Category: Journals - Page 25 - International Solidarity Movement

Ali Jiddah – an alternative tour guide

6th April 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, Ramallah Team | Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine

Ali greets us international activists with a certain kind of warmth that those who are foreign to the middle east (or Palestine in this case) may have never experienced or have been accustomed to in our home countries. We have all learned very quickly to appreciate the culture that is being bestowed upon us and the welcoming nature of the Palestinian people; a nature which remained steadfast for more than a half century despite the ongoing, brutal occupation and despite what much of the media and certain governments from abroad would like you to think of the Palestinian people and the current situation they are facing.

He prepares seating arrangements for us to the best of his ability in his tiny family home, asking everyone to take a seat whilst he sits himself on a single bed that has been prepared in the living room. The bed has been placed there to accommodate the extra people in his family, due to the evident lack of space they endure whilst living in the highly dense African quarter of Jerusalem.

You know from the moment he begins to speak that Ali has natural charisma, charm and a quick way of thinking that has been acquired through a lifetime of hardship and struggle. Turning his past situation into positive ideas and proposed solutions for the future of Palestine. He sheds real food for thought for those who care to know the real situation the Palestinian people of Jerusalem, and Palestine as a whole, continue to face.

Ali was only eighteen years old in 1967 when he and some friends tired of the situation, along with the racial oppression that he ~~also~~ faced ~~from~~ being an afro-Palestinian ~~from the Israeli’s,~~ decided in an act of defiance to place a bomb at the entrance to Jaffa gate in Jerusalem. Nobody was killed, however nine Israeli soldiers were seriously wounded. Ali was soon found, arrested and tried for the crime that he had committed. His next seventeen years were to be spent in an Israeli jail, shaping and changing the way in which Ali would now live out the remainder of his life.

When released Ali started to run alternative tours throughout Jerusalem, bringing awareness to the situation that the people of Palestine and occupied Jerusalem face daily. However it’s a tour far different from the standardised religious journeys that the majority of internationals and passers by would participate in. In fact anyone fortunate enough to strike up conversation with Ali, who can be found near the entrance of Damascus gate, may just find themselves on one of the most worthwhile, informative and alternative tours in the old city.

Ali chain-smoked his cigarettes, pausing between inhalations, leaving long but comfortable silences as he pondered on what to tell us next, leaving us internationals on the edge of our seats. As he exhaled, the smoke danced in front of his face through the thin ray of sunlight that cut through the dimly lit room and onto his face.

Ali spoke to us about the current situation the Palestinians in the Islamic quarter face and the “tightening of the noose” on Palestinian shopkeepers by the occupying forces. He sees the Islamic quarter being reduced to nothing in the near future due to strategic economic strangulation by the Zionist government, heightening taxes and limiting the flow of tourisms and locals within the area. He explained to us the continued harassment and occupation of homes by the illegal Israeli settlers in the area.

Ali looks at the ideas put forth from the political parties regarding the situation facing the Israel/Palestine conflict, the one state or two state proposals that he deems have passed their used by dates, “the new Palestine, if there is to be one must come from the roots up.” This was a perspective that, in no small part due to my experiences on the ground as well as the conversations about the dead-end nature of past attempts at top-down political reorganisation I have had with Palestinians, I found myself in absolute agreement with.

Ali has toured internationally throughout Europe, giving speeches in varying countries and has received recognition and admiration wherever he has spoken.

My take on the day: Ali is a unique character, he is in no way what you would expect of a tour guide, he speaks from the heart (perhaps a little crudely at times!) and tells it how it is. He is extremely informative and brings about questions and points that no formal tour would dare speak of. All of which makes him and his talk captivating and extremely interesting in their own way. I would highly recommend him to anyone wanting to get to know the real Jerusalem. If you’re interested you can find him near the entrance to Damascus gate drinking coffee on most days. Just look out for the ‘Denzel Washington’ character as he likes to call himself.

A night of protective presence needed

3rd April 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | al-Khalil, occupied Palestine

The two boys met us at the store, shouting the name of our Palestinian contact and waving us along. The cobbled stones in the alley made a nice contrast to the darkness of the night. My feet landed softly on the mud where we started our climb. Glimpses of trash were seen from the flickering flash lights, as if we were threading our way across the city dump. We were going to the house of Imad Abu Shamsiyyeh, the man who had managed to catch last week’s execution on film. His name was out in the media and he and his family had received death threats. The local illegal settlers had also put up posters with his name and face on them, saying they wanted him skinned alive. The house had already been firebombed. We were going there as an international presence to act as a deterrent to what seemed a likely further attack.

Emad in his family home — Imad in his family home

This night his backyard looked like your average neighbourhood barbecue, except that nobody was eating. Imad was sitting by the brazier alongside ten other men from the surrounding houses. His children were buzzing about, and his wife Faisa made sure everyone got their coffee and tea. When the soldiers showed up she made sure everything got caught on film.

There were three of them, all dressed in green, with black automatic rifles and some form of knee pads, which went well with the beret of their leader. They reminded me of turtles with their inability to look back over their shoulders. The execution had been condemned by president Netanyahu at first but later on, as the Israeli public opinion cleared in favour of the soldier, the shooting was surrounded with excuses. The situation for the messenger had however deteriorated.

As the soldiers walked in to the backyard a handful of camera LCDs lit up the night, like torches keeping the wolves at bay. Faisa brought her camera close to the officer’s face, where he hopefully saw a reflection of himself, a harasser of ordinary people.

The soldiers stood around for a while as they checked our passports and IDs. The situation was a bit tense but as everyone had the right to be there, they turned on their heels and left. They were the second delegation from the Israeli army that night. A lone soldier had come at first, to see if there was any protection present, and Issa guessed, to go back and tell the settlers. Luckily, there were a lot of people showing Imad and Faisa their support.

As the hours passed people started to leave for their homes. Our delegation from the ISM spent the rest of the night at Imad’s place. There was an Indian soap opera on TV, dubbed to Arabic, and the children surfed the internet. It could have been a quiet night in a home anywhere in the world, if it hadn’t been for the occupation, or the death threats.

Laila: an unexpected entrepreneur and feminist

23rd March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied West Bank

I’ve wanted to find out more about Laila since I met her on my first day here. She is the only woman storekeeper in the souk and she has a bed and breakfast here. One evening I saw her standing up to soldiers who did not want to let her pass to go home. I have seen nobody else with that firmness and confidence. Everything about her is unusual here (or indeed anywhere). When I do talk with her for this interview, I realise just how unusual.

Laila’s store sells the same beautiful traditional Palestinian products as many others in the souk but hers are the produce of a rural womens’ cooperative run by her sister Nawal. Laila serves tea and we settle down to talk. Next to me are boxes of beads, silver and stone that I rummage in idly as I sit with her.

Laila doesn’t come from a Hebron family: she was brought up in one of the hill villages and she is lyrical about her childhood there, in what must have been a tough upbringing. In winters they lived in the village, in a cave with the animals, and in summer in a tent near the summer crops: by the time she was a child her family were living on a tiny vestige of the land they had owned before 1948 and the Nakba. ‘If you think about our lives you never believe how we survive. We survive for little things. I remember when we are young our food is from the garden. We can have vegetables from the garden, we can cook, we can catch birds. It’s a simple life. We have a fire to cook, we have water from the wells or a spring. Its very hard for people but for us we like it, we enjoy it much, much better [than in the city].’

Then after 1967 with the coming of illegal settlements came the fear, and the fear was justified: over the years, either settlers or soldiers have burned down the majority of the village’s olive trees. They lost even more land in the last decade when the separation wall sliced away further areas ‘to make the road straight’ and they could no longer get to their own olive trees to crop. ‘In the beginning they let a few people, not many, enter in so they can pick olives but after they burned the trees. Now the land is empty and they took it and they use it for agriculture and they have a lot of cows in that [settler] village.’ Recently too, settlers who had been evacuated from Gaza in 2005 were resettled in new houses built near their village (so much for the munificence of the Israeli government in returning Gazan land to Palestinians). ‘It makes you very nervous and sad; you can see how they take your land. They have everything; at the same time you cannot buy even 200 metres of land to build a house for your child.’

Now Laila lives in the heart of a complex and dangerous city but it is not how she wants to live: ‘Now its more complicated the life, you have to buy everything; you have to buy the water, you have to buy the food, everything is modern and it costs more than we can pay. I miss the life before, I want my children to have the same life I had.’

The need to make a living drove Laila and her husband for three years to Jordan but she hated it so much they had to come back. Then she worked for many years for a women’s cooperative in Jerusalem until the Israeli government built the separation wall and she was unable to cross to work. That is when her new life in Hebron began: her sister Nawal asked her to take on the shop in the souk from her women’s rural cooperative, and despite Laila’s pleas that she did not speak English, Nawal left her for longer and longer periods until she was in full charge.

‘ISM, they have a girl, I never forget her, she came to the shop every day. She want to learn Arabic, I want to learn English. We start to write for each other and by her she encourage me to talk a little bit and I started to listen to people when they talk. I still learn day by day.’ Now her English is good if idiosyncratic and her entrepreneurial skills are considerable: she never pressures customers (unlike many who are desperate in these difficult times) and people like and return to her to buy.

She has recently branched out into operating a bed and breakfast in the souk (if you are ever in Hebron: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/2148561?s=LVjE97o5). Again she had the help of ISM. When their Tel Rumeida apartment became a closed military zone some time ago, Laila put them up. ‘Then I have a friend who help me put it on airbnb. People who stay with me teach me how to use it. And after [that] I started to make lunch for people, for groups. Friend by friend they know about me and they like it and they tell other people.’This degree of independence and initiative is surprising in the very masculine environment of the souk. But then Laila volunteers something that I really wasn’t expecting: she says, ‘I like to do some thing women they cannot do it, just for man. I like to put myself in [a] place I can be strong in.’ Why is that, I ask?

‘I don’t know, she says. ‘Because maybe when I grew up with my father, always he taught me how to be strong: when you have problems, talk about them. He was really clear with me. Really, he loves me more than the boys. And all the people in the village they never say I am a girl. I am look like boy, not girl. And I continue with this. I respect the men but I never feel shy to be in places where the men have to be. Allah he cannot give them things more than he give me. He give the same. I am nine months, they are nine months. I am female is just from Allah, but I feel I can do what they do. I like it.’

Then we talk about life now in Hebron and that is when she nearly makes me cry, and when she tells me that ‘we have not to cry, we have to be patient’. Her two sons have been arrested several times. One threw stones at soldiers when he was fifteen and went to prison. The other attempted to work in Israel without a permit and was imprisoned three times, for 45 days, for three months and then for six months. Both are still unemployed but she would never want them to go abroad to work.‘When my son was arrested I feel as mothers feel and from that time I start to fight: if I see they stopped any boys or children, I have to ask: ‘why you search them? be nice with them, do it in a nice way’. Some are aggressive with me. They are very scary for us and we don’t know what they can do to us but I never care if they want to kill me: if Allah he want to take my soul, its not by their hand. It should be your time is finish. Allah he decide. This is how the mothers of children [who] got killed by the soldiers they believe their time is finish: I cannot say ‘it is haram* he has died’ because it is the will of Allah. This is how we continue. Allah gives the patience. You never believe your children will die, when you start to think you will become crazy. You never believe you can continue.’‘We have to continue by good food, by water, by air, we have to continue: its enough for us.’

* forbidden by Islamic law

Jamal, steadfastness and a death

21st March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Ni’lin, occupied Palestine

Jamal is younger than I am but he doesn’t look it. He is always there, as are all the storekeepers in the souk and he always greets us, as does nearly everybody (walking down the souk when it is open can be a slow business). We walk through the souk several times a day to monitor tension at the mosque and at the checkpoints beyond them.

Jamal sells beautiful Palestinian embroideries, rugs and cushions, but nobody buys. I stay with him for an hour to do this interview, and unusually in that time he has one group of customers, tourists from France who have bought before, but they don’t buy today. He gets out all his rugs and explains how good they are. He asks nervously if they wouldn’t like to buy a small something today, but they don’t. I want to shake them but I don’t.

We settle down to a cup of ginger tea (no conversation conducted without tea or coffee) and he tells me that he has been coming here for forty-seven years, starting as a child after school and in the holidays. It is his father’s store. (I’m going to leave Jamal’s words in the good but slightly broken English that he speaks in his very soft voice.) He has been here through all the troubles in Hebron.

‘I did watch the first intifada and the second intifada and now the third intifada. I did stay all that time and when settlers began occupying lands after the war in 1967, they start building settlements outside the city, and after that they move to the heart of the city you could say the 80s, inside the city, four settlements.’

That’s the situation we have now and that is what makes Hebron unique: four settlements in the heart of the old city, in Palestinian houses, with about 600 settlers living behind barbed wire and checkpoints, with between 1500 and 2000 armed Israeli soldiers stationed to ‘protect’ them from their Palestinian neighbours.

‘Number four the one it’s behind my store and on top of my store; it’s what they call Abraham Avino settlement. They built it on the main vegetable and fruit market. They occupied all these old houses above us, they rebuild them which is not their properties, they just took them, their owners did not sell them, they fight in court and they won the case but [the settlers] didn’t leave them.’

What this doesn’t convey is how close and how hostile the settlers are. They live literally above the shop, above a wire netting filled with rocks and rubbish which they throw from their windows: ‘We done it, we fix it as a kind of protection and sometimes that metal net won’t do any good as while you are standing they pour on you liquid such as dirty water, urine, rotten eggs, and all that happens in front of the soldiers’ eyes. On both sides there are watching towers, sometimes we do complain, we shout to the soldiers.’ The soldiers however do nothing. The soldiers do not do anything to protect Palestinians (or internationals) when settlers attack them and this happens often. They say it is a matter for the (Israeli) police but the police are never there.

I ask him how things used to be before the 1994 Massacre in the mosque that led to the obscene division of Hebron city centre into the two halves we have today. ‘It used to be crowded, active, so busy because you see the main city to produce this stuff [embroideries and rugs] is Hebron. Palestinians from all over used to come every day, even from the Gaza Strip, to buy their goods from here and to pray in the mosque and to leave late in the afternoon, and even internationals from the embassies from Ramallah and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they used to come at the weekends to buy their stuff. We used to make a lot of money, we had a nice business and good life, no trouble, no problem, no nothing.’

I queried him: really, even though the settlements had begun to make their presence felt? ‘The settlements when they came in the eighties they were small and it wasn’t like any trouble between Palestinians or settlers. It used be that a lot of settlers even they came from Kiryat Arba to buy fruit and vegetables.’

Then I ask him about the Oslo Accords, that set of negotiations and agreements from the 1990s to the 2000s which led to the setting up of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: that seemed to be a time of hope for many Palestinians, didn’t it? ‘People thought Oslo was good in a way. It might help and sort problems and solve it. We might have our own state. We were disappointed after that because they said at the beginning by the year 2000 all settlements in the heart of the city, they were going to leave them and to go and to live in Kiryat Arba, the main and the first and the biggest settlement outside the city.’

And why did it not happen? ‘Since that time the Israelis don’t want the peace process to go forward to let Palestinians have their own state, they don’t want it. Americans and British and a lot of countries, they said to them stop building settlements; they ignore everyone; they are not listening to anyone, they don’t want to give us a state.’

Jamal is very clear about the Israeli strategy: ‘Life is so hard, difficult, tough. We don’t feel safe and secure down here from the army and the settlers, we are frightened they will open fire on us and shoot us. Look what they have done round the mosque: they have shot so many people, they want the area empty, they want people to be frightened and to leave the area. By shooting these kids they made it so frightening even I don’t go there.’

I am sitting here writing this as my fellow activist Jenny comes in with breakfast and tells us that someone was shot and killed ten minutes ago at one of the checkpoints, not the one that we just came back from, one that none of the internationals was at. This says two things to me: this is exactly what Jamal is saying. Every day, small things and big things. Every day, pressure to leave. And secondly, if I was ever unconvinced, standing for two hours at a checkpoint counting and watching, that my time is well spent, I am not now. This would not have happened if international observers had been there. I am sure of this. How can we be everywhere all the time?

And Jamal reminds me of the other reason we are here: ‘The media is not on our side, it is on their side. When you go back home you are going to tell your husband, you are going to tell your kids, your neighbours, you are going to say what you have seen with your own eyes and they will know from you the harassment and the attacks and the bad things they do against us.’

There is already a funeral today. Now there will be another tomorrow, if the Israelis release the body. Muslims have to bury their dead the same or the next day. Three funerals last week. Funerals every week.

Jamal rejects violence for himself and his family. All that is left is sumud, steadfastness: ‘We are resistant, we are determined to stay, its hard for us to leave. It’s in our blood, it’s in our soul. To stay and to be patient. Here you have to live and to take this way of life because this is the way it goes, safe or not safe, peace or not peace, to me as a person I can’t do anything about it.’

I put my metaphorical pen down, sobered.

Checkpoint harassment – everyday ‘normality’?

17th March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine

Occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) is a city of far too many checkpoints. Operated by heavily armed Israeli forces, they create obstacles that all Palestinians must cross in order to go about their daily lives in al-Khalil: to go to school or work, to visit friends or even just to go grocery-shopping. These checkpoints become a ‘normal’ feature of everyday life—as does being delayed, stopped, searched and questioned, even denied passage by Israeli forces when attempting to traverse these checkpoints. It is a normality that should not exist.

As many are forced to pass through these checkpoints regularly, some of the soldiers and border police begin to recognize faces, to get to know and target people. Some will close the metal turnstile just after opening it for someone to pass, making them get stuck; some will ask someone who already passed through the metal detector without setting it off to take off some of their clothing, to go back and forth again repeatedly, pointlessly through the metal detector. It often seems, to those passing through and watching as the soldiers harass those attempting to cross, that the Israeli forces are enjoying the power they have over the people forced to endure their humiliation. At times they act childishly, soldiers manning a checkpoint cracking up laughing as they manage to stop the turnstile halfway through, at just the right time to make people crash into it as they try to walk through. Sitting in their small walled-off guard posts with assault rifles slung over their shoulders, these Israeli soldiers are given total power to decide the fates of Palestinian civilians—children, adults, women, elderly people—an unjust, unreasonable power to determine what will happen to anyone passing through the checkpoints.

Many Palestinians try to avoid checkpoints at night, when it’s dark. As a foreigner in Palestine, I enjoy certain privileges in contrast to Palestinians, privileges that make passing checkpoints much easier for me. For example, a tourist or international will rarely be asked to remove metal items and walk back through the metal detector repeatedly until it no longer beeps, nor will they have their bags emptied and thoroughly checked, be arbitrarily detained, or invasively searched. I am sometimes permitted to cross checkpoints or enter areas most Palestinians are barred from. I am also far less likely to be physically assaulted, beaten or killed by Israeli forces. The life of a foreigner, it seems, is worth more to outsiders and media than that of a Palestinian; there might at least be a media outcry if soldiers did something to a light-skinned European. But a few days ago, passing a checkpoint in the vicinity of Ibrahimi Mosque at night, things changed…

As I attempted to pass I recognized the two soldiers at the checkpoint as the ones that tend to make passing a long-drawn-out process, harassing anyone trying to pass as much as possible. This did not surprise me when I was repeatedly ordered—In Hebrew, a language I, as well as many Palestinians, do not understand— to go back through the metal detector even though it did not beep. One of the soldiers came out of the small walled-off room they use to control the checkpoint to stand on the other side of the high gates, ordering me to take off my jacket, which I refused. After some discussion, they allowed me to pass to the other side, past the metal detector and turnstile to the far side of the soldiers’ control post, he then ordered me to hand over my bag to the soldiers.

It was a gloomy night, in an area with no real lights, deserted except for the soldiers. I was alone with the them, as the person I had been walking with was trapped on the far side of the checkpoint, behind the locked turnstiles, waiting to pass and unable to see what was happening.

After putting my bag on a cement roadblock, one of the soldiers started searching for something in his trouser pockets while the other kept a close eye on me, watching my every movement. As the soldier kept going through his pockets searching for something specific, I started wondering what he was looking for.

After many Palestinians were gunned down at checkpoints in recent months, not only in al-Khalil but throughout the West Bank, knives suddenly ‘appeared’ next to them. Many Palestinian women have told me of how they are scared that soldiers would plant a knife in their bag when ‘searching’ it at checkpoints. Standing in the dark at this checkpoint, these thoughts crossing my mind, I started worrying that this might happen to me as well. Would the soldiers put a knife in my bag? And would they arrest me when ‘finding’ the knife, or would they shoot me? Would anyone believe that a knife was planted in my bag? Would anyone believe me more than any Palestinian this has happened to? Having already lived in al-Khalil for a long time, repeatedly crossing checkpoints, knowing that these soldiers always try to harass and intimidate me, I started wondering how much they must dislike me. I started doubting my privileges—international media would likely believe the soldiers’ story in any case, as they have so many times before when Palestinians were killed. Would this be the last time I passed this checkpoint? There was no-one around witnessing what was happening – no-one but me and the soldiers. Fortunately, after harrowing moments that dragged on for what felt like about five minutes, the soldier took a flashlight from his pocket, starting to comment on whatever he saw in my bag.

For a few minutes, I had experienced that fear, that terror which soldiers operating with impunity would turn harassment at a checkpoint into something worse. For Palestinians living under the illegal Israeli military occupation, this fear is part of everyday life. This fear, that something might happen when passing a checkpoint – for Palestinians living under the illegal Israeli military occupation, is part of everyday life.

As international media and governments turn a blind eye to the daily, ongoing human rights violations by Israeli forces, Palestinians are denied the basic rights that European and US politicians tend to speak so highly of, criticizing every small infringement – except those against Palestinians. This ridiculous ‘double standard’ has continued for far too long; it is about time to stop turning a blind eye to the situation of the Palestinians under illegal Israeli military occupation. Global forces looked the other way and ignored repeated UN resolutions as Israeli forces trampled human rights for generations of illegal occupation. The international community has stood idly by for sixty-seven years too long already.

As humiliation and intimidation are routine parts of passing checkpoints and going about life under military occupation, people have learned to adapt, to come to expect and learn to arrange their lives around something that is not supposed to be part of anyone’s life. As humiliation and intimidation often is part of the experience passing checkpoints and living under military occupation in general, one learns to ‘accept’ or ‘arrange’ with something that is not supposed to be part of anyone’s life. This is not only about human rights and basic freedoms, about being able to pass a checkpoint without fear, but it is also about dignity – about being treated like a human being.