Category: In the Media

by Stefan Christoff

I travelled to Jordan from Montreal, Canada, at the end of November with plans to cross the Israeli controlled border into Palestine to work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). I was refused entry into Israel after being held for more than five hours, and deemed a “security threat”, according to information provided to border officials by the ministry of the interior. I had planned to work in Palestine with the ISM, a Palestinian-led movement which brings together Palestinians and internationals from all over the world to work on the ground in the occupied territories and stage campaigns of nonviolent direct action against the Israeli occupation.

The ISM has brought hundreds of internationals to work in Palestine to confront the daily workings of the Israeli occupation. During the summer of 2003, the ISM organised the Freedom Summer Campaign, which focused on confronting the current construction of the Israeli apartheid wall. Palestinian and international activists working with the ISM took part in non-violent direct action to tear down sections of the internationally condemned wall. The wall, deemed a “security measure” by the Israeli state, is clearly an effort to steal more Palestinian land. The Palestinian Environmental NGO Network has estimated that upwards of 50 per cent of the West Bank land will be plundered by the completion of the wall, which is not being built on or near the 1967 Green Line and at points reaches 16km deep into the heart of the West Bank.

Thus, the ISM, through direct confrontation with the colonial realities of the Israeli occupation has become an important facet of resistance to the occupation. The fact that the ISM operates outside of the confines and regulations of international institutions, such as the United Nations, is one of the reasons why the organisation has been effective on the ground in Palestine and throughout the world in bringing to light the terrible realities of life, and death, under occupation.

The ISM has been so effective that Israel is barring activists from participating in the organisation’s work on the ground in Palestine. In the past year, the Israeli military has raided the nonviolent group’s offices, confiscating computers, documents and equipment a number of times.

Grassroots organisations like the ISM are needed at a time when the international community has, through the United Nation and its countless resolutions, condemned many practices and policies of the Israeli state, such as the current construction of the apartheid wall, without doing much on the ground to take action or to change the devastating situation. It takes real action led by Palestinians directly affected to change the situation.

That is why the ISM, like many other resistance groups and organisations in Palestine and throughout the world, is becoming a tangible threat to Israel’s racist and genocidal policies against the Palestinians.

It must also be mentioned that the ISM has been targeted in many more devastating ways by the Israeli state. Two of its members, Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, were killed last spring. These two deaths sent shock waves through Palestine and the world, but until now, the Israeli state or military have not been reprimanded for the deaths in any tangible way. This continues the Israeli military’s tradition of killing with impunity.

The deaths of two ISM members must also be held up in contrast to the fact that between Sept. 29, 2000, and Rachel Corrie’s murder, members of the Israeli army and associated Israeli settler paramilitary units were responsible for the killing of 2,181 Palestinians and the injuring of another 22,218. Palestinians are murdered almost on a daily basis by the Israeli military.

Although there has been a handful of international activists murdered as well, it must be remembered that Palestinian civilians are dying at an extraordinary rate, without outrage or concrete action from the majority of the international community. This fact reinforces the idea that Palestinian life is less valuable than other life and that the world should remain silent in the face of a genocide being perpetrated against an entire nation.

Despite the fact that I was refused entry to Palestine at the Israeli border, my work in support of Palestinian liberation continues, along with that of many millions of others. The work of pro-Palestinian activists throughout the world, especially in nation states such as Canada, is essential. It is often the nations where we find home that are in many ways responsible for the continuation of the apartheid policies against the Palestinian population. For instance, Canada signed the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA) on July 30, 1996. The Canada-Israel pact removed tariffs from industrial products of Canadian or Israeli origin, and in essence gives a boost to the Israeli economy. Thus, it further justifies the actions of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people as it implements, in the form of an economic agreement, Canada’s acceptance of the genocide and colonialism on which the Israeli state is based.

The state of Israel, since its creation in 1948, is directly responsible for the ongoing crisis of millions of Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the world.

The writer is a member of the International Solidarity Movement and an independent journalist working with CKUT Radio Montreal & Free Speech Radio News in the US. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

By James Bennet
Originally published in the New York Times

West Bank – The barrier Israel is building against West Bank Palestinians has had a striking, if unintended, effect: It has stirred a sustained, bloodless protest movement among Palestinians for the first time in more than three years of conflict.

As the bulldozers have swept south toward Jerusalem and cut deeper into West Bank land, villagers who have mostly stayed on the sidelines of the uprising have joined with Israeli leftists to demonstrate. In places, as in this hamlet, they have blocked the machines with their bodies.

“I am totally against touching civilians,” said Naim Morar, 50, a leader of the movement here, as he walked hand in hand on Friday with his 5-year-old son, Mashal, for another demonstration along the 50-yard-wide gash the construction has opened through the village fields.

To that statement of principle, he added a more pragmatic consideration: “If there was shooting at the wall, it would have been finished the next day. But our peaceful resistance forced them to stop.” Often, teenagers throw stones at the end of the demonstrations, but the organizers say they discourage that.

This new approach raises a basic, discomfiting question: Why should such tactics seem unusual? Why has the Palestinian national movement become defined instead by increasingly nihilistic violence, like the suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus last Sunday that killed eight passengers?

It is to stop such suicide attacks that Israel says it needs to build this barrier. Palestinians say it is actually a land grab.

The answer to the question about tactics shines a light into several corners of the conflict, including the jihadic visions of militant Islam, the strategy of anti-colonial movements of the 20th century, the structure of Palestinian society and the nature of the Israeli occupation.

One also must not ignore the appetites of the news media. It is not as though the Palestinians just discovered the existence of peaceful tactics. Some Palestinians complain that sporadic strikes and marches get little international attention.

As the protest unfolded here – with hundreds chanting as they faced off with about 20 Israeli soldiers and policemen at the construction site – demonstrators at the next village, Qibiya, began throwing stones. Then from the Israeli side came the inevitable booms, and the telltale gray trails of tear-gas canisters streaked toward the protesters. Most of the handful of news photographers covering this rally hurried toward that scene, a quarter-mile away.

On Thursday, in a similar anti-barrier demonstration in the village of Biddo, Israeli forces responded to stone throwers with deadly fire, killing two Palestinians.

In advocating civil disobedience, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. had a bedrock faith in the essential humanity of their oppressors. As this conflict grinds on, it is tempting to conclude that any chance of glimpsing a shared humanity has been blown away.

Yet demonstrations like the one here suggest that is not necessarily so. On her way to the protest, an elderly Palestinian woman in a white head scarf paused atop a heap of rocks and reached back to help a gray-haired Israeli woman. They cleared the obstacle, then kept holding hands as they walked toward the crowd.

The Palestinians have never had a mainstream leader committed to nonviolent tactics, despite their official acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.

“The predominant paradigm was that this is a war of liberation,” said Martin Kramer, an expert on Islam and Arab politics. “Their model was Algeria. It was armed struggle against a colonial power, and you had to bleed them.”

Under American pressure last year, Yasir Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas, an opponent of the armed uprising, as his prime minister.

Last April, as Mr. Abbas was confirmed by the Palestinian parliament, one legislator, Abdel Jawad Saleh, said Mr. Abbas was making a mistake in trying to end the uprising without offering an alternative form of resistance. “You should be a Gandhi,” Mr. Saleh told him. No Gandhi, Mr. Abbas lasted less than five months in the job.

The main political competition for Mr. Arafat’s mainstream Fatah faction is even sharper-edged – the fundamentalist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which remain officially bent on erasing Israel.

With no one in power exhorting them to try other tactics, Fatah militants, in theory members of a secular faction, have tried to out-Hamas Hamas. They adopted an Islamic name for their violent wing, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and took up suicide bombing along with the language of martyrdom.

Mirroring a widespread Israeli opinion of Palestinians, most Palestinians take it as axiomatic that Israelis respond to nothing but force. “They have ample precedent to cite,” Dr. Kramer said.

It is not lost on Palestinians that, during the relatively quiet days under the Oslo peace accords between the two Palestinian uprisings, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories doubled in size. Further, it was to the neighboring village, Qibiya, in 1953 that a young commando named Ariel Sharon led a reprisal raid for the killing of an Israeli woman and her two toddlers. Mr. Sharon later said that he and his men believed that the 45 houses they blew up were empty.

But 69 Arabs were killed, half of them women and children. People here are accustomed to the trading of an eye for an eye.

Yet there are reasons to understand why peaceful protest could catch hold in these villages and also why it may not spread far beyond them. When Mr. Sharon raided Qibiya, it was controlled by Jordan. Now, Israeli forces can move freely here. That is a practical reason for peaceful protest: any militant would be quickly arrested or killed. Palestinian gunmen have largely retreated to the city centers and refugee camps, where they can hide more easily.

Villagers in this area of the West Bank, within sight of the towers of Tel Aviv, are rather accustomed to Israelis. Many have worked in Israel and speak Hebrew. Forming alliances with left-wing Israelis – even the young people who show up to demonstrate with multiple piercings in ears, nose and lips – does not seem as outlandish as it does to Palestinians who have known only Israeli soldiers or settlers. Then there is the barrier itself. It is consuming the fields and orchards of many farming families without a history of militancy, driving them to protest. It is cutting Palestinian workers off from Israeli jobs. Further, as Palestinians have taken to calling it the “apartheid wall” and foreign activists have focused their attention on it, it has emerged as a tangible, telegenic object of mass protest.

The path of the barrier, which looks like a dirt runway through the West Bank, halted in the middle of an olive orchard here in early January, after peaceful demonstrations to block the bulldozers.

Days later, Naim Morar and his brother, Ayed, were separately arrested by Israeli forces in what was seen here as an effort to break the demonstrations. In each case, an Israeli judge ordered the man’s release, saying there was no evidence of ties to terrorism. “I felt that the mere reason for the arrest pertained to the anti-fence protest and nothing beyond that,” wrote the judge in his order releasing Naim Morar.

Ayed Morar, 42, has a shiny, puckered scar on his left bicep from a bullet wound in the first intifada. He was throwing stones, he said. “In my life, I experienced a lot of ways to struggle,” he said. “But we are not against the Israelis, and we are not against the Jews. We are just against occupation. We have the right to struggle, but we have to choose the best way.” He added that Palestinians were being seen as terrorists around the world, and that “we need international governments to be with us.”

That sounds more like a pragmatic argument than a clarion call for nonviolence. Rather than pointing to a break with the past, these demonstrations increasingly offer a return to it – to the first intifada, when protesters and stone-throwing youths stood up to heavily armed soldiers. That David-and-Goliath imagery gained the Palestinians sympathy worldwide.

As the demonstrators left the construction site and climbed the hill toward the village Friday, a few teenagers ineffectually flung stones toward the soldiers. The soldiers responded with tear gas, sending everyone off with watering eyes and stinging throats.

“The first intifada was more popular because of the stones,” said Sanad Shahadi, 18, holding a sling fashioned from rope and a nylon strap.

Asked if the violence conflicted with the demonstration, he said: “It’s a symbol. If you throw a stone at a soldier, you won’t kill him. It’s a message against occupation, not a message to kill.”

Land-grab wall or security fence, Israel’s new project is a barrier to Mideast peace

By Ayed Morrar
Originally published in the Globe & Mail

From the West Bank’s olive groves to the hearing that continues in a Hague courtroom, Palestinians are struggling against the wall Israel is erecting. In my West Bank village of Budrus, we need the support of people from around the world who care about human rights. Our non-violent resistance to the barrier’s construction is one example of Palestinians’ effort to stop the theft of our land, protect our olive trees, and move freely between our own towns and cities. The International Court of Justice continues today to examine these concerns, and the legality of Israel’s barrier.

When Israeli construction crews began destroying our olive trees in November, schoolgirls left their chemistry books and old men marched with their sons to face the bulldozers and the soldiers. Forgetting political differences, our whole village showed up for demonstrations, often led by children carrying banners and women marching and chanting. In dozens of non-violent demonstrations since November, we’ve faced Israeli soldiers with only our signs, flags, and songs.

We have also planted olive tree saplings donated by the international Jewish organization Rabbis for Human Rights, to remind the Israelis that we will not surrender our land, our homes or our future. The soldiers often respond with tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, and, in one instance, with live ammunition. I often claim that in our struggle against Israel’s apartheid wall, “It is forbidden for us to tire” — a common view here in Budrus.

Budrus is home to 1,200 Palestinians, and is one of nine villages in this area that will be completely encircled by two branches of the barrier. We will lose 20 per cent of our land to the construction of the fence, and 3,000 olive trees will be destroyed; some dating back to Roman times. This barrier, promoted as a security measure, will force many of us to leave our homes. Without their land Budrus’s farming families will be unable to survive. Many will also be unable to find jobs or afford life in Ramallah, the nearest city.

This isn’t just a problem for farmers. With only one gate through which the area’s 25,000 people can pass, the already difficult journey around roadblocks and through checkpoints between our villages and Ramallah will be harder. Access to the city’s hospitals and schools will be restricted. A sick man’s illness and a student’s studies won’t wait for a gate to open.

Many of the people in our village have been resisting the occupation their entire lives. We are tired of loss and violence, of seeing family members jailed and friends killed. We are tired also of the deaths of our neighbors, the Israelis. The people of Budrus have chosen non-violent resistance because we’ve seen enough blood and believe that violence is the root of fighting, not its solution.

Resisting a powerful occupying force requires many sacrifices. I myself was arrested Jan. 14 at night. The soldiers took me from my family and my home without giving me time to put on shoes.

In the military jeep I met my brother Na’im, who also was in handcuffs. We had planned a big demonstration for the next day, and the soldiers assumed our arrest would discourage the village. Yet during my eight days in prison, our village held two peaceful demonstrations. Although I was released after international pressure, Na’im continued to be held. He was released Thursday after 35 days when an Israeli judge ruled that the army had misled the court and that Na’im should not be imprisoned for peaceful protest activities.

Many Palestinian prisoners are not so fortunate, spending years without seeing their families and their home. Na’im’s welcome home included not only greeting his family and his friends, as is our tradition, but greeting the entire village when they turned up for Monday’s peaceful demonstration.

It is not easy when someone else decides your future. Every day, we fear the Israeli jeeps will drive through the village announcing curfew. Curfew means the bulldozers have begun destroying our olive groves once again.

Yet we are prepared to defend what is ours. From the rooftops, families watch the construction vehicles drive slowly through the valley below. We wait until they pass our olive grove, and only then do we go on with our daily work. A friend of mine often says that Palestinians exist without living. We have spent our lives resisting Israel’s occupation, which began in 1967, but it does not mean that our children must also live this way.

As Budrus and many other villages work non-violently to resist occupation, we call on the world for support. The court at the Hague and the international community must stop this wall so that Budrus’s children have something to live for.

Ayed Morrar, who lives in Budrus, is a leading voice in the Popular Committee Against the Wall.

By Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/393347.html

There’s a remote little village in the West Bank that decided to behave differently. A village whose residents decided not to lament and not to blow themselves up. They chose another way between violence and surrender. The residents of the village of Budrus, west of Ramallah and close to the Green Line, chose to wage a nonviolent struggle against the separation fence that is being built on its land. The whole village has pitched in – the Hamas and Fatah members, the old and the young, men and women, and for three months they have been going down by the hundreds to their olive groves every week, to demonstrate against the uprooting of their trees and the encircling of the residents.

The IDF and the Border Police have been faced with an unfamiliar phenomenon: What are they supposed to do about hundreds of unarmed, nonviolent residents slowly descending toward the bulldozers, with women and children leading the pack, and a handful of Israeli and international volunteers sprinkled among them, approaching to within touching distance of the armed soldiers? Should they shoot to kill? Shoot to injure?

So far, the IDF has fired, but less – no one has been killed, and about 100 people have been injured, most of them lightly, in the course of about 25 demonstrations over a two-month period. Most of the injuries were from batons and rubber bullets, like in the old days. Twelve villagers have been arrested, and nine of them are still in jail, for participating in clearly nonviolent demonstrations. This, too, is a violation of the IDF’s rules, as one military judge noted when he refused to send one of the leaders of this pacifist revolt to administrative detention. The arrested man’s brother, however, was sent straight to administrative detention by another military judge. But the most important point is that the construction work on the fence near the village has been stopped, for now.

Budrus against the occupation. Budrus against the separation fence, which will encircle the village on all sides and cut it off, like eight other villages slated to be enclosed in fenced-in enclaves opposite Ben-Gurion Airport. The fence could have been built along the Green Line, several hundred meters from the present route, but Israel had other ideas – about the vineyards, about the olives, about life. Today, or tomorrow, the quarrying and paving work will resume, and so will the protest demonstrations.

Will this remote village become a milestone in the struggle over the fence? Will the residents of Budrus herald a change to nonviolence in the Palestinian struggle against the occupation? Or, in a week or two, will the separation fence cut off life in this village, too, and show that nonviolence doesn’t pay, with the scene in Budrus soon becoming a forgotten episode?

Cacti wherever you look. Old stone houses standing alongside half-built ones that will never be completed. Things look promising as you enter the village, but the further inside you go, the more the reality hits you. After the last house, from within the olive groves, is the sight that is frightening the residents: the rising orange of the bulldozers, blotches of color in the wadi cutting into the rock, digging up and scarring, and after them the steamrollers and the heavy trucks. Olive trees whose tops have been cut off stand in mute testimony to the work of the bulldozers so far.

This is where the fence will pass. Through these olive groves. One fence to the west of them and another to the east of them, leaving them stuck, imprisoned in the middle. Why? Because.

“If the fence were on the mountain, it would give more security,” ventures Iyad Ahmed Murar, a leader of the protest in Budrus, whose two brothers are in administrative detention. “But they want a fence in the wadi. Common sense says that if you want a security fence, put it on the mountain and not in the wadi. But they want to destroy the land and the olives. What difference would it make if they moved 200 meters toward the Green Line?”

Before 1948, Budrus had approximately 25,000 dunams. Of that, 20,000 went to Israel and the village was left with about 5,000. Now, according to Murar’s calculations, about another 1,000 dunams will be stolen. The construction work near the groves has stopped for now, but is continuing not far away, toward the neighboring village of Qibiya. But it’s not just the fate of the land that is worrying the village, which hasn’t had a resident killed since 1993. What’s more worrisome is how the fence will effectively choke off the village.

Murar: “The fence will be around nine villages. Ramallah is our mother and only one gate will lead to it. And what if the soldier is on a coffee break? Or off smoking a cigarette? Maybe he’ll lock the gate so he can go to the bathroom. Maybe there will be a problem in Tel Aviv and they’ll close the gate. And then you won’t be able to get to the university, to the hospital or to work, and in the end, people will start to live where they work. If someone gives me a job, and I come one day and not the next, in the end he’ll tell me to stay there where the job is or be fired. People will start thinking about having to stay where their job is. And the student and the sick person will start thinking the same way.”

This is what the village is the most afraid of – a “willing” transfer; of life being made so difficult that they’ll be compelled to move east. A 1,000-year-old village. That’s why the fence is here. In Budrus, they’re convinced that Prime Minister Sharon is continuing what Captain Sharon began: In Qibiya, he tried it with dynamite, now he’s trying it with a fence. The objective is the same: to move them away from the Green Line, especially in the vicinity of Ben-Gurion airport. What can they do? “Demonstrate in a peaceful manner,” says Murar the rebel.

It all began on November 9, when construction work first started here. Since then, they’ve been demonstrating and demonstrating, always in a peaceful manner. Sometimes once a week, sometimes every day; sometimes the entire village; sometimes only the women and children. They walk down through the groves toward the route of the fence and get as close as possible to the soldiers and Border Police officers. Murar likes to describe the little rebellion, stage after stage, almost hour after hour. How they once stood there for a whole day, how they brought lunch and ate in front of the soldiers, how they were beaten with batons and rifle butts.

He records every detail: During one demonstration in December, he counted 15 humvees, six Border Police jeeps, two blue police jeeps and another two military jeeps inside the village, 25 jeeps altogether. At another demonstration, the officer declared the area a closed military zone.

Murar: “They had a letter in Hebrew – maybe about this area, maybe about the whole village, maybe about the whole world, declaring a closed military zone. They said they’d impose a curfew if we did anything.” He also talks about how they managed to go out to the land despite the curfew and to demonstrate in front of the bulldozers.

We decide to go down now toward the route that has already been paved. Murar remains behind. “If there are too many of us, they’ll think it’s a demonstration.” The last demonstration was last Friday; tear gas canisters are still scattered about. The residents know the work is going to resume soon. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Here are the red markings on the ground. They have scouts on the balconies of the outer houses of the village, who will report if they see something. The treadmarks left by the bulldozers are still visible in the mud. From here, the route is supposed to ascend toward the olive groves, another four kilometers. The first trees have already been uprooted. Yesterday was Tu Bishvat (Jewish arbor day).

A group of volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement, along with two young Israelis, accompany us through the olive groves, but they do not go down toward the fence route. They are staying in the village now, preparing for what is to come. Today they’re here, tomorrow they’ll be in the next village that the fence is approaching. Young dreamers and fighters who pay 20 shekels a night to stay in a rented apartment in the village. Yonatan Pollak of Anarchists Against the Fence, a 21-year-old with blue eyes, dimples, acne scars, a worldview and a past: Europe is already closed to him because of anti-globalization demonstrations he participated in there. He pulls a black sleeve over the tattoos on his arm. He won’t buy an Israeli soda in the village grocery store. While his contemporaries are standing at checkpoints and deciding which woman in labor to let pass and which not, he is here, with the Budrus residents, in their struggle.

We return to the village. The Amhassein family’s two-story house: the family on the first floor, the chickens on the second. The mother, Suriya, just returned from Mecca and the house has been decorated in her honor. The children play loudly at recess at the school at the edge of the village. The fence will pass right behind the border of the school and the border of the nearby cemetery. Mighty Israel is spread out all around: Modi’in, Ramle, Shoham, Rosh Ha’ayin – and on a clear day, you can even make out the Shalom Tower in Tel Aviv. And on the other side, to the east, Kiryat Sefer, Nili, Na’aleh. “Tell me, could the fence go into the cemetery?,” Murar asks.

A meeting at his home: About 20 women sit in the yard of the attractive house on the edge of the green valley and plan the exhibition they want to stage here on the 23rd of the month, the first day of hearings on the fence in the International Court in The Hague. Half the women came from Salfit and half are from the village. They sit in the shade of the banana tree in Murar’s yard and talk about the exhibit of olivewood products they will present in a tent in the center of the village. Maybe people from all over the world will come to see. A Swedish member of parliament was already arrested here by the IDF. Murar says that the exhibition will include a dove carved out of olivewood. They’re also planning a demonstration of children
soon.

Murar: “We’ve learned lessons – where we did good and where we did bad. They [the Israelis] have also learned lessons. Maybe they’ll strengthen the curfew more when they’re working. But our plan is to defend our land and our trees in a peaceful manner. Sometimes among our people there are a lot of ideas about what to do against the occupation. We here have chosen a different strategy. Our strategy in this small village is that we’re turning things over. In the north, from Jenin until Budrus, there were Israeli and international demonstrators, supported by Palestinians. But here, we think that it’s our problem and that we have to defend our land and do something, and the Israelis and international protesters are only supporting us. First the Palestinians, and then the internationals. We are very grateful for Israeli and international support, but the Palestinians have to make a stand. We’re adopting a special strategy, a peaceful strategy. The Hamas here, too. In the beginning, they walked with their green flags in the demonstrations. After the first three demonstrations, we only carry the flag of Palestine. Everyone together. In a totally peaceful way. We also all agreed on one thing: We are not against the Israelis and not against the Jews and not against the soldiers. We are only against the occupation. We are against the bulldozers. And we in Budrus believe that killing is easier than crying. But just crying over the land isn’t enough. A peaceful demonstration is stronger than killing. If you stand before the Israeli soldier, right beside him, you’ll be stronger.

If someone asks: Why peaceful? I tell him: I’ve tried all the ways and the peaceful way works best. The worst thing is to kill the innocent. That’s the worst thing in the world. They kill day and night and say that we are terrorists. But we need all the world to be on our side. I’m against killing people. All people, Jews and Arabs. I’m not afraid or ashamed to say that. That’s why I’m demonstrating peacefully against the fence.”