Category: Journals - Page 19 - International Solidarity Movement

Nothing is simple in Palestine

17th November 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Umm al-Kheir, occupied south Hebron Hills

Almost nothing in Palestine is what you expect for the most part. And, this is so true of the negative things you see. No matter how bad you think things are or expect them to be, you are almost always guaranteed that they will be worse (usually much worse) when you actually see them. And if you tell people the truth you may be thought to be making things up. But, this is Palestine and things are this unbelievable and this bad. This was true today for me (to put it mildly). Part of our team was invited by an “inspector” from the United Nations office based here in Al Khalil to go to a Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills where a demolition took place yesterday.

The two demolished structures - with the illegal settlement in the background — The two demolished structures – with the illegal settlement in the background

Throughout my multiple trips here I’ve been to numerous house demolitions and even sat with families throughout the night waiting for the Israeli Occupation Forces to arrive to demolish a home. I was not ready for what I saw today. On our way to the village our U.N. inspector told us a bit of the history/story of the village. But, when we arrived I just wanted to vomit and I still have a knot in my stomach as I write this. The village of Umm Al Khair was established in 1952 on land the villagers purchased. They have the deed to prove ownership. The village is currently made up of approximately 140 Bedouin (registered) refugees, (approximately 28 families) who are mostly goat herders and farmers. They came here to the West Bank from “the 48” (Israel proper) after their home village was destroyed along with over 500 other Palestinian villages by Israeli Zionists, during the Nakba which created over 700,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 1982 the illegal colonial Zionist settlement of Carmel was established right next to them (less than 50 yards away) on land they stole from the village. Even though we couldn’t see inside the illegal settlement we were informed by the individual from the U.N. that the homes in the settlement were spacious, modern, had green grass lawns and gardens and even a small goldfish pond or two and all of the modern luxuries. In contrast, the village is made up of makeshift tents, crude metal and wood structures with dirt floors. There is no running water, no electricity, and a few crude toilet facilities.
Given that the villagers own the land, according to Israeli law, they cannot be legally evicted. However, the Zionists can make life so miserable that the villagers will give up and leave. This (in all probability) will never happen. They are strong, hopeful, and determined to stay here. This is their home. They will not leave. Even the children who have grown up here and gone off and got university degrees return here to their homes.

Israel uses the excuse that the villagers don’t have building permits. But Israel doesn’t grant but a few building permits per year (if any) to Palestinians.
Drones routinely fly over the village photographing , looking for any sign of new construction or rebuilding and the soldiers will return and demolish again and again. And if a demolition order is given for a particular home or building, it is permanent and nothing can be built on that spot again.
There have been 5 demolitions in the past year: October 27, 2015; 1 in April 2016; 2 this past August; and the most recent one yesterday where two structures were demolished. Their Community Center which housed the kindergarten, a computer center, an after school program to help kids with homework, and a library has been demolished several times. There are some international aid programs such as the International Red Cross, several U.N. programs, and from the European Union that have helped with building materials and /or small structures for living. None of these programs, however, can help with the Community Center because it does not provide shelter for people or animals. So it is the children who suffer the brunt of these losses.

Rubble from the demolition, with the luxurious houses in the illegal settlement in the background

While one of our team members was conducting a video interview I went outside and was swarmed by young children. All smiling, laughing and excited by my presence and attention to them. All eager to show me around the village. Show me their goat herds, their small playground and push them on the swings, take their photographs with their goats. They all appeared to be happy and none the worse for ware. But what I am describing is and has been their life. They know nothing else. It doesn’t make it any less excusable for how these villagers are treated. And this is only one observation from one person visiting one of the scores of similar villages throughout the West Bank. An older woman whose home was demolished in August of this year stated before we left, “We just need the demolitions to stop. We are getting sick and tired of it.” Our U.N. person then said, everyone including most of the aid programs are feeling the same way as this woman and little by little pay a bit less attention as time goes on. Even the government, The Palestinian Authority was called this morning about yesterdays demolition and they stated they couldn’t come to look they had other things to do today.

Residential dwelling of some of the families

I’ve always thought (and said) that somewhere inside the Israeli Zionist must still have some small bit of humanity left in them. After what I witnessed today I cannot believe that there is even a shred of humanity left in any of them. Today was by far the most overwhelming and depressing day I’ve had in all of my trips here to Palestine, and I’ve seen quite a few depressing and overwhelming things during these trips.
What can you do? Join the Boycott movement in your country. Write to your elected government officials to stop funding the various degrees of genocide that Israel is committing here in Palestine. Write letters to the editor of your newspapers. Talk to your families, friends, neighbors and let them know the truth. Speak up. As long as our country continues to support the behavior of Israel with our tax dollars we are all responsible!

Imprisoned life: the feeling of a ‘closed military zone’

30th October 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine

‘Closed military zone’ – a sterile term for an act of deliberate apartheid policies and dehumanisation with the clear and deliberate target of forcibly displacing Palestinian civilians: women, children, elderly, anyone that is Palestinian, from the Tel Rumeida and Shuhada Street neighborhood with the deliberate aim of connecting the illegal Israeli settlements in the heart of the city of occupied al-Khalil. A connection of illegal settlements: ‘sterile’, ethnically cleansed of any Palestinian presence.

‘Closed military zone’ – such an objective term for obliterating human rights and even a sense of security and justice for Palestinians – in ambitions to in the end, finally, obliterate the people as well.

‘Closed military zone’, a sterile and objective term, that is hard, if not impossible to grapple. A term, just like ethnic cleansing and genocide that seems very far away, and hard to get the gist of, the feeling, what it means to struggle with it every day. Day in and day out, no escape.

‘Closed military zone’ (cmz) means degradation, dehumanization. Every Palestinian is made a number, stripped of their humanity, at the endless checkpoints, only numbers will pass.

‘Closed military zone’ is the denial of friends and families to visit relatives and friends, as humans aren’t allowed in the cmz by the Israeli forces, only the few ‘registered’ and listed- yet still human – Palestinians will pass – if a soldier, emboldened with impunity and the privilege to act on their own whim, allows them to.

‘Closed military zone’ is the all-to-familiar humiliation at the checkpoint, the yelling, having to empty your handbag, all your grocery-shopping. To put it in plain sight, on a table, for the soldiers behind the bullet proof glass to stare and gaze, to crack jokes and laugh. It’s being forced to lift up your shirt, undershirt, trouser-legs and take off your shoes, after passing a metal detector twice. The soldier enyojing the spectacle laughing with his comrade.

‘Closed military zone’ is the wait, the endless wait, when soldiers at the checkpoint turn up the music, so they can’t hear you asking to open the gate at the checkpoint for you. The endless wait, when you ask them to open, the soldier looks at you, and with impunity just goes back to playing on his phone, pretending not to have noticed your presence, with a smirk on his face. The endless wait, when a ‘busy’ soldier is reading, talking to someone on the phone, watching a movie, playing an ego-shooter, or simply decides to not allow you to pass.

‘Closed military zone’ is the obvious and deliberate instrument for the humiliation and dehumanization of a whole people. The Palestinian people. Humans. Humans denied basic human rights, treated like prisoners in their own homes, simply because they’re Palestinian. Because they don’t move out of the way for a racist, zionist, apartheid venture of an ethnically cleansed strip of illegal settlements.

Last but not least, the ‘closed military zone’ can only succeed, if the world turns a blind eye, if the injustice perpetrated by the Israeli forces is allowed to prevail, if the dehumanization of a people with the aim of their obliteration is silently accepted by the international community, by a country, and by an individual.

‘Closed military zone’ means ethnic cleansing of humans not spoken against, dehumanization not spoken against, the forcible transfer of humans not spoken against; even the idea of a human being behind the term of ‘Palestinian’ being denied, the existence of Palestinian human beings denied, their existence destroyed.

I’m sorry we never knew each other

29th October 2016 | International Solidarity Movement | Hebron, occupied Palestine

This is a the personal thoughts of an ISMer, remembering the execution of Hummam Adnan al-Saeed and Islam Rafiq Hammad Ibeido, on 27th and 28th October 2015. Israeli forces gunned down the two Palestinian men right in front of the ISM-apartment.

The only thing we have in common is:

That you happened to die in front of my eyes

Corrected: that you were shot in the back just behind my back, Hummam.

Corrected: that you were shot dead while holding your hands up high, Islam.

My initial thought was that the soldiers were “poking fun” at us

by intimidating us with some terrifying sounds.

Until I finally grasped that what sounded like barking machine gun bullets

were barking machine gun bullets

pumped into your precious bodies

to remain there for good.

For terror.

Also: you didn’t die

for you weren’t even granted the time to die.

You were mowed down and wiped out.

You were dead before you touched the ground.

I wish I had walked down the stairs and held your head.

Or touched your shoulder.

Or covered you with a kuffiyeh.

Anything, just anything to give you back what they tried to wipe out:

Being human in inhuman times

which is the only thing we have in common.

Settlers attack boy’s school, Israeli army traps students

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.

Remembering Hummam, Remembering Islam: Reflections on genocide, one year on.

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 2^nd 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.

10-a-img_0267 — “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.