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.

Communique from Tobias in jail

Hi all.

So we´re down to 3. Me, Tarek and Fredrik here in cell #4. We are all in good spirits as we make an attempt to fight this injust deportation in the Supreme Court. As of now, we have no idea when our hearing is going to be. The word is anything from tomorrow (Sunday), until 3 weeks. Whatever happens, we stand firm in our conviction that we must fight this to as far an extent as we can take it. Our chances are slim but I hope with all my heart that I will soon be out there working again together with you, all my loved friends in Jenin and the ISM.

Love and Rage
Tobias

—–
Read about Tarek’s beating by prison guards here.

Letter from an Israeli Jail

The following was scribbled on a piece of paper by Tarek and passed to Huwaida via a lawyer during court proceedings for the deportation of 8 international peace activists on July 17, 2003. The hunger protest referred to was begun on the evening on July 15.

I had forgotten what love was. My world was one of anger, rage and hate. As the 5 or 6 police officers each took a turn hitting me, all I cold think of was hate. There could be nothing else. All of this started when Captain Ya’kov (Yoki) Golan came into our room and asked if we were on hunger strike. “We’re not eating,” we replied. A few police thugs swarmed the room and started to take anything. Capt. Ya’kov started to talk about how we were nothing, to which I replied, “shut the hell up and don’t you dare talk to us like that. You can’t break me. You can’t break any of us.” “I’m not just going to break you; I’m going to destroy you.” We all laughed.

We were strip searched 3 times in the next hour and then they came for me.

“Where are you taking him?” The other seven protested on my behalf. They cared more about me than I did. I came to terms with the fact that I was going into solitary, and finally approached the police. “I’m ready.” I declared melodramatically. That’s when the first hand came. They grabbed my shirt and pulled me to the ground in front of the cell. I did nothing. Even if I wanted to, I had lost track of all my appendages. All I knew was that they were all limp. The hitting started, and I filled the halls with screams of pain.

As I was up against the wall, with one man stomping on my leg, another bending my arm and another two or three pulling and hitting elsewhere, I caught a glimpse of the faces and entered that other world.

I can’t do anything now. The guards who were involved all smile when they pass our cell. And all of this over the only act of resistance we can do: going hungry. One thing hasn’t changed though: none of us will be broken.

Tarek

—–
Read Tobius’ note from jail here.

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.