30 November 2011 | International Solidarity Day, West Bank
This morning at 7am the Israeli army entered the village of El Beida in the northern Jordan Valley with 10 military jeeps and one bulldozer. Israeli military proceeded towards Abu Tarek Fracka’s land where he houses a honey farm on the land where his father’s house once stood.
The bee farm was shared by 50 families. Previous harvest has been known to produce 900 kilos of honey with recent prices of honey, yielding 60-100 NIS per kilo. Abu Tarek is in possession of paper work permitting him to build on this land and also forbidding demolishment. Time was not granted to him to produce this paperwork, nor was a demolition notice given to him prior, as the military rushed to unjustly destroy Abu Tarek’s property, the first time he and his family experienced a demolition.
A wave of demolitions - Click here for more images
At 9:00 AM in the village of El Himma, Hassan Ahmad had the barracks of his sheep demolished. The barracks held 200 sheep. There was no prior warning of the demolition given to the family. Back in 2008 the family received orders to stop building on the land. This order was abided by with no recent additions made. The family has rented the land for 6 years from Palestinians. In the past week Israel has demolished three animal barracks within this area, accruing damages costing in excess of 15,000 NIS.
In Al Farisiya, of the Northern Jordan valley, at 9:00 AM soldiers entered the land of Ali Zuhed. No communication was made with the family; instead, the bulldozer went straight to work tearing down the barracks of the sheep. An order was also given to dismantle the remaining animal barracks within hours. The soldiers stated that if these barracks are still standing when they return they would demolish the rest of their properties including their home.
Lydia is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
30 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Photo: Rosa Schiano - Click here for more images
Today, Tuesday, November 29, 2011 is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This day commemorates the racist and colonialist proposal of the United Nations to partition Palestine in 1947. All over the world, people stood in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle today. In Beit Hanoun, today, like every Tuesday for the last three years, the popular struggle raised its voice against the occupation. Against the no go zone which surrounds Gaza, which makes the refugees of 1948 and 1967 who live in Beit Hanoun refugees once again, the no go zone which throws them off their land and destroys their houses and orchards. Against the siege on Gaza which is designed to destroy them, their hopes, their dreams, their economy, their future. Under the unceasing gaze of observation balloons and drones, in the shadow of a giant concrete wall studded with gun towers which seem to come out of a futuristic horror film but which is in fact is the present and is no movie, it is Gaza. Against the occupation which can only remind the world of George Orwell’s prediction of what the future would look like, “a boot stamping on a human face, forever”.
We gathered in the shadows of the ruins of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural College, not 100 meters away from the graves of the Beit Hanoun Massacre of 2006. The Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, the International Solidarity Movement, and Palestinians from around Gaza gathered to march into the no go zone. We were buoyed by the knowledge that around the world today people were raising their voices in support of Palestine, in support of peace, justice and freedom. The megaphone crackled to life, “We Will Not Go Down” by Michael Heart. In a sea of flags from around the world, Palestine, Ireland, Italy, India, Malaysia and many others, we began our march towards the no go zone.
We enter the no go zone and begin to release balloons with Palestinian flags attached to them. The balloons will float over the walls that surround Gaza, they will take our message farther than our megaphone and our voices can. Perhaps they will be caught in the branches of an orange tree planted by the fathers or grandfathers of the men gathered here, on the land that they were expelled from. There is no risk that they will be caught in the branches of orange trees before they cross the wall, all of those trees have been bulldozed by Israel when it created the no go zone, the zone of death which surrounds Gaza. In the short story “Men in the Sun” by Ghassan Kanafini some Palestinian laborers die in a water tank while waiting to cross a border. The driver of the truck is left lamenting, “Why didn’t they say anything” as they died. We are not silent, even if are voices are lost in the space of the dead zone which Israel created around Gaza, these balloons will carry our message to the outside. Let no one say that they did not know, that we did not say anything while Gaza is strangled to death.
Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative spoke to the crowd. He called upon the people of the world “to isolate Israel internationally and to exert pressure in all its forms until the end of the occupation of Palestine.” Radhika Sainath from the International Solidarity Movement also spoke, “Today the entire free world is against the settlements, the wall and the Israeli occupation. We will continue our work in Palestine with Palestinian activistsuntil we succeed in bringing freedom and justice to Palestine.” Their voices were echoed by the chanting of the crowd, against the occupation, voiced demanding peace, justice and freedom, voicing pledgingsteadfastness in the struggle to the end the occupation.
Despite Israel’s blockade on building materials entering the Gaza Strip, local entrepreneurs have come up with a way to turn destruction into reconstruction by recycling rubble into construction material.
He who builds his house here puts his sweat and blood into it, laying stone after stone. When it becomes rubble, it is devastating and personal for him... (Photo: Ruqaya Izzidien) - Click here for more images
The bedroom of Nasser Abu Said features two-meter holes punched by Israeli rockets and his front door is splattered with deep gashes from the nail-bomb which clawed his garden apart and killed his wife. The staircase is half-collapsed, there is no roof and involuntary windows have cropped up all over the house, each one marking the entry of one of the nine bombs that hit his home, meters away from the eastern border with Israel in the Jahr el Deek neighborhood. This is what a shelled house looks like in Gaza.
The Gaza Strip experiences frequent airstrikes which have targeted every form of infrastructure over the last few months, leaving destroyed farmland, factories and houses in their wake.
Israel forbids Palestinians in Gaza from importing building materials, obstructing their ongoing attempts to repair damage caused during the 2008-2009 war. Add to this continuing destruction caused by regular, if unpredictable, bombings that rain down on Gaza and it becomes seemingly impossible for Palestinians to reconstruct buildings destroyed by Israel since the siege came into effect in 2007.
However, a stroll through central Gaza City makes it clear that Palestinians living in the coastal enclave have resorted to ingenious and defiant methods in order to keep Gaza’s homes and businesses running. It is known as ‘rubble recycling.’
The area east of Gaza City is littered with stone-crushing factories that are identifiable from the huge clouds of dust that hang over them. These factories buy rubble from bombed out buildings, crush it down into pebbles and refashion them into new bricks, allowing Gaza to be rebuilt, in spite of the ban on construction materials.
Younis Aboul Foud was one of the first entrepreneurs to found a stone-crushing plant, or kassarat in Gaza. He began crushing rubble 25 years ago, “We even used to import stone and crush it into all sorts of bricks, but now importing such materials is banned by Israel. Today, recycling rubble into building blocks is our only option; there is no alternative and no other construction materials are available to us.
Three weeks into November, the Israeli authorities allowed a rare shipment of construction materials into Gaza, but the recipients were hand-picked private organizations or businesses. Although Israel permitted an average of 800 trucks into Gaza over the last three months, this is around 16 percent of the construction material that crossed into Gaza between 2005-2007, before ‘Operation Cast Lead’ and the need to reconstruct the 18,000 homes that were damaged or destroyed in the offensive.
The few building materials that enter Gaza are only permitted for use by recognized international agencies, while regular citizens have no access to the 800 trucks that enter and no opportunity to reconstruct damage caused by repeated bombings. Even civilians who qualify for assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), say they are told that their home is not ‘damaged enough’ or wait months or years for their houses to be rebuilt.
23-year-old Khalil Elzaneen began rebuilding his home in the north of the Gaza Strip one year ago using bricks he bought from the kassarat stone-crushing plants. “There are no stones in the country to construct bricks, so they have to be made out of rubble. The borders were completely closed and until today there aren’t building materials in Gaza. Even the cement had to come in through tunnels.”
Elzaneen and his family could no longer live in their old home, which suffered day-to-day wear and tear, exacerbated by frequent bombings that weaken the structure of many of Gaza’s older buildings. “You can’t stop people from acquiring the materials they need to live, however hard you might try.”
Ban on Construction Materials
Israel maintains that the blockade of the Gaza Strip is necessary for state security and that construction materials are prohibited because militants could use the cement and stones to build hideouts.
Khalil Elzaneen disputes this, “Every restriction they impose on us is to do with ‘terrorists.’ I really don’t think that this is what the construction materials are used for; Israel is simply punishing an entire population. Look around you, you can see that we don’t use the bricks to build hideouts for terrorists; we use them for constructing homes and civilian buildings.”
Kassarat factories have created an exclusive and highly-coveted amount of building materials in Gaza. As with any other market, these fall into the hands of the most affluent amongst the community. Along with factory-owners, businesspeople and NGO-workers, political parties and armed groups are able to raise funds when a building they own is destroyed. As a result, the ban on construction materials – and the blockade in general – affects most the poorest residents of Gaza, who cannot pay the escalated price of up to US$10 per cement block.
From the Ashes
Some see other advantages to rubble recycling that have a deeper message than simply making a living, “Israel doesn’t want us to rebuild, that is why it is important that we do,” explained Aboul Foud. He sees his means of earning a living as an act of defiance against Israel, using their airstrikes to bring new life to bombed bricks. “In spite of their attacks and the blockade, we will keep recycling rubble and making life from nothing, making life from rubble.”
Khalil Elzaneen explained, “Even if I am told not to rebuild, I will still continue to do whatever it takes to survive and that, to me, is a form of resistance.”
But recycling rubble is far from idyllic. Fahd Daghmoush runs a rubble-crushing plant east of Gaza, which employs young men to break down the larger pieces of rubble so that they are digestible for his machinery. His employees work surrounded by powdered rubble and dust. “You can see that it is very dangerous to be crushing these stones,” he explained, “it is going to affect our health in the future and maybe even shorten our lives.”
Daghmoush entered into the business of recycling rubble out of compulsion, “If I could do absolutely any other job, I would; I don’t want a job that damages my health. I used to be a construction worker, but these days there is no work and I’m too old for that anyway. Hopefully by manufacturing bricks from rubble, I am creating jobs for the younger people who struggle
as I do.”
There is also a depressive cycle associated with refashioning building materials from rubble, the bricks are simply in rotation, like a currency. In order to have new bricks for your own house you have to wait for someone’s home to be bombed.
Fahd Daghmoush explained, “He who builds his house here puts his sweat and blood into it, laying stone after stone. When it becomes rubble, it is devastating and personal for him. People here put everything they own into building their homes. But life has to continue and we have to bounce back.”
But using the resources available to you is not optional in Gaza, Younis Aboul Foul explains. “We use all of our resourcefulness against this siege to challenge those responsible. Gaza is resilient – every way which we pick ourselves up is miraculous. Everyone has a right to live, and that’s all we want to do, whatever it takes,” he says.
The majority of recycled rubble is used to create the standard half-meter blocks that overwhelm the Gaza Strip, particularly in the refugee camps that are identifiable by their gray, piled cube signature. But a small amount of granite is reused for decoration and calcium carbonate is powdered down to provide Gaza with talcum powder, make-up and whitewash.
Palestinians in Gaza have defied the ban on construction materials since the siege began; turning what was once a blooming trade into a necessary business required in order to rebuild the territory. It is a bittersweet industry, but in besieged Gaza, nothing can afford to go to waste.
29 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On the third floor of the Nablus Municipality Library, there sits a room of over 8,000 books set apart from the rest. Many of these books are very old and tattered; many of them, in lieu of a normal face, are adorned with images taken from old National Geographic or Reader’s Digest magazines. Some are laboriously written by hand. The spines of the books show a variety of languages, from Arabic to English, French and Spanish. The New English Bible is flanked by The Great American Revolution of 1776 on one side and The Diary of Anne Frank on the other; across the aisle, Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Greek Myths look on silently, next to Elementary Physics and a study of The Chinese Road to Socialism.
One day in 2008, Italian artist Beatrice Catanzaro became fascinated with this section of the Nablus Library. “I would return day after day”, she related, “to pour over every detail- how the work was sown, the notations, the drawings.” A librarian, seeing her fascination, told her a story:
A few years ago an old man asked me for a specific book. [She picks up and shows me a thick hard covered grey book with old yellowish pages.] He started to explore the perimeter of the cover with his fingers, searching in the bookbinding gap. When [I] asked him what he was searching for, the man looked at [me] with a discouraged expression: ‘in prison I use to hide my embroidering needle in the binding of this book.’
What fascinated Beatrice about this collection? This 8,000-book collection is no ordinary collection, but the Prisoner’s Section of the Nablus Library. Here are gathered books that lived with generations of Palestinian prisoners behind the bars of Israeli prisons. The shelves are adorned with weathered tomes of economic theory, slim volumes of poetry, well-worn novels, textbooks on mathematics and physics, classic works of philosophy and history, and much more. Personal and political annotations, scribbles and drawings adorn these pages, which captivated the hearts and minds of decades of Palestinian prisoners before finding their way, after the closure of two ex-Israeli military detention structures in 1996, to this library.
PFLP leader Abdel-Alim Da’na, who was imprisoned for a total of 17 years between 1970 and 2004, spearheaded PFLP educational programs behind bars to spread the philosophy of resistance to less experienced prisoners. He explains the foundation of prison pedagogy- “everyone, when they enter the prison, must learn to read and to study. Some people, when they enter the prison, cannot read or write, and we put an end to their illiteracy. Some of them are very famous journalists now, some are poets, some are writing in the newspapers and doing research in the universities, some are men in the Palestinian Authority, some are activists!”
Khaled al-Azraq, a refugee from Aida Refugee camp who has been a political prisoner for the last 20 years,testifies that
Through the will and perseverance of the prisoners, prison was transformed into a school, a veritable university offering education in literature, languages, politics, philosophy, history and more…Prisoners passed on what they knew and had learned in an organized and systematic fashion. Simply put, learning and passing on knowledge and understanding, both about Palestine and in general, has been considered a patriotic duty necessary to ensure steadfastness and perseverance in the struggle to defend our rights against Zionism and colonialism. There is no doubt that the Palestinian political prisoners’ movement has played a leading role in developing Palestinian national education.
Khalil Ashour was a Palestinian political prisoner from 1970 to 1982. Years later, he became Director of the Ministry of Local Government for the PA in Nablus until his retirement in 2005. He was also a central figure in Beatrice Catanzaro’s aptly-titled exhibit in the Prisoner’s Section of the Nablus Municipality Library, ‘ANeedlein theBinding’. Several excellent pictures and stories from Catanzaro’s exhibit, which ran until November 17, can be found here.
In conjunction with the exhibit, Khalil Ashour wrote a moving personal testimony called ‘The Palestinian Detainee and the Book’. In accordance with the wishes of Ashour and Catanzaro, it is reproduced here in full.
THE PALESTINIAN DETAINEE AND THE BOOK
by Khalil Ashour
The tragedy of detention is the deprivation of freedom of choice, or the limiting of this freedom to the minimum. If someone imposed their rules on you and oppressed you, you are their subject even if you are not a prisoner. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lived this tragedy in the Israeli detention centers starting from the year 1967 until now, and the ugliest image of this tragedy was when Palestinian detainees were prohibited from reading and writing. They were allowed only to write letters of ten lines to their families, and if they were to write more than ten lines by one word or more, the prison administration used to tear up the letter. During this period Palestinian detainees used to spend their time in narrating stories they knew and films they had watched before detention.
I recall that a detainee narrated for us the story “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo, in several chapters. He used to narrate one chapter a day, until he finished the story after two weeks. We used to wait anxiously everyday until nighttime to listen to a new chapter. We all felt as if “Jean Valjean” the hero of the novel, was living among us. The last night we were so sad, as “Jean Valjean” was leaving our detention center, knowing that we were never to meet him again. And when the moment of separation arrived, a sorrowful silence fell upon us all.
This was our situation in Asqalan prison in the years 1970-1971. However, in Biet Led, in 1972, the prison administration allowed three things: the first one was to allow the “Jerusalem Post” Newspaper into the prison, which is published in English. One of the detainees who is fluent in English used to translate articles and news relevant to our interests as detainees for freedom. The second was distributing Israeli books which explain and defend the Zionist Movement, the Jewish right to Palestine, and that the Palestinian Organizations are a group of “terrorists” who are going to fail, in order to inject detainees’ minds with the Israeli version of the situation, bring despair to their hearts and smash their morale. The third one was that every detainee’s family is allowed to buy two books every month for their detained family member, however, these books were to be approved by the prison’s administration first, in addition to the fact that they should remain in the prison if the detainee is released or transferred to another prison. This is how the first library was established in Beit Led prison.
However, cultural life in Nablus prison was rather different. The prison was managed by the Jordanian Police before 1967, there was a small library of tens books in this prison. Most of the books were novels, poetry and few school books that talk about the Jordanian History. However books that address philosophy or politics were originally prohibited in the Jordanian Reign. A remarkable improvement occurred during one of the Red Cross’s visits near the end of the year 1972, the delegation handed us a long list of the books that are allowed and approved by the prison’s administration. The list was distributed to the detainees to choose whatever they wanted, it included books about Marxism, Leninism, Communist theory, and Socialist thought. It was a golden opportunity for the Popular Front and democratic front organizations’ members, as their leaders say that they are leftist organizations that defend laborers’ rights, and lead the proletariat revolution from the inside of the Palestinian national movement and Arab nationalism. This was the first time that the communist books were seen in prisons.
Every time a delegation from the Red Cross used to visit the detainees, the number of red books increased, as well as religious books, especially those authored by Hassan Al-Banna, Sayed Qotob and his brother Mohammed Qotob, as well as Mohammed Al-Ghazali. Those authors were the founders and poles of the Muslim Brotherhood that was established in Egypt in 1928.
Based on these books, the thoughts that lie within their pages, and according to their viewers and readers, three intellectual trends appeared and spread among detainees. 1. A patriotic and national movement 2. A communist and socialist movement 3. A religious and Salafi movement. Fruitful and rich discussions and debates occurred between these three parties, which improved the intellectual and cultural level of the detainees. These movements also influenced residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as its ideas spread among the populace, especially amongst university students and educated people. When the communist and socialist movements disintegrated as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union after the year 1989, the leftist parties and organizations suffered from a sever tremor, and a deep shock, as they started flopping aimlessly searching for an identity, which resulted in the spread of the Religious and Salafi movement’s values, thus gaining more popularity, as it found itself more free to compete with the national movement.
In addition, books’ spread in Israeli prisons, and the variation in its genres and subjects, opened new horizons for the detainees; even those who were illiterate, mastered reading and writing. Detained students completed their education, became Tawjihi degree holders, and joined universities after they were released. Those who were interested in language learned Hebrew, English and French. Those with little knowledge read books about geography, history, economy, politics, philosophy, astronomy, religion, and literature. This is how Palestinian detainees turned prisons, through reading and writing into active and living workshops, as a room in any prison used to be calm at time allocated for reading and noisy when holding sessions and conducting debates, regardless of the number of inmates. In order to test erudition and level of knowledge, they used to conduct a weekly “question & answer” tournament, and award the winning team. As a result of this tournament, the spirit of competition spread among detainees, they started reading more, and copying books to send to other prisons that lacked them. It is known that copying books helps in memorizing more than reading. Translations also became common from Hebrew or English into Arabic. Detainees used to hold a special meeting to listen to translated articles’, which used to be read by the translator himself. They even held meetings in order to listen to translated literature.
One of the cultural activities also was that a group of detainees worked on preparing and distributing magazines, where they would hand write their articles in notebooks. Here one can see how the desire for learning, reading new books and self-education, was spread amongst detainees, as it was their priority. Books played a pioneering role in the significant change in detainees’ lives and hearts, and the clear evidence was that detainees were different when they were released; different than how they were several years ago when they were arrested. They occupied important and influential positions in society after they were released, in fact, some of them were top students at universities, and some of them went on to complete their MA and PHD degrees.
It is natural for detainees to pursue any mean in order to free themselves from imprisonment, and search for a way to escape from their harsh and bleak reality. Those who are deprived of bread dream of bread, and those who are deprived of freedom seek freedom. The Palestinian prisoner resorted to books in order to dream and free themselves through words as well as to escape to an alternative to their lived reality. If the book was a novel, the prisoner lives with its characters and moves amongst them from one place to the other, eavesdrops on their discussions, experiences their feelings, and walks around in their homes. This feeling creates another life for the prisoner, another world, and another reality.
Hence, books transferred and freed prisoners, even if it was temporary, it is the path to their salvation, as it also brings new ideas to the reader, and new beliefs, it introduces us to different lived experiences, which leads to a widening of horizon and an openness towards difference. The more books a human reads, the more minds he tackles and deals with, the more he enriches his knowledge.
A book is a spring of knowledge that quenches the intellect’s thirst for learning, blessed are those minds that are forever thirsty.
A book is a new world – we add to the world we know a space for another. The book is a transformation tool from a state to a better one, if we listened carefully to what it says and comprehended what it means. A book does not redeem humans from illiteracy, ignorance, delusion and myth only, it redeems one from corruption, bad manners, bad behavior, narrow mindedness, and bias.
Books reveal your true self, guide you to what you will become, and illuminate your world just like the sun lights your day. There are two truths in this world, the first is is God which is a permanent truth, and the second; the world, is temporary. We came to this life to read the second truth in order to understand the first, and those who do not know are the ones who do not read.
Ben Lorber and Rana Way are volunteers with International Solidarity Movement.
29 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Today in the Occupied West Bank, Palestinians and internationals gathered in Nablus to participate in an international day of support for Palestine.
In 1977 the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare November 29 as the The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. On that day in 1947 the same body voted to partition Palestine as part of UN resolution 181. The following year the state of Israel was created. 64 years later Palestinians have not regained their freedom, and refugees have been unable to return to their native land.
As solidarity actions took place around the world, international activists joined Palestinians in Nablus to commemorate the important day. Demonstrators held signs, waved flags, and joined Palestinian-led chants of freedom and justice. The Mayor of Nablus addressed the crowd and encouraged his fellow citizens to remain strong in the face of the decades long occupation. Solidarity activists from Europe, North America, South America, and Africa were present. Internationals and Palestinians were encouraged by the event and plan to organize a similar action next year.
Wahed Rejol is an ISM volunteer working in the West Bank (name has been changed).
