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.
26th October 2016 | ISM & IWPS | Urif, occupied Palestine
Last Tuesday both the IWPS team and ISM team were harvesting olives in separate areas when we received a phone call telling us that there had been trouble with settlers from the illegal settlement Yitzhar and Israeli occupation forces near the high school for boys in Urif, south of Nablus. Urif is located 2km away from Yitzhar, which is known for its especially violent settlers, and the school is situated at the highest point of the village, nearest to the illegal settlement. This is not the first time the school has experienced problems of this kind and we quickly left the fields to make our way to Urif.
By the time we arrived, the settlers and Israeli occupation forces had left and the children and teachers had managed to leave the school. We were able to speak with an eye witness, Mr A. Amer, who works in Urif’s municipality and who had been the first person to reach the boys’ school. He showed us the footage he had captured and informed us that around 12pm the infamous settler responsible for security in Yitzhar, known as Jacob, approached the school with two younger settlers by foot carrying an M16 along with another gun. Shortly after, around twelve Israeli occupation soldiers also arrived at the school, meaning that students and teachers were trapped inside. The eye witness told the settler to leave because he worked for Yitzhar security and not in Urif, and was far away from the illegal settlement. The reason given for the intrusion was a false accusation that some boys had set fire to land closer to Yitzhar. We were informed that anyone from the village approaching those lands, would face an immediate response from the army and not settler security. The army demanded to see his ID, which they retained for one hour for no apparent reason. The army also never gave any reason why they were there in the first place, but they did make their way into the village below the school under the pretext of preventing children throwing stones; this possibly as all soldiers have small cameras attached to their uniforms. At 2pm the settlers and army left the area, and the children and teachers were able to leave the school grounds.
This is the second time in the last two months that the settler security has come close to the village. In August he harassed local olive farmers and demanded they leave their fields. Villages in the area often have problems from Yitzhar settlers during the olive harvest, with trees burned or uprooted and villagers attacked, and this was clearly an attempt to terrorise the local community. IWPS and ISM continue to support farmers and villages during this time, and hope to seek further support from the international community to highlight the ongoing plight.
27th October 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Acts of injustice done
between the setting and the rising sun
In history lie like bones,
each one. – W. H. Auden, from “The Ascent of F6″
Today marks one year since the murder of a young man outside the ISM apartment in Tel Rumeida, occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
The shooting of the 23-year-old at 10:30 at night was followed less than 24 hours later by another blast of gun fire, when a young man was shot by Israeli army personnel beneath our lounge room windows, in full sight of my colleague. The two men, it was identified in the following hours, were Hummam Adnan al-Saeed and Islam Rafiq Hammad Ibeido.
At the time, I was among the nine or so internationals working with ISM in the face of increasingly targeted restrictions on our solidarity work in the H2 areas of al-Khalil (under full Israeli control). This was to be exacerbated just days after the murders by the declaration of the Closed Military Zone across Tel Rumeida and the surrounding district, which culminated in our eviction from the neighbourhood and a series of impossible, arbitrarily renewed military orders upon the Palestinian residents, which have continued to this day.
—A historical irony of numbered identities
The deaths of these two young men were among 70 extrajudicial executions of Palestinians across the occupied territories and 1948 historical Palestine which occurred during my short two months’ stay, the overwhelming majority of which were of men and women in their late teens or early twenties, and in circumstances where the evidence against their alleged attacks were so insurmountable, it would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
Since leaving the West Bank, I have watched the occurrences of these executions only sky-rocket. In the customary fashion of geopolitics with regard to Palestine, this has been met with: persistent outrage, suffering and at once steadfast and tired resistance by Palestinians; ongoing condemnation by rights organisations across the world; meagre intermittent mention by the UN; and velvet-gloved, rare, tokenistic slap-on-the-wrist rhetoric by the USA, followed by a fistful of $38bn in support. The situation hasn’t changed.
The current estimates of Palestinians to be killed in this way now number over 200, with more than 230 Palestinians being killed in total and at least 18, 000 injured in the past year. Meanwhile, the “Third Intifada” outpouring of frustration and rage through mass demonstrations and actual stabbing and car attacks, taking the lives of 34 Israelis – the supposed excuse for such blatant disregard for due process of law – are decreasing.
What remains are socialised, cultural and new legal precedents of emboldening Israeli military, civilian and illegal settler populations to act as judge, jury and executioner, with the horrifying consequence of both hysterical and calculated instances of murder with complete impunity. On the rare occasions when there has been a Palestinian witness able and willing to face the very real danger of publicly disputing the discourse of a “pre-emptive” “neutralisation” of a “terrorist,” [from an Israeli police spokesperson in regard to the murder of 17-year-old Dania Irsheid] their voices very rarely make it into the mass media.
This is what foreign conflicts look like:
Remote.
When the terms ethnic cleansing and genocide are used by ISM to relay internationals’ interpretation of Israeli policy and the tenets of popular Zionism, it is often met with criticism, abuse, and scepticism, even amongst supporters of Palestine. I’ve found a distance between my interpretations and many would-be supporters, finding it near impossible to capture the ubiquitousness of the occupation and the dynamics of apartheid, shy of having actually being there or in a comparable situation. To use a word so historically associated with the holocaust, in which millions of Jewish people were murdered, is considered inappropriate, disproportionate and insensitive. Yet, the brazen murders of Hummam and Islam stand out to me as an iceberg tip symptom of contemporary Israeli state-sanctioned racism, and the extent to which the lived experience of ethnic cleansing has come to be normalised if not expected of the region.
They were part of a generation who have grown up entirely under the gunpoint of Zionism and their deaths are treated like history’s collateral.
On the ground, what one comes to both expect and desensitise to is a rigorous psychological warfare of oppression, humiliation and state-sanctioned terrorism. This predominantly presents itself in the physicality of checkpoints, the vast concrete wall and settlers with M-16’s. However, more insidiously and equally damaging is also the stop-and-spread body searches, the crippling bureaucracy of arbitrary permits to access food crops, night raids where children viscerally learn the meaning of insecurity, and superhero fathers are emasculated by teenage soldiers emboldened with righteousness and immunity. And then what of the psychology of the kindergartners who anticipate tear gas en route to school and are excluded from streets where metres away, settler children live illegally in stolen houses backed up by the full weight of an internationally supported state? These things which are happening in Palestine, when “nothing is happening” (From a speech by Steven Salaita at the Israeli Apartheid Week opening event, London, 2016): ethnic cleansing and genocide in slow motion.
This period of “increased tensions,” beginning around the stabbing attacks by Muhannad Halabi and the shooting of unarmed 18 year old Hadeel al-Hashlamon, only a few hundred meters from where Islam and Hummam would perish a month later, marks but moments where these policies become visible. Moments where the applicability of the 2nd Article of the United Nations Convention on Genocide: “(a) Killing…with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” cannot be denied. Islam and Hummam’s deaths were among five days of executions in a row that we reached in the H2 suburbs of Hebron. For the other three, Dania Irsheid, 17, murdered at the Ibrahimi mosque checkpoint, Saad Youssef al-Atrash, 19, murdered many metres from a checkpoint, searching for his Identity Card, and Mahdi Ramadan al-Muhtasib, 23, shot from close range whilst incapacitated near Salaymeh Checkpoint, whilst Palestinian voices testified to their innocence, Israeli forces wrote a historical record of benign, thinly defended silences and double-speak. All medical treatment was denied.
These deaths make visible the current expansionist Zionist agenda – to follow with the UN definition: “(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” Where perhaps for a minute the international community pays attention to the fact that a modern colonial state feels emboldened enough to shoot at ambulances and beat medical staff in the full light of day.
When these realities were brought to a place we had slept in and worked from, the soldiers, the same men who checked our passports and performed countless body searches in front of us, we tasted the sharp edge of genocide up close: ugly. Terrifying. A science-fiction like erasure of lives followed by settlers playing festive music on the site. Maybe you won’t believe me. It happened. I haven’t found a place for it.
These are the bones of history. They have names and dates of birth, and classmates who keep an empty seat for them.
It is not lost on me that the death of a man named Islam did not make it onto the news in my home country. It is not lost on me that Islam and Hummam have been written into the dominant record as terrorists while the men who murdered them have returned to their families. It is not lost that the streets of al-Khalil have the words “Gas the Arabs” graffitied on its walls, or that the Convention on Genocide was written in 1948 in the dying spectre of WWII, and only became accessible for accession by Palestine in 2014, along with Palestinians’ first official, theoretical access to the protections of international law.
“Gas the Arabs” spray-painted by settlers from the illegal settlements
“I am 100% sure he was unarmed. I saw the two soldiers creeping slowly along the road outside our apartment window with their guns cocked, so I looked down the street to see why. I saw an unarmed man walking normally towards the soldiers and suddenly they shot.” – Orion, the ISM activist who witnessed Islam’s shooting.
And for the families of these victims, people I never got to meet, people who were not able to bury their children until 2 months later, when their bodies were “released” by Israeli authorities amid 21 others bodies, they are still there. And I cannot imagine the insurmountable suffering of their past year, or their compounded grief of life under occupation.
May their lives be remembered for who they really were, and their deaths be called for what they were.
25th October 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Last Friday I attended a demonstration in the small town of Kafr Qaddum, situated in the Northern region of the West Bank, just west of the city of Nablus. In 1974 Israel began to illegally erect settlements in the nearby Keddumin area. In 2003 Israeli forces set up roadblocks, denying the Palestinian residents of Kafr Qaddum access to much of their land and to the main route leading to Nablus. This road closure increased travelling time to Nablus, and the hospitals and other amenities located there, by more than 30 minutes for the Palestinian residents of Kafr Qaddum.
Understandably aggrieved by this act of forcible encroachment, Palestinian residents entered into negotiations with their now Israeli neighbours to seek to have the route reopened. However, despite the roadblock being declared illegal in 2010, and after years of unfulfilled guarantees on the part of the Israeli occupiers that the road would reopen, the Palestinian residents began to demonstrate in opposition of the closure in 2011. The Israelis’ overhanded retaliation to these demonstrations involves the use of skunk water, tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, dogs and even live ammunition. Homes have also been destroyed with the use of skunk water, which leaves a stench so potent that houses are rendered uninhabitable.
Spent casings of stun grenades and tear gas fired at protesters during previous demonstrations at Kafr Qaddum.Partially ruptured rubber-coated steel bullet found in the dirt at Kafr Qaddum.
New to me was the knowledge that Palestinian farmers have to apply for permits to access large portions of their own land, which is now under Israeli control, in order to harvest their olives. This year however, as collective punishment for the weekly demonstrations, the Israeli authorities reduced the permit from 45 days to 7 days, time enough to harvest only a fraction of their land.
Present at the demonstration that day were Palestinian residents of all ages, journalists, and international and Israeli activists. After the noon prayer people began to gather and march down the road through which Palestinian movement is now prohibited. The mood was tense as only days beforehand settlers set alight a number of the olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers, adding insult to injury as the list of injustices against these people grows even longer.
Demonstrators march in protest of road block which has been closed to Palestinians since 2003.The scorched remains of olive trees burned by settlers that week.
However, despite feeling intense anger at these recurring acts of settler aggression, the protesters remained reserved in their action and did not retaliate in kind. Tyres were set on fire, the primary purpose of which is to create a smoke screen in order to protect protesters from sniper fire. Large plumes of smoke rose from the flames and travelled in a windward direction over the settlement to make known to its residents their discontent. But at no point was the settlement approached or was a single act of aggression enacted by any of the protesters present. Indeed, I am told this is common of all the demonstrations carried out at Kafr Qaddum. Violence only erupts when the army comes out to face the protesters in large numbers, answering stones with rubber-coated steel bullets or worse. Only two weeks previous a journalist was struck in the head with a high-velocity tear gas canister shot from a distance of 400 meters, shattering the helmet that undoubtedly saved his life. Thankfully, on this occasion, the army did not leave their base and the demonstration passed without incident. Afterwards I walked down to see the large patch of land and olive trees scorched by the settlers that week. I was struck by an overwhelming sense of injustice that such despicable acts of hatred could go unanswered. I wondered if I would be capable of the level of reserve shown by the Palestinians residents of Kafr Qaddum if I had suffered as these people have over so many years.
Clouds of smoke bellow into the sky as a mark of indignation to the occupation under which the Palestinian residents of Kafr Qaddum suffer.
These are a non-violent people, who have had a history of violence put upon them by Israeli settlers and the army that supports them. And yet this is not the story told by the media at large, presenting them to the world as warmongering terrorists. I have seen first hand that the only terrorists in this situation are those wielding armoured cars and riffles, not those whose only defence of their homes and livelihoods are the rocks they find at their feet.
24th October 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Imagine being an eight-year old boy, walking to school,
and as you come close, close to the roadblock you have to pass every day,
army jeeps are everywhere, blocking the roadblock and the gate.
You have to squeeze past the jeeps on one side, or squeeze between the two,
just to pass the roadblock, just one of the obstacles installed by Israeli forces,
as an everyday reminder that you’re the occupied, the ‘less human’,
the people the occupying army is trying so hard to displace.
Your only fault: being born Palestinian.
Or the boy, that lives near the settlement, used to the ubiquitous presence,
of settlers from the nearby illegal settlement, built on your family land,
of heavily-armed occupying soldiers, with the only duty to protect the settlers.
The military tower on top of your family home, your ‘safe place’,
a daily reminder of the vicious occupation.
Your only fault: being born Palestinian
Growing up under occupation, nothing is normal.
Everything is normal. A foreign army waking you up at night,
the day before an important exam, dragging your brother away,
into the dark of the night. Normal.
Normal is not normal, unnormal is normal. Occupation is ‘normal’.
Given this normalcy, on the way to school, two dozens soldiers,
army jeeps and military gates blocking the way. Normal.
Happily walking to school, looking forward to meet friends.
Your only fault: being born Palestinian
Imagine being a first-grader, the way to school, scary.
Settlers from the illegal settlements, they’ve already beaten up your big brother.
His fault: being born Palestinian,
daring to play outside his own home on a Jewish holiday.
The ever present occupying army: watching. Preventing an ambulance to reach your brother.
“No Palestinian cars on this road”.
With many settlers and soldiers on the street, the way to school seems impossible to do.
The way to school, just two minutes, suddenly seems like an hour.
Still standing in the door, unsure whether the way is do-able today.
All the army presence – leaving as soon as the first tunes of the national anthem sound,
marking the start of the school-day. The army presence, just for intimidation?
To intimidate school-children, on their way to school,
to achieve an education despite the occupation.
The national anthem, sounding the resistance, the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.
Sounding the illegallity of the Israeli land-theft, blatant human rights violations and war crimes.
Sounding the unwillingness of the Palestinians to be de-humanised, destroyed, dissapeared.
