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.

Elor Azaria verdict: a personal view

22nd February 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team, | Hebron, occupied Palestine

Yesterday the Israeli soldier Elor Azaria was sentenced to 18 months in prison for the extra-judicial killing of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, which happened last year in Hebron. Everybody in Hebron was waiting for the sentence. Everybody knew by one o’clock what it was. Everyone was heavy hearted. Palestinian friends compared a sentence of two years for stone throwing with Azaria’s eighteen months for murder. The implications here on the ground for what soldiers can do with impunity is also clear to all.

We at ISM had been in touch with Imad Abu Shamsiya, the Palestinian who filmed the execution, in case he wanted our support if the settlers were angry at the sentence as he has experienced large amounts of threats and harassment from both soldiers and settlers for bringing this incident to light.

Today I get email from the UK with news of how the case was reported on the BBC flagship morning show:

‘…almost all of the piece consisted of a discussion with their Jerusalem correspondent about Israeli anger that Azaria had been jailed. The fact that Palestinians were angered at the brevity of the sentence was tacked on as an afterthought. It was not explained that the Israeli soldiers are an army of occupation that is protecting settlers who are in Hebron illegally. It was not explained that Abdel Fattah al-Sherif had been lying injured and motionless on the ground for ten minutes and presenting no threat to anyone before Azaria executed him. Al-Sherif was described as “an attacker”, Azaria as “a soldier”. The framing of what happened could have been scripted by the IDF. The impression given was of the IDF acting in support of the civil authorities and being subjected to a military assault by enemy combatants. The right-wing Israeli perspective that Azaria was an inexperienced conscript who acted in the heat of the moment in battle was reported unchallenged. The alternative view that al-Sharif had committed grievous bodily harm or some such criminal assault before being totally incapacitated and that he was then murdered in cold blood by a heavily-armed agent of an occupying power was not given.’

Shame.

To see the video so bravely filmed by Imad which led to the case being heard at all:

 

Sumud: Palestinian for endurance

22nd February 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine 

As a second time ISMer I write a blog for friends and supporters back home (at salamfrombetty.tumblr.com if you would like to follow).  I asked for questions from my readership and I got this from my friend Rachel:

How are you coping with living with this huge sense of injustice? How do the Palestinians manage it day in day out?

Weirdly I don’t find it hard coping with the injustice here. I don’t know why. The last time I came I was really scared beforehand that I would, but I don’t. I don’t really get angry much anywhere in my life, and I guess this cutting off is what might make a good nurse too.

I have no idea how Palestinians manage. Living under occupation comes at great psychological cost. Children in Tel Rumeida can’t sleep without the light on because they have been night raided so often by soldiers; they often wet the bed until their teens. Women are attacked by settlers and lose pregnancies. Families lose sons to prison and bullets. Everybody inside the ghetto which is H2 has to go through the daily humiliation of not having any control of how they will be treated at checkpoints, and of facing soldiers who attempted to humiliate them yesterday or last week.

Of course this is the old centre of Hebron that I am talking about. Most Hebronites from the city at large do not go there much. They live lives of occupation certainly, but not of this daily hardship. I taught a class of young and ambitious Hebronite students last week and they have studied in Jordan, Amman, Germany, travelled to China for business; they take driving lessons, they drink Italian coffee, and have dreams of running businesses, taking PhDs in physics, transforming the Hebron fire service. Great dreams. But they are still under occupation and they still know it. They are stunted in their hopes and opportunities and feel the injustice of Palestinian powerlessness. Many have not seen the sea only thirty miles away.

And then of course, many of the people I talk to in the old city have children who have ‘escaped’, who are engineers in Saudi, professors in Oxford, they have educations themselves and choose to stay. They are resisting by choice, not trapped by circumstance.

This is the front line: when the houses of Hebron are taken by settlers; when the villages in the Naqab (the Negev) are demolished and the Bedouin moved off; when the villagers of the fertile Jordan valley are put to work as labourers on their own land: then the Israeli occupying machinery will come and swallow up the next bit of Palestine and the next and the next…

My friend Talal thinks that it has taken all the years of occupation to bring Palestinians to this degree of strength and endurance: this sumud (steadfast perseverance). 69 years since the Naqba of 1948; 50 years since the occupation of 1967. That is a lot of time to develop endurance.

Total impunity to mess with lives

14th February 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine

Israeli forces, again, or rather still, are using their impunity as occupiers to humiliate, harass and intimidate Palestinians and internationals crossing Shuhada checkpoint in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).

The Israeli forces at this checkpoint sit behind bullet proof glass in a closed checkpoint-box, that nobody can see into.  Anyone attempting to pass rings a bell to alert the soldiers inside, then waits for the soldiers to release the turnstile, which leads into the closed box. There you can see soldiers playing on their phones, gossiping, or even sleeping. When you enter the box, you have to put all your belongings, shopping, handbags, phones, change, and anything from your pockets on the table, before passing through the metal detector.

Then,  depending on the soldiers’ mood and whim, you might be allowed simply to leave and go on your way, or you could be asked to unpack all your bags, pass through the metal detector again (even if you didn’t set it off).  You might be asked to show your ID or passport, or asked for your resident’s number (all Palestinian residents of Tel Rumeida have been registered and assigned numbers since the declaration of the area as a closed military zone since 1st November 2015).

Some soldiers are entirely uninterested in the whole process and allow people to pass without further ado, but many seem to enjoy the almost infinite power bestowed upon them with their Israeli army uniform. This stretches from making Palestinians wait in the rain  and ignoring the bell they need to ring to come through, to asking people to go back again and again through the metal detector for no reason, put babys on the ground in freezing temperatures, or denying them passage completely even after finding their resident’s number on the list. Palestinian school students and teachers attempting to reach their school are not exempted from this treatment.

But it goes even beyond that.

Soldiers often act without any clear rationale except disruption. For example, last week a soldier yelled at a woman to take off her shoes, as they set off the metal detector.  She goes through every day and the soldiers know that the shoes are what sets off the alarm, which she points out to him.  But today he starts yelling and tells her to shut up.  She refuses to take off her shoes and the soldier comes into the checkpoint box, uncomfortably close to her, yelling that he thinks she might have something else on her body. This alone can be considered a threat, as Israeli soldiers have shot a number of Palestinians at checkpoints here in the last year on the suspicion of ‘having a knife’, not necessarily attacking with it or even having it in their hand.  It is impossible to get new kitchen knives home from the shops for just this reason.

In the end, the soldier, meticulously and with a grin on his face, goes through the woman’s bag, ignoring the plastic-bag of groceries right next to the handbag on the table. The purpose is to harass, humiliate and intimidate, to make life difficult and hateful for the Palestinians who need to pass through several times daily.  Meanwhile growing numbers of Palestinians gather outside waiting to get through and home, hoping that it is not their turn to be humiliated by this occupying army.

Being yelled at, insulted, humiliated and harassed is rather the norm than the exception. It’s a calculated norm intended to make Palestinians’ life so unbearable that they will leave the area easing the way for more settlement expansion in the centre of the city. This, under international law is called creating a ‘coercive environment’ for ethnic cleansing, a war crime.

Humiliation

3rd February 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine

No one can describe this feeling,
when occupation did what it does best:
humiliate, harass, humiliate.
There is no words to say, today,
I was treated like I’m not a human being.
No words, that can put across the actual meaning.
The daily humiliation, it can not,
it will never become ‘normal’,
it can never be acceptable.
The arrogance of occupation, that
humiliates and harasses you,
yells at you, insists and demonstrates,
that there is no laws regulating it.
That it can do whatever, it can humiliate, harass,
yell, sexually harass, intimidate, kill.
It can kill by shooting, but it can also kill slowly,
killing the spirit, slowly, daily,
through humiliation and harassment.
Slowly by slowly, wearing down the spirit,
showing that this occupation has long lost any sense of humanity.
The subjects are only there to be destroyed,
to be harassed, humiliated.
Humiliation can kill.
It kills the spirit, it demonstrates that in the end
occupation is free, free to humiliate,
free to harass, free to kill.
Daily humiliation,
from when you step out of the door
till you reach your home again.
At the checkpoint, on the street.
Ubiquitous. Everywhere. No escape.
Even in your home, your not safe from humiliation.
Occupation rules by humiliation.
There’s nowhere to feel safe.
No hope if you expect to be seen as what you are:
a human being

The checkpoint regime: Israel and the fragmentation of Palestinian society

31st January 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine

There are 17 permanent checkpoints in the H2 area under full Israeli military control in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron), manned by Israeli forces and impeding Palestinian freedom of movement. The official rhetoric of the Israeli government is that these checkpoints serve ‘security purposes’.

In total contrast to this ‘security rationale’, Israeli forces within al-Khalil have often illustrated how the checkpoints rather serve the purpose of humiliating the civilian Palestinian population and dictating their movement. Whereas most of the checkpoints are theoretically in operation 24hrs a day, a checkpoint near Ibrahimi Mosque is closed every evening around 9 – effectively imposing a nightly curfew on the Palestinian population in this area; in order to circumvent the checkpoint, Palestinians would have to take a half-hour long, extremely hilly detour.

Over the last few weeks, soldiers at Shuhada checkpoint have been observed twice sleeping inside the checkpoint. On 12th January 2017 Israeli forces were fast asleep in the checkpoint, thus effectively shutting down any kind of movement for Palestinians, who were stuck outside the turnstile as they waited for the soldiers to wake up and manually open it for every single person. On January 30th, one of the two soldiers supposedly ‘working’ in the checkpoint was asleep again. Both of the soldiers were sitting behind the bullet proof glass, with one of them obviously asleep, in plain sight of anyone crossing the checkpoint. When asked in surprise, if the soldier is sleeping, the soldier that was awake just shrugged his shoulders.

The official rationale of ‘security reasons’ for the implementation of this checkpoint-regime seems pointless. If soldiers are asleep at checkpoints, unaware of their surroundings, how are they really maintaining security? Instead, the checkpoints serve the purpose of fragmentation and humiliation. They lead to the fragmentation of Palestinian civilian neighborhoods: dividing neighborhoods in the same city from each other by fenced off checkpoints, separating families from work, schools, medical care, basic necessities such as cooking gas or a pack of rice. Additionally, the checkpoints perpetuate the all to common humiliation of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli forces; they force Palestinian men to take off their belts ‘for security reasons’ when they pass through the metal detector at the checkpoint – the soldiers clearly  know that the belt is setting of the metal detector and even say so – but force everyone to take it off anyways, merely to humiliate innocent people. The long lines in the rain, where Palestinians are forced by the Israeli forces to ‘wait’ to be allowed to pass the checkpoint without reason destroys their sense of worth and dignity. They often have to stand in the pouring rain with no shelter indefinitely. In this system of humiliation, even a less than a month old baby is a ‘security threat’ and treated as such, without any regard for humanity.

In the end, the checkpoint-regime is solely implemented for this kind of humiliation and fragmentation: aiming to create a coercive environment that will facilitate forcible displacement of the Palestinian population. The checkpoints  facilitate the expansion of existing illegal settlements. It allows Israel to eventually grab enough land to connect a consistent stretch of illegal settlements that are free of the indigenous population, the Palestinians.