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.
In the basement, the family begins the night at their allotted sleeping spaces, but as the hours pass, draw closer together until women and children are huddled together in a pile of blankets. The women have slept little, and look exhausted. There are 5 or 6 children under the age of 5, tousled hair and solemn faces. The oldest boy’s face is pinched and distorted with anxiety.
Explosions are sporadic; sometimes far off, sometimes close. The drone of Israeli aircraft is constant. Fragments of news come by the phone. Attack beside Al Shifa hospital; windows break onto patients. Security and Protection Forces attacked. Al Aqsa TV channel attacked. Plastic factory attacked. Al Asaraya building. The number of dead increases in small leaps.
Multiple reports that Israel is phoning people at home, telling them “any house with weapons in it is a target and should be evacuated.” And the usual calls about “return Gilad Shalit and everything will be just fine”; as if any of these civilians know the first thing about his detention. If they answer “we don’t have any weapons in our house and we don’t have Gilad Shalit either,” will Israel just bomb the next door neighbours instead?
At 4.30am – deafening bang, flare of fire, some of the windows break, the children shriek and each mother grabs her child. One of the young women was on the basement stairs, and she is carried in, sallow with shock and fear, to be cradled by one of the older women. I give her honey sweets, since the more desirable sugary tea appears beyond anyone’s capacity to produce right now, perhaps there is nothing even to heat water with. We cautiously venture up the stairs; an unfeasibly large crater has appeared beside us, courtesy of an F16. Olive trees are the only casualties, but this is a little field in amongst residential houses. There is nothing here that even Israel, whose definition has always been broad, could begin to describe as a legitimate target.
“Where is grandma?”, asks one of the little girls. Grandma represents sweets and other good things, which would be pretty welcome right now. “Grandma is in paradise,” is the weary answer. This past morning no-one could find any bread in the nearby shops. Sara Eid Al Hawajri set off determined to track some down to feed the grandchildren. The first sweep of attacks at 11am caught her in the street, and left her covered in dust, dead from shrapnel. Eva (Canadian ISM volunteer) knew her, she was a friend of her son (who himself has lost both his legs) and of her daughter-in-law, who now feeds her small boy under the blankets beside me.
We came to pay our respects, but fearing an Israeli army incursion as happened to them before, the family asked us to stay. Sara’s teenage daughter is helping care for the children, but when things are quiet her face drifts into blankness.
In that first sweep of attacks, in approximately 10 minutes, we understand that 205 people were killed and more than 700 injured. Most government buildings and other social infrastructure were destroyed. 80 Israeli planes and helicopters were involved in the attack and over 100 bombs were dropped. So before tonight began, the hospitals and mortuaries were full, the staff overwhelmed, the medical supplies exhausted. It will be dawn soon and it is hard to imagine what we will find with the daylight.
Personal account of accompanying Gazan fishermen by ISM activist
On Sunday 12th October, I joined a group of international human rights observers dispersed amongst a small fleet of seven Palestinian trawlers from the port of Gaza City. We left port at 8.00am and headed out to sea in a westerly direction. Soon after leaving port we observed two Israeli gunboats some distance away, their outlines like sharks. Predators patrolling Gazan waters seeking prey. On seeing our fleet, they drew closer. At about 9.30am, whilst off the southern coast of Gaza, the distant image of a larger naval vessel appeared on the horizon. We realised it was the ship carrying the water cannon which has previously assaulted Palestinian fishing boats.
The fishermen were incredibly good humoured despite the anticipation of a water cannon attack. They began singing and this led onto dancing traditional Palestinian dabke, reflecting their irrepressible spirit of resistance. Fishermen on two boats traveling alongside ours saw this and joined in too! They then began boarding up their windows and changing into vests and shorts in preparation for their ‘dush’ (shower).
At approximately 10.00am the naval ship reached two Palestinian fishing vessels some distance from the rest of the fleet and began a prolonged bombardment with the water cannon. An ISM volunteer from Scotland was on-board one of the fishing boats, which sustained severe damage to its wheelhouse. At nearly 11.00am it was finally our turn. Initially, a neighbouring vessel close by came under assault from the water cannon. An Italian human rights observer and I were on the roof of our boat observing the attack. He was filming and I attempted to signal to the soldiers to stop firing the high-pressure water. After a while it seemed as though they were about to turn their attention to us. We quickly clambered down and found the Israeli ship bearing down on our starboard bow.
I was standing on the foredeck watching its approach, when the water cannon was suddenly turned on us, directly at the bow. I was hit by the full force of the high-pressure hose and was thrown off my feet, slamming the deck and smashing my hip against the hull. At first, amidst the confusion, I couldn’t see anything due to the intensity of the spray, then realised I was hanging over the side of the port bow. I scrambled to pull myself back in and narrowly escaped falling overboard as the barrage continued. Fortunately, by now, most of the crew had managed to take shelter behind the wheelhouse, but one young fisherman was still out on the bow trying to shield me from the blast.
Three boats in the fleet were squeezed between the naval ship and the gunboat and had limited space to maneuver, especially as they were still trawling. As they attempted to raise their nets, the cables became horribly entangled. However, the navy continued to attack them whilst they were experiencing difficulties. Machinery on one of the boats was damaged and the net on ours was ripped apart. It seemed like it was all just a game to the IOF.
All this is a mere glimpse of the daily harassment Gazan fishermen have endured for years and my bruised hip pales into insignificance compared to everything they have suffered. Many of the fishermen I’ve been to sea with have shown me deep scars from gunshot wounds inflicted by the IOF. At least they lived to tell their tales. Earlier in the morning I noticed a framed photo on the wall of the cabin of a smartly dressed young man. He gazed down at me with gentle eyes and a serene smile. It was a picture of Hany Alnajar, a Palestinian fisherman shot in the head by the Israeli navy in 2006 whilst out fishing in Palestinian waters. He was merely attempting to earn a living to support his family. He left behind three small children. Sailors the world over face danger every time they put to sea. However, their risk stems from the elements, not from state-sponsored terrorism.
There was a lull in the afternoon and we saw a trio of dolphins playing a short distance from the boat, their backs arching through the sun-speckled water. They somehow signified freedom at a point when the gunboats were a reassuringly long distance away. It struck me how tranquil the scene was, as it should be. As we headed towards shore, the sun began to set, casting a rosy glow over the Gaza shoreline. A rather meager catch was brought in by our boat. Every day is a struggle for these fishermen – not only to sustain a livelihood under the ongoing siege, but simply to survive another day.
Every day Mahmoud takes his sheep and goats out to the fields that his family has used and been bound to through blood and sweat for generations. Every day he is met by violence and threats of violence by the ultra-orthodox settlers who live two hills away, who say that the land is theirs because it was given the by their God four thousand years ago. Every day he is forced from his lands by the soldiers of the occupation forces who are protecting the illegal settlers. Every day he loses the fight for the land that is his, his only way of surviving. Every night he and his wonderful family sleep in a tiny tent without water, electricity and plumbing because they’ve been refused building rights on their own land for forty years – while the settlers two hills away are provided with every resource by the state of Israel.
But every night he goes with his brothers and their children to the football field and he becomes Mahmoud Maradona, and laughs like crazy with joy when he scores in the light of the setting sun over the hills of south Hebron.
Every Friday Fatima sees her son Hassan go at the head of the demonstration that marches from her house towards the illegal wall that Israel is building across their land, the wall that is destroying their olive groves and taking away their right to travel freely in their own land. One of her sons was killed by the military, and another but in prison while non-violently expressing his disgust and protest against the occupation. Every Friday she knows that Hassan maybe won’t come back, since every Friday for the past months he has been arrested and held for four days by the military. Every day her family lives under constant harassment from the soldiers.
But every Friday Hassan is home again, and Fatima offers her friends and international activists sweet tea and laughs, and shares her warmth, her joy of life and her inexhaustible fighting spirit – telling us about the occupation and what it is doing to her people and her children.
Every day Mustafa’s father goes to the wall in Ni’lin. Every day he comes home with eyes that are red from teargas. Mustafa, who is four years old, had a teargas grenade fired into his home last week when the army occupied Ni’lin, and since then he plays a lot with an onion – onion is used to counter teargas. Every guest that comes into his home gets to play with his onion. When the grenade exploded he was silent for a long time, marked by the fear of the grownups that they will lose seventy percent of the olive trees that have been in their ancestors planted centuries ago. Every day his father has to tell him that the soldiers who came into their home and who occupied the village are friends, and that they are just playing. Mustafa has seen more weapons in his four years than I will in my entire life.
But when we are invited for dinner he plays with us, he laughs and flirts and charms us, he gives us his onion and sits a while peacefully in his father’s lap.
These people fill me with such awe and admiration that I have a hard time finding the right words. They welcome us into their homes, they give us of the little they have and say that we are brave who come here. I feel ashamed when they do – we are going home in three weeks or two months but they have no choice, they will fight the occupation until they die or until they win the peace that they always speak of, the peace that is ever present in their language.
Again I must say: the occupation is illegal. Collective punishment is a war crime. Destroying and breaking down an entire people is a crime against humanity. The wall is illegal, declared so in international courts of law. What Israel is doing to the Palestinian people is comparable to what happened in South Africa. This is Apartheid, and it will not stop until the world sees it for what it is and puts pressure on Israel to stop it.
What stays with me most from the last few days is the kindness of women. Just ordinary women, caught in bad circumstances, being nice to one another.
I’ve spent a lot of the last week being searched, questioned, detained, jailed, and ultimately denied entry and deported from the State of Israel–that land which I had been raised to believe would always be the ultimate refuge for anyone born Jewish. But not, apparently, for me.
I was refused entrance because of work I have done in the past with the International Solidarity Movement, a group which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. ISM works in the West Bank and Gaza, bringing internationals as witnesses, moral and practical support for nonviolent Palestinian initiatives–like the ongoing campaign against the Wall which the Israeli military is building to protect the illegal settlements which have encroached deeply into the territory once designated for a Palestinian state.
I came to join the ISM out of a deep belief that nonviolence is a powerful means of struggle, that the Jews of Israel who after all are my own people are good people and a nonviolent struggle would touch their hearts and turn the tide toward real justice. I saw efforts to establish a nonviolent movement as a small ray of hope in an endless cycle of killing begetting more killing and revenge begetting revenge.
Four years ago, I spent a month or more working with the ISM. When I left the country, I was questioned and warned that I might have difficulty returning.
But I chose to try, anyway. This time my intention was to work with ecological groups, doing permaculture presentations and trainings. I had invitations from three green Isrtaeli organizations, and the assurance of a lawyer that that would be enough to get me in.
The lawyer was wrong.
There’s a jail that they take people to, who are refused entry into a country or being deported for one reason or another. It’s not a horrific place–no one was being beaten or tortured, no screams echoed on the concrete walls. Those places exist, too, and most Palestinian men and many women have spent time in them, under conditions so much worse than anything I have ever experienced that the strength it takes to survive is hard to fathom.
But this jail is just a kind of limbo, a place to wait, for a forced flight back home, or for a few lucky or intrepid ones with lawyers, for a hearing and a trial. Most people are there for a few hours, maybe a day or two. Some are there longer, as their court cases drag on.
There’s a human tide of immigration that washes around the world, lured by the gravitational pull of jobs and hope. Now and then, the waves crash up against the seawall of a border and leave behind a human being as the sea leaves mementoes of driftwood and shells..
Now I had become a piece of that detritus. And for the other women with me, some tide of hope has also gone out. The first night, I am with Tina, the young American law student of Palestinian descent. She and her brother are plucked from a student tour group and refused entry. All the indignant protests of their law professor, travelling with them, and their professional friends cannot change their fate. Tina, in her headscarf and white poncho, has spent months planning and organizing the trip, and she sobs in disapppointment when it finally becomes clear she will not be able to stay.
With us is Zmerna, who I begin to call the Bewildered Brazilian. She is slim, dark-haired, dressed in her good jewelry and high heels. She speaks nothing but Portuguese, and no one else speaks her language–not the guards, not the Security or the Ministry of Interior or anyone she has contact with through the whole process. A couple of us speak Spanish and at times manage to communicate some simple concepts.
“Prison?” Zmerna says in alarm as the guards marched us into the locked entryway. Tina and her brother have been told they were going to a hotel, where they would have wifi and access to their luggage and computers..
“Not prison,” says the guard. But they separate us from Tina’s brother, and lock us into a small room full of bunkbeds. I say, if you’re locked in and can’t get out, you’re in jail. It’s not the worst jail I’ve ever been in. I note its attractions: plastic mattresses, wool blankets, a toilet with a door that actually closed, a shower. Tina has a horror of germs, and has to force herself to use the facilities. I try to comfort and reassure her. She tries to comfort me. We both sit down and try to comfort Zmerna, who is crying on the other bunk.
Tina’s course which she will now miss is, ironically enough, a human rights course. I tell her she deserves an ‘A’.
“Get some sleep,” I said. “You’ll need your rest.” Bur I find it hard to take my own advice. There’s an energetic field that seems to underly Israel, like a nest of high voltage wires that short circuit continuously, buzzing and jangling. It’s hard to hold an uninterrupted conversation, a train of thought. I find myself able to doze lightly, but not able to relax and truly sleep. My mind keeps buzzing and I keep fighting with it, doing my meditations, grounding, trying to draw some help and nurturance from the land itself. But all I can really feel are walls and fences, barriers to any flow.
By morning, Zmerna and Tina are gone. I refuse the first flights that are offered to me, waiting to hear back from the lawyer my friends have hastily arranged to take my case. One of the guards, round and hard as a billiard ball, with a round beer belly and sharp, round eyes, tries to intimidate me, shouting and bringing out a pair of handcuffs to show me. But his heart isn’t really in it, and he soon gives up and admits that they will not physically force me to get on a plane.
Instead they move me to a new room, with Sol, a young Phillipina with an acne-scarred face, six months pregnant, who istrying to resist going back to the Phillipines. With her is Marie, from Moldava on the border of Romania and Ukraine, who has been here for a month, while her lawyer push her case slowly through the courts. Sol is heavy bodied and tired and sad; Marie is slim, blond, and radiantly cheerful, washing out her underware in the sink, stalking about the cell in her gold, high heeled sandals, creaming her face and chattering on the cell phones. They are economic refugees. In Israel, one of the results of the Intifada and the closures is that the low-level jobs once done by Palestinians are now taken by a stream of immigrants from Russia and Central Europe, Africa and Asia. They come, as immigrants all over the world come, with the hope of bettering themselves, making money to send home, finding love and fortune. When they overstay their welcome, or when the system decides, for its own reasons, not to admit them, they end up here.
Marie gives Sol most of her lunch. I try to give her mine. For some reason, I just can’t eat. It’s not my usual reaction to stress–usually, the worse things get the more I’ll eat anything in front of me. But for once in my life, I have entirely lost my apetite, even though I tell myself that I should eat something. “Eat when you can, sleep when you can, and whenever you get a chance to pee, pee!” is my usual rule. But this time I just can’t force down the mystery meat, the plentiful but greasy and dead-looking chicken wings, potatoes and rice. I do eat some aged salad, and an orange.
To cheer Sol up, I offer to read her cards,, as I have my pocket Tarot deck with me. Her face lights up as I predict something good happening for her, soon. Love, celebration, joyfullness–the cars are like a window into all the bright possibilities on the other side of the walls.
Marie’s cards show trouble ahead, but I comb through them for every hint of good fortune. Strength is at her crown. “You are a strong woman,” I tell her. In truth I am amazed at her ability to smile, to radiate cherrfulness and grace after a month in this place which, for all it’s amenities, is still driving me crazing with boredom after less than a day.
“Ani ’zkah,” she agrees, smiling and nodding with confidence. “I am strong.”
And then Sol gets called by the guards, to be ready to go. Whatever is happening to her, she seems joyful about it. The cards’ prediction is confirmed, and she leaves us, smiling.
The guards, for reasons of their own, move me to a different cell. I am settling into the solitude when the door opens and they usher in Irina, from Russia–Siberia, to be exact. Irina is plump and middle-aged, like me, and she makes herself at home, taking off her blouse and relaxing in her slip. She wears a gold icon around her neck and gold, spoked earrings and she tells me she is a doctor, a gynecologist who has been in Israel for eight years. She speaks fluent Hebrew but little English, and we communicate in Hebrew words I drag up from my deep memory like archaeological relics. She has a big bagful of food and drink, and she makes me drink a cup of orangina and shares her face cream. Although we are both fifty six years old, I can’t help but notice how much better preserved she appears. Her hair is still brown, her face neatly made up, her mouth a red rosebud and her skin clear of wrinkles. Whereas I have no hairbrush–it disappeared in the original search at the airport, my skin is dry and covered with a fine net of wrinkles, and I am coming to more and more resemble the Hag of the Underworld.
Irina does what I think of as ‘the woman thing’…she flirts with the guards, purses up her little rosebud mouth and lowers her eyes, scolds them from time to time, pleads with them. I can’t do it. It’s not that I don’t know how, I just can’t bring myself to do it even though I know that the way I am with them–clear, calm and stubborn–makes them angry.
Irina comforts me as I get bad news from my lawyer, news which convinces me that I have little chance of winning a case. My own cards look consistently dismal.
Irina goes off to Moscow. I try again to sleep. In the night I am jolted awake with the conviction that I have made a terrible mistake in abandoning my case. But in the morning, when I might still get word to my lawyer to carry on with it, the cards say over and over again that it is useless, and time to make a strategic retreat. I can’t ever know, really, if they’re right or wrong, if I’ve lost all objectivity, if my own inner sense of agreement with their verdict is accurate or influenced by the stress of going cold turkey from all my usual addictions and comforts: food, tea, exercise, and above all, work. In the end, I have to make some decision, so I decide to go.
The morning brings two sweet, doll-like Filipina women, sisters who have come, they say, to spend Holy Week with a friend. Immigration has not believed them, and after yelling and shouting and threatening, is sending them back. They are slim and delicate and beautiful, and one speaks English quite well. She is studying for a Bachelor of Science in Tourism, she tells me, and says, again and again, repeating it like a mantra: “You come to the Phillipines, you will not need visa.” They huddle on the bunk in a state of shock, two delicate, frightened birds, while I urge them to eat, to rest, and assure them that they don’t need to be afraid, that nothing terrible will happen to them. Finally I read their cards, too. I feel like I have become the Hag of the Underworld. I’m glad to see their faces brighten a bit, imagining they can go home now with at least a good story and a bit of confidence in a brighter future predicted for them by the old Witch in the bowls of the Israeli jails.
Just as I finish the second sister’s reading, the guards come to escort me to the plane.
I’m in the back of the van with the tall, good-looking guard whom Irina told me was the good one, the one with a heart of gold. “I noticed you were doing something with the cards,” he says. “You read them? What are they called?
And while they load my luggage onto the plane, I read his palm.
Israel is a place where faith is either magnified or abandoned, where belief becomes delusion easily, shifts to fanaticism, or burns itself out into cynical ash. From my first visit there with my Hebrew High School student trip when I was fifteen, For me, something in the air or the water or the energy always challenges every system of belief or faith I come in with: from my childhood faith in a personal God that deserted me in the midst of the Hebrew High School youth trip I was on at fifteen, to my belief that nonviolence would easily turn the hearts of the Israelis back toward justice for all people of the land. And my faith in a refuge.
But I continue to believe in this: that in even the terrible places of the world, we find.the small hands of sisterhood, reaching across boundaries and borders and walls, across gaps of culture and language and belief to do acts of kindness for one another. And that in the end, that power is strong enough to break down the walls.
For a week now the security checks on Palestinians and internationals in Hebron has maintained it’s tightest grip since our arrival.
Soldiers who a month ago limited themselves to their posts now extend their jurisdiction along whole streets; patrolling and watching in a paranoid attempt to preempt some fictitious attack. They scan the roof tops with their rifles; plausibly in case of Palestinian fighters, of which their are none in Hebron.
Yellow lines have been painted on the road indicating where locals should stop and line up before being searched. Whereas before soldiers would ask some men and youths to lift their shirts and turn around, now all members of the community, in each individual case, are being inconvenienced by more rigorous searches. These include full pat down body searches on the men; feet apart hands up against a wall; women being scanned with hand held metal detectors and in many cases emptying entire bags of groceries onto the pavement for inspection.
Further harassment and intimidation have included threatening internationals with arrest for simply watching, let alone filming. Preventing women and shop keepers from sweeping their doorways, and moving congregations of the street in a sort of mini curfew.
