Category: In the Media

United by Hatred of Oppression

by Johann Hari
Originally published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

In the hills of Palestine, next to a village called Anin, three groups of people stood one recent afternoon amid clouds of tear gas and the boom of bullets to yell at each other. I was standing on one side of Israel’s new “security fence” with the largest group, a band of 100 Palestinian villagers and 80 members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the organization that brings committed internationalists from across the world to support non-violent Palestinian resistance. On the other side were Israeli protesters, disgusted by their own government’s inhumanity; and in between us stood a group of teenage soldiers fighting an old man’s war they barely seemed to understand.

Their job was to guard the wall that is being built deep into the West Bank, splitting Palestinian land in two, dividing farmers from their fields, chopping families in half. Even the ultra-pro-Israeli George W. Bush, as he shared canapes with Ariel Sharon in Washington, D.C., last week, has condemned the building program as a terrible mistake.

The ISM and Palestinians came to these hills to symbolically destroy a patch of this immoral barrier. Two ISM negotiators began the protest by telling the troops what they were here to do — and with that, the destruction of one patch of this steel construct, which is three times the height of the Berlin Wall, began. Within seconds, five people had been shot with rubber bullets, including two of my friends; and then there was a descent into an angry, chaotic mess.

One person glided through the spluttering and bleeding that followed with an infectious sense of total calm. Her name is Huwaida Arraf, a 27-year-old Palestinian America who, with her Jewish husband Adam Shapiro, founded the ISM 2 1/2 years ago. As I saw her talk calmly and firmly to an Israeli soldier, asking for an explanation, I thought of the film “Apocalypse Now.” There is a character in the movie about Vietnam called Wild Bill who is described as “one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t gonna get so much as a scratch out here.”

Huwaida has that weird light. Most Palestinians resist the occupation in their minds but not with their flesh: They still flinch when an Israeli gun is turned on them, they still retreat when a soldier howls that they should. Huwaida walks toward gunfire with an air of tranquil certainty that she belongs here and the soldiers, with their fences and guns and tanks, do not.

Over coffee the day before the protest, she explained to me how she does it: “I am stronger than some soldier turning his tank barrel at me. When I stand in front of him, unarmed and in peace as I walk around my own city, I know that he is the weak one. Non-violence is much more threatening to the occupation because it shows we are morally strong.” She continues, “You know, at a demonstration against the closure of the Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, we marched in protest, and they opened machine gun fire on us. We stayed standing. When the dust cleared, we carried on marching forward with the students who just wanted to go to school. We chose not be frightened of an occupier who chooses massive and disproportionate violence.”

The ISM is to our day what the International Brigade was to the Spanish Civil War. Left-wingers from countless countries have gathered here with nothing to unite them but their hatred of oppression; the ghost of George Orwell is no doubt smiling on them.

The ISM’s actions are mostly solid and practical: For example, they march Palestinian children to school during Israeli-imposed curfews because, as one ISMer explained, “Nobody can justify sealing children in their homes for months on end and denying them an education. Nobody.” Sometimes, they reach for the symbolic: The week before last, they painted the words “Return To Sender” on an Israeli tank.

Already, the movement has generated myths and folk heroes. I visited Rafah, the Gaza Strip town where an Israeli bulldozer killed 26-year-old American Rachel Corrie of Washington state as she tried to protect the house of an innocent Palestinian doctor. The town looks like it has been hit by a vast bomb. Rubble and the possessions of newly homeless families are strewn like rubbish across the streets. The patch of dirt and earth where Rachel died is now a site of near-pilgrimage, and hers was only the first of three ISM deaths so far this year.

Yet despite all this danger, there are now nearly 200 ISMers in Palestine who could just as easily be lolling on a beach in Ibiza and more are expected throughout August.

Predictably, the Israel defense establishment has tried to bulldoze the ISM’s reputation. They have claimed that the group is not “in favor of human rights, as they claim” but “pro-Palestinian” — a fatuous distinction.

They have even tried to link the ISM to Palestinian terrorism with a series of silly charges that crumble on the slightest analysis. A claim circulated by The Associated Press (and reported gleefully in U.S. right-wing circles) that Kalashnikovs had been found in an ISM office was completely retracted by AP and even the Israeli army itself when it emerged that it was totally false. Two British suicide bombers did, it is true, meet some ISM representatives in Gaza earlier this year, as anybody can; but nobody has suggested that the ISM knew their purposes or that they offered them more than a cup of tea. That is the sum of the Israeli government’s rather pathetic charges against the ISM.

Before I joined the group in Anin, I braced myself for the possibility that many of the ISM members, understandably disgusted by the occupation, would question Israel’s right to exist alongside a Palestinian state at all — a political stance I am very uncomfortable with. My fears were totally unfounded. A few ISMers I met believed in a binational solution — one big state of both Israel and Palestine — but most of the people I spoke to argued strongly for a two-state solution.

There are people who want to destroy Israel and push the Jews into the sea, and we must never underestimate the danger they pose; but the ISM is definitely not on their side. When one lone protester in Anin tried to chant, “Bush, Sharon, you should know/ We are all the PLO,” he was universally shot contemptuous looks and told to shut up. If this conflict were the other way round and the Palestinians were oppressing the Israelis and denying their right to national self-determination, I have no doubt that most of the current ISMers would come to protect the Jews. If only the Jewish people had had such friends for the past two millennia, there would be an awful lot more of them alive today.

As the shouting died down and the sting of tear-gas died away, a Palestinian man named Mohammed Aktar turned to me and shook my hand so hard I feared it would snap. “Thank you for coming,” he cried. “We used to think that nobody cared and we were alone in this fight. We thought the world had forgotten us. Now we know that there are people everywhere who think we matter, who know we are human beings and not animals. Now we know that this occupation must one day end.”

Johann Hari writes for The Independent of Great Britain

Haaretz: Five ISM activists hurt by IDF troops in fence protest

By Arnon Regular

Five peace activists were lightly injured yesterday in clashes with the Israel Defense Forces.

The activists, members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), were demonstrating with hundreds of Palestinians from Kafr Anin and dozens of Israelis in the north of Samaria against the construction of the separation fence.

The demonstrators approached the fence from the Palestinian side, by a gate intended to enable the villagers of Anin reach their lands, which were left on the Israeli side of the fence. But the gate remained blocked. The protesters began cutting the barbed wire with fence cutters.

With this, the Border Patrol, police and IDF troops, who were waiting for the demonstrators, opened fire at them with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Five ISM activists were injured, receiving rubber bullets in their arms and legs. One was evacuated by the Palestinians to the Jenin hospital after a bullet had punctured his thigh.

Palestinian animosity to the fence has been gathering momentum in the past few days following U.S. President George Bush’s criticism of its construction. Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat yesterday slammed the fence, saying “building the fence, like Israel’s talk of removing blockades and the IDF’s withdrawal from Palestinian areas, are merely reports Sharon planted before his meeting with Bush.”

The 140-kilometer separation fence now under construction by the Defense Ministry, directly affects some 12,000 Palestinians in 15 villages. It cuts them off from their lands, their water sources, their schools and social services. In addition, the fence “annexes” some 100,000 Palestinians to Israel, trapping them between the fence and the Green Line.

Freedom Summer

by Adam Shapiro
Originally published in The Nation

The International Solidarity Movement’s second Freedom Summer has begun, and much has changed since our last: the war on Iraq, which focused all eyes on the region; the much-hyped road map; full-blown construction on what Palestinians have come to call the Apartheid Wall. Sadly, though, much remains the same: the continuing deterioration of the lives of Palestinians, with poverty and health crises in a crescendo.

The ISM itself is in a far more precarious position. This year, volunteers signed up knowing that one ISMer was killed, that others have been shot, expelled or detained. They knew that the ISM headquarters was raided in May, that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) instituted new regulations barring the ISM from entering Gaza. They knew that the military sought to smear the ISM by claiming it has links to terrorists. And still people from all over the world have come, in record numbers, to volunteer.

The ISM was founded a few months into the current intifada to engage in nonviolent action against the Israeli occupation. The idea, inspired by the Freedom Rides of the American civil rights movement, was that international civilians could provide a resource for the Palestinian nonviolent struggle-and that their eyewitness accounts of the occupation could affect political debate back home. With internationals mixed in with Palestinian civilians at protests, we believed that Israeli soldiers would be more reluctant to use lethal force. These efforts worked, at least at first. Not that violence was eliminated-tear gas, sound grenades and rubber bullets were still used against Palestinians. But mostly, live ammunition was avoided around internationals, and rubber bullets weren’t fired at head or chest level. Last August, for example, I joined 200 Palestinians in a peaceful march near Nablus to break the curfew there. With forty internationals in the crowd, the IDF relied on tear gas and sound grenades, firing only a few rubber bullets into the air. When one soldier fired a rubber bullet lower, into the crowd, I saw one of his superiors grab his gun and berate him. The message was clear: Israeli soldiers respected the lives of international civilians more than Palestinian lives. We, unlike the Palestinians, had governments that could hold Israel accountable-or so we thought.

Then in March, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah. In early April, Brian Avery was shot in the face in Jenin by patrolling Israeli troops. Less than a week later Tom Hurndall was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in Rafah. All three had taken precautions, identifying themselves as international observers to IDF soldiers, wearing fluorescent orange vests. They had put themselves in danger only to the extent that all Palestinian civilian areas were in the path of a deepening Israeli military occupation. In the four months since Rachel’s death, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed, most of them noncombatants, in Israeli attacks.

The assaults on these activists stunned the ISM. But they had little effect on most Americans. Perhaps it was the poor media coverage or the distraction of the war on Iraq-or perhaps we have just gotten used to seeing the victims of Israeli violence as in some way to blame for their own victimization. Although witnesses say that Rachel was deliberately run over, the IDF quickly claimed that the driver was not at fault, and he has remained on the job without suspension. So even if Rachel’s killing was accidental, future attacks would be less so. In a recent e-mail to the ISM, an Israeli soldier wrote that while the IDF determination was by no means a “direct order to shoot at internationals, it sent the message that it would be OK.” Within weeks, if the shootings of Tom and Brian are any indication, soldiers got the message. Brian came home to Chapel Hill in June severely disfigured; Tom arrived home to Manchester, England, in a coma, unlikely to recover. It seems that internationals now face from the IDF something close to the callous disregard for life that Palestinians experience every day.

According to the Geneva Conventions, civilians under occupation are to be protected by the occupying power. When Israel revokes these protections even for international civilians, it is a sign that such protections have been utterly dispensed with for local residents. It is routine in this occupation for Palestinian homes to be destroyed, trees and agricultural fields to be torn up, land confiscated for the building of ever more settlements and Palestinians denied access to education and healthcare.

It’s time for the international community to step in to guarantee the safety of international observers and of Palestinians themselves. To start, British and US governments must conduct investigations into the attacks on their citizens. These investigations should go beyond the specifics of each case, to determine acceptable rules of engagement for Israeli soldiers when civilians-international or Palestinian-are present. They could expose the links between basic Israeli policies of occupation and the death and injury of Palestinian civilians-policies like home demolition and rules that allow Israeli soldiers to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. In Rachel’s case, an investigation would undoubtedly uncover the illegal use of US-supplied weaponry. The armored bulldozer that crushed Rachel was a Caterpillar, and was being used to demolish Palestinian homes-a likely violation of the US Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits the use of US-supplied weaponry against civilians. The use of all US weapons, from F-16s to Apache helicopters, could thus come under scrutiny, perhaps finally forcing Washington to make the sale of weapons to Israel conditional on their legitimate use-effectively undermining Israel’s ability to enforce its occupation.

Despite threats of violence, volunteers from around the world, of all ages, ethnicities and faiths, have now arrived in the occupied territories for Freedom Summer, even as diplomats urge cooperation with a road map that fatally accepts many aspects of the occupation as legitimate. These volunteers share an understanding that the biggest obstacle to peace is the occupation itself, solidified by Israel’s “facts on the ground”: checkpoints, settlements, bypass roads, military bases and “closed military zones.” The newest “fact” (unremarked in the road map) is the Apartheid Wall, which will annex some 10 percent of West Bank land and rob many West Bank towns of their only water source. If completed, it will extend more than 350 kilometers, cut off 72,000 farmers from their land and trap 140,000 villagers between the wall and the Green Line. This summer, the wall is our target: the ISM is working with local communities to tear it down, one piece at a time. We are pressing not just for a Palestinian state but for the future viability of the Palestinian people on their land.

Rachel’s emails

Compiled by The Guardian

23-year-old American ISM activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying a home owned by the Nasrallah family in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. What follows are a series of emails to her family:

February 7 2003
Hi friends and family, and others,

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me – Ali – or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me, “Kaif Sharon?” “Kaif Bush?” and they laugh when I say, “Bush Majnoon”, “Sharon Majnoon” back in my limited arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn’t quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: “Bush mish Majnoon” … Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say, “Bush is a tool”, but I don’t think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago.

Nevertheless, no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it – and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway between Mud Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I’m done. As an afterthought to all this rambling, I am in Rafah: a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60% of whom are refugees – many of whom are twice or three times refugees. Today, as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once stood, Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border, “Go! Go!” because a tank was coming. And then waving and “What’s your name?”. Something disturbing about this friendly curiosity. It reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious about other kids. Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from the tanks when they peak out from behind walls to see what’s going on. International kids standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks anonymously – occasionally shouting and also occasionally waving – many forced to be here, many just agressive – shooting into the houses as we wander away.

I’ve been having trouble accessing news about the outside world here, but I hear an escalation of war on Iraq is inevitable. There is a great deal of concern here about the “reoccupation of Gaza”. Gaza is reoccupied every day to various extents but I think the fear is that the tanks will enter all the streets and remain here instead of entering some of the streets and then withdrawing after some hours or days to observe and shoot from the edges of the communities. If people aren’t already thinking about the consequences of this war for the people of the entire region then I hope you will start.

My love to everyone. My love to my mom. My love to smooch. My love to fg and barnhair and sesamees and Lincoln School. My love to Olympia.

Rachel

February 20 2003
Mama,

Now the Israeli army has actually dug up the road to Gaza, and both of the major checkpoints are closed. This means that Palestinians who want to go and register for their next quarter at university can’t. People can’t get to their jobs and those who are trapped on the other side can’t get home; and internationals, who have a meeting tomorrow in the West Bank, won’t make it. We could probably make it through if we made serious use of our international white person privilege, but that would also mean some risk of arrest and deportation, even though none of us has done anything illegal.

The Gaza Strip is divided in thirds now. There is some talk about the “reoccupation of Gaza”, but I seriously doubt this will happen, because I think it would be a geopolitically stupid move for Israel right now. I think the more likely thing is an increase in smaller below-the-international-outcry-radar incursions and possibly the oft-hinted “population transfer”.

I am staying put in Rafah for now, no plans to head north. I still feel like I’m relatively safe and think that my most likely risk in case of a larger-scale incursion is arrest. A move to reoccupy Gaza would generate a much larger outcry than Sharon’s assassination-during-peace-negotiations/land grab strategy, which is working very well now to create settlements all over, slowly but surely eliminating any meaningful possibility for Palestinian self-determination. Know that I have a lot of very nice Palestinians looking after me. I have a small flu bug, and got some very nice lemony drinks to cure me. Also, the woman who keeps the key for the well where we still sleep keeps asking me about you. She doesn’t speak a bit of English, but she asks about my mom pretty frequently – wants to make sure I’m calling you.

Love to you and Dad and Sarah and Chris and everybody.

Rachel

February 27 2003
(To her mother)

Love you. Really miss you. I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again – a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded. Jenny and I stayed in the house with several women and two small babies. It was our mistake in translation that caused him to think it was his house that was being exploded. In fact, the Israeli army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground nearby – one that appears to have been planted by Palestinian resistance.

This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded up and contained outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads and around them, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses – the livelihoods for 300 people. The explosive was right in front of the greenhouses – right in the point of entry for tanks that might come back again. I was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were all going to be shot and I tried to stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but just this father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, just happened to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I felt it was our translation problems that made him leave.

I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed – the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours – do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed – just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would.

You asked me about non-violent resistance.

When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family’s house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I’m having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be. I felt after talking to you that maybe you didn’t completely believe me. I think it’s actually good if you don’t, because I do believe pretty much above all else in the importance of independent critical thinking. And I also realise that with you I’m much less careful than usual about trying to source every assertion that I make. A lot of the reason for that is I know that you actually do go and do your own research. But it makes me worry about the job I’m doing. All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above – and a lot of other things – constitutes a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities – but in focusing on them I’m terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here – even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon’s possible goals), can’t leave. Because they can’t even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won’t let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can’t get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don’t remember it right now. I’m going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don’t like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside.

When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

I love you and Dad. Sorry for the diatribe. OK, some strange men next to me just gave me some peas, so I need to eat and thank them.

Rachel

February 28 2003
(To her mother)

Thanks, Mom, for your response to my email. It really helps me to get word from you, and from other people who care about me.

After I wrote to you I went incommunicado from the affinity group for about 10 hours which I spent with a family on the front line in Hi Salam – who fixed me dinner – and have cable TV. The two front rooms of their house are unusable because gunshots have been fired through the walls, so the whole family – three kids and two parents – sleep in the parent’s bedroom. I sleep on the floor next to the youngest daughter, Iman, and we all shared blankets. I helped the son with his English homework a little, and we all watched Pet Semetery, which is a horrifying movie. I think they all thought it was pretty funny how much trouble I had watching it. Friday is the holiday, and when I woke up they were watching Gummy Bears dubbed into Arabic. So I ate breakfast with them and sat there for a while and just enjoyed being in this big puddle of blankets with this family watching what for me seemed like Saturday morning cartoons. Then I walked some way to B’razil, which is where Nidal and Mansur and Grandmother and Rafat and all the rest of the big family that has really wholeheartedly adopted me live. (The other day, by the way, Grandmother gave me a pantomimed lecture in Arabic that involved a lot of blowing and pointing to her black shawl. I got Nidal to tell her that my mother would appreciate knowing that someone here was giving me a lecture about smoking turning my lungs black.) I met their sister-in-law, who is visiting from Nusserat camp, and played with her small baby.

Nidal’s English gets better every day. He’s the one who calls me, “My sister”. He started teaching Grandmother how to say, “Hello. How are you?” In English. You can always hear the tanks and bulldozers passing by, but all of these people are genuinely cheerful with each other, and with me. When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them – and may ultimately get them – on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity – laughter, generosity, family-time – against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death. I felt much better after this morning. I spent a lot of time writing about the disappointment of discovering, somewhat first-hand, the degree of evil of which we are still capable. I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances – which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will.

February 8 2003
I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don’t have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel’s response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you.

Received by Rachel on February 7 2003
I am a reserve first sergeant in the IDF. The military orisons are filling up with conscientious objectors. Many of them are reservists with families. These are men who have proven their courage under fire in the past. Some have been in jail for more than six months with no end in sight.

The amount of AWOLS and refusals to serve are unprecedented in our history as a nation as well as are refusals to carry out orders that involve firing on targets where civilians may be harmed. In a time now in Israel where jobs are scarce and people are losing their homes and businesses to Sharon’s vendetta, many career soldiers – among them pilots and intelligence personnel – have chosen jail and unemployment over what they cold only describe as murder.

I am supposed to report to the Military Justice department – it is my job to hunt down runaway soldiers and bring them in. I have not reported in for 18 months. Instead, I’ve been using my talents and credentials to document on film and see with my own eyes what the ISMers and other internationals have claimed my boys have been up to.

I love my country. I believe that Israel is under the leadership of some very bad people right now. I believe that settlers and local police are in collusion with each other and that the border police are acting disgracefully. They are an embarrassment to 40% of the Israeli public and they would be an embarrassment to 90% of the population if they knew what we know.

Please document as much as you can and do not embellish anything with creative writing. The media here serves as a very convincing spin control agent through all of this. Pass this on letter to your friends. There are many soldiers among the ranks of those serving in the occupied territories that are sickened by what they see.

There is a code of honor in the IDF – it is called “tohar haneshek” (pronounced TOWhar haNEHshek). It’s what we say to a comrade who is about to do something awful, like kill an unarmed prisoner or carry out an order that violates decency. It means literally “the purity of arms”.

Another phrase that speaks to a soldier in his own language is “degle shachor” (DEHgel ShaHor) – it means “black flag”. If you say, “Atah MeTachat Degle Shahor” it means “you are carrying out immoral orders”. It’s a big deal and a shock to hear it from the lips of “silly misguided foreigners”

At all times possible try to engage the soldiers in conversation. Do not make the mistake of objectifying them as they have objectified you. Respect is catching, as is disrespect, whether either be deserved or not.

You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it.

Peace,

Danny

Continuation of her email to her mother, February 28 2003
I think I could see a Palestinian state or a democratic Israeli-Palestinian state within my lifetime. I think freedom for Palestine could be an incredible source of hope to people struggling all over the world. I think it could also be an incredible inspiration to Arab people in the Middle East, who are struggling under undemocratic regimes which the US supports.

I look forward to increasing numbers of middle-class privileged people like you and me becoming aware of the structures that support our privilege and beginning to support the work of those who aren’t privileged to dismantle those structures.

I look forward to more moments like February 15 when civil society wakes up en masse and issues massive and resonant evidence of it’s conscience, it’s unwillingness to be repressed, and it’s compassion for the suffering of others. I look forward to more teachers emerging like Matt Grant and Barbara Weaver and Dale Knuth who teach critical thinking to kids in the United States. I look forward to the international resistance that’s occurring now fertilizing analysis on all kinds of issues, with dialogue between diverse groups of people. I look forward to all of us who are new at this developing better skills for working in democratic structures and healing our own racism and classism and sexism and heterosexism and ageism and ableism and becoming more effective

One other thing – I think this a lot about public protest – like the one a few weeks ago here that was attended by only about 150 people. Whenever I organize or participate in public protest I get really worried that it will just suck, be really small, embarrassing, and the media will laugh at me. Oftentimes, it is really small and most of the time the media laughs at us. The weekend after our 150-person protest we were invited to a maybe 2,000 person protest. Even though we had a small protest and of course it didn’t get coverage all over the world, in some places the word “Rafah” was mentioned outside of the Arab press. Colin got a sign in English and Arabic into the protest in Seattle that said “Olympia says no to war on Rafah and Iraq”. His pictures went up on the Rafah-today website that a guy named Mohammed here runs. People here and elsewhere saw those pictures.

I think about Glen going out every Friday for ten years with tagboard signs that addressed the number of children dead from sanctions in Iraq. Sometimes just one or two people there and everyone thought they were crazy and they got spit upon. Now there are a lot more people on Friday evenings.

The juncture between 4th and State is just lined with them, and they get a lot of honks and waves, and thumbs ups. They created an infrastructure there for other people to do something. Getting spit on, they made it easier for someone else to decide that they could write a letter to the editor, or stand at the back of a rally – or do something that seems slightly less ridiculous than standing at the side of the road addressing the deaths of children in Iraq and getting spit upon.

Just hearing about what you are doing makes me feel less alone, less useless, less invisible. Those honks and waves help. The pictures help. Colin helps. The international media and our government are not going to tell us that we are effective, important, justified in our work, courageous, intelligent, valuable. We have to do that for each other, and one way we can do that is by continuing our work, visibly.

I also think it’s important for people in the United States in relative privilege to realize that people without privilege will be doing this work no matter what, because they are working for their lives. We can work with them, and they know that we work with them, or we can leave them to do this work themselves and curse us for our complicity in killing them. I really don’t get the sense that anyone here curses us.

I also get the sense that people here, in particular, are actually more concerned in the immediate about our comfort and health than they are about us risking our lives on their behalf. At least that’s the case for me. People try to give me a lot of tea and food in the midst of gunfire and explosive-detonation.

I love you,

Rachel

Rachel’s last email

Hi papa,

Thank you for your email. I feel like sometimes I spend all my time propogandizing mom, and assuming she’ll pass stuff on to you, so you get neglected. Don’t worry about me too much, right now I am most concerned that we are not being effective. I still don’t feel particularly at risk. Rafah has seemed calmer lately, maybe because the military is preoccupied with incursions in the north – still shooting and house demolitions – one death this week that I know of, but not any larger incursions. Still can’t say how this will change if and when war with Iraq comes.

Thanks also for stepping up your anti-war work. I know it is not easy to do, and probably much more difficult where you are than where I am. I am really interested in talking to the journalist in Charlotte – let me know what I can do to speed the process along. I am trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I leave here, and when I’m going to leave. Right now I think I could stay until June, financially. I really don’t want to move back to Olympia, but do need to go back there to clean my stuff out of the garage and talk about my experiences here. On the other hand, now that I’ve crossed the ocean I’m feeling a strong desire to try to stay across the ocean for some time. Considering trying to get English teaching jobs – would like to really buckle down and learn Arabic.

Also got an invitation to visit Sweden on my way back – which I think I could do very cheaply. I would like to leave Rafah with a viable plan to return, too. One of the core members of our group has to leave tomorrow – and watching her say goodbye to people is making me realize how difficult it will be. People here can’t leave, so that complicates things. They also are pretty matter-of-fact about the fact that they don’t know if they will be alive when we come back here.

I really don’t want to live with a lot of guilt about this place – being able to come and go so easily – and not going back. I think it is valuable to make commitments to places – so I would like to be able to plan on coming back here within a year or so. Of all of these possibilities I think it’s most likely that I will at least go to Sweden for a few weeks on my way back – I can change tickets and get a plane to from Paris to Sweden and back for a total of around 150 bucks or so. I know I should really try to link up with the family in France – but I really think that I’m not going to do that. I think I would just be angry the whole time and not much fun to be around. It also seems like a transition into too much opulence right now – I would feel a lot of class guilt the whole time as well.

Let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with the rest of my life. I love you very much. If you want you can write to me as if I was on vacation at a camp on the big island of Hawaii learning to weave. One thing I do to make things easier here is to utterly retreat into fantasies that I am in a Hollywood movie or a sitcom starring Michael J Fox. So feel free to make something up and I’ll be happy to play along. Much love Poppy.

Rachel

Hundreds Salute International Solidarity Movement, Rachel Corrie’s Parents

Pat and Samir Twair | Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

The world was shocked March 16 by photos of International Solidarity Movement volunteer Rachel Corrie standing before an Israeli bulldozer that, seconds later, crushed her to death. The international outcry didn’t faze the Israeli government, however, which on April 5 shot ISM member Brian Avery in the face and on April 11 shot Tom Hurndall, who has been declared brain dead.

While global attention was focused on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Israeli tanks and bulldozers drove roughshod over Palestinian towns, killing Associated Press journalist Nazih Darwazeh in Nablus April 20 and British photographer James Miller on May 2. In the midst of this rampage, Southern California humanitarian groups decided to raise funds for ISM and honor Rachel Corrie’s parents for their dignity throughout the tragedy of losing their daughter.

The Israeli propaganda machine immediately launched its spin on the unnecessary deaths of American and British peace advocates, but Israel’s pattern of threatening, beating and now murdering foreign observers refutes the occupier’s explanations.

Eyewitnesses report that Rachel stood a couple of yards in front of the American-made Caterpillar D9 bulldozer about to demolish the home of a Palestinian physician. She looked the driver in the eye before he buried her in debris and drove over her, then went into reverse and crushed her a second time. Israel says the driver, who has not been reprimanded, said he did not see the American woman in a bright orange day-glo vest.

Just as invitations were issued to the May 17 event, Israeli troops raided the ISM office in Beit Sahour, confiscating computers, photographs and files and arresting three women on the premises. Adding insult to injury, Israel decreed on May 11 that all internationals entering Gaza must sign a “waiver” absolving Israeli soldiers from any deaths or injuries they inflict.

Nonetheless, a respite from these images of escalating brutality was offered May 17 with an evening of poetry, music and recollections of Rachel Corrie in the Hyatt Regency Orange County Hotel.

A violin solo by Dr. Nabil Azzam, a debke dance by children of Birzeit, and poetry by KPFK newsman Jerry Quickley and Dima Hilal opened a window onto Arab culture for the more than 600 guests on hand.

ISM spokesman Adam Shapiro vowed that the Israeli clampdown on international rights activists will not succeed.

“We all know the risks involved,” he said, “and this summer, we hope to have 1,000 volunteers to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians. We’re going to go to the Apartheid Wall that is forcing Palestinians off their land and we’re going to take down that wall with our hands.”

Acknowledging that Israel has billions of dollars, and weapons and bulldozers, Shapiro said the Palestinians have sumud, a unity and strength of knowing their cause is just, which cannot be taken away.

“Many think nonviolence is passivity,” Shapiro noted, “but it means being pro-active.” In August 2001, 50 people volunteered with ISM. By December of the same year, 300 internationals and Palestinians took over a checkpoint between Ramallah and Birzeit. “We laid on the ground and when they threw tear gas canisters at us, we threw them away.”

He urged people to check the ISM Web site and to join in ISM Freedom Summer 2003.

In presenting the Muslim Public Affairs Council Courage Award, Dr. Maher Hathout said that courage is not the opposite of cowardice, but rather the principle of standing up to injustice.

“When Rachel Corrie faced that bulldozer and with her own hand tried to stop it from demolishing a house, she transcended the pettiness of life,” he declared. “Rachel became a flickering candle in thick darkness. For darkness cannot be complete if just one candle is lit.”

Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, disclosed that, ironically, when he served as a combat engineer with the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam in 1970, he had been in charge of bulldozers.

“But I didn’t harm anyone,” commented the tall, greying insurance actuary.

He now realizes, he said, the courage it took for his daughter to put on her ISM vest every day and witness calculated cruelties and human rights abuses. In her hometown of Olympia, WA, she had encouraged her parents to talk to the street people and feel their pain.

“We don’t dwell on what we didn’t do or what might have been avoided,” Corrie concluded, “but we do demand more accountability from our government.”

Cynthia Corrie acknowledged that over the past few weeks she has found it difficult to adequately describe her daughter, because there were so many dimensions to her character. Rachel sent many e-mails home from Gaza, always stressing the need for Palestinian voices to be heard in the U.S. and marveling over the Palestinians’ ability to organize against all obstacles.

Rachel grew up in a home on two acres near Puget Sound, Mrs. Corrie said. By the fifth grade, Rachel wrote that she wanted to be a lawyer, dancer, actress, mother, wife, children’s author, distance runner, poet, pianist, pet store owner, astronaut, envioronmental and humanitarian activist, psychiatrist, ballet teacher and the first woman president. In the seventh grade she organized a student walkout on behalf of the teachers. When her mother told her she shouldn’t go through with the strike, Rachel said she had to because she’d already called a press conference.

During her sophomore year in high school, Rachel was an exchange student and lived with a Russian family for six weeks in the Sakhalin Islands.

“Rachel witnessed the hardships the family endured, and she realized how lucky Americans are,” Mrs. Corrie said. It was about this time that a teacher remarked that “Rachel is destined to make a difference.”

Rachel took one year off from her studies at Evergreen State University to serve in the Washington State Conservation Corps. Her volunteerism included weekly drop-ins over three years to mental patients in a hospital diversion house.

“Some of these patients talked publicly after Rachel’s death and mentioned the positive impact she had on their lives,” Mrs. Corrie continued.

“Rachel went to Gaza to do more than stand in front of bulldozers. She was doing the paper work to make Rafah a sister city of Olympia and was negotiating with a local storekeeper to sell hand crafts from Gaza. Rachel was concerned about the water shortage in Gaza and slept beside wells to protect them.”

The young idealist confided in e-mails that being in Gaza was the most important work of her life. “Rachel admitted she was often afraid,” her mother said, “but she wanted to see an end to the injustice perpetrated there.”

The emotional finale was the presentation of a hand-embroidered Palestinian jacket from Sameera Sood of the Palestinian-American Women’s Association to Mrs. Corrie. Other organizers of the ISM fund-raiser were American Friends Service Committee, Los Angeles-Palestine Solidarity Committee and MPAC.

And, as her teacher once predicted, Rachel has made a difference. Olympians are carrying out Rachel’s endeavors to establish a sister city relationship with Rafah and, according to Phan Nguyen, Olympia’s ISM coordinator, many people are signing up to serve with ISM this summer.

The Corries have established the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice.

Protest on Israeli Crackdown

It may be difficult to stop Israeli atrocities, but much can be done to expose Israel’s new push to expel foreigners bearing witness to its assault on the Palestinian population. A noisy, attention-getting May 16 demonstration was arranged within four days at the Los Angeles Israeli Consulate, where passing motorists honked their horns and gave the V sign to protesters on both sides of Wilshire Boulevard.

Many protesters wore hastily sewn orange and yellow day-glo vests, the uniform of International Solidarity Movement workers in Gaza and the West Bank.

At the rally, Michael Shaik of Canberra, Australia, recalled his experiences with the ISM from Jan. 16 to April 16. “The U.S. wants all these abuses covered up, they don’t want Israel to be embarrassed,” he told the crowd of 150 people. “This year the U.S. is giving $15 billion to Israel to keep up its occupation of the Palestinians. Israeli soldiers bear no responsibility, they can deliberately kill anyone with impunity.”

One month before Rachel Corrie was murdered, Shaik said, he had called the U.S. Consulate to say that American citizens were being threatened by Israeli soldiers and settlers. The response was that the Americans shouldn’t be there.

“What if Americans are killed?” he asked.

The consular officer responded that that was no excuse.

“I won’t let Rachel’s death be in vain,” the young volunteer told the Washington Report. “Brian [Avery] is my friend as well. So much must be told to the world. It is stupefying to see how the truth is muffled.”

Avery was shot in the face April 5 in Jenin by soldiers in an armored personnel carrier who opened fire on unarmed ISM members.

Protesters sent a letter to the Israeli Consulate demanding Israel rescind requirements that foreigners entering Gaza sign waivers absolving the Israeli army if they shoot them.

Across the street from the consulate, a dozen demonstrators held a 32-foot-long banner that read “No Occupation in Palestine or Iraq.” A husky, bearded protester wearing a red beret and plaid shirt carried a sign reading: “Sharon’s Orgy of Hatred, Bush’s Orgy of Greed.” As he approached the demonstration, he remarked, people asked, “Who’s Sharon, your old girlfriend? Are you advertising a porno flick?”