Volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement are encouraged to write personal reflections about the work they engage in with Palestinian communities, the events they experience, and the people they meet. These journals offer the human context often missing in traditional reports or journalism. These articles represent the author’s thoughts and feelings and not necessarily those of the International Solidarity Movement.
On Wednesday I was in an Israeli prison for one day. As you know, Nablus, and the old city mainly, is now undergoing the Israeli operation of ‘The Hot Winter’. The operation started on Sunday, continued on Monday, stopped just for Tuesday and was resumed yesterday. Yesterday was the turn of our area (Al-qariown area) in the old city. They started at 3:00 at night, told all the families to leave their houses, including women, babies and old people.
After standing for more than 6 hours without being allowed to get any food or even chairs they told all the women, children and those over 30 to go back home, and kept just us, the youth They put some blindfolds on our eyes, and tied our hands behind our backs with some very painful plastic cuffs.
After that, we were moved to some stores in the street, which were opened, destroyed and converted to prisons. We were there for half an hour, after that we had to go up a lot of stairs and through passages to a very dirty unused room, full of dirt that is not suitable even for animals to sit inside. When we were moving, I was the last one of the prisoners, I was grabbed by one soldier who led me as I could not see anything, then another two soldiers came and started to beat me using thier weapons on my back! note that we still had our hands cuffed and the masks on our eyes. We were kept there for 7 hours (untill 10:00 am), not allowed to go to WC , and when we requested some food, they brought some bread, threw it to the ground, and said that this is food, eat it as you want, they demanded that we eat like animals, but we refused that, and continued without food.
We were there until 4:00pm, then we were taken to an Israeli military vehicle, big enough just for 4 people (inside it one of the prisoners who could remove the mask was able to read in Hebrew, that the maximum number of people is 6) but we were 22!!!!!! we sat one on top of the other, which was the worst period of the day, we were taken through different streets until they decided to take us to Huwwara military base. We arrived there at 5:30 pm and after a while they decided to keep us inside a room. The room had 6 beds, but we were 28. When we really were hungry, we told the army that we were really hungry, and after 3 hours they brought us some meals that are suitable for 3 prisoners. Every 4 people shared a small piece of bread, and for the rice-meal, every one had a little – we had to eat rice with our hands, not spoons)
At 9:00pm we decided to sleep, because we did not expect to be released that night. Three people slept in every bed, two top to toe and the third in the rest of the bed, and the other three had to sleep on the ground – there was no proper floor. Every one had a blanket but there were no pillows so we used our shoes.
It is not possible for 28 people to be silent immediately, and we continued chatting. I was the last to get to sleep at 10:00pm. At 10:30pm a soldier knocked on the door loudly and told us we were going to the “intelligence” (I am not sure of the word but it’s some military intelligence like CIA) They again blindfolded and handcuffed us, put us in a military vehicle and drove us for a short distance, then let us out.
Here we met some very bad soldiers who asked us to sit down on the rough,very cold ground for about 30 minutes before one of the human rights workers asked the soldiers to remove the masks and untie our hands, when we discovered that we were in a large area of ground, surrounded by razor wire. At 12:30am they started taking us one by one to the intelligence colonel, during the waiting period we asked for some blankets or anything to cover ourselves but they refused.
When it was my turn to meet the colonel, I was searched, even my shoes and socks were searched with high-tech machines!
When I entered the office, it was just ordinary questions and they tried to persuade everyone to spy for them. But the thing that made me most angry was that while we were suffering with temperature less than 8 degrees, the colonel’s room was supplied with an LG air conditioner.
After that and as expected as I had done nothing against them, they sent me back to the same vehicle to send us to some place, don’t know where (again masked and handcuffed), the vehicle moved for 3 minutes and they ordered us to get out, removed the masks, cut the ties and said, this is Huwwara check point (I think you know it well) it was about 1:30am. We passed the checkpoint , some of my friends said – this is the only time you come to Huwwara and pass it quickly.
We knocked on the door of the first house after the checkpoint to call the Palestinian emergency services who came with two buses and took us home. I arrived home at 2:00am to find my parents waiting and my little brothers Ahmad(12 years) and Abdulqader(5 years) still crying, and my sister was staying with our neighbours.
I just want to tell you, that when they took us from the street, they did not even look at our ID cards to check if we were wanted or not.
I just Pray to God to take us away from this situation.
Monday morning I got a call saying there is a major invasion in Nablus because soldiers had uncovered an explosives laboratory. The entire city was under curfew, and ISM needed volunteers to go there and help the medical teams. Of course, sure, I had a day off so why not spend it tramping through the wet, muddy streets of Nablus with the UPMRC (the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees) Sounds like a party to me.
Before leaving we learned that soldiers had taken over the local TV station and were broadcasting the names of eight men they wanted either dead or alive and that the operation would last until the men were found. Hmm, so they want to kill or arrest eight men and so the entire city is shut down, everyone is ordered to remain in doors while the soldiers rampage through the city, occupy homes and schools and continue the general harassment that is jading me to the point where things that seemed worthy of writing home about are brushed off and no longer given a second thought anymore. That is bad.
The road from Ramallah to Nablus is beautiful in the spring. The almond trees are blooming, there are fields of yellow and purple flowers and my favorite flower, the striking red poppy.
After arriving in Nablus, our team of four international volunteers met up with a group of PMRC volunteers and began the somewhat harrowing job of breaking curfew in order to check on sick people and bring medicine and food. I’ve never walked around a city under curfew before. It looked like a ghost town except for a few stragglers and teenaged boys who were provoking and teasing the teenaged soldiers. Ridiculous. Is any of this worth dying for ? I don’t think so, I wonder if the soldiers do. Then comes the existential questions, what am I doing here, is it helping ? Why bother… Even when the occupation has ended, the strife will move to another part of the world. Who is to say the Palestinians won’t turn their collective devastation onto another population like the Israelis have done to them and the cycle will continue ? The world is such a bad place now. I feel helpless.
Nevertheless we followed the UPMRC teams with our hands up shouting “MEDICAL RELIEF, WE ARE UNARMED, DON’T SHOOT” whenever we encountered soldiers. There’s nothing like staring down the barrel of a gun to pull you out of bouts of self-pity. It’s ironic how the unarmed UPMRC guys seemed so much less frightened than the jumpy soldiers who were armed to the teeth. Fear is a funny thing. I guess they’re used to it; it’s their city; it’s normal life for them. We helped them bring food and medicine to people who had called in with requests because the soldiers are less jumpy and violent when they see a group of international girls breaking curfew.
At one point a group of eight soldiers walked passed us, guns aimed in every direction, accompanied by an older Palestinian man. I couldn’t figure out what the Palestinian man was doing with them because he didn’t appear to be under arrest. I asked one of the PMRC volunteers who explained to me that the man had whispered to him that he was a human shield. He’d been “kidnapped” since 4am that morning and was forced to accompany the soldiers as they patrolled the streets so that Palestinian fighters would not shoot at the soldiers. You know this happens, you read about it but nothing prepares you for the shock and disgust of actually seeing it yourself. We made some phone calls to Israeli human rights organizations. The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the use of civilians as human shields in military operations. At this point I start to wonder if anyone cares if a father of five who sells vegetables in the market during the day is being used as a human shield in a military operation.
As it began to get dark we found a hotel to stay at and the UPMRC guys helped us locate what seemed to be the only open grocery store in all of Nablus.
The following morning I left back to Ramallah. The beautiful ride back is kind of like the payment you get for the devastating way being in Nablus makes you feel. As I’m writing this report I heard of the first casualty of the invasion. A 50 year man was shot in the back of the neck while walking down the street with his son.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has a section where readers can post comments on a story, and while reading a recent story on the current situation in Nablus, I uncovered this little gem:
Title: God Help those who live near savages
Name: Steve
City: Tel Aviv
Why do we even associate with these people. Wall them in, expel them, and import thai laborers. END OF STORY. We need to be COMPLETELY seperate from murderous barbarians.
The other day, I got a tattoo. Actually, I should say that I got another tattoo, as it is not my first, or for that matter, my last. The day I got my tattoo, was more or less like any other; I got to work by my usual bike route (uphill, unfortunately), had my morning latte, and fortunately got off of work early. Of course, there were the occasional daily annoyances, my daily cup of coffee, anxiety about the tattoo (yes, this one hurt!), but for the most part, there was nothing terribly abnormal about my days events; so what the hell, let’s call it a ‘normal day.’
On February 14th, I received confirmation through a CPT report, that the homes of friends of mine in Palestine were destroyed. In one sense, this is also normal, as they were not the first, and won’t be the last homesdestroyed in Palestine by Israeli soldiers (or Palestinian homes destroyed in Israel for that matter). But truly, how can the demolition of your home by an illegal military occupation ever be considered normal? How can such brutality be carried out by human beings who are just following orders, without some semblance of reflection and disgust? And how do my friends, and countless other Palestinians, find the strength to survive such violence, and not only carry on, but rebuild and hope for the future?
In a moment, I’ll be going through the pictures, both from my trip and the current destruction, but first a few more words. I wrote about the community that has suffered this outrage before, in a diary called Close Encounter of a Settler Kind . It is the village of Qawawis, and the residents have endured numerous acts of violence over the years, the main aim of which is to remove them (and other small villages in the area) from the land.
If one looks at the many maps available, they will show you the logic of the occupation in this area; the less populated (by Palestinians) South Hebron Hills have been targeted for annexation by the Israeli settlers for decades, as opposed to the more densely populated Palestinian areas of Yatta, Samu, and Hebron nearby (that said, Hebron is another story). The villages of Qawawis and many others like them are a problem, not due to ‘terrorism’ or ‘security’as such, but due to their repeated refusal to leave, and their rootedness in the land.
Adi Ophir wrote in an article in the Book, Against the Wall that the occupation is defined not as much by overt acts of violence (although they do occur from time to time), which he calls kinetic violence, but by violence in small bursts, or even more, violence suspended, always there and threatened, always possible, but held back for the present. This is one of the reasons that conveying the terror and violence of the occupation can be deceptive to those that do not understand the way occupation dominates the daily life of Palestinians. But in the time I spent in Qawawis, I witnessed so many small and large examples of violence, it is hard to list them all. Just getting to the village requires a circuitous route replete with checkpoints, backroads and some on-foot traversing; then there was the morning we found 6 olive trees cut down by settlers, the surprise visits by the army, the countless visits to the village by armed and violent settlers. And then there is just the physical setting; Qawawis is ringed to the north, south and east by 3 settlements, and one major highway cuts it off from the village of Karmel. Two more roads branch off the main highway, completing the pincer which surrounds and attempts to choke off any ability to survive for the villages of the region. On top of that, in addition to the Apartheid Wall which passes close to the Green line, they are building an inner wall along the Highway, which will completely seal off the villages from Karmil and Yatta. The Supreme Court ordered the IOF to remove this wall over two months ago but this hasn’t happened yet.
Now I don’t just know this because I read Jeff Halper’s Matrix of Control article, which describes this basic policy and strategy of control and suffocation that the IOF employs, and is certainly applicable to Qawawis and other parts of Palestine. I know it because I lived it when I stayed in Qawawis. When we would take the goats and sheep out to graze, we could go only so far as the lack of roads and settlements would allow us (to give you some idea, I traverse well more than twice that distance during my 20 minute bike ride to work). And when we would be near the roads, we would be in constant threat of soldiers and settlers, due to military orders which say that they need to stay 200 meters from the roads. Some days, the army jeeps would drive by and ignore us, and some days they would try and force us to leave. Some days, the settlers would ignore us (you can always tell who they are by the orange ribbons, a holdover from the disengagement), or some days they would honk their horns at us, or shout from their cars. And, some days, they would do more, as my previous post explains.
But on February 14th, the suspended violence gave way to a full-scale explosion, in the form of home demolitions, in 3 villages in the South Hebron Hills. First, here is a portion of the Haaretz article that discusses it;
Security forces destroyed seven illegally constructed Palestinian houses and 13 other structures Wednesday on the southern slope of Mount Hebron in the West Bank.
The demolitions took place in the villages of Manzal, Umm al-Khir and Gawawis.
The Civil Administration said, “Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity.”
And if you would like to see some of the reuters pictures of that day, go here
And here is the CPT report, which was emailed to me by Joe Carr & posted on the ISM site, and is fully approved for reposting;
Israeli soldiers demolished homes in three Palestinian villages near bypass road 317 on February 14, 2007. Starting in Imneizil at around 9am about forty Israeli soldiers with two bulldozers demolished one home, an animal pen and a stone bake-oven. At noon the soldiers moved to Qawawis where they demolished the homes of five families and one bake-oven, then on to Um Al-Kher where they demolished one home and damaged a wall of another home.
At Imneizil several young children were in their home eating when the Israeli military arrived; the soldiers gave the family time to get out, but did not give them time to remove their personal belongings. The animal pen was demolished with a few animals inside; two lambs were injured. The Palestinian family began immediately to build a makeshift pen for the animals as the majority of the sheep were just returning from grazing in the fields.
In the village of Qawawis one of the demolished homes was over sixty-five years old, and sheltered two families. Photos of the families amid the rubble are on the CPT photo gallery: www.cpt.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album93
The Israeli military, in concert with Israeli settlers, has been trying to force the Palestinian residents of the south Hebron hills to leave their homes for years. Due to harassment from the nearby Israeli outposts several of the young families of Qawawis moved to a nearby town; when the Israeli army then forcibly evacuated the remaining families, a court ordered that the families could return to their homes. According to a lawyer representing the families, the Israeli army now claims that this court ruling allows only the last inhabitants of Qawawis to return, not their children who earlier fled the assaults of the Israeli settlers.
“Our children need homes,” said one villager. “What do they want us to do”?
The Israeli army said, “Twenty illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity”. The Israeli military made no provisions for shelter for the families whose homes they demolished. The families asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide them with tents.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions said, “A building permit is unavailable there [in the south Hebron hills].” The preceding day three Israeli peace activists and two internationals, including CPTer Sally Hunsberger, joined approximately fifty Palestinians in working on their land near Imneizil. The Palestinian men, women and children planted 600 olive trees in fields that they had afraid to walk on for the past four years due to threats of settler violence. During the action, soldiers and settlers watched from a distance, but did not interfere with the tree planting.
Now, I would like to walk through some of the pictures, which consist of the day’s destruction, and my own pictures that precede it. It was especially painful to see these pictures, as these are people that fed and took care of me, in whose homes I slept and ate, and whose children I played with.
First, here is a picture of Qawawis from sometime bin 2004-2005, with the house of Hajj Khalil in the center. The land is farmed for olives, almonds and figs on the hills, and elsewhere for wheat and grazing for livestock.
Next to Hajj Khalil’s house is the smaller structure that the internationals would sleep in. It is made of stone, mud & cement, with a tarp for a roof (after the rain, the water would collect in bunches and we would have to take sticks to push it out). The winter was cold there, but we would always gather in Hajj Khalil’s house for sweet tea to warm us up.
And here are the remains of the home I stayed in, stones, tarp & all.
In the center of this picture is my dear friend, Hajj Ibrahim, and to his right, his wife Hajja Amne. Of the homes there, only Hajj Khalil’s, seen behind them, still stands.
Now, this is a picture of my lame attempt to put together a family tree of the families of Qawawis, and I show it to you as my excuse for not remembering everyone’s names in the photographs; the families are big, and it has been some time since I was there last, so my apologies!
Here I am in the home of Ibrahim, son of Hajj Mohammed who lives in the nearby village of Karmil. In the center is Ibrahim’s son Mohammed, who lives and works in the nearby town of Yatta and teaches English. He was very welcoming, his English was excellent, and I enjoyed spending time with him there. One of the great things about staying in Qawawis was that it really forced me to learn some Arabic, as few spoke English, but when he was there, I luckily had some help!
The taller boy is Salah, and the younger one is either Eyal or Lohai, I honestly forget! I remember playing soccer with them & I twisted my ankle on the rocky terrain (that said, one of the kids was playing barefoot!)
Here is Ibrahim, sitting with his family in the ruins of his home, the one in which I took the previous pictures. To this day he bears an injury to his leg from a confrontation with soldiers years back (he was audacious enough to take his flock by the highway, can you believe that?).
The house is shared with his brother Abed, whose wife Mariamme is here in front of the tire.
some of their possessions that survived the destruction.
Here is a picture of Hajj Mahmoud from last year. He was a funny guy and fed me many times in his home. He also was a bit impatient with my steep Arabic learning curve; as soon as I would figure out a word or an expression of the most rudimentary sort, he would jump straight to full-speed Arabic! I had to learn how to say to him “slow down, I know very little Arabic;” needless to say, I forgot how to say even that.
Here is Hajj Mahmoud after the destruction of his home, with his wife Aisha and his son Ziad, who’s wife was pregnant and has since given birth to their first child. Now they are all homeless, from the newborn to the grandfather.
Here I am in the home of Hajj Khalil with Mahmoud’s son Ziad. Khalil and Ziad had just come back from Karmil after voting in the January 2006 election, fingers purple and all. Hajj Khalil was truly kind to me, and I look forward to seeing him and his family again; who knows, maybe I can help with the rebuilding of their homes, as rabbis for Human Rights and others have pledged to help them rebuild.
This is Hajj Khalil, just minutes before the settler came and attacked us, as described in my diary Close Encounter of a Settler Kind . The man is over 80 years old, and despite everything, both he and his family will refuse to leave their land.
It’s my third time visiting Palestine, and not much is different. I was just commenting to my co-volunteers on how I’ve already written about such and such issue, I can’t do it again… but my housemate here pointed out the truth: repetition is life here. If reading the same stories over and over feels exasperating, imagine living it.
A few days ago, we were called by Maher, a town leader in a village in the north of the West Bank, very close to the actual 1967 green-line border of Israel. In fact, it’s right next to an Israeli town where 70% of this Palestinian village population worked before the intifada (or “uprising”) began and Palestinians were no longer allowed entry inside Israel. When we arrived, Maher led us to a home and explained how, as the family was religious, we would be visiting with the women and a family member would translate for us. We entered a room where 50 women sat on floor mattresses against the wall. It was the final day of the three day mourning period in which family members and neighbors sit with the father, brothers, sisters, spouse, and mother of the deceased from morning till night. We sat next to the mother and wife of Omar, a 28-year-old Palestinian man who was assasinated while walking with his wife and 30-day old baby from his brother’s house next door after an evening visit. Plain clothes officers jumped out from the entrance way in his apartment building and shot him 3 times, put the baby in his arms and told his wife that if she screamed, the baby would die as well. They ran towards the road where military jeeps stood waiting.
Did the family contact a lawyer? They said no. See, Omar’s brother is in prison. After a long period of hiding from the military police, he was finally imprisoned last year. Omar’s family knows he has been tortured and fears even more retaliation if they initiate a legal battle with the Israeli military.
Almost EVERY single Palestinian family has had a few people imprisoned in Israeli jails and few people die from Israeli bullets. Where would your anger lie?
by Abdullah Abu Rahme, Coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil’in. Translated By Nasir Samara, February 3rd
Throughout the history of the occupation, Palestinians have sought every means to resist, to make their voices heard to the world, and to raise international support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence. One of these means includes promoting solidarity with Palestine through international volunteers, whom we consider as ambassadors for our struggle in their own countries.
Yet the lives of these volunteers also bring inspiration to us. Take the story of Anna Wicks, 30, as an example. Anna fought against discrimination in her native South Africa, and came to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement on five occasions to stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle against the occupation and the Apartheid Wall, one of the most visible forms of open discrimination in the world, one which separates citizens from their lands and which prevents them from moving freely in their own homeland.
Anna stood with farmers and citizens of the villages of Nas’ha, Budrus, Jayyous and Bil’in. She participated in demonstrations and direct actions against the Wall, and accompanied students in Hebron in order to help them reach their schools. She stayed awake with the Bedouins living in caves in Khirbat Qawawis in South Hebron in order to protect them from settler attacks. She also acted as a human shield to protect civilians from Israeli military attacks. When the Israeli army tried to arrest one Palestinian youth, she and her friends exerted all their physical energy to secure his release. Her life was endangered many times in this way, and she herself was injured and arrested in Bil’in, and eventually deported from the village by the Israeli military and prevented from returning.
The last time she came here was one year ago. Israeli immigration authorities tried to deny her entry at Ben Gurion airport until she presented them with documentation proving that her visit was not political, but humanitarian in nature: Anna had come to donate one of her kidneys to a three-year-old Palestinian girl, Lina Fareed T’aem Allah, from the village of Qiri.
She was allowed to enter only under the condition that she did not return to Bil’in. The transplant was carried out successfully and Anna’s act of generosity has saved Lina’s life.
A few days ago, Anna gave birth to a little girl whom she named Nkwenkwezi Bil’in, “the star of Bil’in.” So while she cannot physically be with us in Palestine, Palestine will always be with Anna in the form of little Nkwenkwezi Bil’in.
