Category: Journals - Page 61 - International Solidarity Movement

Grazing on tragedy and the promises of scripture in South Hebron Hills

1 September 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

The army is establishing two virtual lines for each of the settlements that are near a Palestinian village. The first line, if crossed by Palestinian demonstrators, will be met with tear gas and other means for dispersing crowds.

The second line is a “red line,” and if this one is crossed, the soldiers will be allowed to open fire at the legs of the demonstrators, as is also standard practice if the northern border is crossed.

Each map was approved by the regional brigade commander, and the IDF force that is deployed to the area will be ready to respond on the basis of the lines determined.—Haaretz

Shortly after dawn on August 29th, with the soft light spreading across the hills, eight armed soldiers climb out of their military vehicle to watch sheep.

Na’il is unperturbed. He makes a clicking noise with his tongue and drives his flock a little further up the slope. The soldiers are on the opposite hill, visible against the brightening sky. They guard an illegal settlement from us – two Palestinian shepherds, two international activists, and a small battalion of sheep and goats.

In these hills, sheep farming is political. Rights to this land are re-enacted daily by grazing flocks. The sheep kick back the dusty earth to find short grasses and sparse roots; goats strip the sharp thorns from the scrub. Some days, the shepherds will hang back in the low fields. Others, they will push a little higher, a little further, a little closer towards the boundary.

The sheep do not look up as they scour the earth. The grass is no different here from there; no wall stops their wandering. It matters little to the sheep that up there, the land is claimed by Zionist settlers, who guard it with sticks and stones and guns; nor that the Zionist settlers say this land will one day all be theirs, promised to them by God. As the sheep search onwards for fresh pasture, they do not notice the soldiers on the hilltop; they do not sense the cautious glances of the shepherds; they know nothing of the Oslo Agreement or UN resolutions or international law. They chew the earth, swallowing it in sandy mouthfuls with the roots and the shrubs. It is fine, dry, powdery, physical. But the boundary – that is entirely imagined.

The boundary is not a place; it is a ritual. It cannot be seen in itself, but only in the behaviour it creates. Stray too close to the settlement, and the shepherds know they will meet a response. Today, the army is here – an alien force in an occupied land, frightened young men who came to fight terrorists and find themselves supervising shepherds. They watch, but they do not intervene. The shepherds are permitted to come this far, but no further.

But it is not the army that Na’il and Khaled are worried about. Soldiers can be brutal, but they are by and large ordered, pragmatic, predictable. The illegal settlers, by contrast, are zealous, fanatical. They follow no commands, only Commandments; they recognize no law, only the Law, the Torah, the eternal and unalterable word of God. An army sergeant who used to serve in these hills describes it as the Wild West: ‘the Arabs can be beaten up, the settlers are untouchable.’

Like the original Wild West, the settlers – the cowboys – are violent, lawless, appropriating the land of the native inhabitants through theft and assault. And like the original Wild West, mythologized by Hollywood, their story is retold in the Zionist press, the illegal settlers as bold pioneers and the Palestinians as irrational savages.

The shepherds’ gaze oscillates between the sheep and the settlement, alert to any approach from the self-appointed sheriffs. We are right on the boundary now; the ritual has begun. For about an hour, nothing happens. The soldiers watch us, we watch the soldiers. The only sound is the grinding of ovine teeth and Na’il quietly reciting verses from the Qur’an. With the sun now high in the eastern sky, the shepherds start to drive their sheep back to the fold. As we turn to leave, we see the soldiers climb back into their jeep and disappear over the horizon.

But we have crossed the boundary, and that is enough. With the soldiers gone, we see a lone figure coming down the hill from the settlement. He is moving quickly; in his left hand he is carrying a stick. He moves with purpose, following the contours around the valley. He is some way out of the settlement now.

He is coming towards us. Na’il points: ‘Mustawtan.‘ Settler.

We are now half a kilometer away from the settlement, but the illegal settler continues to follow us. We lose sight of him for a moment, then suddenly he appears over the brow of a hill. He approaches Abu, an Italian activist, shouting with rage. I thought for a moment he might hit Abu with the stick, but instead he pushes him, hard, and screams

“Nazi, Nazi, go!” Abu walks backwards slowly, and responds that he is Italian.

“Italia, Mussolini, fascist” shouts the settler, continuing to push him, shouting now right into his face. For these illegal settlers, anyone who denies their right to this land is a fascist, an anti-Semite, supporting the Arabs who they say stole this land from the Jews two thousand years ago.

“Fascist, go, now, now!”

And so the promises of scripture and the tragedies of twentieth century Europe are thrown together in a sense of entitlement, of indignation, of rage, in this dusty field in Palestine.

A few meters away, I film what happens; Na’il films too, on a video camera provided by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. This is the only protection that these shepherds have – observation, recording, and the meticulous chronicling of truth. Rarely is justice served. But the knowledge that their actions may be known elsewhere sometimes gives the illegal settlers pause. The worst violence takes place when cameras are not there. Today, the settler goes no further. Perhaps the presence of cameras makes a difference. After a few minutes he turns and storms off, marching in long strides across the stony ground. He shouts insults at the shepherds as he leaves, which they shout back in turn.

Back in Khaled’s tent we stretch out on thin mattresses and rest. He speaks no English and I only understand a few words of Arabic; we talk with our hands and our faces, in gestures. He pulls up his shirt to show a scar from a bullet wound on his belly – this is what can happen, sometimes, this is why the settlers are feared, this is why he brings cameras and foreigners to help him graze his sheep. Usually, he says, six illegal settlers come down, threatening and sometimes attacking the shepherds, guarding the land that is not theirs to guard. This is how the land is stolen; not in a grand historical moment, but in increments, dunam by dunam, hilltop by hilltop, the imagined boundary moving a little further each day.

Olive branches strike against the car window as we take the bumpy track back to Yatta. We take this detour through the olive groves because the main track has been blocked, a giant rock pushed across the route by illegal settlers. The straight, smooth illegal settler road bisects the landscape; it, too, is a kind of boundary. Palestinians near the settler road attract attention, Musa tells us, as he maneuvers his car across a stony field. The tarmac stretches away into the distance, a sign in Hebrew and English pointing the way to the Israeli town of Be’er Sheva. Cars and trucks with Israeli plates speed up this road in Palestine. The Promised Land turns beneath their wheels.

The rumble of the trucks can be heard from the tents, where the shepherds wait out the hot noon hours until it is time to take the sheep out again. As the sun drops in the West, and the women begin to prepare the iftar meal to break their Ramadan fasts, they will drive their sheep up the hill once more, towards the boundary. They will keep going back, because it is the only way to live like this, on their land, all of it their land. Like connoisseurs of the absurd, they wait for the invisible boundary to disappear, as Khaled mutters:

“Kul yom. Kul yom. Kul yom.”

Everyday, everyday, everyday.

Interview sheds light on Israeli prison-colonial complex

29 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Conversations are strange over here. When you are told a horrible story by somebody, or you hear yet another example of the brutality Palestinians experience as part of their daily lives, you find yourself eerily laughing along with them. It’s as if the spectrum of human emotions has buckled under strain and flipped back on itself, making up become downward and left turn into right. Perhaps this was just a coping mechanism.

Such was the atmosphere when we interviewed Bardran Jabbal , a geography and sociology lecturer at Hebron Polytechnic University. We went to interview him following the arrest of four people on his street, along with roughly 120 others from Hebron that same night of Saturday 20th of August in one of the biggest mass arrests the area has seen in years.

We ended up chatting with him for two hours, along with one of his sons, and the topic trailed far away from the arrests into interesting territories–or what was left of them.

We were keen to know about what kind of treatment the recent detainees could expect, and he seemed to be the perfect person to speak to, considering he has spent 20 years in Israeli prisons over the course of his life as have each of his sons., under the British mandate laws that allow people to be arrested without any evidence or charge for up to six months, a sentence which can be renewed at any time.

When one of his sons was 11, he was walking down the road with his pet bird between his hands. Israeli soldiers ran after him, causing him to let the bird out of his grip. They imprisoned him for two weeks for “throwing stones.”

Each of his sons have spent sentences (ranging from 3 months to seven years) for either being members of a Palestinian political party or nothing at all . These prisoners are held separately from the likes of rapists and drug dealers who are held in “civil prisons,” all political prisoners are detained in “security prisons.”

Badran himself has spent 20 years in Israeli security prisons over the course of his life, in separate sentences between 1967 and 2007. Three of his children were born while he was in prison. He never saw one of his sons until he was five years old, who refused to believe for sometime that he was his actual father, and tried to attack him to get him out of the house considering the only father he knew was a picture on the wall.

Discussing what conditions the prisoners could expect to face, he told us that human rights organizations pressuring since the 80s, the torture has shifted more to psychological methods.

One example he provided was when they produced a fake document from the International Red Cross Society saying that his wife had died and that his five children were now living on their own. They wanted him to sign it to “hand custody over to their grandparents.” Second-guessing them, he told them that his wife had died willingly as he had met another woman three months previously, and she had sacrificed herself to make way for their relationship.

Later when he was being driven to court in a police vehicle, he saw his wife walking down the street through a tiny window in the armed car.

However a shift to psychological torture in no means should suggest that the prisoners are treated well, he warned. Where in the West we are arrested by means of a warrant, the army here uses sound bombs, teargas and live ammo in the houses they raid, whether they soldiers are met with resistance or not. Once arrested, their eyes are blindfolded and their hands are cuffed to their legs, and they can expect to stay in this position in the transit van for up to four days without food or water before even reaching prison.

Badran estimates that he spent roughly 100 days in the course of his 20 years as an inmate in this position staring at a wall for days on end without food or water. In prison, inmates are expected to pay for their own food at Israeli market prices, and if they don’t ,they don’t get enough to survive. Another way that inmates are tested physiologically is by being held in “fake prisons” full of Israeli informants. This is particularly difficult considering the sense of solidarity Badran tells us that the inmates have with one another in order to survive.

On top of jail sentences, Badran told us that he feels that arrests are run like a business. If somebody is released without charge (which is more often than not the case) they still have to pay a fine at the officer’s discretion. All of his sons have paid up to 15,000 shekels along with their prison sentences. Soldiers routinely loot the houses of the people they are about to arrest or simply destroy them.

One of his friends managed to get his stolen goods back from a soldier, as he managed to take a picture of him in the act. This is a rare case however, considering the soldiers wear face masks, and obviously don’t give away their identities willingly.

Badran was even sceptical about the amount that of influence that the Israeli government has over the IDF. He says that settlement plans, ruled out as illegal by the High courts, are often carried out in spite of this. Another example he gave, was when the High Court ordered his release from prison. He was released and re-arrested on the doorstep for another year.

Palestinians also need to get permission from military officers to plant their crops.

We asked him about the attack on an Israeli coach last Thursday in Eilat , and asked him what the connection this had to the arrests made in Hebron. He was aware that there was no connection, and the shootings were just an excuse to arrest anybody they could.

We proposed the idea that it may have been Israel themselves who carried out the shootings, considering nobody, including Hamas had claimed responsibility for them. He said he wouldn’t put it past them, and used the example of Ben Gurion bombing a ship full of Jews in the 40’s in the Mediterranean, to gain sympathy for the state of Israel.

“Generally when a resistance group carries out such attacks, they are keen to claim responsibility. They have served as an excuse to bomb Gaza from the air without mercy ever since,” he said.

He also drew a connection between the recent protests from within Israel against their governments economic policies, which seemed apt considering many marches in the likes of Tel Aviv were called off in light of the attacks.

The conversation ended with Badran comparing the sentences of Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for resisting the apartheid system under which he and his people lived. He compared it to the Palestinian political prisoners (including two of his brothers) who have spent 34 years in jail.

Over 400 political prisoners have spent over 25 years in prison without release.

Elderly farmer murdered in Israeli airstrike in Buriej

26 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Ismail Nimr Ammoum worked his whole life as a farm laborer. He did not have land of his own, he worked for others, planting, watering, weeding, whatever needed done. He was a strong man, and he loved to work, work did not bother him. He kept working because he loved to work, what else would he do? He lived with his sister in Buriej, but often spent the nights sleeping wherever he was working. On Wednesday, August 24, 2011 Ismail was working for the Al-Khaldi family. He had spent the previous several days living in a small wood hut on the land. At five A.M. neighbors heard the explosion of an Israeli missile strike, but they thought that the land there was empty, they did not realize that Ismail had stayed the night in the hut. That afternoon, the owner of the land came to check up on things. When he arrived he noticed that everything things weren’t right, he opened the gate and then he saw the hut. He saw Ismail’s shattered body lying in the rubble. He had been killed in the missile strike.

Ismail’s father was from Lod. He was a refugee; his family was expelled from his home by Israeli soldiers in 1948. He fled to Gaza with his children, eventually they numbered eight, Ismail, four more sons, and three daughters. Ismail’s father is not here to mourn his son. Not because he died of old age, but because Israel killed him. He died during Cast Lead, one of the almost 1,500 Gazans murdered during those cruel three weeks. He was killed when Israel bombed the police station in Buriej.

We sit talking with Nasser, Ismail’s nephew; it is obvious that he respected his uncle Ismail. He misses his uncle, his uncle who was killed for no reason, just an old man who loved to work on the land. Nasser asks, “How can the world do nothing when innocent people are being killed, it must do something.” The world does nothing, and all that can be done in response to the world’s indifference, is, like Ismail, to get up again and go to work, to go to the land, to not abandon it, to carry on living.

Occupation in the Jordan Valley

22 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

In the last month ISM has joined up with Jordan Valley Solidarity and a slew of other international activists to make mud bricks for a new house and football field in the small Bedouin village of Fasayil, in the Jordan Valley. Fasayil is made up of many scattered islets of Bedouin homes, animal pens and makeshift structures, spread out over a swath of desert. In the daytime, children run around in the stifling heat yelling at each other; men walk around in short sleeves busy with the day’s tasks, or sit in the shade together talking and staring off toward the mountains; women, wrapped in shawls, peek out of their houses briefly to walk across the encampments, and can sometimes be seen sitting on their porches, but otherwise seem embarrassed to appear before the eyes of Westerners (and pretty much anyone, given the conservative social structure here). There are many scattered encampments, of five or six houses each, that gradually lead up to the center of the village, where the structures are more permanent, and there is a little shop that sells cold cans of Coke, warm pita, and all the other amenities.

Right now, though the Jordan Valley is one of the regions of the West Bank hardest hit by the Occupation, Jordan Valley Solidarity is one of the only NGOs working on the ground. This is because, in Israel’s tripartite structure of apartheid, most of the Jordan Valley falls under Area C zoning regulations, where it is under full Israeli military and civil control as a ‘closed military zone’. This means, among other things, that it is illegal for the Palestinians, most of whom are Bedouin, to build any permanent structures without a permit, which is almost impossible to obtain. Therefore, most NGOs will not work in the Jordan Valley, not so much because any structure they build will be demolished (which is largely true), but because building is illegal in the first place.

Fasayil is a unique example because the center of town falls under Area B regulations- Israeli military control, but Palestinian civil control- while the outskirts of town are completely Area C. The structures at the center of Fasayil are larger and more permanent, therefore, because, due to zoning laws, this is the only part of town that is not regularly demolished. After demolitions in Fasayil 2 months ago, 134 people, including 64 children, were left sitting under the blazing sun, surrounded by their possessions, with nowhere to go.

Because the land is designated as an Area C Closed Military Zone, the Bedouin, who have either lived semi-nomadic lives in the region for centuries or who have moved there as refugees after 1948, not only are not allowed to build structures of any significant permanency, but they also cannot dig water wells of any significant depth, and because of Israeli military checkpoints and road closures they can scarcely export goods of any significant quantity or quality. The not-yet-published Jordan Valley Solidarity factbook ‘To Exist is To Resist’ describes the difference between the two areas in Fasayil-

“Because it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain construction permits in Area C, the difference between the two sides of town is stark. Indeed, when crossing from Area B to C the demarcation is not a checkpoint or a sign, but rather the end of paved roads and the drastic change from houses to shacks. Animal shelters mix with residences, electricity is scarce and water must be bought and brought in at exorbitant prices from Israeli companies.”

The web site of PEDAL (www.100daystopalestine.org), one of the international groups that work with us here, gives a great summary of the history of the Valley-

“After the 1948 Nakba (when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled) many refugees arrived here and in 1967, in a deal between Jordan and Israe,l they had their refugee status revoked in exchange for small plots of land. Following this, many inhabited refugee camps were demolished while the UN turned a blind eye. Since 1967 Israel has taken nearly all the remaining land, leaving just 5% Palestinian (area a+b) consisting of Jericho and 5 villages: Lower Fasaiel, Bardala, Al Uja, Zubeidat, and Ein Al Beida. The rest of the valley (95%) is now area c and subject to military control. Of the 320,000 Palestinians that lived in the valley before 1967 only 56,000 remain (75% of which live in Jericho), the rest have been displaced.”

The stated purpose of Israel’s vise-like grip on ownership and control of the Valley is to hold a security buffer space between Israel and Jordan, necessary to defend the country; in reality, however, Israel covets the Valley because (1) the West Bank, which could serve as a future Palestinian state, is thereby surrounded on all sides by Israel; (2) the West Bank is thereby cut off from economic interaction and communication with Jordan, and the rest of the Middle East; and (3) in the words of Jordan Valley Solidarity, the Jordan Valley’s “abundance of water resources, fertile soil and natural minerals offer competitive economic advantages in agriculture, industry and tourism. It also constitutes a geographical “reservoir” of land where the Palestinians could establish housing projects and public facilities.”

Every day, at about five in the afternoon, after a long day of sitting around eating pita with hummus and talking politics (or hitch-hiking to Jericho), the internationals (usually anywhere from twelve to five of us, depending on the day) walk out to the desert beside the village to begin work. At this time, the sun has sunk down to touch the top of the mountains, it is no longer unbearably hot outside, and a strong breeze begins to kick up through the valley, sweeping sand up in its path, as the hot air rises and cool air rushes in to fill the vacuum underneath. As we walk in between the houses and animal pens of Area C Fasayil, mothers smile at us from their windows, children look up into our eyes and look away, fathers nod their heads and say ‘salaam aleikum’, the smell of Ramadan break-fast wafts out of open doors, donkeys stand and neigh, goats shift their feet, dogs bask in the afternoon heat; the enchantment of this beautiful community mingles with the haunting recognition that each of these structures has received final demolition orders, and thus could be bulldozed to the ground at any time. This entire village could disappear from existence in the blink of an eye, at 6 in the morning, with the Bedouin families standing beside the rubble of their homes screaming and sobbing, and international activists arriving just in time to offer their condolences, take pictures, and write a report for the news media.

At the site of work, a water tank drives up to the large pit we dug in the earth; somebody turns the faucet, and water pours out into the pit, mixing with the sand to create a thick, wet mud. Excitedly we pull up our trousers, dig our feet into the mud and begin working the sand in with the water, spreading the mixture evenly to make a consistent mushy, gooey mud which envelops everything it touches. Five mud-caked, wide-eyed, primarily European 20-somethings dancing around in the mud, surrounded by ten or so Palestinian shebab (young men) looking amused, is certainly a sight to see! We dump a bag full of ‘kash’ (straw) into the mix, and once that becomes suffused throughout the goop it is proper mud, perfect to make bricks. Some of us scoop the stuff into buckets, others carry the buckets to the third group, who stand hunched over in a line, shaping the mud into bricks, and leaving the mud bricks out to dry.

Recently, the IDF has begun to crack down on our activities. In the words of an international, who would prefer to go by the name Francis Taylor, ”the soldiers came every night the last five nights. The first night they just asked us what we were doing, the second night they said ‘you know you’re building illegal houses and you could be arrested today or tomorrow’. The third night we anticipated them coming, and we left before they raided the site. When they came they stole the tools and destroyed the equipment and smashed the bricks. Since then we have made new tools and are working harder.”

We work into the night, taking various tea and hookah breaks, and then come 11 p.m. we stumble back to our single collective room, with weary bones and muddy skin, and sit down to an amazing meal, cooked by a Bedouin woman behind the closed doors of her home and served to us by her husband, who gets all the thanks.

Iftar at the House of the Ezkadenia

24 August 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Israel’s latest round of attacks on Gaza has made it too dangerous to demonstrate in the buffer zone. The people of Beit Hanoun do not demonstrate because they want to die, they demonstrate because they want to live. They want to live in dignity, they want to be able to farm their lands, they want to be able to return to their grandfather’s lands. On Tuesday we did not march into the buffer zone. We had Iftar at the house of the ezkadenia. The ezkadenia is small fruit that I have never seen outside of Gaza. This is the house where I remember Vittorio before he was killed. He was draped on a hammock, smoking his pipe, drinking tea and trying to stay out of the sun. We were planning our return to the buffer zone, vowing that we would not give up. Vittorio, we have returned to the buffer zone, we have not given up.

We did not gather here just to have Iftar, but to plan, to remind ourselves why we struggle. Local farmers from the buffer zone had been invited, both so that they could meet us, the International Solidarity Movement, and the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun which spearheads the demonstrations against the buffer zone in Beit Hanoun. Over a meal of chicken and rice we explained to them what we did, and they told us about their lives.

Abu Alaa told us how the Israeli’s have three times destroyed his trees, his crops. Each time, he replants. He will not give up, it is his land, much of it too dangerous for him to farm, or even to visit, but nonetheless it is his land and he will not give it up. He asked me to feel his head, there was a crease in his skull, he had been shot in the head by the Israeli’s. He has actually been shot three times by the Israeli’s. Still, he does not quit. He has ten children, they must eat, he must pay for weddings and university. For this he needs his land. For this he needs the buffer zone to disappear. We met his son, Hussein, an English student in university. We looked over the balcony into the distance, at the buffer zone, the farthest light that we could see was Abu Alaa’s house.

Our struggle against the buffer zone is a struggle for dignity, for the right of people to live and work on their land. Nobody in Gaza wants to live on charity; they are forced to by the siege, by the occupation, by the Nakba. Most of the people of Gaza are refugees, forced from their land in 1948, they do not want to live on charity, they want to return to their homes, to their grandfather’s olive groves and orange trees, to their grandfather’s shops and factories. This is what we struggle for, for the right of people to live in dignity on their land.