Category: Journals

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.

Tel Rumeida – Stones & Struggle

By Joe Carr

The Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron is a major flashpoint of tension between Palestinians and Israeli colonial settlers. Around forty Israeli soldiers protect over sixty of the most racist and violent of Israeli settlers, forcing over one thousand Palestinians (whose families have lived in Tel Rumeida for hundreds of years) to live in a virtual prison. Fences, walls, and checkpoints block every entrance to Tel Rumeida, and there are Israeli soldier posts throughout the neighborhood. The closures make commerce virtually impossible, and it is difficult for any non-residents to visit their Tel Rumeida friends and family. Many families have moved out for this reason alone.

Even more troublesome than the constant prison-camp conditions are the fanatical settlers who regularly harass and attack their Palestinian neighbors. Palestinians live in a constant state of terror from being beaten, stoned, robbed, and threatened with guns but they refuse to be forced out of their homes or let it interfere with their daily life.

Several international activists from the Tel Rumeida Project live fulltime in Tel Rumeida. They work with volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement, Ecumenical Accompaniment Program for Palestine & Israel, the Christian Peacemaker Teams, and a variety of Israeli groups to accompany, document, and physically intervene to deter Israeli attacks and pressure authorities to better protect Palestinians and prosecute criminal settlers. Israeli soldiers and settlers regularly harass, threaten, intimidate, and stone the international and Israeli activists, but Palestinian children say they now feel safer playing outside their homes.

Even more encouraging, is the potential for a progressive change in the climate. Unlike other accompaniment groups, the goal of the Tel Rumeida Project is to support and empower Palestinians as they stand up against this colonial oppression.

For instance, last Saturday we got a call that settler children were throwing rocks at Palestinian passers-by. When we arrived, we found five 9-13 year-old settler boys hanging out in the Israeli military post. Palestinians immediately came out of their houses to tell us how the settler boys had just stoned them while the soldiers watched. The settler boys started throwing more rocks, some from inside the military post, and we began arguing with the soldiers that they should protect the Palestinians (supposedly a part of their job). The soldiers argued with eachother about what to do while we supported the Palestinians, including a mother and daughter, as they confronted the settler boys. Palestinians yelled at the settlers and soldiers for putting them through all this, and the Israelis were visibly intimidated. More settler children came out and began throwing stones, so we stood in front of the Palestinians. I got hit pretty hard in the leg, but the soldiers started trying to stop the settler boys, which made the soldiers a target for their stones. The situation escalated, but our presence supported the Palestinians’ expression of their outrage and prevented Israeli soldiers from repressing this Palestinian resistance.

Cordova School is a Palestinian girls’ school located directly across from Israeli settlement apartments and a settler school. Settler children often harass Palestinian students and teachers as they pass by. Yesterday was the first day of school for Palestinians, so we brought a team of internationals and media to accompany the children. Two Israeli military jeeps and a police jeep arrived shortly after us. All in all, there were 25 internationals, 12 soldiers, and four police officers to get around 100 Palestinian girls to school.

There were fewer internationals and soldiers for the girls’ afternoon walk home, and the settlers escalated their attacks. They threw stones and eggs from their apartment windows, while others hollered insults and threatened us. The Israeli police (who’s job it is to arrest settler law-breakers) also became a target of the settler violence, but they did nothing to stop it. We continued patrolling the area for the rest of the day, trying to have a presence in all the areas where settlers and Palestinians interact. “We’re like human security cameras,” one activist commented, “we never let the settlers out of our sight until we know another international can see them”.

A little before 2pm, several internationals had to leave and we went out to meet their replacements. On our way back in, we got stopped at the recently upgraded Tel Rumeida checkpoint. What used to be a green tower with concrete blockades is now a fortified trailer with metal detectors and electronic sliding doors. They’ve even tried to make it prettier by painting it to look like the white stone of the surrounding ancient buildings. An Israeli soldier at the checkpoint said that they would no longer allow in any internationals that are part of organizations, “Only tourists and residents” he said. We tried to explain that we are residents and have a house in Tel Rumeida, but because he had seen us doing accompaniment and documentation work he refused us entry. To go around the checkpoint, we had to wind through back allies, scale a wall, and crawl under grapevines.

During this time, a group of settlers took advantage of our absence and attacked several Palestinians. We found a 13-year-old Palestinian boy with cuts and bruises on his arms and stomach. He said a group of around 20 settlers in their late teens had surrounded him and beat him with sticks for around ten minutes. Other settler youths threw large stones a group of Palestinians, injuring an older Palestinian woman’s leg. We accompanied the Palestinians to file reports with the police, and then became more diligent with our patrols.

Things came to a head around 5pm, when a large group of settler children, some in masks, (observed from the hill by their parents and other settler adults), began throwing large stones and other debris at Palestinians, internationals, and Israeli soldiers in the area. One international was injured on her hand when she blocked a sharp rock from hitting her head. When the police arrived, the settlers briefly dispersed but then quickly regrouped. They began intensely stoning the police, who did nothing but videotape and stay in the protection of their armored jeeps. More police arrived and drove into the settlement area, and eventually an officer grabbed a settler boy. A small riot ensued, and settlers attacked the police officers.

Later in the evening, Palestinians reported that settler boys intensely stoned two Palestinian homes. Saturday, the Jewish holy day Shabbat, is a busy day for settler religious fanatics.

All in all, we hope that the settlers now know that their days of terrorizing Palestinians with impunity are over. Though the Israeli violence continues, Palestinians are now armed with international and Israeli activists, cameras, video-cameras, potential lawsuits, and contacts with the international community. I feel privileged to be able to stand with Palestinians in their struggle, it’s an honor to be stoned along side them.

Read Joe’s blog, Lovinrevolution.

Qawawis and the mustawtaneen

Qawawis is a small village with big problems. After an Israeli court ruled that villagers had the right to live on their land, settlers have harassed them with humiliation and violence. ISM and other organizations have kept a constant presence in the village.

Here’s an account from one of the volunteers who recently stayed in Qawawis. — via thismuchicansayistrue, an ISM media coordinator’s blog.

Palestinians Struggle to Hold on to Land, Watering Holes

by Henry Norr
Berkeley Daily Planet

Life in the tiny Palestinian hamlet of Qawawis seems straight out of the Old Testament, but that doesn’t stop the Jewish settlers in the hilltop outposts that surround the place from doing their best to destroy it. And if something isn’t done soon about the settlers’ latest threat—denying Qawawis’s shepherds access to watering holes their flocks depend on—the villagers might have no choice but to abandon their ancestral homes and lands.

Qawawis, located near the southern tip of the occupied West Bank, south of the city of Hebron, is home to just four extended families and a few hundred sheep and goats. Only one of the families has a house; the others live in caves carved—originally by nature, later by human hand—out of the region’s limestone hills.

Like their neighbors in nearby At-Twani and dozens of other villages throughout the south Hebron hills, the residents of Qawawis have faced harassment from the settlers since the 1980s. (See “Means of Expulsion: Violence, Harassment and Lawlessness against Palestinians in the Southern Hebron Hills,” a report released in July 2005 by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, and the reports of the Christian Peacemaker Team on the poisoning of wells, the beating of schoolchildren and international monitors, and other forms of settler harassment in At-Twani.

For a while things in Qawawis got so bad that the villagers had to move out altogether. When they left, settlers promptly moved into their caves, until the Israeli military decided to clear everyone out (for “security reasons”) and brought in bulldozers to seal the caves with rubble.

But in March of this year, after winning an order from Israel’s High Court confirming their right to their land, the villagers came back to Qawawis, cleaned up the mess left by the settlers and the army, and reclaimed their homes. In hopes of deterring settler retaliation, the villagers requested help from progressive Israelis and internationals, and ever since the International Solidarity Movement has provided a steady stream of volunteers to stay in the village and accompany the shepherds to their fields.

Neither the court order nor the international presence has stopped the harassment, though. At first the settlers showed up almost daily, often wearing masks, shouting insults and threats, waving guns and throwing rocks, sometimes attempting to enter the villagers’ caves, and beating locals and internationals alike. (See the account posted on April 1, 2005 by Kasper Lundberg, an ISM volunteer from Denmark, at electronicintifada.net/v2/article3735.shtml.)

While I was in Qawawis in late July, the settlers came up with a new trick: two of them showed up on horseback, galloping through the village’s olive groves and right past the caves. They didn’t stay long and caused no particular problem, but under the circumstances, their very appearance on village land was an act of intimidation. As I followed them, trying to snap their pictures, I could only imagine what would happen to a Palestinian who had the temerity to approach the settlers’ outposts.

What really has Qawawis’s residents worried at the moment, however, is the threat to its always precarious water supply. In July, after a suicide bombing in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, the settlers informed the villagers that they are no longer permitted to graze their sheep and goats within 150 meters of a road that leads to one of the outposts.

That order, which appears to have no legal basis—not even one of the military orders that provide pseudo-legitimacy for most of the occupation’s abuses—denies Qawawis a significant portion of its land. But the immediate problem is that the prohibited strip includes two watering holes to which the village’s herders have taken their sheep and goats since time immemorial. To keep the animals alive in the area’s stifling summer heat, the villagers have had to share the water from their own wells in the village. But the capacity of those wells is limited, and the villagers say it’s insufficient to supply both them and their animals (not to mention the internationals) for long.

Time standing still
At a glance, you might wonder why the settlers bother with Qawawis. The population usually totals only about 20, though it sometimes rises to 50 or 60, depending on how many offspring and relatives are at home at a given moment, as opposed to staying in the nearby town of Al-Karmel (a 40-minute walk), sleeping in the hills with their flocks, or—as in the case of one young man I met—studying electrical engineering at the university in Hebron. If you drive by on the highway that runs near the place, all you see are the solitary house (three bare rooms, no plumbing or kitchen) and the stone walls that surround the cave entrances and pens for the sheep and goats.

There’s no running water, just a couple of wells. Electricity arrived only this summer, in the form of a generator provided by Ta’ayush, a progressive Israeli organization with both Jewish and Arab members; the generator runs for just an hour and a half or two every evening. Each cave, as well as the outdoor platforms the families sometimes eat on and the canvas-roofed shelter the villagers recently built for visiting internationals, now has a bare light bulb and an outlet, but so far they have had no visible effect on the residents’ lifestyle: there’s no radio, TV, or any other appliance except a video camera left by a visiting international, which remains something of a mystery to the locals.

Daily life revolves around the sheep and goats, as it has in this area for millennia. At sun-up, men from each family take their flocks—about 30 or 40 animals each—out to graze on the rocky fields that surround the village, or sometimes to the adjoining olive groves. The women, meanwhile, prepare the food and tend to the homes, crops, and kids. (Except for constant infusions of tea and sugar, all the food I was served during my three-day stay was homegrown, including delicious flat bread baked in tabuun, or traditional outdoor ovens.)

By around 10 a.m., at least in the summer, the heat begins to get overwhelming, and the shepherds bring the flocks back to their stone-walled pens in the village. Then everyone seems to disappear for a rest and the midday meal. At 3:30 or 4 p.m, it’s off to graze again until dusk. By 9:30, when the generator cuts out, most everyone seems to have retired, until the routine begins again the next morning.

All in all, it’s a simple, peaceful life—or it would be if not for the settlers and the warplanes constantly audible and occasionally visible overhead. (There’s apparently an Israeli air force training base nearby—perhaps they’re practicing for a raid on Iran’s nuclear sites?)

The planes, though, are easy to ignore. The settlers are not. The shepherds continually look over their shoulders to see who might be sneaking up on them; the boys study each car that passes on the settler road.

Running dry
So far, the villagers have complied with the settlers’ demand that they stay away from the road and the watering holes near it—though they seem to value the presence of the international volunteers, they obviously don’t believe that we’re capable of protecting them from the consequences of defying the order.

The villagers have, however, tried to interest international humanitarian organizations in the threat they face. While I was there, a jeep from the International Committee of the Red Cross pulled up to the village, carrying an investigator, a translator, and a three-person film crew.

At the time the family that owns the house was away (they were in town with relatives visiting from Saudi Arabia), but one of the other elders had a key, and the house was quickly opened, and a half-dozen of the men, plus the two internationals, assembled there to meet with the ICRC team.

In addition to describing past incidents of harassment, the villagers explained the impending water crisis. The ICRC investigator tried hard to get the villagers to give him exact figures for Qawawis’s population as well as for the capacity in cubic meters of each of the “water systems” in question. The men were unable to respond with the precision he wanted, but after much consultation among them, they arrived at the key conclusion: if the sheep and goats as well as the human residents have to use the village wells, they’ll likely run dry in as few as thirty days, or sometime around the end of August.

The ICRC investigator promised to file an urgent report with the Israeli authorities. Whether that will do any good remains to be seen. But unless someone intervenes, the residents of Qawawis may again be forced to leave, and the settlers will have succeeded in cleansing another small piece of Palestine of its legitimate owners.

Update:
After this article was written, activists from the Israeli grassroots organization Ta’ayush brought a water tanker truck to Qawawis. With the activists standing by to deter settler interference, the truck pumped a tankful of water out of one of the prohibited watering holes, then into one of the wells the residents still have access to.

This emergency response has apparently eliminated the immediate threat to the survival of Qawawis, but it’s obviously not a long-term solution. That, of course, would begin with the removal of all Israeli settlements from the occupied Palestinian territories, as required by the Fourth Geneva Convention, United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and dozens of subsequent U.N. resolutions.

So Little Hope

Greta B.

Today as I was walking back to the hotel in Jerusalem, I heard a terrible crying. It was coming from a pile of garbage outside the Gloria Hotel. It’s very difficult to pick up garbage in the old city, unless you just happen to live in the Jewish quarter,because, although Palestinians pay the same taxes that Jews pay, they get very little services…not even the mail unless they have a post office box at one of the few post offices.

So the crying continued, louder and louder as I approached the garbage heap. There, under all the orange peels and detrius was a tiny kitten, yelling as loudly as she could. She isn’t more than six weeks old.

What could I do? Every bone in my American body said I had to rescue her, and every bit of common sense said to leave her to die. In Palestine, it’s survival of the fit, not the weak. A young girl in Marda has to have a kidney transplant. Hadassah hospital in Israel wants $40,000 up front. She will die.

Another l8-year old girl has epileptic seizures, and her father must pay $400.00 a month for her medicine, because they have no insurance to cover this kind of monthly cost. And he doesn’t even make $400.00 a month. She is
slipping further and further into mental retardation.

So I looked at the kitten, and I knew she would die in the garbage of the Gloria Hotel. I just couldn’t leave her. I picked her up and took her to my hotel and asked for someone, anyone, to save her.

One young man lives illegally in one room with his wife, three children and his fear of being caught. He doesn’t have a Jerusalem ID and will be thrown in jail if the Israeli authorities find him living with his wife and working in the city. He’s already been in jail for 3 months, because he was caught working.

Another man lives in Ramallah and walks nine hours to get to Jerusalem. He knows that when the 27-foot wall that is encircling Jerusalem is finished, so is his job and so are his hopes.

I sat on the floor of the dining room with this little kitten in my lap, and I cried. One of the waiters took pity on me and said he’d take her home for his son.

I can only hope he meant it. It’s foolish I know. We can barely help the Palestinians open their shops or go to school and demonstrate against the wall, and I’m worried about a kitten.

I’m very sad.

Does anyone care?

by Ash

The demonstration of Bil’in last Friday was a direct message to the UN, I think that message was “The UN is blind to see the crimes against Palestinians and cannot rule against the Israeli government, because Israel is shutting everyone up”.

16 Internationals and Israelis (the number of the security council members of the UN) were at the front line of the demonstration, blindfolded, with Israeli flags over their eyes, strips of tape over their mouths, and UN posters attached on their shirts. As soon the demonstration reached the barbed razor wire where the Israeli military was standing fully geared, the 16 Internationals and Israelis played catch with a ball painted with the color of the Palestinian flag.

One of the farmers of Bili’n managed to stick a sign “this weapon kills peace” on a soldier’s weapon. Eight soldiers rushed after him, but the demonstrators stayed calm and continued chanting and singing. After about 15 minutes, one of the local coordinators decided that the message had been conveyed, and then the demonstrators took a side road, which leads to the construction site.

The Israeli army fired sound grenades and teargas into the crowd. I was running backwards to avoid being hit with the teargas canisters. A 61-yearold woman was shot with a teargas canister on the back of the head and taken to the ambulance. I was standing behind a group of demonstrators watching some of the Israeli army dragging some protestors on the ground after we were pushed back.

A group of seven soldiers were in the village firing rubber bullets at children who were throwing stones. But no stones were thrown for at least 15 minutes after the soldiers started to fire tear gas. Later they began firing live ammunition. I told a friend of mine we should go to the place where the soldiers were shooting to see what’s happening; we decided to go together!

Two soldiers were firing live ammunition at kids inside the village, I immediately shouted in Hebrew “Don’t shoot!” We walked quickly towards the soldiers and blocked them from shooting; we were standing with both hands on the back of our heads. While passing some phrases in Hebrew to my friend, one of the soldiers took an aiming position at the other side and shot a round of live ammunition at the children.

After 10 minutes, the rest of demonstrators were pushed back into the village where I was standing, as the soldiers fired teargas and sound grenades. More soldiers arrived. I went to the ambulance for treatment, because I had inhaled teargas, and came back after 10 minutes to sit on the ground with the rest of demonstrators, blocking the Israeli army from proceeding inside the village.

While we were all sitting on the ground, the army used their shields to attack the demonstrators. One soldier grabbed my shirt and said, “You are next”. Four soldiers rushed between the houses to arrest some children and occupied a rooftop of one under construction to shoot rubber bullets. I volunteered to join a group of Internationals and Israeli activists to go to the sight and try to stop the army from shooting.

The demonstration lasted for more than three hours before the committee against the Wall called it off for that day.

What came to my mind after that day is, would the UN know that the Israeli army used force and illegal ammunition against peaceful demonstrators? Would the UN know that the Israeli government did not comply with the ruling of the International Court of Justice to stop building the Wall? Would the UN know that nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers in peaceful protests against building the Wall in their villages? Would the UN know that Israel is building ghettos?

Does anyone care?