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.
Every Monday for years the families of the Palestinian prisoners are protesting at the offices of the Red Cross in Gaza City.
These families have not been allowed to visit their relatives imprisoned in Israeli jails for almost 2 years. According to human rights organizations (including Israeli organizations), Palestinian prisoners are submitted to torture and ill-treatment, permitted by the Israeli High Court of Justice. Israeli Prison Service admits that there are about 8,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, but according to Palestinian Authorities the number exceeds 11,600.
I met Ramadan and Sabrine Shamali at a Sheyjayee market a couple of days ago. They were going to buy new blankets, mattresses, and other essentials, including clothing, to replace what was lost when their house was attacked by the invading Israeli army during Israel’s war on Gaza. They were using money sent from those outside of Gaza in solidarity with Palestinians.
Sabrine Shamali trying to restore a home for her family
newly-bought mattresses, blankets and pillows to replace those destroyed by Israel’s attacks on Gaza
Ramadan Shamali picking a new blanket
Ramadan knew the best place for blankets, a small store in the district, with blankets mostly brought in through sporadically-opened borders or, more likely, the tunnels. I was told that immediately after the war, when people were scrambling to replace burned and destroyed blankets, there were nearly none to be had, with the borders closed since November 4 and the tunnels out of order.
We eyed the different weights and got a run-down of the prices: a 7 kg blanket goes for 270 shekels (~$65), a 5 kg for170 shekels (~$40), and a children’s for 75 shekels (~$18).
The mattresses were 170 shekels, pillows 25 shekels, and a large, woven floor mat 170 shekels.
Just replacing these items ended up costing the couple 1500 shekels, or about $365.
While the days have gotten warmer, nights still merit good blankets, particularly in a missile-hole-riddled house.
Needless to say, Sabrine and Ramadan were pleased to finally replace them, 2 months after their losses.
From there we headed to a clothing market in the same region, where items like underwear for the kids and sports pants, t-shirts, and other children’s needs were added to the bill.
They’ll still be living in a house most would consider not fit, not safe, for habitation. But such is the dilemma of so many here, where cement is on the banned list, held at bay by Israeli authorities from the Palestinians here who so desperately need it.
Today we accompanied farmers in the Latamat area on the outskirts of Khoza’a. The last time we were out farming in Khoza’a the shooting was the closest I’d experienced, and from the video footage it looked like the Israelis were aiming to shoot my college J in the leg. Since later that same day Wafa was shot in the kneecap, and not too long before that farmer Mohammed was shot in the foot while we were with him, the ISM group had been taking stock of our role. We decided that Gaza ISM had to hold meetings with any farmers that wanted our accompaniment and be absolutely sure they understood that our presence protects them only mildly if in fact it protects them at all.
Lentil picking in Khoza’a
An anxious eye on the border
…and picking as quickly as possible
7am – an early start sometimes means less shooting
Today’s workers were mostly women
picking lentils
My personal feeling was that as long as they are clear on that, then if they still want us we should still go, but then I have to leave Gaza soon. In the Khoza’a meeting (this included showing our video footage of the Faraheen shooting of Mohammed and telling them about Tristan’s shooting and the past killings of ISMers) the farmers replied “Ok, maybe they shoot at us when you are with us, well we’re used to that because they shoot at us when you are not with us. So it’s normal. But if you are with us when it happens – at least you can tell the world about it.”
So we met the mostly women farmers at 7am (often women work the most dangerous areas in the hope the soldiers will shoot less) and walked to the fields which were about 4-500 metres from the border. Today’s crop was lentils. I have never seen a lentil plant before, and I certainly hope no-one has to shell the lentils individually cos that would really be some job.
The farmers told us they had been shot at the day before in this same field. Several of us had had bad dreams the night before, and I’d written a quick will with various keepsakes for Gaza friends. In the van, E and I exchanged computer passwords and emergency contact numbers. (Actually, I’ve noticed her looking speculatively at me sometimes, since I told her she gets my laptop if something happens to me here.) She also informed me that for her martyr poster if she died, she wanted a picture of her with a donkey. So it was with somewhat of a sense of doom we walked down the track among golden wheatfields. And when explosions started shaking the ground, we wondered if we should even keep going. We rang our friend J in Faraheen, since they seemed to be coming from his direction.
But he told us that actually what we could hear was a fight between Palestinian resistance, and Israeli occupation forces, in Maghazi camp (where Dr Halid – who is a nurse not a doctor – and his family live) which was a lot further north. So the lentil picking got underway and we tried to feel reassured by the fact that the F16s and Apaches flying overhead, and the distant roaring, were not directed at us. But I couldn’t help imagining what it must be like to be a resistance fighter on the ground facing those Apaches and F16s.
Anyway, it wasn’t long before two jeeps turned up at the border, and Israeli soldiers got out. We waited for the inevitable, and it came – a short burst of shooting only broadly in our general direction. The women working on the ground tensed up and waited. But that turned out to be it. The soldiers got back in the jeeps, and the jeeps drove off again. Some hours later, lots of lentils were picked, the sun was high, everyone was relaxed, and the morning was a success. You can see my colleage G’s Youtube footage of the brief shooting, which he has cheekily finished with a minute or two of me and E entertaining ourselves with some of the dubke dance steps we’ve learnt. You can also find a report of the day and archived articles and videos at the new blog Gaza ISMers have created to support the campaign to protect Gaza farmers, at http://farmingunderfire.blogspot.com/. Please tell your friends.
Later we heard that in Maghazi camp, two fighters were killed, 2 injured, and an Israeli soldier was injured and an Israeli jeep destroyed. I texted Dr Halid and asked how the little girls were. “My children are used to bombing now”, he replied resignedly. I can’t help but feel like the resistance fighters took the fire for us today. If Israel hadn’t been busy shooting at them, from past experience it seems a sure thing they would have stuck round to shoot at us, like they had at the same farmers in the same place the day before. I guess that’s why the resistance is called the resistance.
Later that afternoon, V and I were sitting smoking shisha, looking out at the sea, and gunfire got our attention again. Squinting, we spotted another Israeli gunship, tormenting another Palestinian fishing boat. The gunboat alternated tightly circling the fishing boat with drive-by shooting; we could see the spray as the bullets hit the water. It reminded me of nothing more than a cat playing with a mouse. This was still going on several hours later when we left.
Today, E heard that yesterday a woman she visited in Al Shifa hospital, Ghada, the 21 year old mum of two little girls, finally died in an Egyptian hospital of her horrendous white phosphorous burns. Before she was sent out to Egypt she gave her testimony to my friend M, one of the Al Quds Red Crescent workers, and it is posted here on the B’T Selem website. Please read it. It’s the least we can do.
Oh…and Israel dropped its internal investigation into possible war crimes by the Israeli army in the Dec/Jan attacks.
Less than two months have passed since the end of Israel’s grisly war on Gaza. Not a house has been re-built (there is no cement; Israel continues to ban its entry into Gaza), thousands are displaced or sheltering in an overcrowded relative’s house or renting a scarcely-available apartment. The aid has stockpiled on the other side of crossings into Gaza, many trucks being sent back or expired. And the pain of loss, let alone of seeing family members -children, siblings, parents-burned by white phosphorous, being murdered or left to bleed to death is still unbearably fresh.
Yet Palestinians are trying to move on, again, while dealing with a siege which has only tightened post-destruction of Gaza. Last week Palestinian youths held a concert in the burnt-out theatre in one of the al Quds hospital buildings, attacked and seriously damaged by Israel during its war on Gaza [more than 14 hospitals and medical centres were bombed and damaged by Israeli army, 2 clinics were destroyed, 44 other damaged, and 23 emergency workers and medics were killed].
Land Day in Gaza
Palestinian child holds sign
Dabka in the ruins of Quds hospital
Gazan youth
Women in Gaza mark Land Day
Dabka in the fields
Quds Concert
Charred walls as a backdrop, piles of twisted metal, burnt rafters, and the ash of destroyed walls framing the stage, the next generation of Palestinian parents and leaders stood proud last Thursday, saying with their presence, as well as singing, “we will not go down”. The Michael Heart song written during Israel’s 3 weeks of attacks on Gaza caught the spirit of what Palestinians have been saying and living for decades, since the Zionists first began -even before Israel was created on the smoking ruins of Palestinian villages -their assassinations and acts of terrorism designed to frighten and drive out the existing Palestinian population.
On stage, a youth troupe of Dabke dancers held their own, did justice to the art that is Dabke. What was evident more than the skill of the musicians and dancers was Palestinians’ drive to live, to laugh, to show off and share their love of life. Just as with a concert organized by several youths last November to lift the spirits of Palestinians in Gaza living under a suffocating siege, the crowd clearly reveled in the opportunity for joy …after so much tragedy.
Land Day
In Gaza’s northern Beit Hanoun region, Palestinians, led by women, marched to land in the Israel-imposed “buffer zone” to tend the remaining trees and proclaim their right to the land. The area once flourished with olive, lemon, orange, guava and almond trees, in the years before Israeli invasions razed them to the ground, simultaneously razing history and life. Following Isreal’s latest bout of destruction upon Gaza, most sources cite 60,000-75,000 dunams (1 dunam is 1,000 square metres) of fertile, cultivable land as having been destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. In Gaza’s perimeter areas, the “buffer zone” annexes land to Israel, gobbling up rich soil which had served Gaza’s agricultural needs. As of the last attacks on Gaza, as much as 60 % of the agriculture industry has been destroyed by Israel, further rendering Gazans aid-dependent.
Yet, again despite the gravity of the bleak situation Palestinians are facing, all over Palestine, on Land Day their voices were loud in protest, in defiance, and in joy. Organized by Beit Hanoun’s Local Initiative, a group leading agricultural and social projects in the northern region, Land Day celebrants sang, danced Dabke, tended their trees, and celebrated being on their land. On any given normal day, most of the residents would hesitate to go to this border region area due to the Israeli soldiers’ shooting which routinely erupts dangerously close to anyone on the land.
How can I affect what is happening and how can the world respond?
The concept of civil resistance is not new at all. This non-violent, unarmed, citizen oriented strategy of resistance in modern history played a role in the struggles against colonialism, and neo-colonialism especially in British colonies of Africa, in Apartheid South Africa, India, and the Middle East, particularly Palestine.
We live in a very imbalanced world, where language, dress, technology, education, food, media, and other aspects in post-modern life are dictated by a few and are imposed on the many, the rest of the world. This few decides the flow of politics, and dictates how the world will rotate around. This few, also, will accept no resistance, at any cost.
I come from a country that has, since 1982, the last Israeli occupation, officially founded a paramilitary resistance. Despite being an armed resistance, the Lebanese muqawama (resistance) is a resistance in many forms. It is a culture of resistance, against any form of colonialism, occupation and, most importantly, the evil of all evils, imperialism. During the war on Lebanon, another form of resistance coming from ordinary citizens managed to form. This occurred between July-August 2006, a group of activists local and international, decided to “resist” the Israeli shelling, defying it by driving a series of vehicles to the South of Lebanon to help the internally displaced. This movement was called the Civil Resistance campaign and its aim was to defy Israeli siege on Lebanon during the strikes in any way the citizens in it found possible.
During 2006, another siege was also being imposed on a population, this time more savage, and extending till this moment on. The siege on Palestinian citizens in the Gaza Strip came as a collective punishment imposed on almost one and a half million souls who, due to a democratically elected government that they chose. The only fault this government committed to the few dominating our world is that it was and is a resistance- it resisted those few, with their decisions, their indirect and direct forms of neo-colonialism, occupation and imperialism.
Again, on the 8th of August, 2008, the world witnessed a historical event of a group of activists from all over the world, resisting, non-violently. They resisted the Israeli Apartheid state’s collective punishment and illegal siege. The mighty illusion of power that Apartheid Israel conveyed to the world, again, as in 2006 with the war on Lebanon, was broken. On Dec. 20th, 2008, seven days prior to the Israeli genocidal attacks and ethnic cleansing strategy in the Gaza Strip, a group of activists and journalists, arrived in Gaza’s port. It also included the first Arab delegation consisting of Lebanese and Qataris on board.
For seven days prior to the attacks, since my arrival on an occupied land, a besieged people, collectively punished, I listened to and saw what the blockade of the Strip has created. It created a Bantustan of the worst kind: a concentration camp with a coming wave of slaughtering. A Bantustan with underground tunnels extending to Egypt which were one of the reasons people survived and are still surviving, and one with a slow, genocide, unnoticed by the world; there were weekly if not daily Israeli attacks on civilians such as farmers and fishermen, and, if you track down those figures noted by human rights observers in the Strip, you would also read through the perpetual killing of children.
I remained with a Palestinian family during the attacks. Together, we shared one room under the bombings. On the floor we slept, in the only room far away from the front of the building so as to minimize the devastation of strikes. We were four individuals, the parents and their child, and I. At night, when no sleep was possible, we heard the surveillance plane with its frightening buzzing sound linger above us, then, we heard the F16s and F35s bomb the place near by… this would happen every night for 21 nights…
During the attacks, I accompanied the Red Crescent ambulances that were not free of attacks by the Israeli Occupation Forces. 16 paramedics were killed during the IOF attacks of ambulances. There was no safe place to be in, in this largest concentration camp that modern history has noted similar. Can Auschwitz and Warsaw be repeated again? They were. No one around me was capable of understanding the extent of savagery. It was random slaughtering, with a racially discriminative tone, and a blinded, ignorant hatred. What was worse, was that the world had become so familiar with the death of Arabs, from Iraqis to Palestinians, that the increasing numbers add on to the immunity of response.
In Gaza, watching the international media report the events, many around the world thought there was an army in Gaza. “Where is the Palestinian army?” one commentator had asked. There is no Palestinian army. There are no nuclear weapons in the Strip. There are resistance fighters, with guns in their hands, and a minimal number of Grad rockets developed similar to those produced in the 1960s in the USSR, that sometimes fall back on their launchers. Does that make an army against the largest nuclear power in the region…? Apartheid Israel is not only the largest, but the most destructive nuclear power in the region.
The little boy in my house sang during the war… he sang to sleep, he sang to fight the shaking of our building and the breaking of our windows… the cold air at night and the sounds of gunboats, war planes, tanks and snipers around us… so close, death is so close.
I had no courage if it weren’t for that little boy. I had no courage in facing all this weaponry, this tragedy.
We laughed during the shelling. Yes, there was laughter. We made fun of the Israelis. When they struck, we argued what type of weapon was used. Now, we are war experts from the Palestinian Academy of 61 years of slow genocide and planned ethnic cleansing. People joked with me, and teased me, saying I, the Lebanese, brought the war from Lebanon here.
Along with other areas, Tal el Hawa, my street, was invaded by the occupation forces. They came in with their tanks into our street. Our building was bombed, on the seventh, sixth, and fifth floor. We didn’t know it was us until the next day that we were capable of stepping out. We found a street of rubble, dust and ruins. The Red Crescent building in front of ours burnt entirely, with the one-story storage adjacent compound containing medicine and tents for shelter, devastated with its contents.
I walked during the nights, under bombs. My comrades from the International Solidarity Movement and I had to constantly write. So, there was a need to visit the media agencies offices. They had electricity and internet. Walking around rubble, ruins, was like living one of the classical horror movies. A ghost town… I hid under the balcony shodows as I ran from one building to another hoping the soldier with the sniper in the surveillance plane would not see me… every noticeable walking shadow was a target. They targeted sheep, donkeys… and even pigeons.
We strived with activists in Gaza to begin a global boycott movement baring the South African experience in mind. We believed that Apartheid Israel had shot the two-state solution into pieces. What was the alternative? A one democratic state for all its citizens disregarding race, ethnicity, colour, religion and gender… this was the call to action. Zionism is a racist ideology, having a one state for Jews with discrimination against minorities is not the choice of people who support civil democracy, one person, one vote. The punishment of generals and commanders in the IOF as war criminals, and the state of Israel as an apartheid state responsible for war crimes and acts of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians is to be sought, and the creation of a one state on all of historic Palestine is the only solution after Gaza 2009. Palestinians can coexist with Jews, but not Zionism. A democratic, secular society could be established after transitional justice is sought. Nothing else can accomplish the return of the 6 million refugees scattered worldwide, some living in miserable conditions, particularly in Lebanon and other Arab countries, not to mention the drastic sense of alienation that is felt amongst all the Palestinians whether in the Diaspora, in what is now called Israel or the occupied 1967 Palestinian land.
I am in the struggle, I am living within it. But, I refuse to be subject, I am individual, I keep reminding myself. This reality creates an affect on a person making him or her feel less valuable than they really are… as humans, as citizens. The feeling that the world has abandoned you, renounced you, after all the loss, all the pain, is unbearable, is another death by itself. When one has lost a child, or a mother, or beloved one, to a sniper’s shots, to an Apaches’ impact, how could that be justified? Then, in watching the news broadcasts all over the world, we see the victims portrayed as aggressors… it doubles the pain.
After the attacks stopped, I visited a few orchards in Jabalya, 15 minutes away from where I live in Gaza city. I saw the trees plucked from their roots. What does that mean? When the aggressor plucks your trees from their roots… the aggressor wants you to know that you, and your identity, and your existence will be plucked similarly. The hate in the acts, in leveling the buildings down to sand in which they were made from, was heart wrenching. But, what was inspiring, were those families that drank tea above what used to be a home, a house. Tents were built near the rubble, and children played with what they could find of objects broken.
How can I affect what is happening and how can the world respond? The truth is that we can defy oppression and the illusion of power that the oppressor creates in our minds. I was asked once, “are you not afraid to die?” I am only afraid of what I consider the evil of all evils, repression, oppression, colonialism, and occupation, anything that can wipe my existence off, just erasing identities off the map, and this is what has been happening to the Palestinians for 61 years and on going now. What do you choose to do about it?
