists, artists, and academics around the world, including an increasing number of conscientious Israelis. As part of this campaign, we pledge to boycott the "law of return." As an act of political and ideological divestment, we repudiate the claims the State of Israel makes on us as potential citizens.

We protest Israel's colonial policies and discriminatory laws toward the Palestinian people, as well as the U.S. government's political and financial support of these policies.

We hereby renounce Israel's "law of return" and refuse to lend the state our support, resources, or passports.

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1. If you are a U.S. Jew, you can add your name to the signatories (there are already hundreds!) by emailing breakingthelawofret urn@gmail. com with your name, city, and institutional/ organizational affiliations (optional).

2. Join our Facebook group – all people who support this statement are welcome!

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II. "SHIFTING SANDS"

This is your last chance to pre-order at a discount the upcoming book, Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation, which comes into print on Tuesday!

I contributed a chapter, as did Hedy Epstein, Alice Rothchild, Starhawk, and many others. Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote the preface and Cindy Sheehan wrote the foreword. The editor, Osie Gabriel Adelfang, will also be donating a portion of the proceeds to the cause. She did an incredible job. Even the cover is beautiful (some of you will recognize the wall around Munira's home from my DVD).

Visit the book's Official Website and note the Events Calendar at the top.

Order the book online (ASAP if you want the pre-order discount). Consider writing a review on Amazon if you read it and like it. I only have twelve for Witness in Palestine (thank you, whoever you are!) but it sure helps!

And don't forget to join the Facebook fan page and/or follow Shifting Sands on Twitter.

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III. U.S. ASSEMBLY OF JEWS: CONFRONTING RACISM & APARTHEID

June 19-22, 2010

Between the Allied Media Conference and the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer, there will be a historic gathering of anti-Zionist Jews to develop strategies for US organizing, advance the BDS call, and much more!

Join the Facebook group and visit the Official Website to get more information, register, propose a session, contribute, check out the endorsements, or spread the word…

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Although it should not be exaggerated, these three initiatives are testimony to a continuing shift in Jewish consciousness on this issue. It is no longer an extraordinary thing to meet Anti-Zionist Jews in the United States, and Jewish Israelis are among those calling loudest for BDS. AIPAC's membership hovers around 100,000 while Jewish Voice for Peace's mailing list has now surpassed that. We join with millions of others of all backgrounds around the US and around world, forming the critical mass needed for change, led by the Palestinian people themselves. As Cecilie Surasky of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote in her incredible piece (read it!) on the UC Berkeley Divestment vote, It's Clear What the Future Looks Like...

If you're not active now, there's no better time to start!

Two Exciting (and Urgent) Things for Justice in Palestine

2010-04-13T17:29:00.001+03:00

Dear friends,

There are some very exciting things happening these days in the growing movement in the US for justice in Palestine. I get dozens of action alerts a week, but I'm forwarding to you only two, which I believe are very important—and urgent!

[If any of the links below don't work, cut and paste into a new window and remove any spaces.]

(1) The first is a crucial resolution at UC Berkeley that will be voted on TOMORROW (April 14th), so letters of support are needed ASAP! Here's what's happening:

On March 18th, the Senate of the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley (ASUC) passed a bill in support of ASUC's divestment from two American companies, General Electric and United Technologies, for their material and military support for Israel's occupation in Palestine. The bill encouraged the University of California itself to make sure its $135 million in investments are no longer profiting off Israel's "war crimes." You can read the whole bill here: http://mondoweiss.net/2010/03/berkeley-student-senate-divestment-resolution.html

The bill passed 16-4, but the President of the Senate tried to stop it with a veto. Tomorrow, the senate will have the chance to overturn the president's veto. Please use this link from Jewish Voice for Peace (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/301/p/dia/action/public/?action_ KEY=2747) to write to the senate (something short is fine) to encourage them to support the bill.

South African anti-Apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Naomi Klein are among many who have written in support. Tutu's letter is here at http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/tutu-issue-is-the-same-in-palestine-as-it-was-in-south-africa-equality.html#more-17346 and Naomi Klein's letter to the senators is below.

Note: Even if you don't read Klein's letter, please don't miss the section following it…

------------ -------

Dear members of the ASUC Senate,

I am writing to urge you to reaffirm Senate Bill 118A, despite the recent presidential veto.

It comes as no surprise that you are under intense pressure to reverse your historic and democratic decision to divest from two companies that profit from Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory. When a school with a deserved reputation for academic excellence and moral leadership takes such a bold position, it threatens to inspire others to take their own stands.

Indeed, Berkeley—the campus and the wider community—has provided this kind of leadership on many key issues in the past: not only Apartheid in South Africa but also sweatshops in Indonesia, dictatorship in Burma, political killings in Nigeria, and the list goes on. Time and again, when the call for international solidarity has come from people denied a political voice, Berkeley has been among the first to answer. And in virtually every case, what began as a small action in a progressive community quickly spread across the country and around the world.

Your recent divestment bill opposing Israeli war crimes stands to have this same kind of global impact, helping to build a grassroots, non-violent movement to end Israel's violations of international law. And this is precisely what your opponents—by spreading deliberate lies about your actions—are desperately trying to prevent. They are even going so far as to claim that, in the future, there should be no divestment campaigns that target a specific country, a move that would rob activists of one of the most effective tools in the non-violent arsenal. Please don't give into this pressure; too much is on the line.

As the world has just witnessed with the Netanyahu government's refusal to stop its illegal settlement expansion, political pressure is simply not enough to wrench Israel off its current disastrous path. And when our governments fail to apply sanctions for defiant illegality, other forms of pressure must come into play, including targeting those corporations that are profiting directly from human rights abuses.

Whenever we take a political action, we open ourselves up to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards, since the truth is that we can never do enough in the face of pervasive global injustice. Yet to argue that taking a clear stand against Israeli war crimes is somehow to "discriminate unfairly" against Israelis and Jews (as the veto seems to claim) is to grossly pervert the language of human rights. Far from "singling out Israel," with Senate Bill 118A, you are acting within Berkeley's commendable and inspiring tradition.

I understand that there is some debate about whether or not your divestment bill was adopted "in haste." Not having been there, I cannot comment on your process, though I am deeply impressed by the careful research that went into the decision. I also know that in 2005 an extraordinarily broad range of Palestinian civil society groups called on activists around the world to adopt precisely these kinds of peaceful pressure tactics. In the years since that call, we have all watched as Israeli abuses have escalated dramatically: the attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, a massive expansion of illegal settlements and walls, an ongoing siege on Gaza that violates all prohibitions on collective punishment, and, worst of all, the 2008/9 attack on Gaza that left approximately 1,400 dead.

I would humbly suggest that when it comes to acting to end Israeli war crimes, the international response has not suffered from too much haste but from far too little. This is a moment of great urgency, and the world is watching.

Be brave.

Yours sincerely,
Naomi Klein

------------ -------

(2) The second exciting and timely thing I'm writing about is that there is a woman running for Congress who advocates not just an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank & Gaza, but justice and full equal rights for all peoples of historic Palestine.

Her name is Marcy Winograd. She and I have presented together on Palestine several times. She is solidly pro-justice (including on other issues, of course), and she has a strong chance at winning! She won almost 40% of the vote last time around with very little campaigning, and the climate for moving out incumbents has only grown. The campaign is making a major push and support is flowing in. This could really happen!... But she needs our help.

I've already donated to her campaign and if you have the means, I urge you to as well. See her platform (vs. that of her opponent) at: http://www.winogradforcongress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Winogr_Harman_issuesHR101.pdf

If you would like to contribute, please make a check payable to:

Winograd for Congress 2010
Attn: Peter Froelich, Durkee & Associates
1212 S. Victory Blvd., Burbank, CA 91502

Or you may contribute online through the ActBlue secure site: http://www.actblue.com/entity/fundraisers/22298

If you need additional details or would like to host a Winograd for Congress event, please contact Sheri Myers, the Winograd for Congress Event & Fundraiser Coordinator: Sheri@WinogradforCongress.com or 310.801.1819

More info at http://winogradforcongress.com/ or on her Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/WinogradForCongress#!/WinogradForCongress?v=info

Of course, supporting Marcy's campaign is NOT a substitute for organizing and supporting grassroots campaigns for boycott, divestment, and sanctions at UC Berkeley and around the country…

Onward!

Anna

ACTION ALERTS! Muslim students threatened with expulsion, and more

2010-02-11T22:00:00.000+02:00

Dear friends,

There's been a lot going on lately. Here's just a sampling. I'll be sending my Spring Tour schedule very soon...

MSU STUDENTS ARRESTED AT UCI:

On Monday, eleven members of the Muslim Student Union at the University of California at Irvine were arrested after repeatedly interrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren co-sponsored by the UCI Law School and Political Science Department. Following the disruption, the students were arrested and are now being threatened with punishment as severe as expulsion.

Watch a short clip of the event at www.democracynow.org/2010/2/9/headlines (skip to minute 10:25). Towards the end you'll see an angry man announcing to each one, "You are failing your exams." You can read why they chose to interrupt Mr. Oren here: http://www.msuuci.com/. The UCI Muslim Student Union is one of the most committed, organized, and inspiring groups I have ever worked with. They are true allies and they need our support now!

Please write UCI Chancellor Michael Drake (chancellor@uci.edu) and the Dean of Students (deanstu@uci.edu), who will be determining the punishment. Here are some important points to bring up:

* It is unjust to threaten to expel students for having the courage to stand up and speak out against a man responsible for propagating the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
* Civil disobedience has historically played an instrumental role in the civil rights movement in America that fought for equality and human rights for all minorities.
* Michael Oren is a representative of a state that is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world, and he should not be honored at UC Irvine.
* As concerned community members, we will not support an educational institution that threatens to punish its students with suspension and expulsion for standing up for their principles.

You can also join their Facebook group, Drop All Charges Against the Eleven (www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=296764351034)

------------ --------- --

NYT REPORTER TIES TO ISRAELI MILITARY:

In other news, in case you haven't heard, The New York Times has confirmed that the son of Ethan Bronner, their chief reporter on Israel/Palestine, is a soldier in the Israeli Army. The Times announced that it does not see any conflict of interest posed by the Jerusalem bureau chief's familial ties to the Israeli military. The Public Editor, representing readers, determined that Bronner having a son fighting for one side is cause for finding someone else to cover the region (www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opinion/07pubed.html), but the Times editors say they like Bronner's work and so they're keeping him.

I would argue that nobody can remain neutral with their child on one side of crossfire. I would also argue that Bronner has not shown neutrality in the past. American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University Richard Falk co-authored an entire book on the subject (Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East), an If Americans Knew study found the Times to be "Off the Charts" in misrepresenting the issue (http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html), and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has come to similar conclusions (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4004).

The Times chose not to disclose Bronner's family ties to the Israeli Army until EI broke the story (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11031.shtml), after which they were forced to.

Consider writing the New York Times editors (executive-editor@nytimes.com, managing-editor@nytimes.com, letters@nytimes.com) to voice your opinion.

------------ --------- --

THANK NPR!:

One piece of good news on the media is that National Public Radio (NPR) aired a piece called "Should Israel Birthright Include Implications for Occupied Territories" contrasting Birthright Israel and Birthright Unplugged (www.birthrightunplugged.org) last month on "Morning Edition" (www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122416343). NPR generally avoids this issue so even if you're not usually impressed with their coverage, consider writing to thank them (help.npr.org/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=5670&task=ticket, select "Morning Edition"), with hopes this won't be the last time!

------------ --------- --

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION:

Once you're done with all that emailing, take to the streets! A coalition of Israelis & Palestinians is working to coordinate an International Day of action on February 25th. This date marks 16 years since the Baruch Goldstein massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron, after which Israel closed Shuhada Street to Palestinians. Shuhada Street used to be the principal street in the city of Hebron, with homes, businesses and a very active market place. Today, because it runs through a Jewish settlement, Shuhada Street is closed to Palestinian movement and is a ghost town which only Israelis and tourists are allowed to access. Hate graffiti has been sprayed across the closed Palestinian shops and Palestinians living on the street have to enter and exit their houses by climbing over neighbor's roofs.

The campaign is focusing on Shuhada Street as a symbol of core issues everywhere in the West Bank: Israeli settlements, policies of segregation, restricted movement and the basic denial of freedom for Palestinians. People in cities around the world can participate by symbolically shutting down a major street in their cities and/or organizing a demonstration in a strategic location (i.e Israeli embassy/consulate, city center, college campus, etc.) on February 25th in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Shuhada Street. Take 2 minutes to watch the campaign video here: http://www.vimeo.com/8791329

Demonstrations are already scheduled to take place in 15 different locations around the world. For more details about the campaign, join the campaign's Facebook group (www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=251984863283&ref=ts), visit the website (www.openshuhadastreet.org), or email openshuhadastreet@gmail.com

------------ --------- --

WHAT IS YOUR STATE GIVING IN MILITARY AID?

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has put out a new program calculating how much your state is giving in military aid to Israel, and what else that money could have bought (eg: affordable housing grants, green jobs training, early reading education, and primary health care). This is a great advocacy tool to bring home the extent to which unconditional support to Israel is not only contrary to international law, human rights, and basic decency, but also local interests: www.aidtoisrael.org/

------------ --------- --

GAZA ON MY MIND:

Finally, here's a good new website that Haithem El-Zabri just launched: www.gazaonmymind.org. It has informational resources (links to Gaza blogs, diaries, and videos, including the film everyone's talking about: "To Shoot An Elephant" about a team embedded with medics during Operation Cast Lead, which you can download for free), a list of 10 things you can do for Gaza, and a small store where Gaza-related items are offered (with 10% of the proceeds donated half to humanitarian aid and half to advocacy efforts) including T-shirts and hoodies.

------------ --------- --

If you got this far, Mazel Tov! Spring Tour schedule coming in the next few days...

Warmly,

Anna

What To Buy & NOT Buy For Holiday Gifts, and More...

2009-12-17T17:25:00.002+02:00

Dear friends,

Three things in this post:

(1) The Gaza Freedom March

(2) Quick Petitions

(3) Holiday Gifts to Buy & NOT to Buy (read that today!)

I tried to make each one quick…

Anna

************ *******Please distribute widely****** ********* ********

A week from Sunday will mark the one-year anniversary since the beginning of Israel's three-week attack on Gaza that left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead (in addition to 13 Israelis killed, 4 of those by other Israeli soldiers), more than 100,000 Palestinians homeless, and one third of all Gaza's agricultural land destroyed. Before, during, and since the attacks, Gazans have been deprived of adequate food, water, medical supplies, building supplies, heating, and other basic needs in a brutal siege that has reduced Gaza to an open-air prison.

On December 31st, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and all nonviolent resistance to injustice, more than a thousand delegates from 42 countries around the world will join an estimated 50,000 Gazans in a historical march to break the siege of Gaza.

Participants will include Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, French Senator Alima Boumediene Thiery, Filipino Parliament member Walden Bello, former European Parliamentarians Luisa Morgantini (Italy) and Eva Quistorp (Germany), former U.S. diplomat Ann Wright, President of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights Attorney Michael Ratner, Japanese Ambassador Naoto Amaki, and 85-year-old Holocaust survivor and research analyst at the Nuremburg Trials, Hedy Epstein (who also challenged fellow survivor Elie Wiesel to break his silence on this issue and join her: http://palestine.ctsastl.org).

Other marchers include doctors, lawyers, diplomats, rabbis, priests, imams, veterans, and Palestinians born overseas who have never seen their families in Gaza. And for those of us who can't make it to Gaza, there is much to be done! For all the information you could ever want about the March and how to show your support, visit www.GazaFreedomMarch.org.

There's a petition on the website to endorse the March. Here are another handful of petitions—the first three involve dear friends of mine. If you read quickly and sign each, it shouldn't take long at all:

* Sign appeal on Jewish Voice for Peace's website that Obama demand that Israel free Bil'in nonviolence leader Abdallah Abu Rahme (who is a close personal friend of mine): http://bit.ly/6cRqq1

* Open letter to Obama to free Boycott/Divestment/ Sanctions organizer and nonviolence advocate Mohammad Othman (also a friend of mine): http://www.petitiononline.com/STW2/petition.html

* Two other friends of mine, Sarah Shourd & Shane Bauer, are being held in prison, not by Israel but by Iran, which is charging them for espionage. I know Sarah & Shane from Damascus and they are wonderful people, who it seems accidentally strayed into Iran while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan. Please visit this website to sign a petition for their release, and you can also learn more about them: http://freethehikers.org/

* Endorse the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel by writing uscom4acbi@gmail.com after reading the mission statement at http://usacbi.wordpress.com/mission-statement/. If you have questions about what an academic and cultural boycott entails, visit www.pacbi.org.

* The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) petition to "End Demolitions Now: A Settlement Freeze Would Not Be Enough" - enddemolitionsnow.org

* To keep appraised of other petitions, join the email list for the US Campaign to End the Occupation, an umbrella campaign of hundreds of Palestine solidarity organizations around the United States: http://www.endtheoccupation.org/

Finally… Still scrambling for Christmas presents? Or belated Hanukkah gifts? What better gifts than something that supports Palestine? Visit the Palestine Online Store (http://www.PalestineOnlineStore.com) for a great selection of gifts from or about Palestine, including:

* New 2010 calendar
* Olive oil & olive soap
* Za'tar herb
* Handcrafts
* Films, Books, & Music CD's
* Apparel
* Maps & Posters
* Lots more!

IMPORTANT NOTE: To guarantee delivery by the 24th, place your orders quickly, ideally today (Friday, Dec 18th)!

What NOT to buy??... Here are the Top Ten Brands to BOYCOTT this holiday season:

* Ahava
* Delta Galil Industries
* Motorola
* L'Oreal
* Dorot Garlic and Herbs (Trader Joe's)
* Estee Lauder
* Intel
* Sabra
* Sara Lee
* Victoria's Secret

More info on each at: http://www.baceia.org/2009/11/top-ten-brands-to-boycott/

To end on an inspiring note, check out the billboard Albuquerque activists have put up in their community: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI57Z67PyBo

Also, if you haven't gotten this viral photo yet, take a look: www.palestineonlinestore.com/protestphoto

************ *******Please distribute widely****** ********* ********

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti & Anna Baltzer on the Daily Show, and more!

2009-10-24T15:00:00.005+02:00

Dear all,

I'm excited to tell you about three things below...

1. Mustafa Barghouti & I will be on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart this Wednesday!

2. 2009 National Campus Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Conference at Hampshire College

3. November Tour in the Northeast

------------ -

1. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti and I will be on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart this Wednesday, Oct 28^th!

Among many other things, Dr. Barghouti finished 2^nd in the 2005 Palestinian presidential elections, and founded the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Workers (his bio is at http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Mustafa_Barghouti).

The show broadcasts on Comedy Central at 11pm EST, 10pm CST, 12am (midnight) MST,and 11pm PST.

It also rebroadcasts the next evening at 7pm EST, 7pm CST, 8pm MST, and 7pm PST, or you can view the episode at www.dailyshow. com anytime in the future.

------------ -

2.For anyone who doesn't know this, last Spring, Hampshire College became the first US college to divest from the Israeli occupation—33 years after they became the first US college to divest from Apartheid South Africa! Times are changing and we all have much to learn from Hampshire folks.

Therefore, I am excited to announce the 2009 National Campus Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Conference, taking place Nov20^th - Nov 22^nd at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Find out more and register at: http://www.hsjp.org/2009/09/21/CampusBDS/

------------ -

3. Below is the itinerary for my November Tour in the Northeast. All are welcome, and please pass this along to anyone you think might be interested…

************ ********* **Please distribute widely ************ ********* *******

Anna Baltzer presents…

LIFE IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE:EYEWITNES S STORIES & PHOTOS

Dates& Locations (Times & specific details about all events below can be found at: www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com/presentations/upcoming/

Oct 29 Waterloo, CANADA University of Waterloo

Nov 1 Buffalo, NY Congregation Havurah

Nov 1 Rochester, NY First Unitarian Church of Rochester

Nov 2 Ithaca, NY Cornell University

Nov 3 Cazenovia, NY Cazenovia United Methodist Church

Nov 4 Syracuse, NY May MemorialUnitarian Universalist Society

Nov 5 Binghamton, NY Binghamton University

Nov 5 Annandale, NY Bard College

Nov 8 Millburn, NJ Wyoming Presbyterian Church

Nov 9 Manhattan, NY Fordham Law School

Nov 10 Long Island, NY SUNY College at Old Westbury

Nov 11 Bronxville, NY Sarah Lawrence College

Nov 12 Philadelphia, PA Location TBA**

Nov 14 Philadelphia, PA Mishkan Shalom Synagogue

Nov 17 Washington, DC Council for the National Interest**

Nov 18 Philadelphia, PA Villanova University

Nov 20-22 Amherst,MA 2009 National Campus BDS Conference**

Times & specific details about all events above can be found at: www.AnnaInTheMiddle East.com/presentations/upcoming

** Double-starred events will be a Speaker Training, an interactive workshop for people who've gone to Palestine (or are very knowledgeable about it), and would like support in using their experience to support real change in their communities and around the country. Do you feel frustrated and ill-prepared when confronted with opposition and difficult questions? Or do you feel ready to speak but don't know who will listen? Learn techniques and tips for speaking to your communities about the issue in an effective & non-alienating way. RSVP required (check website above).

All other events will be live presentations, covering checkpoints, settlements, Israeli activism, the 1948 war & refugees, censorship, the Separation Wall, Palestinian- led nonviolent resistance, & ideas on taking the next step for change.

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish-American Columbia graduate,former- Fulbright scholar, the granddaughter of Holocaust refugees, and an award-winning lecturer, author, and activist for Palestinian rights. As a volunteer with the International Women's Peace Service in the West Bank, Baltzer documented human rights abuses and supported Palestinian- led nonviolent resistance to the Occupation. Baltzer has appeared on television more than 100 times and lectured at more than 400 universities, schools, churches, mosques,and synagogues around the world with her acclaimed presentation, "Life in Occupied Palestine: Eyewitness Stories & Photos," and her book: Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories. In 2009, Baltzer received the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee's prestigious Annual Rachel Corrie Peace &Justice Award, and is a contributor to three upcoming books on the subject. Baltzer serves on the Middle East committee of the Women's InternationalLeague for Peace & Freedom and on the Board of Directors of TheResearch Journalism Institute, GrassrootsJerusalem, and The Council forthe National Interest. For information about Baltzer's book, DVD, speakingtours, and tour schedule, visit www.AnnaInTheMiddle East.com

************ ********* Please distribute widely ************ *********

Peace,

Anna

Israeli Navy Attacks Boat, Kidnaps Human Rights Workers… & More!

2009-06-30T21:06:00.002+03:00

Friends,

I have been meaning to write for months and have much to report from my last trip to the Middle East. Thank you for those who have written with concern… I returned safely and have been speaking and organizing locally in conjunction with the ongoing struggle on the ground. There is much to be excited about and much to do! Most urgently, I want to focus this first email on Gaza (Note: there are 3 separate items):

************ *

1. URGENT ACTION NEEDED!

[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, at 15:30pm today] - Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the "Spirit of Humanity," abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.

"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. "President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."

According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released yesterday, the Palestinians living in Gaza are "trapped in despair." Thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed earlier during Israel's December/January massacre are still without shelter despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid, because Israel refuses to allow cement and other building material into the Gaza Strip. The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel's disruption of medical supplies.

"The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead". Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.

Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator on this voyage, stated that: "No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel. We carry medical and reconstruction supplies, and children's toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters."

Arraf continued, "Israel's deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release."

************ *

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Call, Email, Fax, and/or Text the contacts below to demand the release of the passengers!

Ask them what crime is being committed by delivering toys, medicine, and olive trees to be the people of Gaza?

Israeli Ministry of Justice
tel: +972 2646 6666 or +972 2646 6340
fax: +972 2646 6357

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
tel: +972 2530 3111
fax: +972 2530 3367

Israeli Prime Minister's Office
Mr. Mark Regev
tel: +972 5 0620 3264 or +972 2670 5354
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il

Contact the Red Cross (below) to ask for their assistance in establishing the well-being of the kidnapped human rights workers and help in securing their immediate release!

Red Cross - Tel Aviv
Ms. Yael Segev-Eytan
tel: +972 3524 5286
fax: +972 3527 0370
tel_aviv.tel@icrc.org
Send a TEXT to +972 52 275 75 17

Red Cross - Jerusalem
Ms. Anne Sophie Bonefeld
tel: +972 259 17 900
fax: +972 259 17 920
jerusalem.jer@icrc.org
Send a TEXT to +972 52 601 91 50

Red Cross - Geneva, Main
tel: +41 22 730 3443
fax: +41 22 734 8280
press.gva@icrc.org

Red Cross - Geneva, Middle East Section
Ms. Dorothea Krimitsas
tel: +41 22 730 25 90
dkrimitsas.gva@icrc.org
Send a TEXT to +41 79 251 93 18

Red Cross - Geneva, Media
Mr. Florian Westphal
tel: +41 22 730 22 82
fwestphal.gva@icrc.org
Send a TEXT to +41 79 217 32 80

Red Cross - USA:
tel: +1 212 599 6021
fax: +1 212 599 6009

************ *

For a list of the 21 kidnapped passengers from the Spirit of Humanity and for more information, visit: www.FreeGaza.org

Free Gaza Media Team:
Cyprus: Greta Berlin (English)
tel: +357 99 081 767 / friends@freegaza. org
Cyprus: Caoimhe Butterly (Arabic/English/ Spanish):
tel: +357 99 077 820 / sahara78@hotmail.co.uk

------------

2. AAPER has launched the Gaza Human Rights Campaign (GHRC) calling on our elected officials to:

a. Call for a State Department investigation into Israel's use of U.S.-supplied and financed weapons during its offensive against Gaza, and
b. Urge Israel to lift the blockade against Gaza and resume unfettered humanitarian aid to the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza

Contact your representatives at: http://www.gazahumanrights.org/c.irLOK3PDLmF/b.5148051/k.B19F/EmailFax_ Your_Rep/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx

Join the CHRC Facebook Group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45082128316 and invite your friends to join too!

------------

3. For anyone who didn't see the follow-up posted in early February on my blog about Barbara Lubin's story from Gaza, here it is below:

************ *

Dear readers,

When I first received Barbara Lubin's story from Gaza, I wrote her to ask how she, I, or someone on the ground could research the story to get all the facts. The MECA office informed me that Barbara had told the story to someone on the phone who wrote the letter, but in the confusion and bad/intermittent phone connection there were several misunderstandings. One of MECA's contacts in Gaza investigated the story to get all the facts. Here is what he found:

"The story happened in Bourij Camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The Israelis [army] called the woman, Manal Albatran, and told her that they wouldn't kill her or her husband Hussein Albatran, instead they would make them die of sadness because they would kill her children. The next day they shot her house with a rocket killing her and 5 of her children.

"The dead:
Manal Albatran 30 years old
Walaa Albatran 12 years old
Islam Albatran 11 years old
Belal Albatran 10 years old
Ezz Albatran 8 years old
Ehsan Albatran 7 years old

"The father who is an employee at an UNRWA school and the youngest child were saved. This is the real story and I hope the amount of victims will convince others to believe the crimes we face. Thanks a lot for your appreciated visit and I hope to see you again soon.

"Regards, Talal Abushawish"

The information uncovered by Mr. Abushawish is clearly different from the story initially reported by Barbara. I am sorry to have relayed something that had been miscommunicated. In contrast, the reality of hundreds of mothers and children killed and families destroyed in the massacre is no legend. Let's hope that professional reporters and investigators are permitted (not denied entry) to follow-up on this family's tragedy--and all the others--to bring the facts to light and eventually to an international court of justice. We owe it to the victims to report every incident as accurately as possible. Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to seek the details of the story.

In peace,

Anna

The Most Important Campaign in Years -- Please Read & Forward!

2009-02-10T19:00:00.000+02:00

What I am about to tell you is a recipe for action that has been growing in my mind for almost a year but I've been waiting for the right moment to put it all together. As I receive more invitations to speak than I can even accept, as I receive requests to join the movement all day long, I am increasingly aware that times are changing in the United States. It may not be perceptible from any one town or city, but as someone who travels from place to place, the overall trend is clear: Americans are more and more skeptical of US foreign policy in the Middle East and increasingly sympathetic towards the plight of the Palestinians. It's not just in the big liberal cities--it's in the smallest Midwestern towns, it's on conservative southern ranches--it' s everywhere. In every corner of the country, there is a middle-aged couple who just came back from Bethlehem or a soldier who just came back from Iraq who is outraged. We have reached a critical mass.

The trouble is, change in popular opinion doesn't automatically effect a change in reality. For many years the majority of Americans opposed George W. Bush and his war on Iraq, but until only recently the majority's frustration was in vain. People would throw up their hands with disgust at the nightly news--just as they may today watching the carnage in Gaza--but they were most often too disillusioned or disempowered to change what they saw. Then Obama stepped into the picture.

The significance of Obama's campaign and subsequent victory cannot be overstated. Obama tapped into the critical mass of disillusioned citizens who were either passive or seperately active, and focused them all into one powerful voice that could not be ignored. He found a way that everyone, no matter who they were, could actively participate in the process and contribute (even if only symbolically with one dollar--it was still a personal investment in the cause). The trouble before Obama's campaign was not that public consciousness for change lacked numbers or even money; the problem was that it lacked organization.

I believe the same can be said about the US movement for justice in Palestine today. People are anxious to see change, but many take no action and those who do often act separately. The middle-aged couple does a presentation for their church; the Iraq veteran talks to whoever will listen; the musicians make hip-hop; the artists paint murals; the labor unions put out joint statements; the ordinary citizen writes a letter to the editor or to congress; the community groups demonstrate or vigil; the organizers put on educational events; the mosques host fundraisers; the teachers talk to their students; the college students work on divestment resolutions; the high school students join facebook clubs...

Many of course do more than one of these things. They are all valuable to the movement, and are much of what accounts for the change in US public opinion, the physical sustenance of the Palestinian people (with financial contributions, especially to Gaza), and the noticable discomfort of Israel (following boycott and divestment efforts). We will--we must--continue to do all of these things. My particular niche has been educational, I plan to continue and expand by founding a new organization later this Spring called Witness in Action, which will facilitate the training of new speakers, placing them to inform communities, and then helping enthusiastic audience members find their place in the movement (more about Witness in Action later this year).

As an educator, I believe my greatest failure has been leaving audiences moved and enthusiastic but not necessarily clear on their next step. I always provide a list of ideas for getting involved, but I only recently realized how overwhelming and unrealistic the options are for most audience members. As much as I wish they would, the average high-school student, senior citizen, or anyone in between is not going to organize an effective divestment campaign. Most won't--or can't--visit Palestine, give talks, or donate significant funds. What is needed is something every single person can do, no matter how little experience, time, or money they have.

I found my answer in the Five for Palestine campaign organized by the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (AAPER). The campaign proposes five very simple and accessible steps that by themselves don't amount to much, but if every single person who cares about this issue did them we could change the course of history. The five steps are as follows:

1. Learn about AAPER at www.americansforpalestine.org
You've already started by reading this email. Now visit the website.

2. Sign up for the campaign at www.fiveforpalestine.org
You'll have to enter your zipcode so you'll be immediately placed with others in your elected officials' consituencies.

3. Contact your elected representatives 5 times during the year.
Most of the contacting can be done quickly via the Five for Palestine website, which will ensure that your letters are grouped with others in the same constituency, giving them much greater impact than if you sent them alone.

4. Contribute $5 per month to the campaign to help it grow.
Once there are a few hundred members in a constituency, the campaign can hire a local organizer. Once there are a few hundred more, it can hire lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

5. Find 5 others to join the campaign too.
This shouldn't be too difficult for most people on this list who know at least a handful of people involved in the movement.

Again, the issue isn't numbers--it' s organization. We have the people, and we could have the financial sustainability, but we lack the infrastructure for a fast-growing and effective campaign to unify us and make our diverse voices resonate as one. I think AAPER has provided that infrastructure and with enough dedication we could be every bit as effective as the Zionist lobby currently maintaining the status quo, in fact even more. We are not talking about a top-down change that begins with Congress or even Obama--this is a bottom-up grassroots campaign through which we will assert--not request--the change that needs to happen.

So will we continue to boycott?--Of course we will! It's what Palestinians have asked of us, and it is applying necessary pressure on Israel to comply with international law. Will we continue to demonstrate? --Heck yeah! But we will compliment all of those things with a solid presence and pressure on Capitol Hill that represents our growing numbers.

------------ --------- --------- ---

THE LATEST:

In addition to learning about AAPER at www.americansforpalestine.org and joining Five for Palestine, here is AAPER's latest outreach effort (I've paraphrased a bit -- Anna). You'll notice AAPER's tactics are largely based on the Obama campaign's successes utilizing internet social networking and promotion:

Dear Friends:

With the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the AAPER Foundation initiates a public letter calling for the dawn of a new era in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. The letter is neither a symbolic gesture nor a desperate plea, but a Statement of Principles for an American Movement for Palestinian Rights in which we will ask every signatory to participate. As such, it is also an organizing document through which we will identify, inspire and invite the American people to join us. Our objective is to obtain the signatures of 100,000 Americans in President Obama's first 100 days in office and, together, begin to change the course of history.

We ask each of you to take just 5 minutes to read, sign, and, most importantly, forward this letter to your family, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens: www.aaper.org/obamaletter

In addition, we ask each of you who uses Facebook to take just 5 minutes to take the following three simple actions:

1) Join our Facebook Group
(http://www.facebook.com/pages/AAPER-Foundation/31138263216) and invite your friends to join;

2) Add our Facebook Application
(http://apps.facebook.com/americaforpalestine) and invite your friends to add it;

3) Donate your Facebook status for at least 3 days to read -- "Donate your status! President Obama: We, the American People, Seek a New U.S. Policy Toward Palestine! Sign the letter at www.aaper.org/obamaletter. "

100,000 signatures in 100 days. Change begins with you.

Sincerely,

AAPER Foundation
www.americansforpalestine.org

Why now?... What now?... WRITE Now!

2009-01-13T02:22:00.002+02:00

* What Now? *

As Israel's invasion of the Gaza strip continues its third week with roughly 900 Palestinians killed and thousands more wounded, it is more important than ever to understand the context behind the current escalation, and then to move beyond our understanding into action.

At the bottom of this email is a piece including analysis inspired by the recent writings and research of Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi (Security General of the Palestinian National Initiative) and Phyllis Bennis (Director of the New Internationalism Project). But first you'll find-—as always, crucially—-a way to take action: WRITE!

___

* WRITE Now! *

In the first week of the attack on Gaza, the Washington Post ran 7-1 hawkish op-ed/editorials, the Washington Times ran 5-0 hawkish op-ed/editorials, and the Wall Street Journal ran 4-0 hawkish op-ed/editorials.

Many of us are upset by this, but we don't feel empowered to change it. But biases in mainstream media do not come out of nowhere; they are largely (though not entirely by any means) the result of active media-monitoring by media watch-dog groups that inundate media who stray from the Zionist party line.

Why can't we be as dedicated as those groups? Why aren't media being inundated by people like us who want to see the truth that is reported to the rest of the world every day? We need to be the change that we seek. We need to write media--not here and there, a couple of us, but consistently, all of us, a collective voice, demanding fair coverage.

I recently discovered the WRITE! Project (www.writetruth.org), which has a team monitoring US media and sending out alerts to peace and justice activists write in response to specific pro-Zionist articles and editorials. They provide the email address to write to, the original piece to respond to, and talking points to use. It doesn't take more than 5 minutes.

I don't personally have the time to monitor mainstream US media, but every time I get an alert I send a quick email to let the relevant media know what I think. What if all 5,000 people on this list were to do that? We could be the influence that we wish we had!

Contact the WRITE! Team to get alerts at writealert@yahoo.com

Take a minute to write after each alert.

It only works if we do it together.

___

* Why Now? *

Contrary to popular belief, plans for Israel's bombing and invasion of Gaza didn't begin when Hamas started firing rockets at the end of last year's ceasefire. According to the Israeli mainstream newspaper Haaretz, plans for a massive attack on the strip began more than six months ago as Israel and Hamas were negotiating the ceasefire (see "IAF strike followed months of planning" - www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050448.html). Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak reasoned that the ceasefire would give Israel time to prepare for a "showdown" as soon as it was over.

At the end of the ceasefire, Hamas put forth diplomatic initiatives aimed at extending the agreement (based on an end to both cross-border attacks and blockade of the strip), but these efforts were actually dismissed by Israel. With an end to diplomatic possibilities and the continuation of a debilitating blockade, Hamas's returning again to rocket attacks was, albeit lamentable, certainly predictable. Renewed violence, far from coming as a surprise, was presumably precisely what Israel was expecting.

So if the decision to strike Gaza in late December was calculated far in advance, why now? The timing coincided precisely with three things: elected officials' holidays in the US, a transitional period for the US administration (a lame duck president and a president-elect hesitant to say anything prematurely) , and most importantly: a tight race in Israel for the next prime minister. In fact Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni, who rejected Hamas's efforts to negotiate an extension of the ceasefire, is running a tight race with the hawkish Likud party. The latter is campaigning on the claim that Livni's political party, Kadima, is too "soft" on the Palestinians, something Livni is working hard to disprove.

Official Israeli explanations mention nothing about US or Israeli political factors, focusing squarely on eradicating Palestinian violence. But if nonviolence and cooperation are Israel's conditions for returning freedom to Palestinians, why weren't those conditions enough in the past? By the end of the year 2008, more than six months since a single fatal attack on an Israeli and following long-term cooperation between the West Bank Fatah leadership and the Israeli government, settlement expansion had heavily increased in the West Bank, about 5,000 Palestinians had been newly captured and imprisoned by Israel (most of them from the West Bank), and the number of West Bank checkpoints had risen from 521 to 699. If Israel wanted to stop a rise in Hamas, why not show that it is willing to make peace with the more peaceful Palestinian leaders?

During my two weeks in the West Bank, coinciding with a time of calm in Israel, I listened to countless stories of immobility, settler attacks, torture, and humiliation. During my first night at the IWPS house, nearby settlers stoned passing cars. I visited a close friend in the nearby `Azzoun village, where settlers invade several times a week carrying large American-made semi-automatic weapons. The army's response is to declare curfew on Azzoun, forbidding villagers from leaving their home. School and work have been cancelled three times a week for the past month on orders of the army, wanting to "protect Palestinians. " One wonders why the army prefers to shut down a Palestinian village rather than standing up to the Israeli settlers themselves (my colleague Hannah wrote an excellent article addressing this question: http://www.counterpunch.org/mermelstein12252008.html).

I visited the Bethlehem area where settlers routinely visit and spray-paint stars of David and anti-Arab racist slurs (which locals then paint over, until the settlers return the next time). Water and electricity in the city are consistently shut off by the Israeli army (Bethlehem has just one functioning traffic light), and enrollment at Bethlehem University hovers at 70% female given the high proportion of local men spending their youth in prison (similar to figures of African American males in the United States).

The one concession I witnessed was Israel's release of more than 200 Palestinian prisoners as a gift for the Muslim "Eid Al-Adha" holiday last month. Israel continues to hold more than 7,500 Palestinians prisoner, more than 10% of them without charge. Hundreds more are arrested every month. Then, occasionally, Israel lets out a couple hundred as an act of goodwill and generosity, but somehow Palestinians don't seem to find the habit terribly generous.

I traveled to Nablus where I learned one of my friends had been killed while another, a major organizer of nonviolent civil disobedience during Israel's invasion in early 2007, was in prison. On my way, I passed a group of eleven cement factory workers who had been stopped by the army on their way to the factory and I hopped out of my cab to document the situation. After holding the group for more than two hours, the Israeli soldiers decided to let the eleven grown men go to work. Other breadwinners cannot even access the road to work anymore, like a Bethlehem family whose home I found surrounded on three sides by the Wall, their main road cut off.

Given the West Bank Fatah leadership's cooperation with Israel, one might have expected a change in the situation in the West Bank, but everywhere I visited the occupation continued as usual, sometimes enhanced. There is no reason for Palestinians—-or us—-to believe that an end to rocket attacks and suicide bombs would bring real change to Israel's continued occupation since neither has in the past. Rather, Hamas's violence provides a convenient, and unfortunate, excuse for Israel to continue what it has been doing all along: expanding and expanding, destroying any obstacle—-be it a home, an olive tree, or a boy with a rock-—in its way.

What Most US Media Isn't Telling You... Now Take Action!

2009-01-07T19:13:00.003+02:00

What Most US Media Isn't Telling You

Four days ago, Israel invaded Gaza on the ground to compliment its aerial bombardment. The Palestinian death toll has reached 660. The official Israeli death toll is up to 5, of whom 4 were civilians. Attacks on civilians, no matter who they are, is criminal. Yet the US government, public relations officials, and mainstream media—unlike those of almost every other country in the world—continue to criminalize Palestinian violence while absolving Israel (the undisputed party in power) of almost any responsibility of its own. The official position seems clear: Israel can do as it likes until Hamas stops all violence.

The underlying assumption here is that Palestinians' human rights depend on the actions of their leaders. This is false. Palestinians do not have to earn the human rights inalienable to every person on Earth. Human rights are non-negotiable. Likewise, Israelis do not have to earn their human rights. Israeli state terror notwithstanding, it would be criminal to bombard the entire population of Israel (in which, as in Gaza, fighters live alongside their families in civilian areas) for the crimes of its government.

But this is exactly what Israel is doing in Gaza with US weapons before a seemingly impotent international community. Every day the carnage unfolds on CNN-International (different from CNN-US—the United States is the only country in the world with domestically customized international news coverage): a mother and her 4 kids killed instantly; a 7-year-old shot twice in the chest (I'm not sure how that happens accidentally, but does that even matter?); more than 40 policemen in training obliterated (even Israel does not claim the Palestinian police orchestrates rocket attacks); TV stations and places of worship successfully destroyed; a mortuary out of room for bodies.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "sewage water is pouring into the streets in Beit Hanoun, following damage to the main pipeline between Beit Hanoun and the Beit Lahiya wastewater treatment plant." Save The Children reports that newborn baby Gazans are battling hypothermia due to power cuts and freezing winter winds.

Some of the worst news comes from the doctors. Can you imagine a hospital functioning without electricity? According to the mainstream British newspaper The Guardian, medics are working around the clock and running out of anesthesia. There is no more gauze so doctors are using cotton, which sticks to wounds. Nurses are forced to draw blood with the wrong sized syringes and without alcohol. The Guardian article was entitled, "The injured were lying there asking God to let them die." Many have gotten their last wish, dying as they wait in the emergency rooms.

Medical workers themselves have also been under fire, with at least 4 killed as they tried to reach victims. Ambulances are not safe, nor are the schools:

When I woke up yesterday a UN school had just been bombed, killing 3 of the civilians who had come to the school seeking shelter. Watching the news later in the evening, I learned the same UN school had been bombed again (twice in one day), killing 40 more. The British director of the school, having lost his usual calm, was irate and imploring the world to understand that nowhere in Gaza is safe anymore—there is nowhere left to go.

Yet reading the Washington Post and watching the nightly news you might believe that Israel's is in fact the most virtuous army in the world, going as far as sending text messages to and dropping leaflets in Palestinian areas explaining that unless civilians leave, they will be attacked. Reported alone, this might sound reasonable, but quickly becomes absurd if you know that Gazans have no place to go to! Nowhere inside the strip of land is safe and there is no way to leave it, since the borders are sealed.

The bombing and invasion have clearly heightened the threat against Gazans' lives, but they did not start it. For the 18 months preceding the invasion, the average Gazan could not reliably go to school, make a living, contact the outside world, divert their sewage, heat their homes, drink clean water, or eat. This was due to the enclosure summed up in the words of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights: "Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key." This was the reality of Israel's "ceasefire."

The closure pushed Gaza's humanitarian crisis to a new low, with poverty reaching 80%. Any attempt to counter poverty was thwarted. Gaza students dependent on transportation could not reach their schools, and those accepted at foreign universities in America, Europe, and the West Bank were denied permits to leave. Without enough fuel, industrial businesses were either shut down or running below 20% capacity, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Contrary to Israeli court order, the Israeli army allowed just 15% of fuel needed for generators, wells, and transportation, resulting in garbage piled high in the streets while up to 15,000,000 gallons of raw or partially-treated sewage flowed into the sea every day. This was the reality of Israel's "ceasefire."

On November 4th and 5th, Israel broke the "ceasefire" by killing at least 6 Palestinians in Gaza, reported on CNN-International but unlikely by CNN-US. Of course, there was no ceasefire to begin with, since the main requirement on Israel was to sufficiently unseal Gaza's borders, a requirement that was consistently ignored. By the end of the "ceasefire," 262 had Gazans died due to lack of access to proper medical care during the blockade.

Hamas should be condemned for its attacks on civilians, but it is naïve to expect that they would renew a truce that Israel had never adhered to. Whether or not it would cease cross-border attacks in exchange for Israeli reciprocity—as Hamas continues to offer—is something we cannot know, since Israel has never given the offer a chance.

------------ --------- --------- --------- -

10 IDEAS for TAKING ACTION:

Analysis and sympathy have no value if they do not result in any action. There are enough action ideas below that every single person on this list has the power to do at least one, ideally many more.

1. Monitor and contact local media to inform others and counter misinformation. Write letters to the editor (usually 100-150 words) or op-eds (usually 600-800 words) for local newspapers. Also contact radio talk shows and television news departments, especially in response to biased coverage. You can find all local media at:
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/media/
The US Campaign to End the Occupation compiled a fact sheet about US direct contributions to the war on Gaza, which you can use for facts:
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/downloads/gaza_us_weapons.pdf

2. Organize and join demonstrations in front of Israeli embassies or (if that's not doable) in front of the offices of elected officials or other visible place. Inform the media beforehand. Here is a list of the many demonstrations happening around the country (For example, St Louis, where I live, usually has one a month, but this month there are demonstrations every day):
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1773

3. Join local activist groups organizing local actions. If there aren't any, start your own. Now is an excellent time to rally support.

4. Initiate boycotts, divestments and sanctions to nonviolently pressure Israeli compliance with international law, as was effective in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. Now is an excellent time to rally support and begin a campaign. More info and resources at http://www.bdsmovement.net/

5. Send direct aid to Gaza through one of the following organizations:
- United Nations Relief and Works Agency: www.un.org/unrwa/
- United Palestinian Appeal: www.helpupa.com
- Islamic Relief: www.irw.org
- Canadian Red Cross: www.redcross.ca
- American Near East Refugee Aid: www.anera.org
- Physicians for Human Rights: www.phr.org.il/phr
- Other groups: http://gazasiege.org/support_gaza.html
You can also support solidarity activists on the ground at www.palsolidarity.org/main/

6. Contact elected and other political leaders in your country to urge them to apply pressure to end the attacks. Find your representatives and their contact info at
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/officials/congress

Call the Obama/Biden Transition Office at 202-540-3000, press 2 to speak to staff member. Tell them the U.S. needs a new Middle East policy, which holds Israel accountable to international law and UN resolutions and human rights. Tell them the U.S. should not support Israel with billions of dollars every year and should not be arming Israel with U.S. made weapons. Add your own suggestions. The time is right for President-elect Obama to hear from the peace community.

7. Sign petitions for Gaza, for example:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace/98.php?cl_tf_sign=1
http://capwiz.com/arab/utr/2/?a=12364076&i=90758629&c
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?s_oo=d13BldH27ypl2jxg-1cOFA..&id=233

8. Put a Palestinian flag at your window. Wear a Palestinian head scarf (keffiya). Wear black arm bands (this helps start conversations with people).

9. Do a group fast for peace one day and hold it in a public place.

10. Inform others in your community with flyers, vigils, and conversations. At the very least, forward this on.

This list was based on a call from the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and Friends of Sabeel.

Gaza Massacres; The Time is Now

2009-01-02T14:10:00.000+02:00

Please, everyone, stop what you're doing. This is not just any report from Palestine, but the worst in my lifetime, the worst in 40 years. At this moment, Israel is raining bombs down on Gaza, an enclosed tiny area that is home to 1.5 million men, women, and children, most of them innocent civilians. This space is tightly sealed by Israel, which constantly denies Gazans electricity, food, medicine, and the ability to leave. Gaza is one big prison being bombed from above. The death toll is up to 428 in the past 7 days. That's more than the number of Israelis killed in the last 7 years. This is what I would call a massacre.

Yes, more Palestinians killed in 7 days than Israelis in 7 years, and yet no comments from President Bush or President-elect Obama. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice places blame solely on Hamas for holding Gazans "hostage," as if Israel's actions were beyond judgment. Would Rice ever respond to a Palestinian attack on Israelis by blaming the Israeli government for holding its citizens hostage with their army's violence?

I am writing you from Jordan. I arrived the day after the attacks began. The day before they began, my friend and colleague Hannah had asked me to deliver a book of poetry to her friend Summer in Gaza, hoping I'd manage to make it on a Free Gaza boat. Since then, these boats bringing unarmed witnesses to Gaza (www.freegaza.org) have been attacked in international waters, and Summer's house has been blown to pieces, her brother almost died under the rubble, and her father desperately needs an operation but the hospitals are overflowing. In every home or shop I enter in Jordan, people are huddled watching the stories unfold: a family killed in their home, a university destroyed, a pharmacy blown to pieces, countless bloody babies screaming or worse, silent.

I wonder if people in the US are also seeing the bodies and faces or, as I fear, only some rubble and angry Gazans. The day after attacks began, Israel's largest newspaper Yediot Aharonot covered almost the entire front page with the words, "500,000 Israelis Under Attack!" In smaller font, one could learn that in addition to 1 Israeli, 225 Palestinians had also been killed. It was surreal. Consider where you are getting your news, and what is not being told to you.

For example, the stated purpose of the attack is to drive out Hamas, i.e. to kill anyone in Hamas and scare the rest into turning against Hamas. Not only does this tactic not work (brutality fosters violence), but it clearly fits the definition of terrorism: unlawful violence intended to frighten or coerce a people or government in order to achieve a political or ideological agenda. Israel is operating as a terrorist state in the true sense of the word.

Hamas is also a terrorist organization by this definition, so it would be easy to simplify the conflict as "an endless cycle of violence" were there no historical context. But there is a context, and there are alternatives: Let us remember that Hamas was elected after an intentional shift away from violence towards a mainstream political agenda. Hamas stopped its attacks and began offering the Palestinian people an alternative to the corruption of Fatah. Hamas was democratically elected and immediately strangled by a US-led boycott, preventing the government from functioning. Hamas continued to hold to its one-sided ceasefire (totaling almost 2 years), meanwhile the US and Israel began to train and arm the opposition government, Fatah, which they preferred. In response to plans for a coup in Gaza (anti-democratic takeover by the US-supported opposition government), Hamas secured its control (again, democratically- elected whether or not we like them) over Gaza, and continues to offer Israel an indefinite ceasefire--no more violent attacks, period--if Israel simply complies with international law. The Arab League (comprised of 22 Arab nation members) has offered the same. These offers are dismissed by Israel and silenced in the US media. Israel says it has tried everything else, but it has not tried the most obvious: complying with international law and accepting repeated offers for a peaceful resolution.

As events unfold in Gaza neither the media nor the people are silent here in Jordan, where people refuse to go on as if nothing were happening to their brothers and sisters (sometimes literally--more than 60% of Jordan's population is Palestinian refugees). Just one day after attacks began, the king of Jordan gave blood to send to Gaza and inspired hundreds of others to do the same (meanwhile President Bush was on vacation in Texas). Spontaneous demonstrations have erupted at least twice here in the capitol today, and thousands are protesting in various major cities around the Middle East and around the world.

Please, wherever you are, do something. Write a letter to the editor. Get a large group to inundate your congressperson at once. Protest! There are demonstrations being organized around the US. If there isn't one happening near you, then do what I would do: buy a poster-board and large marker and write something on it ("Gazans Are People Too," "Massacre in Gaza: Silence is Complicity," "Our Weapons Are Killing Palestinian Children," or anything you can think of). Go outside and stand on a busy corner with it. Force others to confront the reality. Talk to people, invite them to join you. People around the world are empowered enough to take to the streets; we have no excuse not to. The time is now.

Direct Action from Birmingham to Gaza: Uncomfortable but Inevitable

2008-01-23T17:00:00.000+02:00

Dear friends,

Here are some excerpts from a sermon I delivered in Minneapolis last Sunday, combined with some recent events:

This week, our country celebrated Martin Luther King Day and the official end to segregation and racial discrimination in this country. As we celebrate certain historic advances, we mustn't forget that these policies are far from over in this country, and that as we struggle against one injustice we are perpetuating another system of discrimination and segregation on the other side of the world in Occupied Palestine, a land where there are separate roads, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, and legal systems, access to which depends on one's ethnicity or religion.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King "wept" from disappointment with the laxity of the church and its leaders in taking action against the status quo for fear of being considered "nonconformist. " I recently met a young Palestinian Christian dancer (one of those censored in New England last December) who echoed similar frustration with churches around the world who are doing nothing to ease the suffering of Christians and others in the Holy Land. She spoke to a group of church-goers in Old Lyme, Connecticut:

"My name is Mary Qumsiyeh. I am an English teacher from the little town of Bethlehem. My husband works in tourism and I have met many groups that said `We are here to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.' But are they acting the way that Jesus did?

"Our churches are now like museums. Tourists visit, take pictures, and leave. What about the living stories? Jesus in his time was living under the Roman occupation. Today, after 2000 years, we are still living under occupation—now the Israeli occupation that has confiscated 88% of Bethlehem's land. If Jesus were alive today, would he permit this to happen? Jesus helped the oppressed and the ones in need. He made the blind see.

"I ask you all to see how many times in the Bible the word justice is mentioned. And remember that Jesus did not avoid politics. Please spread our message, a message of joy, happiness, and justice, a message from youth full of life, willing to live and die in the little town of Bethlehem."

Thankfully, churches eventually stepped up to play a large and historic role in the civil rights movement, and it's worth remembering how: It was not simply by hoping for change, or by praying for change, or even by voting for change. It was by making change happen, by Christians stepping out of their comfort zones and challenging the status quo even if it meant going to jail or being ostracized.

Making change happen is never comfortable. It's what Dr. King called "tension." He confessed, "I am not afraid of the word `tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth."

Notice the word "necessary." This necessity is often hard for people of privilege to grasp. We think, "if only we educate our leadership, or the Israeli government, they'll come to their senses..." How much more comfortable it would be if it were just a matter of waiting, and listening, and sharing! But we forget Dr. King's clear wisdom:

"We have not made a single gain without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges [until they have to]
... Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

Today in Gaza, Palestinians demanded freedom from the Israeli siege that has endured for years since the so-called "disengagement" and before. After several days under even tighter isolation by Israel, which had sealed the borders of the small strip and cut off electricity, food, medical supplies, and other lifelines, Palestinians blasted through a wall of their collective prison and flooded into Egypt in search of medicine, soap, fuel, cement, and other desperately needed supplies.

Some might call blowing up a wall "extreme." In fact, just about any action taken unilaterally for Palestinian liberation is portrayed as such. Martin Luther King was also called an "extremist," and eventually embraced the word, calling on others to join him in creative extremism. Criticism of the status quo will always be dismissed as ideological or extreme, and that's what makes challenging power structures so uncomfortable. We would prefer to affect change through consensus and the blessing of communities that have traditionally supported the status quo, like mainstream Jewish temples and US legislators. But, my friends, this is unrealistic; these groups will hopefully become a part of the movement someday, but they will not lead the movement today. And while it would be nice to wait until a day when it feels more convenient, remember that change will never be convenient for those who are profiting off of the way things are. Let us not forget that Palestinians, like people of color in Dr King's time (and still today), have not had the luxury waiting and choosing a convenient time... Indeed, there is no convenient time. But inconvenience and discomfort are a small price to pay for justice. Remember that prophets have always been scorned in their own time.

In Palestine, that inevitable discomfort—or tension, as Dr King calls it—has taken the form of popular nonviolent resistance met with army brutality, checkpoints, roadblocks, invasions, curfews, house demolitions, and mass imprisonment. In this country, that inevitable tension has taken the comparatively mild—but admittedly unpleasant—form of moral blackmail: anyone who dares criticize Israel's violations of human rights and international law is labeled anti-Semitic. But this is absurd. Occupation, oppression—these things have nothing to do with Judaism, and to oppose them in Israel, Palestine, or anywhere else in the world is simply not anti-Semitic. On the contrary, it is in line with the Jewish tradition of critical thinking, open debate, and social justice, which have been a source of pride for Jews through history.

The Israel/Palestine struggle is portrayed in our media and elsewhere as an endless religious rivalry, but it is no more a war between Jews and Muslims than the civil rights struggle was one between African-Americans and Whites. This is a struggle for justice, one that affects us all and in which we all play a part. In the words of Dr. King, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

This mutuality is clear in the collaboration today between Palestinians and the Israelis who support their struggle, working together towards an end to discrimination and the Occupation, towards a common future of integration and coexistence. In the United States, churches are once again taking the lead. The United Methodists, the Presbyterians, and others have started campaigns calling for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli government until it complies with international law. This is a crucial campaign not only because it has the potential to be successful in conjunction with Palestinian resistance (after all, it was Black South African resistance supported by international solidarity and divestment that ultimately contributed to the end of Apartheid there), but also because it was called for by Palestinian civil society. This is a Palestinian struggle, and we need to be taking our lead from Palestinians. They have been reaching out for support through the years, particularly this week in Gaza as they were cut off even further from the world. We need to reach back.

Here are just a few reports, calls to action, and a petition regarding Gaza this week:

www.alhaq.org/etemplate.php?id=345
www.freegaza.ps
english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BBA4E18B-E72F-4AB2-A1B4-26612DEFEAE3.htm
www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_end_the_siege/

For more information about Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions, visit
www.BDS-Palestine.net
For a list of companies profiting off of the Occupation, visit
www.InterfaithPeaceInitiative.com/ProfitingFromOccupation.htm

For organizing ideas, campaigns, and to get more involved in the
movement, visit www.EndTheOccupation.org

Thanks for reading,
Anna

Good News, Bad News, and Upcoming Tour Schedule

2007-09-05T12:00:00.001+03:00

Hello all,

Scroll down for my early Fall presentation tour schedule!

THE GOOD NEWS:

1. After a lengthy and costly legal battle, Bil'in, home of weekly nonviolent demonstrations for the past 2.5 years, has won an Israeli Supreme Court case to have the Wall (that runs through the village's land) rerouted.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6977400.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/world/middleeast/05mideast.html

Let us remember, of course, that Bil'in has only "won" what was already theirs, in fact much less than that. Much of the extensive damage wrought by the Wall is permanent, like the uprooting of ancient fruiting olive trees and the destructive razing of the land. In addition, many villages that have won court cases complain that the judgments are not carried out, so it remains to be seen whether or not Israel will change the Wall's path in Bil'in, and by how much.

Nonetheless, it is a reminder to us all that nonviolent resistance is alive and strong in Palestine. We are not powerless in the struggle against injustice, and this has not been the first--nor will it be the last--victory against Israeli apartheid.

2. On a lesser scale, the next piece of good news is that the new revised and updated edition of my book is officially finished and on its way to the US! "Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories" is 400+ pages full-color, with many new maps, stories, and photographs, as well as detailed appendices on Taking Organized Action, Myths & FAQs, and others.

I'll send a more detailed message about the book when it's available, which brings me to the bad news...

THE BAD NEWS:

Putting out such a comprehensive book has taken months longer than expected, and now US Customs (given the nature of my work) is likely to keep the books held up for weeks at the port (they are en route from Turkey). I have had 620 copies airmailed (much more expensive, but fast) for the first part of my tour, so anyone who needs books urgently can write and I'll send some of those, for as long as they last.

This includes for teachers of related classes this Fall. I already know of several who are using Witness in Palestine as a textbook. With the new maps, heavy documentation, and historical information, it is quite suitable for teachers who would like to use a memoir-style text, so feel free to recommend it to educators who might be interested.

A few hundred early-delivery copies of "Witness in Palestine" should be at half the Barnes & Nobles in the country in the next couple of weeks. Alternatively, people can purchase the book via my website: www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com, in which case the proceeds go directly to Palestine.

EARLY FALL TOUR SCHEDULE:

Please forward on to anyone who you think might be interested.

************ Please distribute widely ************

1 Tour, 2 Talks:

"Life in Occupied Palestine: Eyewitness Stories & Photos"

and

"Can a Jewish State be Democratic?"

Sep 9 Boulder, CO First Congregational Church
Sep 9 Denver, CO Regis University, Conference Center
Sep 10 Alamosa, CO Adams State College
Sep 10 Alamosa, CO Adams State College
Sep 21 Kansas City, MO The Pembroke Hill School
Sep 21 Kansas City, MO St James United Methodist Church
Sep 23 Kansas City, MO United Methodist Church
Sep 23 Kansas City, MO Disciples of Christ Church
Sep 23 Lawrence, KS The Solidarity Center
Sep 24 Kansas City, MO William Jewel College
Sep 24 Columbia, MO Missouri United Methodist Church
Sep 26 Blue Springs, MO Lions Club
Sep 28-Oct 4 St Louis, MO TBA
Oct 6 Tucson, AZ Westin La Paloma Resort
Oct 8-18 MONTANA WHEELS OF JUSTICE TOUR
*Visit www.justicewheels. org for more information*
Oct 23 Austin, TX Cafe Caffeine
Date TBA Dallas, TX Brookhaven College
Date TBA San Antonio, TX Trinity College
Date TBA San Antonio, TX University of Texas at San Antonio
Date TBA San Antonio, TX Northwest Vista College
Date TBA Denton, TX TBA
Nov 3-14 NEW ENGLAND TBA
Nov 4 Old Lyme, CT First Congregational Church
Nov 11 Cape Cod, MA South Congregational Church
Nov 15-20 N. OHIO & S. MICHIGAN
Nov 18 Cleveland, OH CASE Western University
Nov 25 St Louis, MO TBA

For exact details, contact information, and sponsors, visit: www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com/presentations/schedule

Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American Columbia graduate, Fulbright scholar, and volunteer with the International Women's Peace Service, is touring the United States with a presentation and book describing her experiences documenting human rights abuses in the West Bank and supporting Palestinian and Israeli nonviolent resistance to the
Occupation.

Anna's main presentation covers checkpoints, settlements, demonstrations, Israeli activism, censorship, the Separation Wall, and more. Providing photographic documentation and critical information often misrepresented or ignored in the Western media, Anna's presentation encourages dialog towards taking informed action. For further information about Anna's work and tour, please visit www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com

NEW!: At certain venues, Anna will be giving her new presentation: "Can a Jewish State be Democratic?" This talk is particularly suitable for activists or audiences that have already seen Anna's main talk.

At all talks, Anna will also be selling and signing copies of her new book: "Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories"

************ Please distribute widely ************

Details on the late Fall tour schedule--featuring co-speaker Hannah Mermelstein (www.BirthrightUnplugged.com & www.NeedleInTheGroove.com)-- TBA at a later date.

Thanks for reading,

Anna

The Forgotten Torture Chambers, Walls, and Economics of the Occupation

2007-05-15T15:44:00.000+03:00

A few weeks ago I attended an event commemorating Palestinian Prisoner's Day at Al Far'a Refugee Camp in the Tubas area. To enter the theatrical and cultural spectacle we had to pass through a makeshift checkpoint with soldiers pointing their guns in our faces and screaming in Hebrew for us to get back. Although I knew these were Palestinian actors role-playing the harassment they experience daily, it was very frightening to have men with guns yell at me in a foreign language and stick killing machines in my face. I realized immediately that although I witness harassment at checkpoints constantly, as a white Jewish American woman of extreme privilege I can never really know what it feels like to go through one as a Palestinian. I suspected the actors had been instructed to especially focus on Western attendees to illustrate some of the abusive behavior we remain so shielded from. It was very effective.

Inside the spectacle, hundreds of locals and visitors were watching performers depict typical scenes of interrogation, abuse, and torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons and detention centers. Some of the actors wore blindfolds, handcuffs, and chains and gave moving monologues about the injustice of abuse and imprisonment without trial in an occupier's land. Others played Israeli soldiers and guards. After the play as a finale, young Palestinian boys danced Debka to signify cultural pride and continuity in spite of monstrous hardships and injustices.

The event took place in a former prison/torture center and afterwards spectators toured the old holding rooms, haunted by past inmates and painted over with graffiti and prisoner shadows. There I met a mother holding a framed picture of her son, currently held in Israeli jail along with more than 9,000 other Palestinians, including many women and children. (For more specific information and statistics about Palestinian political prisoners, see my previous articles: http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2003/11/conversation-with-omar-in-balata.html, http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2005/04/jewish-emancipation-palestinian.html, http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2007/03/from-sharpsville-to-nablus-tragedies-of.html.)
Near the old torture chambers was a holding center converted into an art studio, where I met Morshid Graib, an artist whose many stunning images depicted the suffering of the Palestinian people. His paintings and the performances reminded me once again of the extraordinary creativity of the Palestinians in their nonviolent resistance to the Occupation.

The next day I was going on a tour of the Northern Jordan Valley, about 10 km (6 miles) from Tubas the way a crow flies. By road it's more like 22 km (13 miles), via Tayseer checkpoint, which only Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents of the Jordan Valley are permitted to cross. Tayseer excludes most Palestinians and internationals, so I was forced to reach my destination the long way around, via Ramallah in the center of the West Bank. It's hard to comprehend the absurdity of such a detour without looking at a map. Rather than a 10 minute ride, I traveled 6 hours southeast through 3 checkpoints the first day, and then 4 hours back up through 2 checkpoints the next to reach the other side of Tubas' eastern mountains. 10 hours instead of 10 minutes.

I was cranky from the long ride when I got to Ramallah, but a kind shop-owner noticed my malaise and took me into his store for tea and fresh bread. His name was Ali, and he spoke perfect English. An East Jerusalemite, Ali lived in the United States for 19 years. He studied civil engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology and was one of the top engineers behind a new Chicago Metro Terminal. For 19 years, Ali flew back to Israel every 3 months to renew his Jerusalem ID, which wasn't automatically renewed - although he and his family were born and raised in the city - because he is not Jewish. After Ali acquired US citizenship, he continued returning every three months until one day Israel revoked all Jerusalem IDs of Palestinians with another citizenship. This was the first Ali had heard of such a law, but suddenly his ID was confiscated and he was barred from ever returning to the city where his home and family remain (of course, all the American Jews who "make aliyah" and become Israelis never suffer penalties for dual citizenship). An extremely successful and well-educated engineer, Ali now works at a souvenir shop selling trinkets in Ramallah. He cannot get normal work because he doesn't have a West Bank ID either.

Meeting Ali was a good prelude to my tour through the Jordan Valley where, like East Jerusalem, most Palestinians are not even allowed to enter, and those who live there are constantly threatened by house demolitions, ID-confiscation, and other actions that encourage or require them to relocate. According to our tour guide Fathi from the area, before 1967 there were 350,000 Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley. Now there are 52,000 - less than 15%.

Much of the Jordan Valley indigenous population's flight occurred after violent expulsions in the first five years of the Occupation, but the ethnic cleansing continues today as more and more Israeli Jews move in and Palestinians move out. Israel no longer accepts applications from Palestinians to move into the Jordan Valley, only out of it. (A similar one-way transfer is occurring out of the West Bank: "since the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel 'has not approved a single change of address from Gaza to the West Bank'" but Palestinians have been forcedly transferred in the other direction [www.alhaq.org/pdfs/Deportations%20and%20Forcible%20Transfers.pdf].) Jordan Valley Palestinians who spend too long outside of the region also lose their residence permits, just like Ali did. And as in East Jerusalem, Israel's annexation is so advanced that many Israelis don't even know the area is occupied. Israelis come to the valley on vacation to enjoy the bountiful fruit orchards, the desert mountains, and the Dead Sea. The modern highways are lined with palm trees and nicely-groomed settlements, no Palestinians in sight.

At one point our tour bus stopped at a juice stand and we could just barely hear Fathi's voice over the zoom of settler and vacationer cars speeding by: "I am 40 years old and from the Jordan Valley, but I have only seen the Jordan River twice in my life, on my way to and from Jordan. They say it's about resistance, but Israel controlled this area strictly with checkpoints decades before suicide bombs or the intifadas began. As a Palestinian, I'm not allowed to go to the river, or even to the Dead Sea - that precious natural wonder which scientists now say will be gone in 12 years due to overuse... The valley is reserved for Jews and tourists. But it's owned by Palestinians as far west as Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and beyond."

Traditionally, Palestinian families used to live in the Jordan Valley during the wintertime because of the mild climate and fertile land. But now, of the 2400 square kilometers - 30% of the West Bank - half is controlled by Israeli settlements, and almost all the rest is split between military closed areas, border closed areas, and environmental "green" closed areas. The closed area strategy is familiar to anyone who has studied urban development in East Jerusalem: Israel declares large "closed" or "green areas," bulldozes all the Palestinian homes and institutions within them, and after they've remained empty for a few years the state begins to settle Jewish Israelis inside.

Some of these "closed areas" in the Jordan Valley are villages where Palestinians have been living for generations. We visited Fasayel, a Palestinian village that Israel has refused to recognize for forty years since the Occupation began. Because Fasayel is unrecognized, villagers aren't allowed to build or even repair their own homes. They have no water infrastructure for the same reason. The village recently got electricity but the electric poles are under demolition order since they were built without a permit. In nearby Al Jiflik village, Israel has refused permits to build a school, insisting that families should either move or bus their children more than an hour each way to Tubas town. In peaceful response, the teachers of Al Jiflik started holding classes in a large village tent. Last year, Al Jiflik finally constructed a real schoolhouse, which students will use until it is demolished by Israel for being illegal.

About 4,500 Palestinians live in Fasayel and Al Jiflik combined. Just 1,800 more make up the total settler population in the Jordan Valley: 6,300 Israelis living in 36 settlements. The tiny population controls the land of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Some settlements are just a family or two, but have taken over huge expanses of Palestinian farmland. Naama settlement replaced Ne'ama Palestinian refugee camp and is home to 172 Israelis controlling more than 10,000 dunums. Of the land-rich third of the West Bank, just 4% is left for the remaining 52,000 Palestinian inhabitants. That includes the city of Jericho and a few built-up Palestinian villages, but leaves next to 0% for agricultural use. This has been devastating for the agriculture- based society and explains the mass exodus of Palestinians even after Israel's overtly violent expulsion tactics ceased. Having lost their livelihoods, Jordan Valley farmers can either move west, or stay and work as settlement laborers on their own land.

In Fasayel we met a young man named Zafar who works full-time packing grapes into boxes at Beit Sayel settlement because his family has lost all their land. Zafar said workers are paid between 30 and 50 NIS (US$7.50 - $12.50) for an 8-hour workday, depending on their age: 50 for adults, 30 for child laborers, sometimes 10 years old or younger. He said there's no contract, no insurance, no holiday or sick pay, but they work like slaves because it's the only alternative to leaving. We asked Zafar if he supported the boycott of Israeli products even though that could indirectly affect his job and he answered unhesitatingly: "Yes. I hope everyone will boycott. I only work for the settlement because I have nowhere else to work - they took all our land."

Along our tour we met a farmer named Abu Hashem who used to be one of the richest landowners in Palestine. Of his 8,000 original dunums, only 70 are left after Israel built what Fathi calls, "the Forgotten Wall." East of the major settler highway is a barrier similar in shape and effect to Israel's better-known Apartheid Wall, this one built back in 1971 and reinforced in 1999. From his modest house, Abu Hashem can see past the Wall across the thousands of his dunums that he can never return to, spanning all the way to the Jordan River.

Abu Hashem's sons alternate years going to university and working on the farm to support the family. Abu Hashem would hire Palestinian laborers so his sons could study full-time, but Israel prohibits Palestinians from bringing in outside workers. Another farmer we met said he needs 50 farmers to cultivate his land, but he only has 10, since so many locals have left. Settlements, on the other hand, are free to bring in as much cheap labor from the rest of the West Bank as they like, so long as the Palestinians head back west when they're done so as not to throw off the Judaizing demographic trend.

Much of the produce harvested by cheap Palestinian laborers in Israeli settlements is then exported by the company Carmel-Agrexco, which is 50% owned by the Israeli state and brought in three-quarters of a billion dollars last year alone (http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/1386.shtml). Anyone who claims that Israel is not profiting off of the Occupation need only take a tour of the Jordan Valley to see truck after truck of local goods being sent off to the European market. Carmel-Agrexco boasts about getting produce from the Jordan Valley (which they often refer to as "Israel") to the United Kingdom in 24 hours, when it takes Palestinians three times as long just to get it through checkpoints. Israel has consistently prevented Palestinians from exporting their own produce, so it rots on its way from one village to another, while Europeans enjoy fresh "Israeli" citrus and avocados and the Israeli state's stocks rise.

As always, Palestinians have explored nonviolent resistance to the monopolization of their land. We visited an agricultural cooperative where local farmers have pooled their dwindling resources to try and grow food to feed their communities so that they don't have to rely on settlement products. Two representatives of the cooperative said that Israel - which controls all water in the Jordan Valley, as in the rest of the West Bank - only allows the farmers to use running water once a week, not nearly enough to sustain their crops in the desert heat (meanwhile, several settlements enjoy swimming pools to cool off from the desert heat). In addition, when the farmers produce enough to sell outside their communities, Carmel Agrexco and other Israeli companies lower their prices until the Palestinians are run out of the market. Then, secure in their monopoly, the companies raise their prices back up.

Politicians and analysts have called Jordan Valley the second priority after Jerusalem, but the most convincing reason is not border control. Carmel Agrexco is just one of many companies making a killing off of the Occupation, in the Jordan Valley and beyond. The electric, gas, water, and other governmental and private monopolies have greatly prospered since the Palestinian economy became a captive one in which Palestinians either have to buy directly from Israel or pay taxes to Israel for foreign goods. The latter isn't always an option anymore, so millions go straight from Palestinians' pockets into Israel's. Outside financial support for Palestinians eventually feeds into the Israeli economy on top of the billions in aid Israel already receives from the United States, enough to offset most of the Occupation's costs. Coupled with tax collection, a captive cheap unprotected labor source, and often unchecked industrial expansion using stolen land and resources, the Israeli economy as a whole has been profiting off the Occupation for many, many years.

Surprisingly - or perhaps not so surprisingly - it's difficult to find this information all in one place, but a women's coalition in Israel is working to do just that (Right now the best you can find are the first few bulletins at http://www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/the-economy-of-the-occupation/). Meanwhile, people continue to shrug off the near annexation of almost a third of the West Bank to "security," never stopping to question who the real winners and losers are. Is the United States in Iraq for security? Or is it about big industries and private contractors? As in America's war on Iraq, the driving force behind Israel's policies in the Jordan Valley and all the Occupied Territories is not security; it's power, control, and, money. The winners include the Israeli state, private sectors, the economic settlers and the ideological fundamentalists. The losers are too numerous to name: They are the millions of Palestinians living under brutal military occupation, each of whose stories is in some way as tragic as those of Ali and Zafar. They are the Israelis who live in fear, and who mourn the victims of Palestinian armed resistance. And they are us, the American people, who continue to foot the bill for so much of the carnage, many of us never knowing the difference.

------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -

Check Electronic Intifada Diaries in a couple days for the above report with photos. Here are my last three, in case you haven't read them yet, or seen images:

Paralysis, Prophets, and Forgiveness:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6869.shtml

Deir Yassin Continues:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6854.shtml

Prelude to the Third Intifada?:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6849.shtml

Paralysis, Prophets, and Forgiveness

2007-05-06T16:24:00.000+03:00

Five years ago, nine-month-old Mohammed and his grandmother were in their West Bank home when it began to fill with nerve gas from a nearby Israeli Occupation Forces military base. The Army had moved in on a hill near their home in the Skan Abu Absa suburb of Ramallah, and would frequently shoot all over the surrounding area, often retaliating against Palestinian gunfire from a hill away from the suburb. As the gas seeped into his living room, the baby Mohammed began to shake violently before suffering a stroke causing extensive paralysis. His grandmother ran to pick him up and also inhaled the gas, causing an intense burning sensation all over her body. When she realized her grandson had stopped moving, she pleaded with the soldiers outside to open the road out of her town and raced Mohammed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with severe neurological deterioration resulting in a vegetative state. The Palestinian Ministry of Health and UNRWA conducted extensive tests on Mohammed and his parents to determine with certainty the cause of his condition. After a full genetic investigation, doctors confirmed that Mohammed's state was neither hereditary nor due to a chromosomal abnormality, but a result of the poisonous gas.

I met Mohammed's father Sami waiting at a checkpoint near Haris. He'd hesitated to publicize his son's story for fear of harassment from the Army. He said his family was suffering enough - their personal tragedy only began with the gassing. After Mohammed's injury, Sami's father went from being a strong healthy 47-year-old to an emotional and physical wreck, and died one year later from stress and heart problems. Mohammed, now six, continues to suffer from severe neuro-developmental delay, poorly controlled seizure disorder, the loss of sight, and inability to eat normally. He eats via a G-tube (poking directly into his stomach) and is fed a special formula "Pediasure" that is not available in Israel/Palestine, so Sami travels to Jordan every three months to bring the formula and anticonvulsants that Mohammad requires. Each time Sami crosses back to the West Bank, he is forced to pay Israeli customs taxes on the formula, totaling hundreds of dollars a year. This is in addition to countless other expenses: land travel, adult diapers, maintaining his customized bed (to prevent bed sores), medicine, and round-the-clock care. Sami and his wife spend so much money taking care of Mohammed that they lack the remaining funds to take legal action against the Israeli Army for poisoning their son.

Tragic stories of Occupation-induced paralysis are common in the West Bank, so even if Mohammed's family had the money for a lawsuit there's little reason to believe it would be remarkable enough to bring the Israeli Army to justice. I recently interviewed Moussa, a young paraplegic who lost the use of his legs five years ago at the age of 19 when the Army shot him in the colon. One Monday in February, Moussa began experiencing severe pain from an infection in his wound, which a Red Crescent doctor warned could become systemic if not treated immediately. The infection risked reaching the bones in Moussa's back, developing gangrene, and poisoning his blood, but even the best West Bank hospitals had sent him home because they were ill equipped to treat such a serious condition. On Tuesday, Moussa's doctor referred him to a hospital in Jordan, and in two days the family renewed Moussa's passport and obtained a transfer from the Palestinian Ministry of Health to receive treatment in Amman. Then on Thursday, as the family was preparing to leave, Israel refused the sick wheelchair-bound young man permission to leave the West Bank for unspecified "security reasons." When Moussa's doctor explained that waiting could mean the difference between life and death, the Israeli DCO invited the family to appeal the decision, but only three days later, after the Jewish Sabbath.

We put Moussa's family in touch with Physicians for Human Rights, who were successful in getting him to Jordan before his infection could become fatal. But Moussa will still never walk again, nor will my neighbor and friend Issa, who shot by soldiers outside his home in May 2001 as he ushered children in from the streets during an Army invasion. In spite of his handicap, Issa remains committed to working nonviolently against the Occupation. Last time we spoke, he quoted an Arabic saying: "You can't clap with one hand." He said Jews, Palestinians, and the world must work together to end injustice and oppression everywhere.

Almost three years ago, Issa wrote an open letter to the two anonymous soldiers who shot and paralyzed him. It was published in Haaretz and elsewhere (http://www.palestinemonitor.org/eyewitness/Westbank/murderers_levy_haaretz.html), and I've copied it below. It is worth reading:

"I remember you. I remember your confused face when you stood above my head and wouldn't let people come to my aid. I remember how my voice grew weaker, when I said to you: `Be humane and let my parents help me.' I keep all those pictures in my head. How I lay on the ground, trying to get up but unable. How I fought my shortness of breath, which was caused by the blood that was collecting in my lungs, and the voice that was weakened because my diaphragm was hurt. I won't hide from you that despite this, I had pity for them. I felt that I was strong, because I had powers I didn't know about before.

"That was exactly three years ago. I rushed out of the house in order to distance the village children from the danger of the teargas. They were used to playing their simple games on the dusty streets of the village while the pregnant women watched over them and chatted. I didn't believe that your weapons contained live bullets or dum-dum bullets, which are prohibited under international law. I was able to protect the children and get them away from your fire, and I don't regret that.

"I pity you for having become murderers. Since I was a boy, I have hated killing, hated weapons and hated the color red, just as I hate injustice and fight against it. That is how I have understood life since I was a boy, and that, in the same spirit, is what I have taught others. I gave all my strength for the sake of peace and justice and for reducing the suffering that is caused by injustice, whatever its origin. Yes, I pitied you, because you are sick. Sick with hate and loathing, sick with causing injustice, sick with egoism, with the death of the conscience and the allure of power. Recovery and rehabilitation from those illnesses, just as from paralysis, is very long, but possible. I pitied you, I pitied your children and your wives and I ask myself how they can live with you when you are murderers. I pitied you for having shed your humanity and your values and the precepts of your religion and even your military laws, which forbid breaking into homes and beating civilians, because that undermines the soldier's morale, his strength and his manhood.

"I pitied you for saying that you are the victims of the Nazis of yesterday, and I don't understand how yesterday's victim can become today's criminal. That worries me in connection with today's victim - my people are those victims - and I am afraid that they too will become tomorrow's criminals. I pity you for having fallen victim to a culture that understands life as though it is based on killing, destruction, sowing fear and terror, and lording it over others. Despite all that, I believe that there is a chance for atonement and forgiveness and a possibility that you will restore to yourselves something of your lost humanity and morality. You can recover from the illnesses of hatred and the lust for revenge, and if we should meet one day, even in my house, you can be certain that you won't find me holding an explosive belt or concealing a knife in my pocket or in the wheels of my chair. But you will find someone who will help you get back what you lost.

"You will find a soft and delicate infant here, whose age is the same as the second in which you pulled the trigger and who will never see his father standing on his feet but who is full of pride and power, even if he has to push his father's chair, having no other choice. Even though I have reasons to hate you, I don't feel that way and I have no regrets."

-Issa Suf; May 15, 2004; the third anniversary of my being wounded

Issa is Arabic for Jesus, who is also revered as a prophet in the Muslim faith. Some would say it's a suitable name for a man who believes in responding to injustice with passionate nonviolence and forgiveness. Mohammed and Moussa (which means Moses, also a prophet in Islam) never wrote a letter like Issa's, but they and their families welcomed me, a Jewish American, into their homes with gentle kindness and openness. Struggling for peace and survival in spite of great personal tragedies, the three prophets' namesakes and their families, like so many Palestinians paralyzed physically (as well as emotionally, spiritually, and economically) by the Occupation, are some of the true - albeit often forgotten - heroes of Palestine.

Deir Yassin Continues & A Call To Action

2007-04-30T17:52:00.000+03:00

59 years ago this month, the militant Zionist Irgun and Stern Gang systematically murdered more than 100 men, women, and children in Deir Yassin. The Palestinian village lay outside the area the UN recommended to be included in a future Jewish State, and the massacre occurred several weeks before the end of the British Mandate, but it was part of a carefully planned and orchestrated process that would induce the flight of 70% of the native population to make way for an ethnically Jewish state.

Deir Yassin was just one of more than 400 Palestinian villages depopulated and destroyed by Jewish forces in 1948 (or shortly before and after). I recently visited the ruins of a Palestinian village called Kafrayn in present-day Israel on a tour with Zochrot, "a group of Israeli citizens [both Jewish and Palestinian] working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948" (http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?lang=english).

Our group met in the home of Adnan, a refugee from another village called Lajjun who now lives in Um El Fahim town in Israel. A well-dressed man in his late sixties, Adnan welcomed us into his living room when we asked to hear his story. His grown son brought around fresh strawberries and fancy chocolates before sitting down to translate as his father began to speak:

"I remember Lajjun as if in a dream. I was only seven years old when the men with guns came, but I still remember certain things so clearly. I remember my school, and the name of my teacher. I remember we had a community center for visitors, and the village was very excited because an English ambassador was planning a visit. We worked for weeks renovating the big gardens in anticipation. I remember our village had a strong spring and a sophisticated water system. Israel has succeeded in convincing the world that Palestinians were primitive and uneducated until the Zionists arrived, but that is propaganda. We even had developed agricultural tools like trucks to turn corn. We were well-educated and we had good relations with our Jewish neighbors living in a kibbutz several kilometers away.

"Then the soldiers came. I remember them shooting from atop a mountain, bullets flying over my head as we ran. We fled to a town called Taybi, taking nothing with us - we had no time, and assumed we would be back when the war was over. In Taybi we had to borrow woolen tents to live in. Eventually we found our way to Um El Fahim with thousands of other refugees, and we've been here ever since. Our village had 44,000 dunums of agricultural land and they took ever last one of them. We are citizens of Israel, but never allowed to return to our land and our homes nearby. We are refugees in our own state.

"Between 1948 and 1966, Palestinians in Israel lived the way Palestinians now live in the West Bank and Gaza. We were prisoners in our homes in Um El Fahim, under constant curfew, controlled by checkpoints, etc. Although certain restrictions have been lifted, as non-Jews we are still generally refused from more than 93% of the land in Israel, owned by the state or the Jewish National Fund. That includes my land, my village. They've surrounded it with a fence and won't even let us go pray in the mosque, one of the only structures still standing. The mosque belongs to the nearest kibbutz now, so Jewish kibbutzniks can visit it when they please.

"How can Israel call itself a democracy when I cannot go to my land simply because I am a different ethnicity from my old Jewish neighbors? What kind of a democracy is this where political parties can't challenge the Zionist exclusivist framework, but they can challenge the rights of the indigenous population to stay here? Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman came from Russia a few years ago, and now he's talk about sending Palestinians away, we who've been here for hundreds if not thousands of years! The Jewish people know catastrophe and suffering. They work for justice in their own lives… why not in mine?"

Almost all the residents of Um El Fahim are internal refugees from 1948 like Adnan. They live as second-class citizens, receiving fewer services than their Jewish counterparts. Israel spends an average of 4,935 shekels ($1,372) for each Jewish student per year, compared to 862 ($240) per Arab one. In the words of the Israeli parliamentarian Jamal Zahalka, "Israel is a democratic state for its Jewish citizens, and a Jewish state for its Arab citizens" (http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-03-15/news_story6.php).

Several elderly Um El Fahim residents accompanied us on our tour to Kafrayn. It was a strange thing, driving around in a bus looking for a village that no longer exists. Before we'd reached Kafrayn, one elderly Palestinian named Muneeb jumped up and began motioning outside the window: "That's it! That's my village!" I turned to see several hills covered with trees. Like so many others, Muneeb's village (near Kafrayn) had been emptied of Palestinians and then planted over with fast-growing Jerusalem pines by Zionists who would later brag about "making the desert bloom."

Muneeb pointed excitedly towards one part of the hill: "That's where I used to walk to school! And that's where we'd go to fetch water! And that - that's where my house was…"

Suddenly Muneeb's voice cracked and he looked down, embarrassed. "I shouldn't have come here today," he confessed after he's regained his composure. "It's too emotional. You were here thousands of years ago and you miss your land," he spoke to the Jews in our group, "I was here fifty years ago and I miss my land."

What most struck me about our drive was how bare everything was. Nobody was living in Muneeb or Adnan's villages, or anywhere near them. Their villages had been turned into forests, military bases, and grazing land, controlled by kibbutzim sometimes many miles away. One Israeli on the tour explained to me that Israel typically develops large land-intensive projects to maintain control over empty areas where it doesn't want Palestinians to settle. When we arrived in Kafrayn, we found several empty fenced off areas. One was labeled "Welcome to military base 105." Another posting said "Danger: Firing Area - Entrance Forbidden!" A third sign read "Cattle-grazing land."

"So they let cows live here but not Arabs?" I asked my new friend.

"Cows don't have nationalist aspirations, " he smiled. "Besides, do you even see any cows around here?" He was right - there were no cows in sight, nor soldiers for that matter.

One common misconception about the Palestinian refugees' right of return is that its implementation would create a new refugee crisis by displacing most Israelis. In fact, according to Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, former member of the Palestine National Council and researcher on efugee affairs, "78% of [Jewish Israelis] live in 14% of Israel. The emaining 22% of [Jewish Israelis] live in 86% of Israel's area, which is Palestinian land. Most of them live in a dozen or so Palestinian owns. A tiny minority lives in Kibbutz… Thus, only 200,000 Jews xploit 17,325 sq. km, which is the home and heritage of 5,248,180 efugees, crammed in camps and denied the right to return home" (See Dr. Abu Sitta's highly recommended Nakba Map, available at http://al-awdacal.org/shop.html).

The issue is not about space, it's about demographics. Allowing Palestinian refugees to return would threaten the ethnic character of Israel. Rather than being the state of the Jews, it might have to become the state of the people who live in it, some of whom are Jews, some of whom aren't. But until that happens, the most people like Muneeb and Adnan can look forward to is an occasional tour with Jewish fringe activists every few decades. Some of the Kafrayn expulsion survivors who accompanied our tour had not been back since 1948 - almost 60 years. They wandered around, as if in a dream, pointing out where the old cemetery and school used to be. One survivor, Abu Ghasi, recalled his story for the group:

"We had all heard about the Deir Yassin massacre a few days before, so when the Zionist forces arrived and began shooting, we all ran. Those of us who survived took shelter in a nearby village, and soon we heard the blasts that we knew were our homes being exploded. After the Jewish forces had moved on, we returned to find our village completely obliterated. It was clear we had no alternative but to move elsewhere, and eventually we settled in Um El Fahim."

An old woman from the nearest kibbutz spoke with the survivors and all agreed that their communities had gotten along well before the expulsion. They reminisced about a school bus driver they had shared, and the woman confirmed their story about the Zionist forces razing and bombing Kafrayn. The tour ended with a communal lunch between survivors, kibbutzniks, and the rest of the group next to Kafrayn's old springhouse and main water source.

Somebody had painted "Death to Arabs" in Hebrew on the springhouse before we arrived, but we didn't let that keep us enjoying the spring's natural beauty as several people got up to speak. One Jewish woman who had immigrated from Canada to Israel 27 years ago said it took her the first 20 to really understand the truth about Israel's past and present. One man asked the kibbutznik woman if she thought her Palestinian neighbors should be allowed to return, but she was unwilling to give a straight answer, saying it was complicated. An Israeli man responded to her with frustration, saying, "We are here on 100,000 dunums of empty land. We have in Israel many internal refugees from this land that lies empty. Why not give families just one of their thousands of dunums to let them come back to their homes?"

A Kafrayn survivor addressed the kibbutznik as well: "Look, we all want peace. It's very easy to say, but peace requires making an effort. I've lost 60 years on my land. How can you expect me to live in peace with the Jews if they refuse to give me back my land and my rights?" Another refugee echoed his sentiments: "Peace does not look like one type of person enjoying land and others forbidden. If you want peace, let's share everything. Let's live together."

The Palestinian refugees on our tour are the lucky ones. Unlike the two thirds of Palestinians who are in the diaspora, Adnan, Muneeb, and Abu Ghasi are still here, in historic Palestine. And although not as privileged as Jews, they are at least not living under Occupation like their West Bank and Gaza refugee counterparts. This year, I spent Deir Yassin day in Izbat At Tabib, a village of 226 Palestinians refugees from 1948 whose families resettled in the West Bank and have been facing repeated attempts by Israel to expel them a second time. Almost the entire village is under demolition order to clear the way for settler roads and the Wall (http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1029).

Not only have the massacres and expulsions of the past never been officially acknowledged, but the Nakba goes on in some form or another for all Palestinian refugees today, whether in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, or the diaspora. This is not ancient history - this is now, this is urgent. The Nakba continues. Deir Yassin continues.

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CALL TO ACTION:

The injustices must not remain unrecognized. This year, remember that May 15 is not only Israeli Independence Day… Consider organizing a Nakba Day commemoration event!

Join activists across the country in remembering the Nakba. Here's a simple, interactive, moving action you can organize in your city. Zochrot, an Israeli activist organization, has already created it, but we need YOU to put it on. Please take a look:
http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=522.

If you are interested, email Hannah at hmermels@hotmail.com with confirmation and uestions. She can also tell you if anyone else in your city is already planning a similar event.

In peace,

Anna

Prelude to the Third Intifada?

2007-04-29T19:03:00.000+03:00

It's been more than three weeks since I last wrote. The reason is simple: things have been awful on the ground here in Palestine, leaving little time for reflection. As usual, Passover—the Jewish holiday celebrating freedom from oppression—was accompanied by tightening restrictions on Palestinians. While Jewish Israelis were feasting nearby, travel within the West Bank became difficult if not impossible, except of course for settlers who would breeze by the hundreds of Palestinians waiting for hours at checkpoints on their way home, to work, to the hospital, or elsewhere. Calling the Army was no help since most offices and services were closed for the holidays. Palestinians urgently requiring permits to reach hospitals were forced to wait as well.

A quick look at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights' weekly report(http://www.pchrgaza.ps/files/W_report/English/2007/26-04-2007.htm shows that Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)—among other activities—killed 9 Palestinians (including 2 children and 4 extra-judicial assassinations) , injured 20, conducted 30 incursions into West Bank Palestinian communities, arrested 44 Palestinian civilians (including 8 children), demolished 8 houses rendering more than 48 people homeless, and continued to impose a total siege on the Occupied Territories… all in the past week. This is about average. In the past few weeks, Israeli settlers have also moved back into an evacuated settlement in Nablus. Meanwhile, several hundred Jewish settlers took over a massive building in the heart of Hebron, and Israel immediately deployed soldiers to protect the new Jewish-only colony. The nearby Abu Haykal family, friends whom I visited last month in Tel Rumeida, had their car torched by Hebron settlers who want nothing more than for them to leave so that a new Jewish settlement can be set up next to the already existing ones.

The ongoing brutality and harassment are fuelling a growing tension that I predict will one day explode into a third intifada (Arabic for "uprising"). The signs are there—intense frustration but an even stronger determination to throw off the Occupation's yoke. Demonstrations have been happening all over the West Bank, sometimes several per day. Israel's excessive force and continued colonization are unsustainable, because the Palestinians will never stop resisting. To stop resisting is to have no future—it is national suicide. The worse the Occupation gets, the stronger the resistance.

Although it is not reported as such, most of the current Palestinian resistance has been nonviolent. At the Arab American University of Jenin, the "Green Resistance" student group succeeded in banning the Israeli-produced Tapuzina fruit juice from the AAUJ campus, part of a growing Palestinian campaign to support local products rather than paying for their own Occupation. My neighbor Abu Saed in Haris, whose trees have been uprooted by settlers three times over the past month from his land near Revava settlement, continues to replant them week after week, with support from Rabbis for Human Rights and IWPS. And about a month ago, more than 350 people- Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals— gathered for the first-ever Palestine International Bike Race from Ramallah to Jericho, an event organized by the East Jerusalem YMCA for people from all over the world to protest human rights violations in Palestine, demand freedom of movement for Palestinian civilians, and "support the values of peace and tolerance in the area" (http://www.ej-ymca.org/site/DisplayNews.cfm?NewsId=205). The event was projected to be the longest ever international sporting event protesting the Occupation, but Israeli jeeps cut the race short by closing traffic to two-wheelers and the "Bikes not Bombs" enthusiasts were forced to turn back (for photographs and a participant's account:
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/03/23/bikes-vs-bombs/).

Near the Quaker Friends School where the bike race commenced is a cultural center where dozens of Palestinian youth come together every week to make short films and dance together. After watching an intensely physical and emotive modern dance rehearsal when I visited one day, the students explained that for them "art is not a luxury—it's a must." The Occupation not only threatens Palestinians' homes, land, livelihoods, time, and future, but also creativity and expression. The cultural center is tool to prevent Palestinian culture from being lost or distorted, and students described how they would meet in secrecy to practice quietly during invasions and curfews as their own form of creative nonviolent resistance.

In the Salfit region where we live, a new center has been established to conduct trainings and workshops in strategic communication, peace-building, conflict resolution, and techniques of nonviolent resistance. I spoke with the director Fuad, who explained that nonviolent resistance in Israeli jails (hunger strikes, etc) has recently increased, and that many Palestinians— particularly those returning from prison—have been building what he called "a nonviolent movement for freedom, equality, democratic values, and human rights." His organization aims to develop programs suitable for each section of Palestinian society, as well as human rights and democracy awareness workshops and resistance trainings, but they lack the proper funding to do so. Fuad told me his own story of transformation from a soldier in Arafat's "Sabahtash" Army to a committed nonviolence advocate after his brother was killed. Fuad was particularly inspired by the first intifada, during which all parts of Palestinian society joined in nonviolent civil disobedience to demand freedom with one loud voice. When I told Fuad that IWPS could offer no financial support (although you could—please contact fuad_alramal@yahoo.com if you can help), he replied, "We have no money, but our strength is in our beliefs: our commitment to nonviolence. Violence kills the spirit, pushing it towards more violence or submission, but nonviolence will always prevail in the end."

Fuad said he chose to work in the Salfit area because of its history of nonviolent resistance. Indeed, the past few weeks have seen a number of major actions in our oft-forgotten rural region. On Land Day, hundreds gathered in Rafat village to protest the Wall that is slowly enclosing their village, but when they found the cage unguarded they grabbed hold and began to rock it, back and forth, all together, until finally the gates exploded open. When the soldiers arrived, protesters retreated to their homes, not a single stone thrown. They had made their point: Rafat will not accept collective imprisonment.

The next day in Salfit town a group of demonstrators found the Wall unguarded and began removing the electric sensory wire that lines the fenced sections. Soldiers arrived quickly and began shooting into the air, but protesters held their ground and raised Palestinian flags above the cage that cuts off their main road and annexes much of their land. Salfit, too, will not accept collective imprisonment. Nor will the rest of the West Bank, where many other actions took place on Land Day weekend. In Qaffin town in the north, thousands of demonstrators gathered and marched, danced, and drummed their way to the Wall to show their spirit and resolve to resist the illegal barrier and Occupation. In Nablus, hundreds marched to Beit Furik, one of the six city exits—all Army checkpoints—through which men 16 to 45 years old are not allowed to pass without a special Israeli-issued permit that can only be obtained outside the city. The march, organized in part by the Nablus Women's Union and a society for local handicapped people, continued through the checkpoint past stunned soldiers unable to hold the cheering protesters back. The group then occupied the checkpoint, first by sitting down and later by climbing atop the waiting pens and hanging Palestinian flags and freedom signs around the base.

Injustice is unsustainable. It cannot be normalized, because there will always be resistance. The third intifada will come. It may be nonviolent as the first, or it may be more like the second. Is it a coincidence that Israel began construction at the Temple Mount holy site in Jerusalem just as warring religious and secular Palestinian factions were coming to a truce? Israel prefers that Palestinians resist one another rather than their oppression, but Palestinians in the West Bank and at the negotiating table have shown their resolve to work together against their common enemies: Zionist racism and the Occupation. United, they will prevail. If the third intifada does not succeed, there will be a fourth. And then a fifth… As many as it takes, until justice is served.

Sewage Tsunami and Economic, Physical, & Political Strangulation in Gaza

2007-04-07T16:31:00.000+03:00

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

One week ago, the walls of an overused cesspool in northern Gaza collapsed, flooding a nearby Bedouin village with up to two meters of raw sewage. At least five people drowned to death, with dozens more left sick, injured, or missing.

Predictably, the international community's fingers are pointed at the Palestinian Authority, which was warned of the danger of Beit Lahia treatment plant's flooding but did not take the necessary steps to ensure the villagers' safety. To many, it's just another example of how the Palestinians are incapable of ruling over themselves. But the PA is only part of the problem. In fact, funds were secured long ago for transferring the dangerous sewage pools, but according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), the project "was delayed for more than two years due to delays in importing pipes and pumps from abroad as a result of the closure imposed by IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] on the Gaza Strip. In addition, IOF military operations in the project area prevented workers from free and safe access to the area to conduct their work. It is noted that this project is funded by the World Bank, European Commission, Sweden, and other donors"
(http://www.pchrgaza.ps/files/PressR/English/2007/20-2007.htm).

Almost two years ago, Israel claimed to be withdrawing from Gaza, yet according to the Human Rights Council report commissioned by the UN last year and released two months ago, "Even before the commencement of "Operation Summer Rains", following the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit, Gaza remained under the effective control of Israel. [...] Israel retained control of Gaza's air space, sea space and external borders, and the border crossings of Rafah (for persons) and Karni (for goods) were ultimately under Israeli control and remained closed for lengthy periods." Rafah has been open an average of 14% of scheduled times, so Gazans (including sick people needing treatment in Egypt, and students) have had to wait sometimes for weeks on end to get through either way. Last December Israel promised to allow 400 trucks a day to pass through Karni crossing, delivering among other things desperately needed food and medical supplies, and allowing produce out to support the largely agriculture- based economy. The promise has yet to be implemented, which has had "disastrous" consequences on the local economy. The report continues, "In effect, following Israel's withdrawal, Gaza became a sealed off, imprisoned and occupied territory"
(http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/4session/A.HRC.4.17.pdf).

Last week, over fifty fishermen were arrested in Gaza when they tried to go fishing. Israel controls Gaza's waters, not Palestinians, so the Army opened fire on the small fishing boats (http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20070326104022273). Israel also frequently shoots through the cage around Gaza rom sniper positions if not conducting all-out ground invasions (two this past week or air bombardments. Israel has killed more than 700 Gazans (including hundreds of women and children) since the celebrated "withdrawal" still used by Israeli apologists to show that Palestinians can't take advantage of a good opportunity if it falls into their laps.

Recently, perhaps the most paralyzing features of Israel's continued control over Gaza--as well as the West Bank--is the US and Israeli-led economic embargo against the Palestinian government since Hamas' victory last year. Doctors, teachers, elected officials, and other civil servants have not been fully paid in more than one year, pushing the population into a humanitarian crisis (about quarter of the population is financially dependent on these salaries). Over 80 percent of Gazans are living below the official poverty line, and even issues as serious as overburdened cesspools are often left unaddressed. It is tempting to wonder why the international community should be held responsible for financially supporting the Palestinian population to begin with. The late Tanya Reinhart articulated her answer to this question during her last lecture in France. She explained that Europe, like the US, had no right to cut off food and medicine from the Palestinians:

"It was not an act of generosity which Europe could either carry on or not," she said. "It was a choice which had been made to take on the obligations imposed by international law on the Israeli occupier to see to the well-being of the occupied populations. Europe chose not to oblige Israel to respect its obligations, and preferred to pay money to the Palestinians. When it put an end to this, it breached international law"
(http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=12385&sectionID=1).

The United States, Europe, and Israel (which has withheld $55 million per month in taxes collected from Palestinians on behalf of the PA) say they will only return the Palestinians' lifelines if Hamas agrees to three conditions: (1) renouncing violence, (2) accepting previous agreements, and (3) recognizing Israel. These conditions sound reasonable enough, but are painfully ironic for anyone living on the ground here. True, Hamas has not sworn off violence once and for all, but neither has Israel! In the past year, Palestinians have killed 27 Israelis, most of them soldiers. During that same period of time, Israelis have killed 583 Palestinian civilians (suicide bombers, fighters, or others targeted for assassination are not included). Hamas has held fairly consistently to a unilateral ceasefire since January 2005, when they announced their transition from armed struggle to political struggle. Actions speak louder than words. Hamas says it reserves the right to resist violently, but has stopped attacking Israelis. Israel claims that all it wants is peace, yet the daily invasions and assassinations continue.

The second condition involving previous agreements is hard to take seriously given Israel's consistent violations. In one of her last speeches in New York at St Mary's Church, Tanya cited an early 2006 interview in the Washington Post in which "Hamas Prime Minister Haniyeh explained that according to the Oslo Accords in 1993, five years later in '98, there should have been already a Palestinian state. Instead, what Israel did during this whole period was appropriate more land, continue to colonize, to build settlements, and it did not keep a single clause of the Oslo Agreements"
(http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/19/1354224). When will the US demand that Israel adhere to previous agreements in order to receive the billions that we hand over every year?

And finally, the last and crucial condition is that Hamas must recognize Israel. The question is, what exactly is meant by "Israel"? Does "Israel" mean a place where Jewish people are respected and secure, or is it something else? Israel defines itself as "the state of the Jewish people." It's not the state of it's citizens; Israel is the state of a bunch of people who aren't its citizens, and not the state of a bunch of people who are its citizens. Palestinian citizens of Israel don't have equal rights to Jews (for specific examples, read my recent "Existence is Resistance" report), because so many laws are aimed at condensing or chasing away Palestinian communities in order to fully "Judaize" the country. Israel has an artificial Jewish majority that was created and is maintained through various forms of ethnic cleansing. Israel's very existence as a Jewish state is conditional upon the dispossession and either expulsion or bantustanization of the indigenous Palestinian population. If you ask one of these Palestinians if he recognizes the right of such an Israel to exist, a country built on his land that explicitly excludes him and discriminates against him, and that Palestinian says "no," is he being racist or anti-Semitic? Or is he himself defending against racism and anti-Semitism? (Remember that Arabs are Semites, too.)

Israel cannot specify what exactly it wants Palestinians to recognize because Israel doesn't actually recognize itself. Israel has refused to clarify its own borders, because they keep expanding as the Jewish state establishes more settlement "facts on the ground." In spite of all of these things, the PLO actually agreed to recognize Israel, renounce terror, and sign agreements with Israel almost twenty years ago. Israel responded with continued colonization and resource confiscation in the occupied territories and bombardment of Lebanon to root out the PLO, which was becoming dangerously moderate (see Chomsky classic, The Fateful Triangle). Hamas too has indicated that it would consider peace if Israel withdrew to its internationally recognized 1967 borders leaving Palestinians with just 22% of their historic homeland, but Israel says full withdrawal is out of the question. It is Israel who has yet to recognize Palestine's right to exist, not the other way around.

One more point of irony is that Israel justifies the ongoing siege of Gaza as a response to the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit even though such collective punishment is cruel, illegal, and hugely hypocritical. Just last week, the Israeli Army abducted and imprisoned 29 Palestinians, including one child. The week before that they took 37 Palestinians, including five kids. The week before that they took 61, and the week before that 63, and the week before that 107 Palestinians. Israel has "captured" ("kidnapped" would be a more appropriate word for many since most of the abductees were civilians) at least 860 Palestinians this year, and it's only April (for week by week statistics, visit http://www.pchrgaza.ps/). Palestinians are illegally holding one Israeli, and Israel is illegally holding more than 11,000 Palestinians (http://www.mandela-palestine.org/ ), including about 40 elected officials and almost 500 women and children. If the Israeli Army is justified is collectively starving and bombarding 1.3 million Gazans to avenge the capture of one of their fighters, what could the amilies of 11,000 Palestinians claim is justified?

In reality, Israel is holding more than 1.3 million Palestinians prisoner with its ngoing siege of Gaza. Most of them are refugees, encaged in one of the most densely opulated places in the world while many can practically see their land through the age around them, but are forbidden from ever returning because they are not Jewish I, on the other hand, could go live there next month if I wanted to). The Beit Lahia ewage treatment plant was designed in the 1970's to serve up to 50,000 people, but he local population has since risen to 200,000. The "sewage tsunami" is as much a esult of population density as anything else. In comparison, the land-rich West Bank feels like paradise, but perhaps not for long. As the Wall continues to snake around West Bank towns and villages, cutting inhabitants off from their land, jobs, schools, hospitals, and each other, Israel's intention seems clear: those Palestinians who won't leave the West Bank altogether will be squeezed into bantustans, each of them a new Gaza. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority, civilians, and popular resistance will continue to be demonized with claims of "anti-Semitism" even though the worst crimes are not their own. The guilt and responsibility are not just Israel's. They are all of ours.

The sun is gleaming through silvery olive trees into our office window as I look out across Palestinian land and homes that still remain intact in spite of the Occupation and all its crimes. There is still hope for the West Bank, but only if people speak out and act now. There are so many ways. Visit Palestine. Support the nonviolent boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement called for by Palestinian civil society. Join a local solidarity group and educate your community. Forward this message to your friends and family. Write your representatives. Anything but staying silent.

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

The Untold Stories: Tragic, but Not Tragic Enough to Notice

2007-03-25T09:32:00.000+02:00

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Today I visited my friend Dawud in Kufr 'Ain for the first time since he lost his six-month-old baby at Atara Checkpoint. It was heartbreaking to hear the details of the story from a man who just one month ago was asking me when I would come visit his family for pleasure, not just to take a report. He said there was more to Palestine than the sob stories. But today was all about grief. We watched a video of the funeral in silence, and saw Dawud's mother break down and say she couldn't take it anymore. She'd already lost two sons to natural causes, but apart from moderate and treatable asthma, Khalid had been a happy, healthy, chubby little boy.

Last time I visited Kufr 'Ain I took reports from one family after another regarding nightly incursions by the Army. A 14-year-old girl told me how the soldiers woke her, her mother, and her five younger siblings (her father is working in the United States) up in the middle of the night with sound bombs, forced everyone out in their pajamas with no shoes and isolated the young girl to question her before enclosing the mother and children in their living room and ransacking the house. She said the soldiers put explosions in her room and in the family's well.

Another family told me how they were woken with sound bombs, rushed out into the cold, and then the young men were stripped, handcuffed, and lain on their front lawn before being taken to a neighbor's living room for interrogation. The neighbor's family was meanwhile locked in their bedrooms with the lights off, warned against any sound or movement.

There were more stories. Too many, in fact. Eventually I had to stop taking reports, partially because I had to be somewhere, but more because as I recorded the stories I had a sinking feeling that the incursions were simply too common, too unremarkable to catch anyone's attention. This would not be a human rights report that any legal or humanitarian organization would follow up with.

Major operations in Nablus or Ramallah make headlines, but incursions into many small West Bank villages are just a part of daily life. For example, for the past two months, the Army has come nightly to Marda village, throwing sound bombs, arresting men, abducting boys. They steal IDs and refuse to return them until their holders give names of kids in the village who put stones in the settler road that cuts through Marda. They spontaneously shut the village completely, preventing residents from entering and visitors from leaving. Two weeks ago soldiers broke into the house of a family with three sons. The middle son Ahmad, 19, who was studying for an English exam the next day when he heard soldiers outside, told me his story:

"I left my books to go see what all the commotion was about. There were about 14 soldiers total surrounding my house, and three jeeps. Soldiers were kicking our front door and throwing sound bombs. When the soldiers saw me, they grabbed me and began to hit me. My parents and my brother Qutaiba--he' s only 13--tried to intervene but the Army pushed my mom and dad to the ground and hit Qutaiba in the stomach. Each time my little brother tried to stand up they would punch him in the gut again, and my mother began screaming for them to stop. It seemed like each time she screamed they beat him again. Suddenly my mother began to wail and I saw that two soldiers were covering Qutaiba's face with their hands so that he could not breathe, suffocating him until his face began to turn red. Eventually they allowed him to breathe."

I asked Qutaiba what happened after that.

"The soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed me and Ahmad and brought us in their jeeps to the entrance of our village. They dragged me out of the jeep by lifting my cuffed hands behind my back, which hurt my shoulders. Several soldiers beat me with their fists, bats, and guns, and then they started asking me questions about which village boys were throwing stones. I told them I was cold and sick, and one soldier said that this was nothing; he would punish me to the point of death. They took my cap and began throwing it above my head, laughing, making fun of me. After half an hour they got bored and left me to walk home. They drove away with my brother still blindfolded and handcuffed in the jeep."

Ahmad continued his story when Qutaiba had finished: "It was terrible listening to my little brother being beaten, and I was almost grateful when we drove away. The soldiers took me to the Ariel police station, where they beat me for several hours all over my body, especially in my head and temples. All the time I was blindfolded so I could not anticipate where the next blow was coming from. It was very scary. One soldier put his boot in my mouth. I asked the commander for some water and he told me to 'Go to Hell.' Suddenly one of them kicked me very hard in the groin and everything went black. The next thing I knew they were splashing my face with cold water, and when they saw I was awake they began to beat me again, accusing me of throwing stones, destroying settlers' cars, and being a member of Hamas. After four hours they finally let me go and I walked home."

Ahmad's father Rasmi cut in. "When my son came home after 1am, it looked as if he had taken a blood shower. He had to go into school the next day but his English teacher let him postpone the exam. I teach my children good values, to respect others and to never use violence. But how can they continue to be peaceful when they are constantly surrounded and threatened by so much brutality? I'd like to live peacefully with the Jewish people. They build their state, and we build ours. They take care of their children, and I take care of mine. I lived in Chicago for 15 years. I know that in America it's a sin to hit your children. Here, soldiers can hit other people's children and nobody says a thing! But even if they kill my children, I will not kill theirs. These are my values, what my parents taught me and what I teach my children."

As Rasmi spoke, a car drove by and the whole family jumped. They laughed nervously when they realized it was just a neighbor. Rasmi said the soldiers returned three days later and took Ahmad again, this time with his older brother Samiah. They blindfolded and handcuffed them, and brought them to an abandoned warehouse off of the main road. Ahmad was still fragile from his fresh head wounds, but the soldiers still beat him and his brother, first in silence, then cursing them and accusing them of harboring weapons. When it began to rain, the soldiers brought the young men outside, removed their jackets, and began hitting them again. Eventually they let the boys go, after stealing all the money in Samiah's wallet, 70 Jordanian dinars and 60 Israeli shekels. This in addition to 400 shekels that they stole from the house the first time, all together the equivalent of more than $200 (not to mention the CDs and toys that they broke when they ransacked the home). They also took the university documents that were in Samiah's wallet.

Although Marda villagers call us more than most, Marda's situation is far from unique. Most village's have simply given up on us. We recently met a 56-year-old grandmother named Hilwe who was shot in the face three weeks ago by soldiers hiding behind a corner in hervillage, Qarawat Bani Hassan. One rubber-coated metal bullet (don'tlet the name fool you; rubber bullets can--and do--kill) grazed her face, tearing and detaching a segment of her right nostril, disfiguring her and requiring 20 stitches. I asked Hilwe what the soldiers were doing in her village and she shrugged, "They come everyday. It's nothing special." I asked why nobody had called IWPS to respond to the incursions and Hilwe's brother answered straightly, "What are you gonna do, take a report?"

We encouraged the family in Qarawat to call us more, but I won't blame them if they don't. How much are we really helping by writing these reports that policymakers and even most activists will never read? How much are we just creating false hope and forcing families to relive painful episodes that they'd rather forget? The best we can do is to offer our services and be honest about what we can and cannot do. We cannot bring criminals to justice; we cannot get innocent men out of jail; we cannot keep the soldiers from invading, or settlers from stealing land. Pretty much all we can do is write and look sympathetic, and occasionally remind soldiers that we are watching.

Even our village seems to have given up on us. The jeeps still come, but nobody calls. Yesterday I heard by chance from a friend that a boy from Haris was kidnapped by soldiers because he was wearing too much olive green. They said that color is for the Army. The soldiers drove him onto a quiet road between our village and Kifl Haris, made him take off all his green clothes (everything but his underwear), and left him half-naked to hitch his way back. He hid behind the olive trees until one car took pity on him and brought him some clothes.

Like Ahmad's and Hilwe's, the Haris boy's story will never make headlines. But there will always be the stories that do get out. The well-known Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy recently followed up on two of our recent reports: Dawud's baby and the 11-year-old human shield. The latter made it to the New York Times and other mainstream media, and the Israeli Army has officially stated that it intends to look into the human shields charges (meanwhile, other Israeli soldiers and spokespeople have stated that in fact the invasion "was pretty boring, we barely felt any action" [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3371706,00.html], and in the future "not all operations will be so careful"). My last six reports were published on Electronic Intifada, which I recommend browsing even if you already read them, just for the photographs:

Nablus Invasion Diary I--Occupied Homes & Minds:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6672.shtml

Nablus Invasion Diary II--Human Shields & Medical Obstruction:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6671.shtml

Nablus Invasion Diary III--Resistance, Hypocrisy, & Dead Men Walking:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6669.shtml

War & Irony on Hebron Hilltops:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6678.shtml

Existence is Resistance:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6711.shtml

The Crime of Being Born Palestinian:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6724.shtml

It is the brave voices of Israelis like Levy who give me the most hope for a change in Israeli mainstream society. I remained stoic through dozens of human rights reports over the past weeks and months, but I finally broke down when I learned that one of those brave voices had been lost. On March 17th, Israeli linguist and political activist Tanya Reinhart died of a stroke in New York City. Tanya was a staunch defender of human rights, deeply dedicated to exposing to fellow Israelis and the world the crimes of her government against the Palestinian people. Tanya wrote extraordinary books (including Israel/Palestine, which I sold on tour) and articles, but she also spent time on the front lines of the movement here in Palestine.

In our last correspondence, Tanya confessed shamefully that she was finally leaving Israel because she couldn't bear to remain after her country's summer bombardments of Gaza and Lebanon. She had eventually quit Tel Aviv University after her employers "made life impossible" as punishment for her political outspokenness. It hurt to hear such an extraordinary activist apologize for not doing enough--she did more than most of us can ever hope to.

The brave Israeli voices that remain continue to be targetted: According to the Jerusalem Post, historian Ilan Pappe recently announced plans to quit Israel for the UK because his "'unwelcome views and convictions' "--Pappe has done extensive research about the 1948 expulsions of Palestinians- -have made it "'increasingly difficult to live in Israel.'" Yet the Israeli resistance movement is growing faster than it ever has. And while some stories remain untold, others will always come out, even if it takes another sixty years. The only thing harder than speaking truth to power is covering up the truth indefinitely. Israel is fighting a losing battle. The reality of Israel's historic and present agression and ethnic cleansing of Palestine cannot remain hidden forever.

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

From Sharpsville to Nablus: Tragedies of Ethnic Apartheid

2007-03-21T04:50:00.000+02:00

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Almost two weeks ago, my friend Dawud, a high school English teacher from Kufr 'Ain, called me nearly in tears to report the checkpoint hold-up that had cost him his six month-old son. Shortly after midnight on March 8th, my friend's baby began having trouble breathing. His parents quickly got a taxi to take him to the nearest hospital in Ramallah, where they hoped to secure an oxygen tent, which had helped him recover from difficult respiratory episodes in the past. As the family was rushing from their Palestinian town in the West Bank to their Palestinian hospital in the West Bank, they were stopped at Atara checkpoint, where an Israeli soldier asked for the father's, mother's, and driver's IDs. Dawud explained to the soldier that his son needed urgent medical care, but the soldier insisted on checking the three IDs first, a process that usually takes a few minutes. Dawud's was the only car at the checkpoint in the middle of the night, yet the soldier held the three IDs for more than twenty minutes, even as Dawud and his wife began to cry, begging to be allowed through. After fifteen minutes, Dawud's baby's mouth began to overflow with liquid and my friend wailed at the soldier to allow them through, that his baby was dying. Instead, the soldier demanded to search the car, even after the IDs had been cleared. At 1:05am, six-month-old Khalid Dawud Fakaah died at Atara Checkpoint. As the soldier checked the car, he shined his flashlight on the dead child's face and, realizing what had happened, finally returned the three ID cards and allowed the grieving family to pass.

Checkpoints and ID cards. Mention these words and any victim or witness of Apartheid can produce dozens of horror stories like Dawud's. South Africa employed a similar system with its former Apartheid "Pass Laws," which the South African Government used to monitor the movement of Black South Africans. Blacks had to carry personal ID documents, which required permission stamps from the government before holders could move around within their country. Similarly, Palestinians in the West Bank are required to carry Israeli-issued ID cards that indicate which areas, roads, and holy sites they are or are not allowed access to. Pass Laws enabled South African police to arrest blacks at will. Similarly, Israeli Occupation forces use ID cards not only to monitor Palestinian movement, but also to justify frequent arbitrary detention and arrest with general impunity. Jewish inhabitants of the West Bank (like all Jewish Israelis) have different ID cards, proclaiming their "Jewish" nationality, granting them automatic permission to access the modern roads and almost all holy sites that most Palestinians are restricted from.

Forty-seven years ago today, on March 21, 1960, hundreds of Black South Africans gathered in Sharpsville, South Africa and marched together in protest of the racist and dehumanizing Apartheid Pass Law system. South African white-controlled police forces fired on the unarmed crowd, killing at least 67 and injuring almost three times as many, including men, women, and children. Witnesses say that most of the people shot were hit in the back as they fled.

Almost fifty years after the Sharpsville Massacre, pass laws still plague the lives of the oppressed. Everyday I meet West Bank Palestinians living without permits and ID cards, either because Israel never granted them residency on their land, or because soldiers or police confiscated their IDs as punishment or just harassment. I recently interviewed the family of Ibrahim, a twenty-year-old veterinary student who was arrested three years ago for the crime of not having an Israeli-issued ID card. Ibrahim's parents were born and raised in the West Bank and own land in their small village of Fara'ata, where I interviewed them. In 1966, as newlyweds, the couple moved to Kuwait where they began working abroad. The year after, Israel occupied the West Bank and shortly after took a census. Any Palestinians who were not recorded due to absence—whether studying abroad, visiting family, or anything else—became refugees. Israel, the new occupier, stripped Ibrahim's parents and hundred of thousands of other Palestinians of their right to return to their homes and land, and effectively opened up the West Bank to colonization by any Jews who were willing to come.

Israel's census strategy of 1967 bears a striking resemblance to the Absentee Property Law that Israel employed after the 1948 expulsions. According to Passia (www.passia.org), the law "defines an 'absentee' as a person who 'at any time' in the period between 29 November 1947 and 1 Sept 1948, 'was in any part of the Land of Israel that is outside the territory of Israel (meaning the West Bank or the Gaza Strip) or in other Arab states'. The law stipulates that the property of such an absentee would be transferred to the Custodian of Absentee Property, with no possibility of appeal or compensation. From there, by means of another law, the property was transferred, so that effectively the property that was left behind by Palestinian refugees in 1948 (and also some of the property of Palestinians who are now citizens of Israel) was transferred to the State of Israel." To this day, the Jewish National Fund, which inherited much of the refugees' land, combined with the Israeli state owns about 93% of the land of Israel. This land is exclusively reserved for the Jewish people and almost impossible to obtain for Palestinian citizens of Israel or the owners of the land themselves: the 1947-1948 refugees.

When I say 93% of "the land of Israel," I am implying land within the internationally recognized 1967 borders of Israel, unlike the text of the 1950 Absentee Property Law itself, which defines "the Land of Israel" as all of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip together. This was long before 1967, but makes the territories' occupation less than two decades later either a tremendous coincidence or entirely unsurprising.

To this day, Palestinians like Ibrahim's parents who were in the wrong place during the 1967 occupation and census—and their children—must apply for what is called "family reunification" from the Ministry of the Interior in order to legally reside in their own homes and villages. Passia writes, "the decision to grant or deny these applications is, according to Israeli Law, ultimately at the discretion of the Interior Minister, who is not required to justify refusal. In May 2002, Israel suspended the processing of family reunification claims between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to prevent the latter from acquiring Israeli citizenship, arguing that the growth in the non-Jewish population of Israel due to family reunification was a threat to the 'Jewish character' of the state."

Family reunification applications not involving citizens of Israel were also frozen last year after the Hamas election, including the claims of Ibrahim and his family. The family returned legally to the West Bank in 1998 when Oslo dictated Palestinians would have their own state, but when Israel's occupation and settlement only accelerated, Ibrahim and his parents and five siblings were left with even fewer rights than the Palestinians with West Bank residency. Although the Palestinian Authority and DCO agreed that Ibrahim's family could live in their village (and even provided them free education and health care), they still needed permission from Israel.

Ibrahim began veterinary school at Al-Najaa University in 2000, but had to commute over the Nablus hills since soldiers manning the checkpoints would never allow him to enter the city without an ID card. On March 23, 2004, during Ibrahim's last semester before graduation, the Israeli Army caught him walking to school inside Nablus and put him in prison. This Friday marks three years exactly that Ibrahim—now 23—has been in jail, his only crime that he has no Israeli-issued ID card. The first year Israel imprisoned Ibrahim within the West Bank, but the past two years he was held within Israel, a violation of International Law—occupiers cannot hold prisoners and detainees from the occupied population in the occupying power's land, because of how severely it limits prisoners' rights. Indeed, Israel's policy of generally imprisoning Palestinians inIsrael means that their families often cannot visit them without permits to enter Israel, and they cannot even have a Palestinian lawyer since the lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza don't have permits to practice law in Israel. Ibrahim's father, for example, is a lawyer but can do nothing to help his son without an ID, let alone an Israeli license to practice law. Since he returned from Kuwait he has worked as a shepherd, since he can't safely go anywhere outside his village without an ID.

Ibrahim's situation is worse than most. Since his family has no ID cards they cannot even apply to enter Israel to visit him. Even Ibrahim's sister, who obtained an ID via her husband back when Israel sometimes granted residency through marriage, cannot visit her brother since it is impossible to prove to Israel her relation to a person with no official name or identity.

"Nobody from the family has seen Ibrahim in two years," his mother Hanan told me with my hand in hers after the report interview ended. "I send him gifts and receive news via the mother of another West Bank inmate in the same jail, a friend who occasionally gets permission from Israel to visit her son. Ibrahim is not even allowed the use the phone." Hanan began to cry. "He's the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing before I go to sleep. I cannot bear to imagine him there in prison, perhaps for the rest of his life, knowing how much he must be suffering, knowing that I can do nothing to help him. He did nothing wrong. His only crime is that he was born a Palestinian."

Hanan has six children total, three of whom decided to settle in Jordan, where they could enjoy citizenship (Palestinians in the West Bank before 1967 had Jordanian ID cards), and Hanan hasn't seen them in nine years. She wept again as she told me she has grandchildren and sons and daughters-in- law that she's never met. Even if she wanted Jordanian citizenship now, she's lost her chance having stayed outside Jordan for so long. And the family members who returned to claim their land and rights in the West Bank are now stateless, like so many millions of other Palestinian refugees in the diaspora.

In recognition of the tragic events of the 1960 Sharpsville Massacre, the UN declared May 21st the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, pushing states around the world to redouble their efforts to combat all types of ethnic discrimination. Yet within Israel, a member of the United Nations, ethnicity still determines nationality (there is no Israeli nationality: Palestinians are "Arabs," Jews are "Jewish"), resource allocation, and rights to own JNF and state land. There are discriminatory laws separating Palestinian families in Israel and threatening to revoke Palestinians' Israeli citizenship (these are discussed in an excellent recent interview with Israeli Knesset member Jamal Zahalka, called "A State of all its Citizens": www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12238 —highly recommended). Tel Aviv University Medical School just announced a rule that defacto targets Palestinian prospective students (see www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/ 837932.html for article, and www.adalah.org/eng/index.php or www.mossawacenter.org/ for more general information about minority rights in Israel).

In the rest of the so-called "Land of Israel," the ethnic discrimination is much worse, from segregated roads to separate legal systems. I know what Israel will say: this is only self-defense. On some level this is correct: if Israel desires to control the territory that it has for more than two-thirds of its history, and to remain the state exclusively of the Jewish people, and to be democratic as well, it must find a way to create a Jewish majority on a strip of land in which the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish. There are only so many possible solutions: there's mass transfer (as was tried successfully in 1948, and is currently advocated by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman), there's mass imprisonment (10,000+ Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails as I write), there's genocide... or there is apartheid. The more humane alternatives of Israel withdrawing to the 1967 borders or becoming a state of its citizens are not even on the bargaining table.

Apartheid and segregation failed in South Africa and the United States and they will fail in Israel and Palestine. Ethnocentric nationalism failed in Nazi Germany and it will fail in Zionist Israel. But until they do, the Ibrahims and baby Khalids of Palestine are counting on you and me to do something, to say something, since they themselves cannot. Silence is complicity. We cannot wait for things to get worse. The ethnic cleansing and apartheid have gone on long enough.

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Existence is Resistance: Challenging the Assault on Ordinary Life in Palestine

2007-03-19T22:00:00.000+02:00

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

One week after I left Nablus I found myself again looking out across the city's majestic sunlit hills, this time from one of the highest mountains in the West Bank. In all my reporting on Israel's invasion and human rights violations, I never mentioned how beautiful the ancient city is, from the surrounding mountains to the enchanting Old City, so easy to get lost in. Both remind me of Damascus (one pessimistic Palestinian pointed out the comparison early during my stay, claiming that the Nablus invasion was practice for an attack against Syria). My last day in Nablus I got to discover another one of the city's gems: Al Najaa University. I immediately took to the old architecture mixed with modern sculptures on the main campus, but what inspired me most was watching thousands of students return to the frantic bustle of daily university life so soon after soldiers had released the city from hostage. Resilience is a defining character of Palestinian identity in my experience, and I was more impressed than surprised to see Palestinians asserting their determination to get an education even in the most difficult circumstances. Just another example of the ever-pervasive Palestinian nonviolent resistance.

The night before visiting I had passed by the empty campus--abandoned since the Army took over and classes were cancelled--in a taxi driving home with the family that was hosting me. I had grown quite close to the warm family with Leninist communist leanings, and felt happy and comfortable in their home covered with posters of Che Guevara, David Beckham, Shakira, and others idolized by the three teenage daughters. As we were driving and chatting after having visited some friends, we were suddenly surrounded with jeeps driving through the city to and from seemingly every direction. We panicked. Was there curfew? Would we be shot for being outside? Screeching to a halt, we tried to back up to the neighborhood we'd come from, but jeeps were swarming in that direction as well. Where were we supposed to go?

The jeeps left as quickly as they had come. Apparently they were doing a practice invasion, presumably to train new soldiers, as they've been doing a lot recently in a village called Beit Lid near Tulkarem (even though nobody in the village has been accused of threatening Israel's security). I will never forget that feeling of being suddenly surrounded, the confusion and panic, the helplessness. There was something about sitting together to a cheerful family breakfast the next morning that felt like a kind of nonviolent resistance too: the insistence on ordinary life and pleasures no matter what havoc Occupation Forces are wreaking just outside.

I returned to the Nablus region a week later to accompany a teacher named Addawiya and her family to plow land they haven't been able to work for six years due to soldier harassment. The next plot over hasn't been plowed in 26 years for the same reason. There are Israeli military posts on all the highest West Bank peaks, among them the mountain where Addawiya's land lies. As we cleared away stones that had overrun the land over the last half dozen years, Addawiya told me about the day she was picking olives with her brother when the soldiers came and threatened to shoot her brother if he didn't leave the land immediately. He persisted in picking olives until the soldiers began shooting into the air to show that they were serious, at which point he ran off terrified. Addawiya was left alone, and on her hands and knees pleaded for her life, all along sure she was going to die. Her fear was not unjustified. Three years ago, Addawiya's sister was taking a walk on the family's land near the village with her husband when a group of soldiers popped out from the foliage and open-fired on him. The 33-year-old teacher died instantly.

The Israeli Army came and apologized to Addawiya's family. Apparently they were intending to assassinate a wanted man and shot the wrong guy. Addawiya's sister, who was 23 and pregnant at the time, is now a 26-year-old going on 60. With nobody to support her and two young children to raise, she had to move back in with her mother. Incidentally, the mother invited me to move in too when we returned from plowing (as an unmarried, childless 27-year-old woman, I'm practically an old maid around here). I declined politely, and we began the journey back to Haris.

Our first stop along the way was Huwwara, the southern checkpoint out of Nablus city, where as usual hundreds of students from Al Najaa and other universities were waiting unhappily, squished together like cattle as it began to rain and everyone squeezed under the roof to wait behind metal detectors and turnstiles to leave the city.

I remembered passing through Huwwara a few days earlier on a trip accompanying other farmers in the area. Since the solidarity effort was organized by the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, we were driving in an Israeli car with yellow license plates, so we didn't even slow down as we breezed through on the Israeli-only road parallel to the one where Palestinians had been waiting for hours if not days.

On the way back from Addawiya's land, a colleague and I decided to stay at Huwarra to do Checkpoint Watch, i.e. witness and document any human rights violations. There was already one sick man whom the Army had refused to let pass and we took his story. At first the soldiers didn't seem to mind our presence, but after some time one soldier told us we weren't allowed to stand where we were. He pointed to a line drawn on the floor nearby and said we could stand behind it. We began to protest, but quickly realized a fight would translate into longer waiting time for the Palestinians being processed by the same soldier, so we walked a few paces to the other side of the line. Ten minutes later, a different soldier informed us it was illegal to be observing the checkpoint at all, so we would have to leave immediately. We didn't even dignify his absurd claim with a response. He stood next to us awkwardly repeating himself a few times and then eventually went away.

We were approached by a third soldier, speaking only Hebrew. When we said we couldn't understand, he told us in broken English that it was illegal to be there if you didn't speak Hebrew. This was a new one. Another soldier showed up to translate the soldier's original message, namely that in fact we could look but not take pictures. The soldier regretted to inform us that he would have to delete my photographs. At that point we decided we preferred to leave rather than lose the photos, so we began to walk away. As expected, the soldier didn't chase after the supposedly "illegal" pictures. Just before we left, we saw the sick man previously denied passage try his luck with a different soldier at a different machine and get through.

Israel claims that its checkpoints are for the security and safety of its citizens. What makes this claim so difficult to believe for those observing the institutions is how inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary the Army's actions and "laws" so frequently are. The sick man got through on his second try. Had that failed, he could have sprung for an expensive taxi ride to an alternative checkpoint 10 miles north that is scarcely monitored at all (when we passed through on the way to Addawiya's land there were no soldiers in sight). The whole trip north and then around again would cost him several hours and paychecks, but he could exit his city with relative certainty. Anyone who's spent time in the West Bank knows that if you're desperate, you can get anywhere. There is always an alternative road, even into Israel, even with the Wall, which is full of holes so as not to disturb settlers commuting to Israel. Israel is not stupid. It knows that Palestinians can get around the Army's blockades if they just drain enough energy and resources to do so. So why does Israel do it?

As our shared taxi from Huwwara to Haris left the checkpoint, the driver pulled up next to several drivers to ask how Zatara was. Zatara is a permanent checkpoint between Huwwara and Haris, but there's an alternative road through Jama'iin village, which drivers take when the checkpoint line is too long or slow. The ride takes much longer, and is painfully bumpy and curvy. When our driver chose the detour, the woman next to me grimaced and took out some plastic bags, which she spent the ride vomiting into. I rubbed her back, not knowing what else to do, thinking about the short, straight, paved road that could have eased her suffering if it were not rendered so endless for non-Jews.

The taxi eventually dropped us off near the Haris bus stop, which soldiers have surrounded with large concrete cubes leftover from the roadblock that used to block our village. The blocks mean that waiting Palestinians cannot easily get from the sheltered bus stop to the road, so at least one traveler must wait always wait on the road to spot and flag down cars, even when it's raining. Each time I'm forced to drench my backpack and jeans waiting to start a day's journey, I think about what Israel has to gain by making even a bus stop inaccessible without struggle, by rendering what could be a smooth drive home into a nauseating miserable ride. I think about why the roadblocks were set up to begin with outside Haris, when villagers either had to drive their cars to the entrance, park, walk around, and take a taxi the rest of the way to work or university, or they had to take their cars along a strenuous unpaved detour through the countryside to reach the same outside road. What's the point of making life so frustrating that people reconsider even going to work or school? What happens when daily life in Palestine becomes just too unbearable?

My questions are answered almost every day when strangers call or approach us desperate for help getting a visa to Europe or North America. They say they can't take it anymore: First Israel took their land, then their sons, and now their dignity. What Israel wants more than anything isn't to harm Palestinians; it wants for Palestinians to leave. Israel is the first to admit that the "demographic problem" of too many Palestinians in an exclusively Jewish state threatens Israel more than any suicide bomber ever could.

Addawiya told me she wanted to leave as we were walking back from her groves. I asked her where, and she told me it didnt matter--she wasn't going anywhere. "Because no country will give you a visa?" I asked, and she shook her head. "Because that's what they want us to do. They want us to flee as we did in 1948, so that the Jewish National Fund can again expropriate our land and reserve it for Jews only. But I won't leave. I will stay here because it's my right and it's my duty, to myself and to my children." For Addawiya, even staying in her village and working her land is nonviolent resistance, the kind almost every Palestinian partakes in. It's not the type of resistance that will make it onto headlines or the six o'clock news, but it is there, it is strong, and it is not going away.

In struggle,

Anna

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

War and Irony on Hebron Hilltops

2007-03-10T16:39:00.000+02:00

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

No matter how bad things get in the North West Bank, it's never as bad as in Hebron. I'm back in the ancient city exactly two years after my last visit (see my previous reports for an overall description of the situation and my first impressions: annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2005/03/from-jericho-to-hebron.html, annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2005/03/conversation-with-hamas-supporters.html), to participate in several solidarity actions, among them school patrol in Tel Rumeida. This small Palestinian neighborhood of Hebron is home to some of the most violent ideological settlers in the West Bank, who have moved into local homes by force and parade the streets with guns, terrorizing local residents including children on their way to and from school. Unlike most settlers in the West Bank who move to the Occupied Territories because the Israeli government encourages them to do so with financial subsidies and other programs, the settlers in Hebron are here because they believe the city of 150,000+ Palestinians belongs exclusively to the Jewish people.

Hebron's were the first settlements in the West Bank after Israel occupied the area in 1967, when the Old City's Palestinian population was around 7,500. Twenty-five years later, the population had shrunk by 80% to 1,500, a mass exodus provoked by Israeli settler and state violence and dispossession. The wealth left with the refugees; only the poorest residents remain, those with nowhere else to go. Their children dodge sticks and stones—from settler children (and their parents)—on their way to school every day as soldiers watch on indifferently; I and several other internationals accompanied the students to document and even shield the settler kids' attacks.

Today my station was on Shuhada St, which used to be a major Palestinian thoroughfare before settlers moved in down the road and blocked it to non-Jews. Cars drive frequently through the neighborhood but they are all yellow-plated (Israeli) or jeeps; Palestinians are not allowed to use cars in Tel Rumeida. They are banned from even walking on the main street, so they wind through a cemetery to get from their neighborhood to the city. More than 2,000 small businesses in the Old City and Tel Rumeida area have closed down, and the once thriving cultural and economic center is now a ghost town.

We watched the schoolchildren advance cautiously down the road where Israeli flags hung from street lamps and nearly every Palestinian home had a star of David spray-painted outside. Out of one house came Jamilya, whose mother was recently attacked by a settler girl who incited a mob to come rip the family's door off. Their windows are caged like all others on the street, to block stones; occasional cracks show where small rocks still get through. At the military station, Jamilya climbed a set of stairs to her right and then entered school via a narrow stone path that was just reconstructed for the third time. More kids came from the opposite direction on a dirt path, passing a Palestinian house with graffiti across the main gate: "Arabs to the Gas Chambers."

An Israeli friend Cesca showed a colleague and me around the olive groves between Tel Rumeida settlement and the school, where a few Palestinian families are still struggling to survive. Cesca introduced us to a shepherd named Abu Thalal, who welcomed us warmly into his home. He said he's grateful for Israeli allies like Cesca, and has even tried reaching out to the settlers who trespass on his land everyday. Abu Thelal said when a settler once asked him for a cigarette he didn't hesitate to hand one over, and even prepared tea for the two of them. Shortly after, Abu Thelal was shocked to see the same man and his children throwing stones at his home. He shrugged after he finished the story: "There are good Israelis and bad Israelis, just like there are good Palestinians and bad Palestinians. "

From Abu Thelal's home you can see the mosque and temple where Abraham was buried. The groves and ruins surrounding Abu Thelal's home are not just old; they look and feel biblical. Cesca said she once watched in horror as settlers set fire to one of the hills during the Jewish holiday Lag Ba'Omer. She said they burned Palestinian flags along with the ancient land.

Jewish holidays frequently translate into Palestinian suffering in the West Bank. This past week was Purim, so closure was imposed on the entire West Bank Palestinian population so that soldiers could go home to celebrate with their families. Extra help was needed patrolling today because it's Shabbat, when attacks are more frequent because settler children don't have school. Last week one settler child ran down the street flailing his arms and throwing stones at Palestinian in every direction. Soldiers prevented internationals from photographing saying, "It's ok, it's Purim. He's just drunk."

Soldiers also didn't intervene when settlers rioted in Hebron during Sukkot holiday a few years ago. According to the Alternative Information Center (AIC), "during a big march of settlers, participants started attacking Palestinian homes close to the Tel Rumeida settlement. The house of Palestinian Hana'a Abu Haykal was stoned and windows were smashed in three apartments, and settlers also injured Jameel Abu Haykal, aged 12, in his shoulder. Hana'a said the assault happened during the daytime as soldiers stood by without trying to stop the assaults, while the Palestinians were confined to the house because of curfew."

I met the Abu Haykal family, who live literally next door to a military outpost on one side, and Tel Rumeida settlement on the other. Their windows are caged, much of their land has been declared a "closed military zone" (although settlers frequently trespass it without consequence) , and they removed the staircase to the roof so that soldiers would stop coming to use it for surveillance. Settlers have done everything they can to scare away the family so they can move into the large well-situated house, but the family just won't give up.

The Abu Haykals have 11 children. The youngest, a bubbly 17-year-old girl, met us at the door and welcomed us in for tea. When we asked about school, she explained that all 10 of her older brothers and sisters are engineers, but she wants to study psychology. We met five of her siblings, but most of the others are studying or working abroad. One of the sisters at home offered to teach us a relaxation technique she's been working on. One brother discovered that he was born just ten hours after I was. I told him when I was his age I was eating breakfast, and he thought that was funny.

The Abu Haykals have lived in their home since the neighborhood was Jewish, before Zionism and the Hebron Massacre of 1929 (again, see previous Hebron update for elaboration) . Settlers claim they are reclaiming Jewish territory, yet the families who left have issued joint statements demanding that the settlers leave and stop all violence against their former neighbors.

Many Jewish Israelis like Cesca have spoken out against settler violence in Hebron. Many of them came with us today on a joint action to rebuild destroyed houses in the South Hebron hills. Across the South West Bank there are dozens of tiny villages where Palestinians live in caves, tents, and small stone houses surrounded by rolling hills where they graze their sheep every day. Many years ago, fundamentalist Jews began settling hilltops all over the area, and frequently harass or even physically attack the shepherds on their land and in their villages. Settlers from the illegal outposts have poisoned village water sources with dead chickens and dirty diapers, and cemented over cave entrances. They run down the hills into villages wearing masks and carrying baseball bats or large guns. (There's a telling image from Purim two years ago up at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3735.shtml; click on "Click here.")

To add insult to injury, the Israeli Army has been demolishing Palestinian structures across the region, most of them homes and bathroom facilities. The pretext is that the shepherds didn't secure building permits from Israel before building the rooms and outhouses on their own land. Building permits are expensive (up to $20,000), and generally refused to Palestinians. In contrast, they are readily available to Jews who want to build homes, even on land that does not belong to them. The caravans of violent settlers who have snuck onto Hebron hilltops, surrounding the rural families, are meanwhile encouraged to flourish with subsidies, infrastructure, and protection from the Israeli state, even though they are illegal according to international and Israeli law.

Hundreds of rural Palestinians' homes and caves have been bulldozed, and many families have fled in an exodus that can only be described as ethnic cleansing. Still, several villages remain, despite tremendous obstacles, refusing to leave their ancestral land. One such village is Qawawis, where I spent the day rebuilding homes that the Army recently demolished. Organized by Ta'ayush, a joint Jewish-Palestinian human rights group from Israel, dozens of Israelis, internationals, and Palestinians came together to build foundations, stone walls, and rooftops for the four rural families of Qawawis and other nearby villages. We mixed cement, formed assembly lines, and broke bread together throughout the beautiful exhausting day. When we were finished I headed back to Hebron.

Re-entering Tel Rumeida, soldiers searched my bag and person for weapons. Beyond the checkpoint I could see settler children and their parents carrying M16s home from synagogue. I reflected on the irony of being checked to enter a street where armed fundamentalists known for violence are granted virtual impunity.

One soldier clarified the dynamic for me. He explained, "I'm Jewish, so I have to protect the Jewish people." I told him I was Jewish too, but that security could only come from protecting everyone's rights. His eyes lit up when I said I was Jewish:

"So this is your land too! Don't you know we are the children of Abraham?"

I told him we'd have to agree to disagree on that one. The exchange reminded me that many of the soldiers patrolling Hebron are settlers themselves. Many of the guns used to terrorize Tel Rumeida Palestinians are from the Israeli Army, purchased from American weapons manufacturers with my own tax dollars.

It is always tempting to blame Israel's sins on fundamentalist Jews that most Israelis don't agree with anyway. But the reality is that Jewish-only settlements and outposts could not be established or maintained in the West Bank without Israel's political, financial, and military support. The Israeli government, whose job it is to enforce the law, instead enjoys a functional symbiotic relationship with the ideological settlers. Both have a strong interest in controlling as much West Bank land as possible, with as few Palestinians on it as possible. As the Alternative Information Center puts it, "the core issue is Israel's tacit cooperation with the fundamentalist settlers for its own colonial goals: 1. To exploit resources…[,] 2. To expand Zionist control… [and] 3. To realize military and strategic advantages…" AIC cites four main methods employed by Israel for land confiscation in the Occupied Territories: "the seizure of land for military needs, the designation of land as `state land,' the definition of land as `absentee property,' and expropriation of land for `public needs.' All these methods serve a single purpose: the transfer of land from Palestinian to Israeli ownership."

This trend of cooperation has been true for administrations of both major Israeli parties. As the foreign minister under Yitzhak Rabin's first government, Yigal Allon of the "left-wing" Labor party offered substantial political support to settlements in the east Hebron area, trying to prevent Palestinian development in sections of the West Bank that were to be incorporated by Israeli according to the Allon Plan. Having too many Palestinians on certain coveted sections of the West Bank could threaten the "Jewish character" of Israel when they were eventually annexed.

Of course, Hebron's radical settlers have generally been allied with the right-wing Likud, which along with Labor has facilitated the settler strategies of establishing facts on the ground and attacking Palestinian residents. Israel has stationed 4,000 of its soldiers at checkpoints and military outposts throughout the city of 150,000 in order to protect the 500 settlers. Palestinians are closely monitored while soldiers frequently fail to intervene in settler attacks against Palestinian civilians. In addition, the Army often imposes curfew following settler attacks so that the settlers won't fear retaliation. Curfew only applies to Palestinians. Their Jewish neighbors, who often perpetrated the crimes prompting the curfew, are free to wander through the Palestinians' streets and land.

If Palestinians manage to leave their homes and wish to register complaints at the police station, they have been prevented from entering by soldiers and police, who commonly dismiss charges directed towards settlers. In fact, settlers in Hebron are subject to a different legal system altogether from their Palestinian neighbors. Jewish settlers are subject to Israeli law, while Palestinians are subject to military law. Therefore, they have different rights and face different legal consequences for the same crime. In every scenario, the Israeli penal code is more lenient. Settlers—if tried at all, a rare occasion—frequently enjoy even lighter sentences than usual. For example, a settlement leader Rabbi Levinger spent just ten weeks in jail for killing an unarmed Palestinian merchant, while a Palestinian convicted of manslaughter could face life in prison. According to AIC, "Israel is violating the principle of equality before the law by creating a situation in which ethnic identity determines the applicable legal system."

Tonight around the dinner table, internationals who had stayed in Tel Rumeida throughout the Sabbath while we were in Qawawis discussed which incidents of the day to include in a report. Volunteers didn't think it was worth mentioning that settlers had spit at Palestinians and trespassed on Abu Haykal's land, because such incidents are so common. They did report on the group of settler kids that attacked four 7 to 8-year-old boys who were leaving school with sticks and stones, while border police prevented internationals from intervening.

As we spoke, I kept thinking about Nablus. Jewish fundamentalists once tried to set up camp in Nablus city but they were driven out by the city's armed resistance. It was one of the few victories of the Second Intifada. What would have happened if the people of Hebron had taken up arms back in 1967 when the settlers arrived? Nablus fighters are called terrorists, and Hebron's would surely be as well. Still, knowing now what wasn't known then, could we really blame them? These were the thoughts swirling through my head tonight as I prepared to return to my relatively peaceful existence in Haris.

Thanks for reading,

Anna

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Nablus Invasion III: Resistance, Hypocrisy, and Dead Men Walking

2007-03-08T18:07:00.000+02:00

"The decisions and opinions of the writer do not necessarily reflect those of the International Women's Peace Service."

[For Anna's eyewitness photos from the invasion, click here.]

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

What most struck me about the Nablus invasion wasn't the killing of unarmed civilians. It wasn't the obstructions of medical workers and ambulances, or the indiscriminate detention of males, or the occupied houses and curfews. What I will remember for the rest of my life is the steadfast resistance of the people of Nablus.

I came to Palestine to document and intervene in human rights abuses and to support nonviolent resistance to the Occupation. As I delivered bread and medicine with medical relief workers throughout the invasion, I wondered if I was really fulfilling my mission. Wasn't handing out aid simply accommodating and enabling the curfew?

An experienced Israeli solidarity organizer named Neta Golan eventually clarified things for me. She explained, "It's very good to distribute bread and medicine to needy people, but the real power and purpose of what you are doing is something else: First and foremost, you are supporting Palestinians who are breaking curfew. That is nonviolent resistance. And as you move around in spite of the Army's indiscriminate imposition of house arrest, you empower others to do so as well. If the Army knows there are dozens or even hundreds of civilians in the streets, and that several of them are internationals, they cannot shoot anything that moves, which they have done during curfews in the past."

Neta was right. Simply being outside was a powerful form of nonviolent resistance. But the Palestinians didn't need much empowering—from the first day of the invasion, I saw various civilians on the streets and in cars driving through the city, defying the Army simply by trying to carry on some semblance of daily life.

Some Palestinians went a step further in defiance. Once when the Army stopped me and Firas from UPMRC from entering part of the Old City with bread, Firas waited ten minutes and then said, "Anna, come with me." He grabbed as many bags as he could carry, and began walking past the jeeps. I grabbed twelve pounds of bread and scrambled after him past the soldiers, who had come out of their jeeps and were yelling, "Hey! Stop! What are you doing? We said you can't enter!" Firas kept walking steadily and I turned around to the soldiers. "We're delivering bread to hungry people. What are you going to do, shoot us?" They were speechless and held their fire.

As we walked away, Firas smiled at me and said, "Next time it will be easier." Indeed, when we returned with more bread, the soldiers told us we could go this time but only for five minutes. "Sure," we said and kept walking, knowing the 18-year-olds were trying to salvage some power in the situation.

Resistance was creative and ubiquitous: When speaking English loudly to remind soldiers that internationals were around became tedious and forced, one Palestinian girl suggested that we sing her favorite song, "I Will Always Love You," by Whitney Houston. So we sang together as we came around corners to soldiers breaking into houses, annoyed at us for disturbing the silence of their invasions. I hoped that singing would be both non-threatening and humanizing in the eyes of the soldiers, while still achieving our objective. When the Army prevented medical workers and internationals from entering the Old City, they gathered posters and paint and put together an impromptu demonstration, documented by all the media who were also barred from the Old City. The protesters sat yelling cheers in front of an occupied hospital until jeeps gassed them.

The most powerful demonstration came a week later in honor of Women's Day. The Women's Union in Nablus organized a rally and march in conjunction with the Public Committee Against Closure, UPMRC, the Union of Health Committees, and other local groups, for the city of Nablus to reassert their power and rights after a week ofinvasions. Hundreds of Palestinians, mostly women, gathered and marched to Huwwara-the checkpoint enclosing the city from the South—carrying flags and pictures of sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers who are wanted or imprisoned, or have been killed by the Army. Hundreds of women held their ground as soldiers equipped with riot gear pushed the crowd back.

My colleague Nova recognized one of the pushing soldiers from the invasion because our interaction with him had left such an impression. On Wednesday during curfew we were accompanying a doctor on duty when the soldier forbade our group to pass. He explained, "That man is not a doctor. He's a killer." We were incredulous, and I prompted him to explain further. "An Arab killed my friend, and this man is an Arab." I replied, "I'm sorry to hear about your friend, but that doesn't mean that all Arabs are killers." He was unmoved. He was also not alone. The soldier holding Firas and me back had also shamelessly pronounced his wrath for Arabs. Certainly there are racists everywhere in the world, but it's particularly striking to listen to such hatred from a teenager who has been handed an M16 and near impunity in the land of the people he despises.

Of course, most of the soldier didn't volunteer such remarks and probably considered themselves charitable to the Palestinians, given the circumstances. One soldier who detained us for half an hour bragged about all the food and medicine he'd allowed through. He couldn't understand what the Palestinians were still complaining about. I asked him where he was from.

"Tel Aviv."

"So if armed Palestinians invaded Tel Aviv, shut the entire population in their homes, and allowed aid workers to bring around food and medicine, you wouldn't complain?"

He said that was different. I asked how. He changed the subject. I asked him how long he was going to punish my colleague and me by detaining us on the street. He said he wasn't punishing us, that we just had to wait a little while, which was normal. I asked:

"So if armed Palestinians stopped you outside your house, demanded your ID, and prevented you from going to work, you would consider that normal?" He changed the subject again.

The Occupation and invasions have been happening for so long that soldiers forget they are illegal occupiers with no legitimate authority in the area. It's as if the Mafia took over New York City; it may be beneficial to obey at certain times, but it's certainly not the law. The Occupation itself is illegal according to international law. But even according to agreements signed by Israel, Nablus is in Area A, the 12-17% of the West Bank where Israelis are forbidden according to Oslo II. This is the same Oslo II that is among the agreements Israel and the rest of the world are demanding that Hamas recognize in order for the Palestinian population to regain the lifeline of economic support that was pulled a year ago.

It's always illuminating to switch the pronouns around. Israel arms teenagers and sends them into Palestinian cities, where they consistently kill unarmed civilians. What happens when Palestinian armed teenagers enter an Israeli city? Israel violates Oslo II every day, but the Palestinian government will not be recognized or returned its own tax dollars until it fully accepts the same agreement. (The agreement, by the way, falls vastly short of international law and full human rights for Palestinians.) Israel is justified in planning major offensives against Palestinian fighters. What about attacks against Israeli fighters, the soldiers themselves? It's worth notingthat the soldiers are the very targets of the wanted men, not Israeli civilians. Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade plans attacks exclusively against armed fighters illegally occupying and confiscating their—Palestinian— land. It would seem the hunter and hunted in Nablus are guilty of the same crime: attacking the enemy's soldiers. Except that armed struggle against illegal occupation forces is actually protected under international law, whereas Israel's occupation is not.

I met some of the hunted the day before I left Nablus, including a leader of Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, whom I'll call Moussa. An acquaintance led a colleague and me to where a group of them were sitting and drinking juice in the Old City. They welcomed us and brought us sweet coffee. Moussa was a soft-spoken man not much older than forty, while most of the other wanted men were mere teenagers, curious and excited to meet foreigners. Moussa raised his voice just once during our conversation, to yell at one of the boys for trying to take my picture on his cell phone. He said it could be extremely dangerous for soldiers to find evidence of our meeting if/when the men were caught or killed, and refused my business card for the same reason.

After some time, I asked Moussa if he had a message to the people of America. He thanked me for the opportunity and began to speak:

"I am from the Palestinian armed resistance to the Occupation. I am opposed to violence against any civilians, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, Muslim or Jewish. I hate fighting, but when soldiers invade our homes, our land, and our lives, it is our duty to resist them, to resist the theft of our water, our self determination, and our dignity. We are human just like you. We want to live, to have families, a normal life. But if we must fight to our death to protect what is ours, our land, the future of our children, we are ready to do so.

"I invite you to look at maps and statistics of this conflict over time. I lament the killing of innocent people on both sides, but the tremendous disproportion of land and water rights, civil liberties, and civilian casualties on the two sides is undeniable. The international community calls us terrorists, but we would welcome any objective international presence to bear witness to what is happening here and come to their own conclusions. Is beating unarmed children, medical workers, and even internationals not terror? Is taking advantage of lulls in violence—when the press isn't watching—to accelerate expansion of settlements in land and water rich areas not a crime?

"Palestinians have coexisted harmoniously with Jews in the past, and we are ready to do so again. After all, Jews are our brothers and sisters, people of faith just like us. As our party Fatah has said many times before, we are ready to live in peace with Israel if there can be a just and viable resolution to the issues of borders, distribution of water, settlements, Jerusalem, and the refugees. These are our conditions, and they are also our rights."

Moussa is a dead man walking, but he will continue to resist as long as he can, as will all the people of Nablus in their own ways. I relay Moussa's message not to defend violence, but because I believe his perspective has a right be heard. Different sides of any conflict deserve to have a voice, but the mainstream media is unlikely to pick up Moussa's speech, just as they haven't picked up anything but the most sensationalistic aspects of the invasion. They haven't mentioned the way beautiful old houses were destroyed by soldiers looking for nonexistent tunnels. They haven't mentioned the walls of the Old City broken down by Israeli hummers too wide to fit down the narrow streets, and the water pipes along the walls that were busted and sprayed throughout the curfew, costing the city tons of its precious clean water supply. They haven't mentioned the 400-year-old Turkish baths that soldiers used as a military base between operations, and then destroyed from top to bottom. Several families were dependent on the cultural jewel, which we found in ruins, playing cards all over the floor left by soldiers next to the benches where they would have slept.

The media haven't mentioned the house burned from the inside, or the families of wanted men who were beaten and detained, or the 15-year-old boy shot in the wrist with a rubber bullet while he was out buying bread for his family. They haven't mentioned the way the jeeps returned every night, even after Israel announced that the operation was over. I would like to tell you about each of them in detail, but to be honest, with every passing hour there are new tragedies to report and attend to. I also know that this report is already longer than most busy Americans will have time in their daily lives to read. If you did make it this far, thank you, and until the world stops silencing Palestinian tragedies and voices, please help me let these stories be heard.

In solidarity,

Anna

[For Anna's eyewitness photos from the invasion, click here.]

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

"The decisions and opinions of the writer do not necessarily reflect those of the International Women's Peace Service."

Nablus Invasion II: Human Shields and Medical Obstruction

2007-03-07T16:10:00.000+02:00

[For Anna's eyewitness photos from the invasion, click here.]

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Most of the jeeps pulled out late Monday night, but we all knew they would be back. Israeli officials announced that the operation was not over, as they had not yet achieved their objectives. Typically the Army will withdraw for a several hours or a whole day, hoping the wanted men will move around and be spotted by a collaborator working with Israel, and then the Army can pounce. Soldiers also remained in occupied houses, where they typically set up hidden sniper nests.

Nevertheless, the withdrawal gave the city a chance to move and relax a bit before the next strike. We took the chance to document the destruction and take reports from victims and their families. Our first stop was Al Watani Hospital, one of many that had been surrounded during the invasion. According to the director, soldiers set up a checkpoint for everyone coming into or out of the hospital, and questioned several patients after checking them. He worried about the psychological and physical effects of even mild interrogation on patients already fragile with sickness.

In the hospital we met family members of Ghareb Selhab, a man in critical conditionsince the day before. According to his son, Ghareb was in the bathroom whenhis home began to fill with tear gas. He gasped to his wife that he could not breathe, and went into cardiac arrest. The family immediately called for help, but soldiers prevented the ambulance from reaching Ghareb's home for over an hour. By that time Ghareb had stopped breathing and fallen into a deep coma. By the time the reached the hospital, he had no pulse, and it was too late. Doctors hooked him up to a breathing machine, and five days later (last Sunday) the family decided to pull the plug. He was 47 years old, the father of seven.

Normally UPMRC volunteers serve as a backup if ambulances can't get through, but as luck would have it, while Ghareb was breathing his last independent breath, soldiers were raiding the UPMRC. Soldiers came into the clinic with dogs and herded all the doctors and internationals into one room while they searched the building. My colleagues Nova and Yara overheard someone being beaten next door. The raid was just one of many incidents of the Army detaining medical relief workers. We interviewed our friend Alaa, who was detained while making rounds with a doctor on Monday. Alaa was handcuffed in a jeep for seven hours, scolded when his hands shook (he has a weak pulse condition), and hit anytime he raised his head. He was released five miles south of the city at midnight, but back delivering medicine with UPMRC on Wednesday after the soldiers reinvaded and curfew was imposed again.

The second invasion seemed heavier than the first, with even more soldiers and jeeps around every corner. More and more families were going incommunicado, which we understood to mean their homes were being occupied. Sometimes people would call for help, but when we arrived nobody would answer. Neighbors were sure that the families hadn't left, so we would yell to the soldiers that we knew they were there and just wanted to deliver medicine. After some insisting sometimes they'd answer; sometimes not.

Once we were made to wait forty minutes outside one occupied home. As we waited, soldiers escorted detained men in and out, including one group of at least ten medical volunteers from the Red Crescent and UPMRC. After half an hour they let the medical relief workers go on the condition that seven would leave the area and the other three would stop doing distributing medicine.

Sometimes the detainment was unofficial. Soldiers demanded at gunpoint the IDs of the four volunteers we were accompanying, and then refused to give them back for a full hour. Because it's extremely dangerous to be caught breaking curfew without an ID, we were forced to wait instead of delivering insulin to a diabetic who was waiting. The soldiers claimed they were checking the IDs, but spent the hour chatting, eating lunch, and taking pictures of us waiting.

There were so many stories that I stopped writing them down. But one that stuck with me came from Nova and Yara, who were delivering bread and medicine with three friends from UPMRC when soldiers called them from far away to approach their jeep. One by one, our friends were ordered to open their jackets, pull their pants down, turn around, and put their hands up against the wall. Nova and Yara averted their eyes with shame as the men were forced to strip in front of them. The soldiers let them go afterwards, but we have scarcely seen our friends since—I can only imagine their embarrassment, in a culture where modesty and gender boundaries are so important.

Something about humiliation is worse that physical punishment. I've heard stories of young women detained, photographed naked, and threatened that if they don't collaborate with the Army (as spies), their pictures will be distributed, shaming them and their families beyond repair. This can be more effective that bribery and even torture. It's interesting how many of the detainees are young people, sometimes not more than 13 years old, who say they aren't questioned about the wanted men at all. Instead, soldiers use various techniques to encourage them to collaborate.

It's strategic to target the young and weak. We took one report from an 11-year-old girl named Jihan, taken from her home to serve as a human shield after her father and older sister proved too strong-willed to cooperate. The Army came for her at at night and made her walk in front of ten armed soldiers as they went from house to house in the Old City. When she protested they threatened to arrest her.

Jihan was not the only young human shield used this week. One family told us how the soldiers invaded by breaking a hole through their wall, herding 27 family members into one room, and taking two kids to open doors in front of them as they raided the rest of the neighborhood. After six hours, the women and older men were released while the human shields and all other men were handcuffed and taken away. One of the men, Abdallah, gave us his testimony:

"We were five in total, ages 17 to 30. They led us away from our home via the hole that they'd made in our wall. It was hard to climb through the hole without the use of our hands. Then we had to walk up the steep and rocky hill behind our house, which was also very difficult with our hands behind our back.

"The soldiers brought us to a home in the Raas Al Ain quarter. We were not allowed to use the toilet at all for the next ten hours, but my need was very urgent during most of that time. After the first couple hours, we asked when our hands would be untied—we were having pain in our shoulders, especially my brother who is overweight so he cannot remain so long with his hands stretched behind. A soldier came behind us and instead of opening our hands he tied the handcuffs tighter as punishment for asking. It was very painful for us. Soon I could not feel my hands and I asked another soldier if he would loosen the cuffs. He said we would be released soon.

"Instead, we were taken into jeeps, blindfolded, and driven to Huwwara military base south of Nablus. The Muhabarat (Israeli Intelligence) were waiting there and when we arrived they took off our blindfolds, looked at our IDs, checked them, and asked a few questions: What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do? We answered their questions in two minutes, and then they put the blindfolds back on for six more hours. You cannot know the feeling of being detained, handcuffed, and blindfolded for 17 hours. Try closing your eyes and tying your hands for just one hour—it will feel like an eternity, and you will begin to feel you are losing your mind.

"Between 9pm and 3am they led us around to different jeeps. We kept tripping because we could not see anything or use our hands. At 3am they took off our blinds and handcuffs, gave us a paper saying in Hebrew that we'd been at Huwwara, and told us we could go. We could not understand the logic of detaining and handcuffing us for more than ten hours without food, water, or access to a toilet just to ask us a couple silly questions that they probably already know the answers to.

"Because of the curfew there was no transportation so we had to walk the eight kilometers (five miles) back to Nablus. Actually, we ran part of the way because we were scared—there are many dogs on the road, plus we were afraid of being caught in clashes between Palestinians and the Army. We arrived at home almost two hours later, around 5am."

The soldiers returned twice more to Abdallah's house during the invasions, and they will probably be back. The third time they destroyed many things in the house, turning over furniture and breaking glasses and windows. As illustrated by Abdallah's story, it's not clear whether the raids and detainment are as much about getting information as general harassment, or at best disregard for residents' rights.

We documented another raid at one student dormitory of Al Najaa University, where soldiers arrived at 4:15am, threw sound bombs and demanded that everyone evacuate or the building would be destroyed on top of them. Students and family residents fled out in their pajamas and were brought to the basement of a nearby building. Women and children were kept in one room, while all the men—as young as fourteen—were handcuffed and sat in another room. For the next six hours, the thirty men were forbidden to speak, open a window for fresh air, or even lean against a wall to sleep.

When the soldiers left after 10am (without untying the men's strong plastic handcuffs—neighbors came to help free them), the students and families returned to find their homes in shambles. Each flat had been raided: soldiers had used bombs to blast open doors, windows were shattered, light fixtures were dangling from their sockets, and the elevator had been blown apart. Bedrooms were turned upside-down, textbooks and assignments strewn across the floor, pictures and pop-star posters ripped from the walls. Like every other raid throughout the invasion, none of the wanted people were found in the building. But how many more fighters were created?

I apologize if these reports of detention, raids, human shields, and the obstruction of medical treatment seem repetitive. I tell them not only because I believe they each deserve to be heard, but more crucially because with enough reports the seemingly arbitrary harassment can no longer be dismissed as isolated incidents or simply unfortunate side effects of conflict, but must be recognized as unspoken policies of the Israeli Army. If the intention is security for Israeli citizens, these policies are not only ineffective but counter-productive in my opinion. If the intention is to scare the people of Nablus, then this is terrorism and should be recognized and condemned as such.

In struggle,

Anna

[For Anna's eyewitness photos from the invasion, click here.]

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Nablus Invasion I: Occupied Homes and Minds

2007-03-06T19:00:00.000+02:00

[For Anna's eyewitness photos from the invasion, click here.]

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

Dear friends,

I don't know where to begin. It would make sense to start at the beginning, but the beginning was ages ago, long before I arrived. Nor is there any end in sight. I was plopped into life in Nablus for one short week and I'm not sure if I'll ever recover. And as I write from a place of safety, the people of Nablus continue to struggle, not just with the nightly incursions, bombings, and assassinations, but also simply to remember their own humanity in spite of the most inhumane treatment. I'm trying to rediscover my own, to revive the parts of me now polluted with anger, or worse—shut off, as if a part of me is dead. And I was there for just one week.

We arrived on Sunday to help volunteers from the UPMRC (Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees) deliver food and medical services. Dozens of jeeps and hundreds of soldiers had surrounded the Old City and declared curfew on all of Nablus. Their stated mission was to capture or assassinate eight fighters from Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah movement. Meanwhile, the 40,000 residents of Nablus Old City were trapped in their homes, inside a war zone, unable to go to work or school, or even to buy food for their families.

According to many families, this invasion posed a greater threat than those of the past because it was coming on top of an already desperate economic situation caused by the US-led embargo after the Hamas elections. Whereas in the past residents wouldstock up on food and supplies in case of an invasion, these days people hardly have enough to meet their current needs. People are working to buy bread for that very day, so the invasion was not only leaving them out of food, but preventing them from going out to make the money they needed to buy more.

The Medical Relief volunteers led us into the Old City. Families called to us from windows above the twisted cobbled streets: "We have no more food!"; "My baby needs milk!"; "My mother has diabetes and is out of insulin!" As we rounded each corner, we would call, "Internationals! Medical Relief!" knowing soldiers were less likely to shoot foreigners breaking curfew than others. Sometimes around the corner we came face to face with soldiers, their guns pointed at us, jumpy and angry: "GO BACK!" "PUT AWAY YOUR CAMERA!" Often they were holding back large muzzled dogs. My heart was beating and knees shaking so fast I was sure I would collapse, but we followed the Medical Relief volunteers' lead. They were not interested in challenging the soldiers' actions and authority, just in getting treatment and food to people who needed it. I recognized that this is one major difference between direct action solidarity work and humanitarian aid.

Sometimes the soldiers allowed the doctor and medical volunteers through. Often they didn't. As night fell and soldiers refused our passage to the hospital, we decided to call it a day and hoped we'd have more luck in the morning. As we were making our last bread delivery, eight soldiers walked by our group with one Palestinian. The man spoke quietly as he passed us, and the medical volunteers immediately relayed to us the message he had given them: "I am being used as a human shield."

Using civilians as human shields is a serious violation of international law, and we immediately called B'tselem (the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) and Machsom Watch (Israeli Women who monitor checkpoints but also have a good knowledge of Israeli Law) to file reports and hopefully help free the man. One Israeli contact explained that the practice is so common that we probably couldn't stop it before the man would be replaced with another, and another after that. We wanted to check with the man's family to see if there was anything else we could do, but the Army had blocked off their whole neighborhood.

It was with an intense feeling of helplessness that we checked into the Crystal Hotel that night, bombs exploding in the Old City nearby under a heavy rainstorm. We slept soundly and were woken at 6am by the jeeps again declaring curfew over loudspeakers through the streets. We met the medical workers and began making rounds again. Many families needed bread. One child had a broken arm and needed treatment. Occasionally while we were visiting families, soldiers would barge in with dogs, herd everyone into one room, and search the rest of the house. I would try to amuse the children to distract them, or maybe to distract myself. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have my home raided, my possessions destroyed and made a prisoner in my own home. Most raids ended quickly but some homes were occupied for days on end. We couldn't get to those dozens of families, but heard stories from neighbors and medical workers:

The Dilal family's home was occupied, and twenty people had been stuffed in one room for almost 48 hours. Among them were two elderly people with heart problems, one pregnant woman, and eight small children. The rest of their home had been transformed into a military base where soldiers could rest and meet between operations.

The Awad family was also confined to one room of their home while soldiers took over the rest of the house. One floor was reportedly transformed into an intelligence center, another into a prison, and the basement into a makeshift interrogation center. We had already begun to hear stories from young men returning from interrogation—affectionately referred to as "Hell" in Arabic—while others went missing. In alleys we would find men handcuffed and blindfolded, being led into jeeps while soldiers aimed their guns in our direction as an unspoken warning against speaking or photographing. I kept my camera hidden, knowing that one Reuters cameraman had already had his film taken at gunpoint.

UPMRC volunteers were also starting to disappear, including one man we'd delivered bread with a few hours before, named Alaa. I'd last seen him while I was carrying one of two sick children from the clinic back to their home, since their parents could not come get them. After we'd delivered the kids and were walking away, we heard shooting from close behind us, just beyond the children's house. Within minutes, we learned that an unarmed man had been shot dead on his roof, and his unarmed 20-year-old son Ashraf's elbow had been blown off by a dumdum bullet. Soldiers entered the house and detained young Ashraf, who was in shock. When Dr. Ghassan (from UPMRC) and Alaa (a volunteer) attempted to enter the home to bring the father's body down to an ambulance, soldiers detained them both. They held thedoctor for several hours and then let him go. They kept Alaa in custody, saying he "looked suspicious."

Alaa and Ashraf were eventually released and we took their reports the next day. Ashraf was in the hospital, surrounded by friends and family. The mood was somber, but he agreed to tell us his story:

"On Monday around noon, my dad went up to the roof to check on the water, which was not working. I sensed some movement outside and through the window I saw soldiers. I ran upstairs to warn my dad that the Army was near, and as I spoke the words a dumdum bullet hit my right elbow, shattering it. My dad ran towards me to save me. When he looked back towards where the bullet had come from, he was shot by a sniper in the neck, and then in the head.

"I called for help and tried to give my dad CPR. When the ambulance arrived, it was surrounded by jeeps on all sides and prevented from reaching our home. The soldiers took me into one of their jeeps while my father was still bleeding seriously. They held me for an hour and a half before taking me to an ambulance. One soldier bragged that he was the one who shot me and my dad, and followed me to the ambulance in a jeep by himself. My family told me afterwards that after the soldiers made sure of my dad's death, they allowed the medical workers to carry him down."

Ashraf pointed to a smiling picture of his father that hung on the wall opposite his hospital bed. I asked our translator how Ashraf knew CPR, and he explained that Ashraf volunteers as an Emergency Medical Volunteer, and is the type of person who risks his own life to save others. We asked Ashraf if he had a message to the American people. His response: "We are not terrorists—the soldiers will not find what they're looking for here. We are civilians, and we want to be left alone so that we may live."

There was a great deal of misinformation surrounding Ashraf's story in the mainstream media. Some news sources claimed he and his father were armed; others said they were walking around, breaking curfew. I visited the roof, I saw the bloodstains, I spoke to the medical volunteers who evacuated them... I invite you to view Ashraf's interview yourself (with subtitles!—should be up in a few days), along with other excellent footage available now of the events described above at: www.ResearchJournalismInitiative.net/mediaarchive.htm. I also did two more interviews on KPFA (Thursday March 1st & today, Tuesday March 6th), which you can listen to online: http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=9. It is so crucial to get these stories out and I'm grateful for any help from you, especially as the media seems to have moved on from the story. This is just the first of several reports by me on the Nablus invasions; Alaa's and others' stories are still to come.

Thanks for reading,

Anna

[For Anna's eyewitness photos from the invasion, click here.]

[For this report with photographs, see publication on Electronic Intifada: click here.]

A Breath of Relief Before the Next Strike

2007-02-27T20:32:00.000+02:00

Hello from an Internet Cafe in Nablus...

Most of the Army withdrew from Nablus last night around 12:30am, and we've spent the day documenting the invasion's destruction and taking reports from victims and their families. The Army has announced that their operation is not over, so locals are bracing themselves for the next invasion, meanwhile trying to salvage some kind of normalcy to their daily lives. Today children went to school, and people rushed about, not exactly shell-shocked since it's not the first time they've been collectively imprisoned. Just another day in Occupied Palestine.

I and a few other internationals are staying in the city to continue
to take reports and be present when the soldiers return.

I will be on KPFA Flashpoints again today (interview archived online here: http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=18916).

In struggle,
Anna

Nablus Occupation and Interview Information from Anna

2007-02-26T23:00:00.000+02:00

Dear friends,

This is predominantly a message from Anna. It was related to me over the phone this afternoon. Anna has been in Nablus since Sunday, and has no access to a computer, but she asked me to relay this information to the members of her group.

Anna was interviewed recently for the show "Flashpoints" on KPFA radio in Berkeley. The broadcast will be at the top of the 5 o'clock (pacific time) hour today. You can go to the website www.flashpoints.net to listen or find local affiliates. [NOTE: this interview has already aired but is archived online at: http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=18897, starting 10 minutes and 34 seconds into the program.]

The city of Nablus has been under siege by the Israeli military for over two days now. Over 80 military vehicles and the Israeli troops accompanying them have imposed a complete day and nighttime curfew on the residents. The city of Nablus was already the subject of a disastrous U.S. led international embargo which has exacerbated the effects of the curfew. The people, who otherwise might have been a little more prepared to be stuck in their homes for days on end, are suffering in what Anna called an impending humanitarian crisis.

Anna is in the company of and working with other internationals delivering bread, milk, and medical supplies, and trying to attend to sick people. She has primarily been accompanying the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.

Anna estimates that at least 25 homes have been completely overtaken by the Israeli military, and they are using them for military bases, prisons, and interrogation centers.

Anna reports that she has witnessed the Israeli military:

-- beat Palestinian civilians
-- employ humiliation tactics
-- handcuff and arrest civilians
-- use Palestinians as human shields

Anna also observed at least 8 people in need of insulin who are unable to receive treatment. She told me the story of one man critically wounded by a tear gas bomb in his own house. His family also suffered, but the man's asthma significantly worsened his condition. He is still in need of medical attention.

Anna was encouraged when I told her that I had read about the siege in an Associated Press article, and online from one of Israel's newspapers, Haaretz. From those articles and speaking with Anna, I understand that one unarmed Palestinian man was fatally shot.

Anna stressed to me that innocent civilians breaking the curfew imposed by the Israeli military is an inspirational example of nonviolent resistance employed by the Palestinians. By simply walking down the streets of their own city in the daylight, they are fighting oppression without violence.

Sincerely,
Joshua Nardie

Water Hosing in Bil'in (Watch Interview Today!) and Invasion in Nablus

2007-02-25T15:21:00.000+02:00

Dear friends,

Sorry for my silence--things have been pretty chaotic. The Army has
just invaded Nablus, declared curfew, and occupied hospitals,
several houses, and all TV stations. Because they've taken control
of media outlets, no news can get out so we're leaving now to try to
get into the city to document the situation as best we can.

Media is still functioning in Ramallah and I just finished an hour-
long live interview on the Palestinian Satellite Channel, along with
Abdallah Abu Rahma from the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil'in, regarding the large demonstration there last Friday.

If you'd like to watch it yourself, it will replay again at 1am
Palestinian Time (Sunday 6pm EST, 3pm PST) on TV and their website:
http://www.pbc.net.ps.tvlive/
It's mostly in Arabic, with some translation help for me.

The demonstration in Bil'in included hundreds of internationals
among thousands of protesters, and received a great deal of
publicity. There were photographs of us in several Palestinian
newspapers yesterday, if you're interested:

(1) http://www.al-ayyam.ps/znews/site/pdf.aspx?Date=2/24/2007

-Click on Page 1 for a photo of a group of us being hosed while
doing a sit-in. You can't see me because of all the water. (Wasn't
hosing made illegal during the Civil Rights Movement?)
-Click on Page 2 to see us trying to keep a door between the village
and their land open.

(2) There's another article + the photo at:
http://www.alhayat-j.com/details.php?opt=2&id=40888&cid=713

IN ENGLISH:

(1) Several Israeli photographers have posted photos from the
demonstration up at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/activestills

(2) The International Solidarity Movement has an article in English
with photos: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/02/23/bilin-23-02-07/

I'll write about the demonstration and send more photos and links
when we get back from Nablus.

In struggle,
Anna

Planting Trees with "the Palestinian Gandhi"

2007-02-13T18:41:00.000+02:00

Two winters ago I attended a demonstration in the village of Bil'ain in protest of the Wall that Israel was building between the village and more than half of its land. It was the second Friday in a row that the community had come together to protest their collective imprisonment and dispossession. Now, two years later, the Wall around Bil'ain is complete. Yet the village continues, week after week, to come together to demonstrate in new and creative ways, in spite of the obstacles.

In two years of demonstrating, Bil'ain villagers have prayed on their land. They've constructed giant dioramas. They've marched with a giant paper-maché grey snake with a dove in its mouth to symbolize how the Wall is suffocating peace and the village. They've held a wedding on their "forbidden" land, and World Cup parties. They've invited drummers to give a beat to their marching for freedom. Bil'ain has dressed up like Abu Ghraib prisoners, and worn masks of Bush and Condi. They've spelled out their message with mosaics on their streets. They've resolved to build a hotel on their stolen land, where any person will be free to stay no matter what ethnicity or religion.

Bil'ain has paid a price for its determination. Villagers have withstood kidnappings, rubber bullets, sound bombs, tear gas, beatings, live ammunition, arrests, threats of deportation, arson, and more, yet they continue. When the Army declared overnight curfew on Bil'ain, villagers held a volleyball tournament from midnight to 3am between teams of Israelis, internationals, and Palestinians. When the Army declared internationals were forbidden from entering the village, they invited foreign musical groups to sing and dance on their land with them. When they lost their first court case, they filed another. When a nearby settlement continued expansion on Bil'ain land, villagers built their very own outpost!--a trailer resembling those used by ideological settlers to illegally squat Palestinian land, but this one open to internationals, Israelis, and villagers to affirm Palestinians' right to live on their land. They call it the "Center for Joint Struggle," and although the original was destroyed, another towed, and yet another burned, the villagers return each time to reassert their rights and build a new community home on their stolen groves.

I visited the Bil'ain outpost for the first time today. I arrived with a caravan of Israeli activists from Tel Aviv early in the morning, and was embarrassed to realize we had woken two villagers sleeping inside. One, named Ashraf, insisted he was already awake as he rubbed his eyes, and shuffled around to prepare tea and drag out mattresses for us to sit on under the olive trees. It was a beautiful day, and I admired the fort held together in part by sheets and tree trunks, and the organic garden they had created next to it. We chatted and munched on chocolate wafers as we waited for other villagers to arrive for the planned action. Ashraf was disappointed when his friend Yonatan--an Israeli vegan--declined each round of cookies, and squinted through the ingredients on everything in his snack stash desperate to find something without milk. Eventually the others arrived and we began walking towards the settlement of Modiin Elite.

I had forgotten how quickly settlements can grow. Modiin Elite is a large Jewish-only colony built on Bil'ain village land, home to more than 33,000 Israelis and about twice as many homes, according to an Israeli activist I drove through with. In spite of generous financial packages, the Israeli government has not succeeded in transferring as many Israeli families as they have made room for, yet construction continues aggressively.

Modiin Elite is also known as Kiryat Sefer, and its extensions are sometimes called Matityahu East or Green Park. According to my friend Kobi, an Israeli professor and activist, "Giving settlements different names are part of a general strategy of obstruction and disinformation by developers and the Civil Administration. Master plans are not available, construction is not announced, the planning laws are alternatively Ottoman, British, Jordanian, or Israeli, whichever suits the settlers' purposes at any particular moment. This makes it harder for opponents to know what they're up against and to monitor it." If the court rules something illegal for one settlement, they continue activity under a different name. For example, the court recently required developers to cease all activity in certain areas that the settlement annexed from Bil'ain, but as we drove in we saw cranes working away.

Bil'ain villagers have filed a number of lawsuits against Modiin Elite. Today's action was to plant olive trees on two fenced-in enclaves near the settlement that the court has finally determined do belong to Bil'ain villagers. Contractors have been required to remove all infrastructure and restore the land to its previous state. As expected, while digging holes--ostensibly for the trees--we uncovered all kinds of illegal activity. In the first enclave, we found water pipes, telephone lines, and remnants of an old concrete settler road. In the second enclave we found parts of a building foundation that had been simply covered up with mounds of dirt. As we dug, we were approached by settler security and eventually the contractor himself, who was visibly nervous. Half a dozen Israelis and internationals were extensively documenting his illegal work, and he's likely to get into a lot of trouble. After we finished planting, the Israelis scooted back under the fence to the settlement where they'd parked, and we began the walk back to Bil'ain, where we hoped to catch transport back to our home in the West Bank.

It was upsetting to see the completed Wall in Bil'ain, knowing all the village had done to try and prevent it, or at least change its path. Now it separates the villagers from their land, including the outpost and enclaves where we'd been. The soldiers holding the key to the gate met us along the way, and declared strictly that village residents could pass to Bil'ain, but nobody else. Abdallah, one of the villagers, explained in Hebrew that we are his friends and he was inviting us to his village. He did not ask for permission, he stated clearly that this was his and our right and that we had come in peace. Then he began walking forward and motioned for us to come along.

The soldiers didn't like that. They began yelling and formed a line to prevent us from passing. One soldier began to remove a tear gas canister from his belt. Convinced that the soldiers would not be moved, Abdallah sat down on the road in protest, and invited us to sit with him. He explained once again that there is no law against us passing, but made clear that we would not cause the soldiers any harm or use violence.

Abdallah is an active member of Bil'ain's Popular Committee Against the Wall. He's been called "the Palestinian Gandhi," and remains committed to nonviolent resistance, no matter how many times the Army beats or arrests him. He was calm and poised, and I could tell that the soldiers were not accustomed to Palestinians neither validating them nor becoming upset.

After calling a number of Army hotlines for help (in vain), we resolved to try again to walk peacefully through the line of soldiers towards the village. Abdallah led the group, with his hands up in the air. As soon as he'd passed the soldiers began pushing me and my colleagues back, separating us from Abdallah. They pushed him against the gate, hastily opened it, pushed him onto the other side, and closed it. He did not resist. He just kept asking, "Lamma? Lamma?" ("Why? Why?" in Hebrew). Another villager approached the soldiers, holding the hand of his young daughter. He asked me, "Shall we go to my village?" and I said, "Yalla" (Let's go). He stuck out his elbow for me to link arms with him, and we began to walk towards the soldiers. They immediately broke between us and shoved the man and his daughter through the opened gate before closing it. They threatened to arrest me. I said I hadn't done anything illegal, but I backed off.

The only Palestinian left was Ashraf, who would probably stay in the outpost again. By this time I realized he was slightly mentally handicapped, and hoped he would make it back okay. Abdallah called to us through the fence that he would meet us at the checkpoint a couple miles away if we could hitch a ride there with a settler security man who had recently arrived, curious about the commotion. The man agreed--if only to get us out of there--and half an hour later we were in Abdallah's car on the detour road back to Bil'ain. On the way Abdallah told us the bad news: Ashraf, whom we'd left at the scene, had been detained. We drove quickly from the village to the gate of the Wall, now opposite the soldiers we'd confronted earlier. We could see Ashraf sitting in an army tent, handcuffed and blindfolded. Abdallah called some Israeli friends and a lawyer, and I took some photos. When pressed, the soldiers explained that they had asked Ashraf if he wanted to return to his village and he said nothing. Then they asked if he wanted to return to the outpost and he said nothing. Now they were detaining him temporarily as punishment for not responding to their questions. When asked when he would be released they said they hadn't decided yet but maybe in half an hour. Abdallah felt that rather than cause a big scene we should wait and hope they were telling the truth.

We sat down next to the gate. I reflected on how disempowering it is to witness injustice through an impenetrable Wall. I prayed the soldiers would not hurt Ashraf, not sure if I could handle watching through a fence unable to try and stop it. But they left him alone, and after about 40 minutes they removed his blindfold and handcuffs and escorted him to the gate. He walked through with a sheepish smile, clearly moved that we had waited to ensure his release. We drove back to Abdallah's house--half of which he's donated as a home for Israelis and internationals to have their own space in the village. We told Abdallah we'd see him next Friday, and started the long journey back to Haris.

Thanks for reading,

Anna

Assassination in Bizarro World

2007-02-07T00:35:00.000+02:00

Several days ago while attending an embroidery workshop for local
women, we received a frantic call from the north about a killing. We
called around to see if any other human rights groups had
internationals in Jenin, but it seemed everyone had headed south to
document settler violence around Hebron. The next day, we traveled
to Rumani, a village on the northwestern edge of the West Bank. We
brought along our friend Ashraf translate for us, a soft-spoken
Palestinian nonviolent activist studying at the American University
in Jenin. When we arrived in the village, we were told that the
family we'd be visiting was very religious, so Ashraf would have to
stay with the men while we took the report from the victim's wife,
the only adult witness. My colleagues and I were guided into a room
full of women from the village, sitting with somber faces around the
victim's mother and wife. I realized this was the Palestinian
equivalent of "sitting Shiva" in the Jewish tradition, when family
and friends gather right after a death to mourn and comfort the next
of kin.

The mother was expecting us and made room on both sides of her for
us to sit down, spreading her blanket across us when we did. Not
knowing what to do, I whispered "thank you" and sat with the women
in silence for a while. Eventually I cleared my throat and explained
who we were and why we'd come. Several women smiled weakly and
thanked us. One who was holding a baby stood up and brought the baby over to me to hold. It was a tiny 30-day-old girl who breathed
deeply as she slept in my arms. The victim's brother Saber, who had
just arrived to translate, motioned to his brother's wife before
speaking up: "This is their first, and last, child."

Saber invited us to move next door to get the report from his sister-
in-law in private. There she began to tell her story, which Saber
translated:

"Three nights ago William and I were walking home from this house
after visiting with family. Since there is no electricity in the
village, we could not see that there were people hiding in the
bushes outside our home. When we got to our door, three men in
civilian clothes jumped out and demanded to see William's ID. They were speaking to each other in Hebrew. William showed them his ID and they took out a gun and shot him in the chest. He fell to the ground and then they shot him twice more in the head.

"Then they took our child from my arms and lay her next to William's
body. They took off my headscarf and pulled me by my hair away from my child. They told me that if I cried out they would kill me and my baby too. Then they walked away and I could see the Army jeeps on the main road turn on their headlights to light the way through the forest that surrounds our house. I was so scared that I did not scream."

I asked Saber if they knew why William was targeted. Saber explained
that their brother, Ra'ad, had been arrested exactly one year before
for his support of Islamic Jihad. William had been accused of having
hid his brother when the Israeli Army came to capture him. They had
tried everything—undercove r salespeople, women visitors in civilian
clothes, etc—and blamed William for making Ra'ad's capture so
difficult. Saber said there could be only one explanation for his
brother's assassination: "Revenge."

We asked the family if they had contacted a lawyer and they said
they were afraid it would only make things worse. Ra'ad had a
lawyer, and felt that the more publicity his case received, the
worse his treatment became in jail. He was tortured until he
couldn't see straight, and has continued to suffer from health
problems after spending more than four months in interrogation.
Saber said they move Ra'ad around to different jails constantly so
he's unable to develop or maintain friendships.

Since stories like Ra'ad's are so common I hardly took note. My
colleagues and I call this the "Bizarro World Syndrome," where
outrageous policies suddenly become perfectly acceptable. How has
anyone come to see as normal assassinating a man accused of
protecting his brother? Even if he were guilty of harboring a
threat, or even if he were a threat himself, since when is it
acceptable to hunt a suspect down and murder him in cold blood? If a
suspect in the US were planning an attack against civilians, would
we advocate someone going to his home and shooting him dead? Or
should he be arrested, and put on trial to determine whether or not
he's guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? But "innocent until proven
guilty" does not exist for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories
under Israeli law. Even if spared assassination, Palestinian
prisoners are rarely given a trial, and even more rarely a fair one.
(Sound like somewhere south of Florida you know?)

Israeli-occupied Palestine is a bizarro world indeed. Since when—
outside of Guantanamo, lest we forget—is it normal to torture
prisoners, many of them never even told what they are being held
for? How can the world stand by as a foreign Army kidnaps a third of
the democratically- elected parliament? What would we do if Iran's
army came in and captured a third of our government, claiming—
rightfully, perhaps—that our representatives were a threat to their
safety? (Don't say celebrate, lefties—that' s not how democracy
works!) The parallel of course assumes that Hamas is in the midst of
plotting an attack on Israelis, hard to argue given that the party
has held to an almost unwavering unilateral ceasefire for two years.
Let us also not forget that according to the Israeli military orders
that govern the West Bank and Gaza, it's actually illegal to be a
member of ANY political party, including Hamas, Fatah, the PFLP (the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party), and others. So really anyone who adopts an opinion on the political issues that govern their lives can be a target for assassination, arrest, or even home demolition.. .

This morning we received a call from the Israeli Committee Against
House Demolitions (ICAHD) that two Palestinian homes were being
destroyed in East Jerusalem. We were too far to make it in time, but
it's not hard to guess the reason—either the family did not have a
building permit (permits are given out freely to Jewish families but
almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain), or the demolition was
punitive. Two years ago the Army declared it would halt punitive
demolitions since they are ineffective at deterring attacks (other
good reasons could have included that they are illegal and a form of
collective punishment), but they continue in Gaza so I can only
assume that goes for the West Bank as well.

One such demolition attempt in Gaza recently received widespread
media attention: a man, after hearing that the Army would demolish
his home in ten minutes, ran and gathered friends and family to
flood his home so that demolishing the home would mean running over hundreds of people as well. Their organized direct action was successful and the bulldozers eventually retreated—who says nonviolent resistance is not alive and thriving in Palestine?

Hearing the story, some people sympathized with Israel. Apparently,
the man was involved in shooting Qassam rockets at Israeli towns,
threatening Israeli civilians. Bizarro World Syndrome. Yes, any
country has a right to defend its own citizens. But since when does
this right extend to bulldozing people's homes? Israel's punitive
demolitions aren't just the homes of suspects or confirmed criminals
themselves; it's also the homes of their families. After the
Oklahoma City bombing, did the FBI bulldoze Timothy McVeigh's home? Did they bulldoze the home of his parents, and his siblings, and his cousins? Should they have? It's astounding the way Israeli security hysteria—some, but not all, of it justified, in my opinion—has warped many people's sense of what is okay and what isn't. It doesn't take more than switching the names and ethnicities around to expose the underlying inconsistencies.

The settlements complete the bizarro world. I think my colleague Amy articulated it best in her blog (www.travelingamy. blogspot. com):

"Pretend are Canadian and you went to Sweden. Maybe you bought some land there and built some houses and sold them to your other
Canadian friends. Maybe you even built a little fence around your
compound. But is it okay to raise the Canadian flag, impose
immigrant restrictions, have the Canadian military protect you, and
announce it to be part of Canada? The same thing is happening here
and some people think it's just fine."

The parallel assumes that settlers are even buying land in the West
Bank and Gaza, which they are not, at least not from the land's
rightful owners. They are stealing it, or more accurately, their
government is stealing it and encouraging citizens to move onto it.
The irony is that although Israeli flags, soldiers, and families are
ubiquitous in the West Bank, Israel is careful not to officially
claim the West Bank to be a part of Israel, because then it would
have to extend rights to the people living there. Giving
Palestinians in the coveted West Bank equal rights to the people who
live all around them in Jewish-only towns and cities would
eventually render Palestinians a majority in Israel, and Jews a
minority. If it wanted to be a democracy, Israel would have to
evolve from being the state only of the Jews to being a state of its
citizens and occupants. But this remains a radical idea for many.

Occupation is not transitional stage; it's a strategic limbo between
annexation and withdrawel in which the occupier reaps the benefits
of controlling territory (in this case land, water, and other
resources) without having to grant inhabitants equal rights and
freedoms. But although the economics of the Occupation are
sustainable, the injustice is not; oppressed people will always
resist. Territorially, it is not in Israel's interest to end the
Occupation, but for security and basic decency, I believe, it is.
Time will tell which interest will prevail.

In struggle,

Anna