Author: ISM Media Group

1967: Abandoned and rejected

By Ahmad Shaheen | Guardian: Comment Is Free

I was born in a tent and I’m living in a tent, but I hope I won’t die in a tent.

I’m a middle-aged journalist and a human rights advocate. My children are grown up and college educated – three of them married with children. I’m far from them though, living with my partner in a desert refugee camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Through friends I managed to get word to my brother to phone me on a borrowed mobile, from a shop in our refugee camp in Gaza last week. I was describing my situation and he told me “you born in a tent and you will die in one”. I don’t know if his prediction will come true. So far I’ve been in Tanaf refugee camp for eight months and have still not received asylum from any state. Hundreds of Palestinian refugees are currently in the same situation, along Iraq’s western borders, living in tents.

I fled Baghdad eight months ago. Palestinian life there had become unbearable and incredibly dangerous. After the arrival of Anglo-American troops, we refugees were stripped of all rights, denied the renewal of refugee travel documents that had been customarily issued to us since the days of the monarchy.

Paperless and unable to leave, we were targeted by the death squads as an unprotected minority, and then a collective execution fatwa was issued against our entire community, some 40,000 strong who have been in Iraq since 1948.

Many of my friends were killed in perverse and cruel ways. My neighbour, Abu Adel, was murdered while trying to pick up the body of his son from the morgue. Others were killed by militia having their heads drilled with electric tools. I had previously tried to leave Iraq, spending 14 months at the Ruwaished camp on the Jordanian border, only to be refused entry.

Upon my return to Baghdad, I found that things had got far worse. One afternoon, the interior ministry’s Saqer force arrested me at a café, along with my 76-year-old neighbour, for the crime of sipping tea while being a Palestinian. Taken to an American-run interrogation centre, we saw young men blindfolded and tied, while others were hanging from the ceiling. Fortunately, the debacle ended after the ranking American officer took pity on my elderly friend and ordered our release. We were thereafter thrown in the street while curfew was on, lucky not to have been shot. This incident, along with a phone call ordering me to evacuate my house, convinced me of the need to leave at whatever cost. Nowadays, a tent shields me from the strong dust-storms of the Khamseen wind, while my house in Baghdad has been converted into a local militia office.

My first displacement occurred in the aftermath of what we call the setback, the naksah, of 1967. I was a 15-year-old teenager when the Israeli occupying forces entered Gaza, their megaphones blasting the order for all males between the ages of 15 and 60 to congregate in designated local schools. A vast campaign of random arrests began, and my family feared I would face the fate of other neighborhood youth and told me to escape. Through the desert and across the river, I fled the occupation to Jordan, separated from my family for ever; up until this day never allowed to return. I joined the ranks of the 400,000 displaced (naziheen), almost half of whom had already been refugees since 1948.

Here I am; six displacements later and four decades into my life. I am not that old, but I feel really tired. Stressed out by the last war, I now have diabetes along with high blood pressure. Everyone around me has been through hard times though, and we all share in the daily struggle for survival. The camp is overcrowded, intolerably hot in the morning and incredibly cold during winter nights, extremely flammable (only last month there was a terrible fire that destroyed some of the camp), and lacks most medical and social services. Nevertheless, a UN water truck arrives every other day and rations are distributed monthly (although they are not ideal for diabetics, consisting mainly of flour and sugar). Palestinian refugee volunteers from Syria also come to support us, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society currently provides me with insulin.

Somehow, incredibly, we are still alive, but we are frozen in time, isolated and abandoned by the governments of the world. I am not a refugee by choice and I will hold forever to the right of return to my home. Nevertheless, until I am able to exercise that right, I want to live in safety and dignity somewhere, anywhere, away from the wretchedness of this desert and the carnage of Iraq. Yes, I was born in a tent but I certainly hope I don’t die in one.

Ahmad Shaheen (Abu Fadi) is a Palestinian refugee from the village of Al-Qubayba near Al Ramleh. In 1948 his family was forced out to Gaza. Since 1967, he has been displaced six times. Before moving to the Tanaf refugee camp on the on the Iraqi-Syrian border, he was a Baghdad based journalist and human rights activist.

The world will understand us more

from The Guardian Unlimited, 6 June 2007


A Palestinian boy blows up a balloon in front of Israeli border police during a non-violent protest against the construction of Israel’s West Bank barrier. Photograph: Oded Balilty/AP

Audio can be found HERE

In the fields around the village of Ma’asara, south of Bethlehem, between the rows of vines, olives and almond trees, a long white scar has been carved across the face of the hillside.

For now it doesn’t look like much, but in a few months – when the bulldozers and workmen have finished – it will form the latest stretch of Israel’s vast concrete and steel West Bank barrier. Here it will push 9km deep inside the occupied West Bank, cutting the people of Ma’asara and the surrounding villages off from land they have farmed for generations. Within the barrier, and so effectively connected to Israel, will be the Jewish settlement of Efrat, part of the larger Gush Etzion settlement bloc.

In Ma’asara it has fallen in part to a school physics teacher named Mahmoud Zawahri to decide what to do about it. For the past six years, since the start of the second intifada – the last major uprising against the occupation – Palestinian opposition to Israeli policies in the occupied territories has been dominated by violence: waves of suicide bombings that claimed hundreds of Israeli lives, rocket attacks, abductions and shootings.

Mr Zawahri, 35, is trying to establish a campaign of non-violent resistance, a weapons-free protest. In making his argument he represents a small but growing number of Palestinians who look back with frustration and disenchantment on past militant violence.

“We need to continue to bring new ideas that reflect the effect of the wall,” said Mr Zawahri. “We believe in non-violence because we want to pass our message to the world through a way which is very white and very black. It’s good or bad, white or black. You have the rights, so there is no need to use violence. You have the right that this wall is illegal and built on your land.”

In 2004, the international court of justice said in an advisory opinion that where the barrier runs inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem it is illegal and should be dismantled. Israel argues that the barrier is a security measure necessary to stop the entry of suicide bombers.

Talk of non-violence is a challenge to the influence of the armed factions that dominate Palestinian society, an argument that says their suicide bombings not just failed to advance the Palestinian cause but set it back so far that now Israel’s military occupation has got tougher, with more checkpoints, frequent incursions and a rapidly growing barrier, and that it brought an economic and political crisis and a violent feud between rival Palestinian factions.

“The second intifada was necessary but the way we behaved? They showed the world that we are terrorists,” said Mr Zawahri. Many Palestinians are quick to compare the failings of the second intifada with what they perceive as the successes of the first, begun in 1987, which was more a popular uprising and far less dominated by the militants. Within a few years, Israel and the Palestinians had signed up to the Oslo accords that brought the creation of a Palestinian Authority and, however briefly, the hope of genuine peace between two states.

Every Friday, the villagers from Ma’asara and the surrounding area gather a few hundred yards from the route of the barrier, among them also activists from Israel and abroad. For now they have obtained a brief court injunction halting the construction so they gather for prayers first, before making speeches on megaphones and then marching back up the road towards their homes. On one Friday march earlier this month, young men from each of the political factions took turns chanting slogans against the occupation as dozens of armed Israeli soldiers walked behind the marchers. Mr Zawahri tried to keep the demonstrators in order, rushing in at one point to drag off a young Palestinian who was on the verge of scuffling with the troops.

Later, he admitted it was often hard to rein in the younger men. In other West Bank towns like Jenin and Nablus the militant groups are powerful forces. In Ma’asara, however, school teachers like Mr Zawahri have more influence. “We can’t control them all but we have to try and push them onto the right path,” he said. “We can guide them in the right direction.” Sometimes, he said, it meant allowing his protesters to throw stones and push the soldiers, but he insisted there should be no weapons at any of the rallies.

Most previous efforts at peaceful protest have faded away, except notably in the village of Bil’in, to the north of Jerusalem, where for the past two years, a regular Friday protest by Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners has been held against the barrier. However, although there are no weapons, there is frequent stone throwing which Israeli troops respond to with tear gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets.

The broader sense of disillusionment with the past decade is striking. Businessmen, particularly in Gaza, say the years since the second intifada have pushed up costs, cut salaries and badly damaged business. “People are getting poorer and poorer and that brings more violence,” said Fadi Liddawi, 31, who runs a business in Gaza City selling imported ceramics wholesale. “Where there is money there is peace. Were there is no money, no peace.”

Others sense the influence of the militant groups is beginning to wane. “Today these groups lack the unanimous respect of the people,” said Imad Ayaseh, who runs the Martyr Abu Jihad technical college in Ramallah that trains former political prisoners. “The people were given promises for the past 15 years but in reality nothing has been achieved. All these leaders in the end fight among themselves for a share of the government while the people are lost in the streets.”

One of the most prominent intellectual supporters of non-violence among the Palestinians is Ahmad Harb, a novelist and dean of the faculty of arts at Birzeit University, just north of Ramallah. At the start of the second intifada he and others like him wrote urgent articles promoting peaceful protest.

“The world understands us more when we use non-violent resistance,” he said. “I believe our strength as such lies in the fact that we are victims, that we are weak. This is the power you see in weakness.”

He argues that the political leadership failed to change their tactics from the days before the groundbreaking 1993 Oslo accords, when the PLO was an armed force living in exile. “I felt that part of the Palestinian leadership had a split personality. On the one hand they signed Oslo, and at the same time they maintained the old, revolutionary discourse of liberating Palestine from the river to the sea,” he said. “That was a deceit on the part of the Palestinian leadership.”

He notes that cultural factors may have inhibited peaceful protest, particularly in a collective psychology of pride and courage that is enhanced by religious exhortations to never give up. Peaceful protest is often regarded as cowardice, he said.

But he also argues that the Israeli response to any form of demonstration has become so tough that protest frequently escalates into violence, as now happens weekly at Bil’in. “The question is how much we as subjects of this occupation can control ourselves and stay peaceful regardless of how the other party responds, regardless of how many people will be killed in the demonstration,” he said. Students at Birzeit tried peaceful marches against the occupation in the past, but after they were met with tear gas and bullets, he said it was harder to make his case. “It begins peacefully and then turns into violence,” he said.

(Part 2 of 2): A Hospitality Which Won’t Quit… Nor Submit to the Occupation

Reportback from Daniel

Part 2: the North: Agriculture, Theatre, a Cough to Kill for

I took a 3 day, 2 night trip through the northern West Bank that started by going to Qalqilya, a fairly large Palestinian city that is almost completely surrounded by The Wall. The only way in and out is through a very narrow “bottleneck” with the wall on both sides, and the one road that has a checkpoint. The city is often completely shut off from the rest of the world thought the simple closing of this checkpoint.

While in Qalqilya I contacted Sharif, a farmer in the Village of Jayyous north of Qalqilia. I had gotten his contact from a friend in NY and when he heard that I know Pat, he insisted that we come and spend the night with him and his wife. At this point I was traveling with a very interesting young South Korean woman. We took a service and arrived in Jayyous in the late afternoon. Sharif had told me that he would be at his farm and unavailable until 6:30 but that when we arrive we should just ask anyone in the village to take us to his house, and in typical Palestinian fashion, a couple of young kids were immediately dispatched by a local shop owner to show us the way.

On the way, however, we came across a tall thin obviously western 60-something year old man. He turned out to be part of a three person team from The World Counsel of Churches that maintains a presence in the village. Their purpose is to monitor the three “Agricultural Gates” on the outskirts of the village. After the “security barrier” was completed in this area, 70% of the village’s agricultural land was on the other side. In order for the farmer to get to there land they must go thought these gates which are “open” for a very limited time in the mornings and afternoons. Once at there land, they must stay there all day.

There are so many problems with this system that makes the farming of this land very difficult. For example, if a farmer has a large plot and he needs to hire workers, the only people available to him are other farmers that also own land and have the proper permits. Because of this, Sharif never knows how many workers he will have on any given day. If they don’t need to work there own land, they show up at his house in the morning. Even his children, who live elsewhere, can’t help on the farm when they visit without a huge amount of paperwork. In the morning we went with the gate watchers to see this insane process. One farmer arrived about 3 minutes late and was not allowed through. These are simple peasant farmers that must now follow these strict timetables and navigate this incredibly complicated system of rules, regulations and permits which quite often the Israeli authorities make even more difficult by screwing up the paperwork.

From Jayous we went north to the City of Tulkarem where we met with people from the International Women’s Peace Service who were there to meet with a local Palestinian woman’s group. This Palestinian group has many internationally-funded projects going on but the main discussions had to do with their problems getting their beautiful workshop crafted embroidery out to the international market. The only way that it is possible, even with the backing of mainstream international NGOs, is for international volunteers that visit to buy it and personally take it with them. The woman from IWPS did just this, with maybe $150.00 worth.

From here we were off to the City of Jenin where we visited The Freedom Theater in the Jenin Refugee Camp. This is an amazing project that has built a professional theater right in the middle of the refugee camp. It has become a center for cultural and social activity within the camp and is very busy and hectic. They have also built a large, maybe 16-station internet computer lab. While I was there I attended part of a kindergarten “graduation” performance, that in many ways was just like any kindergarten theater project anywhere except that some of the segments portrayed the realities of the Occupation with the kids playing soldiers and demonstrating portrayals of violence. I also attended a meeting of teenage boys that discussed some of the political issues that are currently at work within Palestinian society and within the camp. Community leaders from different groups which I think included Fatah, Hamas and some of the militias addressed the teenagers on behavior towards “guests” of the camp, drug use, and mostly on Palestinian unity. They are working very hard to keep what is happening in Gaza from spreading to this camp.

In the camp I saw the results of the frequent Israeli military incursions: demolished buildings, bullet marks all over, and, in the cemetery, the graves of the people killed by these actions (martyrs). At this point, the incursions happen a few times per week in the middle of the night.

The area south of Jenin is beautiful with alternating small mountains, large farms and, of course, the ubiquitous olive trees. About 30 minutes into the trip, the driver received a cell phone call and turned around. There was one guy in the van that spoke a little English and I asked him why we had turned around. He told me that the Israelis had closed the road ahead and again. We had to backtrack, than take a different road, than travel for maybe 5 miles on very rugged trails thought the farms to get around this closure.

About a half hour later we came to a checkpoint that I had been through a few times before but the line of vehicles was much longer than I had previously seen. As we got closer I saw that there were many more troops than the other times and that they had people out of their cars. When it was our turn, they opened the door to the van, collected our papers and then started to question everyone in the van. At one point, at another checkpoint further on, one of the guys in the van coughed and one of the soldiers said something that just shut everyone else up. They let us pass and I asked what the soldier had said. He had told the guy who coughed, “If you cough again without covering your mouth, I will put a bullet in you head and your 3 children will never see you again”.

I really wanted to see Nablus and the Balata Refugee Camp while I was on this trip so a few days before I left to come home, I contacted someone in Ramallah who put me in touch with a guy name Mark Turner from Colorado that is currently working in the Balata Camp and he agreed to meet me in Nablus and show me around.

Basically the only way that people can get into Nablus is to walk in through one of the checkpoints that isolate the city from the rest of the West Bank. Most of the cars in the city can never leave. A guy who let me use his phone in the van to Nablus took me with him in a shared cab, gave me his card and told me that I should just go to the “Center City” and look around, which is what I did. I got out of the cab and started walking through a market area. I decided that I wanted an apple and went to one of the venders, picked up an apple and asked the price. The guy said, “one kilo” and I said, “no, just one apple”. He gave me this great big smile and said, “Welcome, where are you from?” I told him that I was from the U.S. and he said “Bush is bad” and I wholeheartedly agreed. He gave me the apple, a hug and a pat on the back and sent me on my way. I pulled out my phone which was getting sporadic reception and I notice that it was almost completely uncharged. I had forgotten to plug it in the night before. I decided to go to a mobile phone store to see if I could get it charged.

I walked into a small store on a corner and asked if I could have them charge my phone. They spoke no English but, through gestures they understood what I wanted. They took my phone and gestured 10 minutes. I walked around for maybe 15 and than came back and they gestured 5 more minutes. When I came back they gave me my fully charged phone and would not let me pay them anything. Mark was still not available so I walked around a little more, got a carrot juice and than thought that maybe I had the wrong number. Mark had e-mailed me his number and so I started trying to find a place to check my e-mail. I couldn’t find anyplace but than I notice what looked like a (relatively) pretty nice hotel. I walked in and asked if they had internet. There was one guy in the lobby who spoke English who told me that they didn’t but then he offered to take me to his office where I could check my e-mail. His name was Farouq Masri and he turned out to be head of the water and sewer department for the city. We walked about 5 blocks to his office, where he sat me down at his large, impressive desk, in his large impressive office (relatively speaking) and said, “OK, now you’re the boss.”

The Old City of Nablus is an incredibly vibrant place with a large market stretching through and off of its main passage. The wonderful smells of spice venders, coffee roaster and shawarma stands mix with the stink of live chicken sellers, open hanging lambs and the ever-present cigarettes. The sounds of the venders hawking there wares mixes with the calls to prayer and the din of the packed-in people. It is hard to believe but the Israeli military often conduct operations within this area.

I had had such good experiences so far asking for help that I decided to return to the water department and ask Farouq if he knew someone that could show me around Balata. I had been told by a few people not to go there alone. He was not in his office but the other workers there called him on his mobile and he arranged to have one of his workers that lives in the camp take me there. The guy took me in a cab that he refused to let me pay for to the entrance of the camp and than we walked to a local NGO within the camp where there was a young Palestinian who spoke perfect English (I believe his name was Ahmad). I told him that I was supposed to be meeting Mark Turner and he was somehow immediately able to reach him on his phone. While we waited for Mark, we discussed the history of the camp, the almost nightly Israeli military incursions and the work of this NGO over Arabic coffee.

After Mark arrived, the three of us went walking all around the camp. It turned out that the other guy was a very religious man who was the keeper of the keys to the mosque, which he was very proud of. He also turned out to be a very friendly guy, with a great big contagious smile, and kept pointing things out and introducing me to people to me as we walked. They took me through all the little alleyways and into areas that they said that they don’t usually bring internationals. All along the way they kept showing me all the damage done by the military incursions. They told me that there are no street lights in the camp because the Israelis keep shooting them out. They have night vision scopes and by shooting out the lights they keep the advantage. They do things like come in with armored bulldozers that have a hook on the back and just drive down the streets ripping up the pavement as they go. They shoot randomly, and I saw plenty of evidence of this on almost every buildings.

I think that what I saw is the continuing institutionalization of the Israeli project to keep as much as possible of the area that was historically known as Palestine with as few of the indigenous population as possible.

(Part 1 of 2): A Hospitality Which Won’t Quit… Nor Submit to the Occupation

Reportback from Daniel

Part 1: Checkpoints, and Violence Against Nonviolent Demos

I’m back from my whirlwind trip to Palestine. The trip was hectic and crazy and shocking. I think I accomplished my goal of seeing first-hand some aspects of the all-encompassing system of Israeli apartheid.

Among other things, my trip included participation in 2 very different demonstrations: the first one in Bil’in, where demonstrators are not allowed even to get close to the Israeli soldiers, and where tear-gas, concussion grenades, water cannons, and “rubber” bullets are freely used against un-armed demonstrators. The second demo was at a new land- confiscation site in a village south of Bethlehem, Artas, where the demonstrators went toe-to-toe with the soldiers. At both of these demonstrations, the goal is for the people of the village, along with Israeli and international allies to try to walk to their confiscated land. Both are mainly non-violent actions (on the side of the Palestinians), except that in Bil’in some of the young village boys use slingshots to throw rocks at the well armed and armored soldiers.

I had a meeting with Jeff Halper of The Israeli Committee against House Demolitions and participated in one of their tours of the Jerusalem area that explains and shows concretely the Israeli project to detach and isolate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, a project which is effectively ripping out Jerusalem, the Palestinian economic and cultural heart, from the West Bank.

Around a bend in the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, bam, you run right into the 30 foot high concrete “security barrier.” It just cuts off the road and creates a dead end. The area was obviously formerly a very busy commercial zone which is now dying since this is no longer a usable route.

I had multiple visits to Ramallah and crossings of the Kalandia checkpoint. In order to get from Jerusalem to any point in the northern West Bank, you must first go to Ramallah and to get to Ramallah you must cross the Kalandia checkpoint. At this checkpoint, people with international passport can stay on the bus but Palestinians must get off the bus and go through a special scan and ID process.

I also had multiple visits to Bethlehem through a different checkpoint which you can’t even drive through. All people must walk through this checkpoint. It is no problem for someone with a US passport but for the Palestinians it is a different story with a very complicated system of permits and computerized ID cards. As part of the identification process, the Palestinians must submit to a computerized “hand-scan”.

I took a day trip to Hebron, which is a very special place. Very militant, ideologically-driven Jewish settlers have taken over sections of this city and a large contingent of Israeli solders is always there to “protect” them. This city is in the occupied West Bank; the transfer of a country’s citizens (Israelis) into an occupied territory is a grave violation of international law. There I visited members of an ISM team that monitors the situation and on a daily basis escorts a group of schoolgirls back and forth to school. The school is in a location near the settlement and quite often the girls are subjected to rock throwing by the children of the settlers. It is a very tense place with checkpoints right in the middle of the city. Palestinians and Volunteers from ISM and Christian Peacemaker Teams are often sent to the hospital with injuries from rocks and other physical abuse.

MEPs stand up for immediate release of 45 Palestinian MPs in Israeli Jail

from Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of European Parliament
6 June 2007

Brussels– 45 Members of the European Parliament, from different political groups, have decided to express their solidarity towards the 45 Palestinian colleagues imprisoned by Israel, and called for their immediate and unconditional release.

All the 45 MEPs stood up symbolically in the plenary, right before the beginning of the debate with Mr. Solana on the situation on the Middle East, representing the 45 Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council detained in the Israeli jails in a clear violation of the international legality .

“Each of us, MEPs, is deeply concerned about the imprisonment of the President and of 1/3 of the Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, democratically and legitimately elected by the Palestinian people”, MEPs said in their declaration.

Through this initiative, MEPs want to strongly condemn these arrests by the Israeli Army, but also remind the anniversary of the beginning of the Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian territories, which is during 40 years exactly today.

“We are deeply worried not only for the plight of the 45 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council but also for the near 11000 Palestinian political prisoners currently imprisoned by the Israeli Army, without a true process and often brutally abducted by the Israeli soldiers.

They have to be released and, at the same time, also the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit must be freed by the Palestinian group that kidnapped him in Gaza Strip, as a change of prisoners- affirms Luisa Morgantini, one of the 45 MEPs participating to this initiative.

“40 years of military occupation are enough: now it’s urgent to implement a political solution of the conflict, based on “two People and two States” and it’s necessary that the Palestinian Legislative Council could continue its activity, instead of preventing its work because of the check points, the arrests, the summary killings kept on by the current Israeli policy of military occupation”, concluded Luisa Morgantini.

MEPs participating to the initiative:


Adamou Adamos, Andria Alfonso, Aubert Marie-Hélčne, Auken Margarete, Beer Angelika, Brepoels Frieda, Bourzai Bernadette, Bowis John, Carnero Gonzŕlez Carlos, Cohn-Bendit Daniel, Davies Chris, De Brún Bairbre, De Keyser Véronique, Demetriou Panayiotis, De Rossa Proinsias, Evans Jill, Flautre Hélčne, Gottardi Donata, Guerreiro Pedro, Hammerstein Mintz David, Isler-Béguin Marie-Anne, Kasoulides Ioannis , Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou Rodi, Locatelli Pia Elda, Lucas Caroline, Madeira Jamila, Matsakis Marios, McMillan-Scott Edward, Menendez Del Valle Emilio, Meyer Pleite Willy, Morgantini Luisa, Napoletano Pasqualina, Patrie Béatrice, Portas Miguel, Purvis John, Resetarits Karin, Romeva i Rueda Raül, Roure Martine, Saďfi Tokia, Savi Toomas, Sudre Margie, Svensson Eva-Britt, Toussas Georgios, Triantaphyllides Kyriacos, Wurtz Francis.