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.

Letter from Dheishe Refugee Camp

Hi Folks,

In the past week since I left, it’s been hard to sit down and put together some thoughts, since new experiences keep happening. Here are a few.

The volunteers for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who showed up in Jerusalem last weekend were guided to Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, for a day of training on Monday. We spent the next day and a half working intensively through Palestinian history, operations of the ISM, principles of non-violence, role-plays, cultural sensitivity, and much more. We met in Bethlehem with a member of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, who shared with us detailed demographic and geographic information on the occupation, complete with satellite photos. For a good web site with maps and other very useful documentation, see www.arij.org.

We were 17: Americans, Swedes, Brits, an Italian, and a Dane. Around 5 Jews. Towards the end of the training we quickly formed into affinity groups, trying in a short time to sort out commonality of temperament and level of engagement. There were some who seemed, as one person said, “ferociously courageous,” and others who wanted to ease into the work.

Possible ongoing activities of the movement (we were told it’s not an organization) include checkpoint watching, house-sitting at homes threatened with demolition, ambulance accompaniment, and “breaking curfew.” The small affinity group that I joined went to Deheishe camp, near Bethlehem. Here, we have been sleeping in a house that has been threatened with demolition. Sometimes houses are demolished in order to make way for Israeli settlements or bypass roads; other times because they were built without permit (as are many Palestinian homes, since permits are almost impossible to get), and other times because someone in the family, or related to the family, or living near it, committed a suicide bombing or other kind of attack.

The latter was the case with this house. A 17-year-old girl, daughter of the family, set off a bomb in a Jerusalem market, killing around 15 people including herself. The fact that we were to protect the family of a suicide bomber from collective punishment caused enough conflict for some of the people in my group that they withdrew and went elsewhere. For me there was no conflict, however, because the family did nothing to deserve punishment. They did not even know she was planning the act, and learned about it from a television report. And after it happened, the father and the girl’s fiancé both made strong public statements against attacks that hurt civilians.

We arrived here Tuesday evening and were given a tour around the camp. It’s on a hill off the main road out of Bethlehem. Deheishe was set up by the U.N. in 1948 for Palestinian refugees from the newly created state of Israel. The father of my family was born on the road as his family was fleeing from Ramle.

It happens that I was in this camp in 1990, when I last visited Palestine and Israel. Then, during the first Intifada, there were two high fences around the camp, blocking off all but one entrance. On the outer fence, someone had spray-painted in Hebrew, “It’s Cheaper to Kill Them.” The fences were removed after Oslo, when Deheishe became part of the Palestinian-controlled area.

We walked around the camp, through the narrow winding streets and alleys, up the hills, passing cinder-block and mortar houses, some poor, some wealthier. Most of the walls had graffiti in Arabic, and many of them had posters with photos of people who had been killed by the army. Some were of people who had died while committing suicide attacks. There was one older man who had been shot 36 times by soldiers while he was coming back from the grocery store.

We were met warmly by the family, and sat up until midnight introducing ourselves and drinking tea. The house has been stripped of almost all furniture, doors, and windows, in anticipation of the demolition. We sat on plastic chairs, and slept on mats on the floors. The house adjoins one other, and there are several others nearby, across a ten-foot alley. If it is bombed, all the neighboring houses will be damaged as well.

Before going to bed we made a plan in case the army showed up. They come in the middle of the night and give you a few minutes to get out, then they set up dynamite. We are here because we are aware that the army prefers that these things not be revealed to the outer world, and if foreign observers are present, they are less likely to come. I was told that the army knows we are here, and won’t come as long as we remain. We are at least the second group that has been staying at the house.

As we talked, we got an earful of information on how people are living. The frustration expressed was intense, talking about people’s inability to go to school or work, to make progress in their lives, to plan anything at all. One man told us that of his 5 brothers, two were in jail. He said, “I like to laugh. Maybe I will laugh for a half hour, and cry the rest of the day.” Almost all of his friends, he said, were either dead or in prison.

This is just a minuscule portion of the woes we have heard about in a short time. I will share in more detail when I get home.

We took a look at a house that had been demolished. The family is now living nearby, under a tent without sides. They had a few plastic chairs, and served us coffee. They were also originally from the Ramle area. The army came in the middle of the night, and they had time to dress and grab their baby. The army outdid itself, and when the house was blown up, the impact was felt at least a half mile away. A fierce blast of wind reached all the way up to the house I’m staying in, and rubble landed on the roof.

The house was a sturdy new three-story building. The family had saved to build it for twenty years. They only moved in three months ago. Now it is a pile of rubble, like a thousand I have seen in Bosnia. The blast was so strong that it blew a metal door 100 feet, to a neighboring house, and the door made a 1.5-foot hole all the way through the concrete wall. This all happened less than a week ago. When we arrived, the door frame was still hanging there, horizontal, stuck into the concrete wall.

There were dead chickens around the yard of the wrecked house. The floors had mostly collapsed onto each other. Oddly, one bathroom door survived, its mirror intact.

Today as I was walking down to the Ibdaa community center (see www.dheisheh-ibdaa.net – it’s the only cultural center/hostel/internet lab of its kind in a refugee camp), I noticed that the main street was empty. At 8:30 a.m. there was already a curfew. I was told, “Forget about today.” I had been planning to visit Bethlehem, but no one was going anywhere.

We sat around Ibdaa talking to visiting Italians and Palestinian-Canadians. Suddenly there was the rumble of a very loud engine right outside our window. It was an APC – an armored personnel carrier full of Israeli soldiers. It looks like a small tank, only it has wheels instead of tracks. The APC backed up and went into the street. For the next hour it drove back and forth, going up side streets and returning. At times several soldiers would get out and march alongside. After a while, a tank showed up too. One brave Palestinian man stood out on the street and filmed the APC. After a while it left, but not without briefly detaining and questioning an adventuresome Italian. The rest of us tried to watch, while keeping out of the way.

When we headed to Deheishe, we were told that “Bethlehem is Occupation Lite.” That may be true, but what I’ve seen already is bad enough to make me feel very angry and sad, and apparently enough to make the people who have to live with it their whole lives desperate.

Yours, Peter

Report on Beit Fureek

By Adam Stumacher

The town of Beit Fureek lies a mere seven kilometers from the West Bank city of Nablus, but under military curfew they might just as well be separated by an ocean. According to Atef Hanini, the town’s mayor, not a single resident of this town has been to Nablus for two months now. As a farming community, Beit Fureek is dependent on access to the nearby city in order to sell produce, and most of the town’s working population is employed there (though of course were they by some miracle able to get to Nablus, they would find all shops and businesses closed due to 56 consecutive days of military curfew). However, the real crisis in Beit Fureek is not unemployment, but water.

Every ounce of water for this town of 12,000 residents must be brought by truck from Nablus. The Israeli authorities have refused to tap into the water pipeline that passes less than five hundred meters from city limits. But perhaps more significantly, there is a spring close enough to this town that the residents can hear its gurgling (when their ears are not filled with the sound of M16 rounds). This spring has enough water that it could meet the needs of all the town’s residents, plus the residents of the nearby community of Beit Dajan, which faces the same water shortage. But one hundred percent of the water from this spring is diverted to illegal Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley. So the water tanker truck has become the tenuous lifeline for this whole community.

The town owns a total of five water tankers. The trouble is, these trucks are sporadically held at the army checkpoint on the Nablus access road. In theory, the trucks have permission to pass back and forth to Nablus between the hours of 10 AM and 2 PM. But soldiers often detain the trucks so long at the checkpoint that even completing one run per day can be a challenge. Sometimes, when unable to pass through the checkpoint, desperate truck drivers fill up from non-sanitary water sources, which has contributed to a outbreak of amoebic dysentery in the town (which has almost no access to medical care, again due to the curfew).

Beit Fureek has been averaging eight tankers of water per day since April, while Hanini assesses the community’s basic survival need at twenty twenty six tankers per day. But when I visited the town today, extremely strict enforcement at the checkpoint for the past couple of days meant that only one water truck had arrived in the town over the last 48 hours. Hanini asserted that this was a fairly typical pattern, and the military would most likely ease up enforcement at the checkpoint in the next day or two.

Some town residents have been without water in their homes for over 40 days now. The only way this community survives is by sharing whatever limited resources they have with their neighbors. Lack of water has severely damaged the town’s agricultural output. Farmers have stopped watering their crops, and most of the town’s livestock has been slaughtered because there is insufficient water to keep both animals and humans alive. In short, the people of Beit Fureek are being murdered, very slowly and systematically, by the conditions under Israeli occupation.

But the killings are not always so slow. I spent the night in the home of Munir, a extremely eloquent and erudite engineer in his late twenties (unable to travel to his work in Nablus since April because of road closures). Over thick cups of coffee under his back yard grape arbor, he told me the story of his late uncle, Mohammed Zamut:

This event took place last October, during the town’s annual olive harvest. This is an extremely dangerous time of year in Beit Fureek, as the town’s olive groves are close to the Israeli settlement of It Mar (the grove has been there for many generations, but the settlement lands were siezed, in violation of international law, less than twenty years ago). Every year for the past three years, at least one villager has been fatally shot by settlers while harvesting olives, but no settler has served a single day of jail time for these crimes.

Last year, the seventy-year-old Zamut was helping with the harvest when he turned up missing at the end of the day. His family searched for him all night, and Israeli security forces were alerted but refused to assist in the search. Zamut’s body was finally found near the olive grove the next morning. This seventy year old man had been shot, but this was not what killed him. His arms were cut off below the elbows and his legs severed below the knees, but these attrocities did not kill him either. Nor did his left eye, which was found pulled out of his socket. According to a coroner’s report, his death occurred when his skull was crushed by a large rock. Israeli authorities eventually arrested and tried a settler by the name of Gurham for this crime, but Gurham pleaded temporary insanity and was acquitted, never serving jail time.

Every person I have met here in Palestine has a story to tell, and every story leaves me unable to breathe. I want to curl into fetal position and cry, or thrash on the ground and shout at the top of my lungs, but I cannot. Instead I offer my condolences to Munir and sip my coffee, silently renewing my pledge to fight this injustice with every ounce of my energy.

Dr. Martin Luther King once said that we should not rest until justice flows like water. But for the people of Beit Fureek, the tankers are still detained at the closest checkpoint.

Shooting at Kites; Bulldozing Schools

by Sam Messier and Jill Dreier

This morning the military pulled out most, but not all, of its presence from Nablus. Though still officially under curfew, many people started coming out into the streets and opening their shops. Internationals, including the two of us from Colorado, purchased several bags of food to distribute to families who were still too frightened to leave their homes during curfew.

While purchasing bread, the internationals witnessed two APC’s pull up outside the bread shop. As the shop-owner hurriedly closed up, the internationals shielded him and his customers from the soldiers and escorted the remaining customers to their nearby houses. A Molotov cocktail was thrown from an alleyway at street level. It grazed one APC, but caused no injury to the soldier inside. The soldier immediately began firing into the surrounding buildings, not just where the Molotov was tossed from but into upper floor apartments. The internationals shouted for him to stop. After a brief stand-off, the soldiers backed away and left.

Less than an hour later, the soldiers returned to this area with reinforcements, more APC’s and a tank. Internationals stood on the street between the soldiers and the Palestinian civilians, including many children on the street. Several Palestinian boys threw rocks in the direction of the tank and APC’s. Others chanted and shouted. Some of the soldiers got out of the vehicles and took aim with their guns as they stood behind corners. The tank made a show of raising and lowering its gun at us.

After about 5-10 minutes, the soldiers advanced in their vehicles. Without the media present and being a small number of people, the internationals decided to stand aside and let the vehicles pass but followed them and then worked their way between the soldiers and the Palestinian boys in a narrow street. The situation grew very tense, and the internationals made the decision to move into an alleyway where the soldiers on foot wanted to move to take up position to fire their guns. With the internationals in the alley off to the side, rocks and live fire were exchanged. The Palestinian boys ran away after the shooting started. After about 10-15 minutes, the soldiers retreated. Three internationals with first-aid training went to check to see if any Palestinians were injured, but fortunately everyone was OK. The entire event was videotaped.

After this, the internationals participated in several activities – including an investigation of occupied houses and houses under threat of demolition. Internationals also accompanied relief workers to distribute food and medicine. Earlier in the day a Palestinian relief volunteer was arrested from the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees center. The reason given was that he was wearing a medallion with the photo of a martyr around his neck.

Internationals accompanied the relief workers all afternoon as they delivered medicine to sick children and infant formula and some staple food supplies. Infant formula is not available in the shops in the old city, and the only way people can get it while under curfew is for these volunteers to deliver it. One of out deliveries was to a house being occupied by soldiers. We had to pass the formula through a small hole in the wall because the door was barricaded.

During our deliveries, we were asked to go and intervene in an arrest under progress. About two blocks away, two Palestinian men, a taxi driver and passenger (recently there are almost no taxis out and about), were handcuffed and were being placed in a military vehicle. One male international attempted to intervene but was roughly forced away by the soldiers. Next we approached the soldiers.

They told us to stop, but we kept walking with our hands out to our sides. They fired into the air. We slowed down but kept walking. They then lowered a gun to aim at us, but we continued walking. Then they started walking towards us very fast so we stopped. When they reached us they demanded that we leave. We calmly explained that the people at the other end of the street had asked us to come and inquire about these men because they were quite concerned about them. The soldiers said that they were being arrested and taken to the detention camp. By this point they had been placed inside the vehicle with the door closed. We tried to get more information, but were told that we were in no position to be asking questions of soldiers. I disagreed of course, but as they were becoming more aggressive and were only two internationals we left. I can only hope these two men are OK.

Palestinians keep asking me where I’m from. When I say the United States, they always respond with “You are welcome”. One of the relief workers told me that she thinks the people in the United States are good people, but they don’t know the truth about what is happening in Palestine. When they understand the truth, she says, she thinks they will support the Palestinian people and the occupation will end.

The truth is that after two invasions this year, the beautiful city of Nablus is littered with rubble that was once people’s homes. One school was destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again since April. Mosques have been desecrated. Young boys have been shot in the head simply for throwing stones at tanks or for simply being outside when the army doesn’t want them to be. People cannot buy food or medicine because they can’t leave their homes, and relief workers need international escorts to keep from being detained and arrested.
And when they get bored or just angry, the soldiers shoot at the kites – the one beautiful symbol of freedom left in Nablus. Every single person in the old city has a story of a home vandalized, a family member injured, a friend being killed. I have stopped going into homes to photograph damage done by soldiers because it would literally consume all of our time.

———-
Sam Messier and Jill Dreier, with the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace are in Palestine joining hundreds of internationals with the International Solidarity Movement in nonviolent direct action to end Israel’s illegal military occupation of Palestine. More on their trip at: www.ccmep.org/palestine.html

Two Days in Bethlehem

by Chris and Carl

Our affinity group members, Mike, Ronise (who is deaf) and Jennie went to the Deaf School in Bethlehem. The school serves boys and girls from 6 months to 15 years old. It was a well equipped modern school run by the Catholic Church. The school is currently closed because of the clamp down of the military occupation. The Italian nuns that work there showed our team bullet holes around the school and in a student desk. It makes you wonder what worse target the Israeli army could pick to shoot.

Our group had a meeting to discuss our future. We decided to leave the Dheisheh Refugee camp on Tuesday morning. Part of the group will be staying together after leaving Dheisheh. Sherri said goodbye. She will be leaving the camp in the morning and leaving Palestine on Tuesday. On Sunday night we heard a speaker at the Ibda Community Center in Dheisheh. Narsir Al-Laham, is a Palestinian journalist who was jailed for 6 years during the first intifada. He has some interesting observations about the struggle against occupation and the search for peace. Here are few thought-provoking quotes:

  • “Everyone has a story.”
    – speaking of the suffering that ALL Palestinians have gone through
  • “If Barak promises us 98% of the land, we guarantee him 98% security, if Sharon guarantees us 42% of the land we guarantee him 42% security.”
    – speaking of peace negotiations
  • “Who makes war makes peace, no one else.”
    – speaking of bringing the fighting parties to the negotiation table, not just the ‘peace camps’
  • “Palestinians did not kill Arafat because of Oslo. In Israel they killed Rabin because he said Gaza was Palestinian.”

A few Israeli army jeeps came into the camp on Sunday night. They weren’t around for long. While Samir, the brother of Ayaat (the female suicide bomber) and Chris were up watching for signs of military activity they started to talk about politics, suicide attacks, and the families’ situation. Samir told Chris the story of his sister.

He said that he would have “broken her foot” if he had known she was going carry out a suicide attack in Israel.

Monday, August 12, 2002

Carl and Suzanna came over to the Abu Samir house to meet the family for the first time. The teenage sisters of the Abu Samir family were ‘intrigued’ with Chris from before and were laughing and giggling at both of us together. It was pretty awkward given the conservative nature of Palestinian culture and the age of the girls. Nonetheless it was flattering.

Tonight is our last night in Dheisheh camp. We hope that the new International Solidarity Movement activists will be willing to take our place. We’ll find out tonight. We are leaving so we’ll have the opportunity to do other things while in Palestine and because some members of our affinity group will be leaving soon.

Internationals Help Deliver Food & Stop Bullets

By Jill Dreier

What the UN refuses to do in Palestine: Internationals Help Deliver Food & Stop Bullets

‘No here we have nothing to live for, so we don’t care, but YOU, you have to return to tell the world what is happening here,
so YOU take care”

So, before I get started about yesterday, let me say that while Sam was dodging rubber bullets, tear gas and sound bombs at the demonstration today (courtesy, of course, of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)), I didn’t have one gun pointed at me or any shots fired over my head today. For the first day since I have been here in Nablus.

Ok, yesterday: while Sam, Merna and I were buying bread for families, two Israeli armored personnel carriers (APC’s) pulled up and shut the bread stand down. Then as one APC pulled away, a kid in the alley right next to the APC threw a Molotov cocktail and scored a hit on part of the APC.

So the Israeli soldiers FREAK out and start shooting into the apartment building, in the completely wrong direction. We SCREAMED at him and he stopped, but the other APC heard the fire and came back around the corner for ‘support’. We de-escalated the soldiers and then one said to me, “go and bring me the map.” (y’all will like my Israeli accent).

So I walked down the street looking for a map. Now, meanwhile the people on the street have emptied and they are all hiding in the alleys and coves and such. So I walk down and several are yelling to me, ‘what does he want?’ Of course I don’t understand until someone yells in English, but I had the gist already and was saying, ‘who the hell knows?’

I picked up some paper trash and called back to him, ‘is this it? Is this it?’ — it’s good to play dumb, of course. So, they pulled back and left. Well, I needed a breather after that one, so we left the scene for about five minutes. Moments later we get a call, that now there are tanks, APC’s and some jeeps in the same area, as well as 12 international activists — could we immediately go there?

Due to a horrible lack of communication, no one had any idea what we had just been thru when we arrived. Of course from OUR end we had gotten the word out about what happened. So, long story longer – Palestinians started throwing rocks and since this is about their only form of resistance, we stepped back. This of course let the IOF be able to fire their guns (hard to explain without seeing the street). Two jeeps even pulled up right in front of us and opened fire. Of course we were screaming and then they stopped and took off.

The cool part is being in the streets with the Palestinians and feeling their energy as they clap and chant (they get loud — they chant ‘god is great’) and stand with us, knowing the tanks and such won’t fire at them with us there. There aren’t ANY women of course, and that sucks….

Digressing a bit: three or four nights ago, Sam and I walked down the road into the Balata Refugee Camp and stayed at a martyr’s house. Stressed out family. Since then I have been with a few more martyr’s families and realized that that family was an exception, according to my experience because these families were like all the rest of the families here, kind kind kind. I swear I have never drank so much coffee and tea in my life.

Another woman, Serena, stayed at the stressed out family’s house the next night and told us the following morning that the family actually got into a fist fight (yeah, the wife and daughters too!) with their neighbor.

So today, most people went to a demonstration at the Huwara Checkpoint, an hour walk, but I decided to stay in Nablus. I hung out with four Palestinians relief volunteers and delivered milk to babies. Yeah, parents do not have milk for their babies/young children.

I heard today that Palestine has the largest growing population in the world, over 50% is under the age of sixteen. That was chill enough, but the workers want escorts for ‘security’ and since another volunteer was taken from the center the day before, they were a little more nervous .

Mohammed, the one taken yesterday was wearing a martyr necklace and the IOF ripped it off his neck (the pendent is of a photo of his friend, a martyr). A martyr, for those who do not know, is term used for a suicide bomber AND anyone who has been killed during this intifada. Mohammed was released today, but they beat him up pretty badly, so he is home for a bit. No reason for detaining him at all.

So, after walking around delivering milk several internationals decided that they wanted to check on an apartment building on the hill where the soldiers were staying and occupying. After getting another international, the 6 of us headed up the hill to check on these families. I figured that they occupied that building strategically.

A few of us went in (women) and chatted with the Palestinian families and got their needs noted, foods and medicines. The apartment was 5 floors, 2 apartments on each floor. The soldiers had one complete floor and all them were shirtless, hanging out, playing guitar, like they owned the place, while 3 families were terrified for their lives. The other apartments were empty (it seemed like a brand new building, not fully occupied with residents).

So after that, we split into 3 groups of 2 to get the food and medicine. My partner was Fadi. A pretty resourceful guy, before I knew it he had gotten a ride in a big flatbed truck to Balata, where the UN warehouse is. Remember it is curfew, so NOTHING is allowed on the streets, let alone driving out to the outskirts of town. Curfew here has meant the last 40 days, 24 hours a day with tiny windows of precarious time to fetch food.

We made it and just after pulling in, a tank and a bulldozer showed up to close the road since cars were driving around. The UN warehouse is a joke. FOOD is everywhere, sitting around. The UN is a joke. Thousands of poor people with NO money to buy food in Nablus and WE hitch a ride, pick up food and deliver it ourselves.

On the way back, we saw a tank driving pretty fast on the parallel road but we beat it and got back to Nablus alright. Then we separated the food and got ready to go. Well, Fadi, wanted to get the one and only ambulance from the center to load the food to take up on the hill. But it wasn’t around, so we used his van — sketchy, eh?

Though we made it up there alright, the soldiers had switched out and all bets were off for us going back inside to deliver the food ourselves. After biting my lip and talking to the soldiers, they got one of the Palestinians to come out to bring the food in. The whole situation and bargaining and discussing is crap, although the soldier was talkable, if you know what I mean.

So during all of this, the soldier says, ‘you don’t remember me, do you?’ “oh, from before …..here right?” “No,” he replied and then I knew he was the guy looking for the map yesterday, in the APC.

“Oh yeah, I remember,’ I quipped back. He said, ‘So you didn’t help me yesterday, why should I help you?”( I was trying to get into the house and possibly spend the night there with the families.) I said, ‘What more could I have done, I walked down the street and looked for the map, geez?’

Talking to them is difficult and one must stay calm to help prevent retaliation against the Palestinians, believe me, whether there are soldiers who don’t ‘agree’ with the occupation or ‘hate’ when a Palestinian is killed, they all have a choice to refuse, and therefore, NO SYMPATHY from me.

One last thing. As we were walking back (dusk, I’m no longer too hesitant to walk in the dark, except for snipers) today a woman pulls up in a car and says, ‘aren’t you afraid to be on the street?’ I said, ‘no, not really, they recognize us now, they know who we are and why we are here.’ She said, ‘ take care’ I said to her, ‘aren’t you afraid to drive now?’ (many people sneak around in cars), and she said, ‘no here we have nothing to live for, so we don’t care, but YOU, you have to return to tell the world what is happening here, so YOU take care” and she drove off.

So many times during the day, I just want to release a little and cry but I don’t, and this was one of those times, for sure. I can only kind of get choked up, not cry, probably because I am so angry and not sad.

* Jill Dreier is one of two Coloradans from the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace in Palestine joining hundreds of internationals with the International Solidarity Movement in nonviolent direct action to end Israel’s illegal military occupation of Palestine.