Increased targeting of International Solidarity Movement

In this article Michael Shaik, Media Coordinator of the International Solidarity Movement writes about two recent events with direct bearing on Israel’s murder of Rachel Corrie.

On 14 February 2002 the ISM faced two almost simultaneous crisis in Rafah and Nablus. Both involved incidents where members of the ISM were in danger of being killed or seriously injured by the soldiers of the Israeli Occupying Army while conducting non-violent resistance to the occupation.

Rafah
At 2 pm on Friday the ISM received word that Israeli military bulldozers were demolishing houses in Rafah town in the south of the Gaza Strip. The destruction is part of Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” policy towards the Occupied Territories. Whereby Palestinians communities will be sealed from the outside world by a massive series of walls, complete with towers from which military sharpshooters can monitor their activities. The section of the Wall under construction near Rafah stretches along the entire length of Gaza’s border with Egypt. To give the snipers in the wall’s towers clear fields of fire, the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza intend to demolish all the houses within 70 – 100 metres of the wall

As soon as they received word of the demolitions seven activists (3 US, 3 UK and 1 Dutch) left ISM Rafah headquarters in Gaza to resist them. The site of the demolitions was in an area of Rafah known of “Block O” that is overlooked by four of the wall’s towers including the infamous Saleh e-Deen Tower from which Israeli snipers have murdered several of Rafah’s residents. When they arrived the activists saw a row of six houses being systematically bulldozed by two Israeli military bulldozers guarded by a tank. They were unable to approach the bulldozers directly because of landmines but found an alternative route to the devastation, which bypassed the minefield.

As soon as the activists began to approach the bulldozers they were fired upon from the towers and the tanks which directed rifle and machine gun fire at the ground in front of them. Using their megaphone the activists announced that they were unarmed international peace activists and continued to advance. The tank and the soldiers in the towers continued to fire warning shots at them but the activists refused to submit to their intimidation and continued their approach.

As soon as the activists came under fire they phoned the ISM media office to alert me to the danger they were under and I immediately made an emergency call to the US consulate in Tel Aviv to inform them what was happening and request that they alert the headquarters of the Israeli occupying forces in the Gaza Strip that there were international peace activists (including 3 Americans) in Rafah Town that were coming under fire from Israeli troops and ask them to please exercise restraint (the standard ISM procedure in such circumstances).

After being put on hold several times. I had the following conversation with US consulate staff:

Diplomat: I’m sorry but its Shabbat and we can’t contact anyone in the Army because they’re all on holiday.

ISM: On holiday? Then what are they doing demolishing houses in Rafah and shooting and international volunteers for?

Diplomat: I’m sorry but we don’t have anyone we can contact in the Army.

ISM: Then phone the Department of Foreign Affairs and tell them to contact the Army. [The standard protocol under such circumstances.]

Diplomat: What are they doing in the area?

ISM: They’re trying to stop house… Can I speak to the consul please?

Diplomat: Please hold a minute…

Ingrid Barzel: How can I help you?

ISM: This is an emergency call about a group of International Peace Activists in Rafah Town that are being fired upon by Israeli troops. I’m phoning you because I want you to get in contact with the Army and advise them that there are American nationals in the area and ask them to please exercise restraint.

Ingrid Barzel: Please advise your people there to leave the area.

ISM: Look they’re in the area and they don’t intend to go anywhere. They’re trying to stop houses being demolished by military bulldozers.

Ingrid Barzel: We have a travel advisory against traveling to the Gaza Strip and if these people are there they are there illegally. [This is untrue to enter the Gaza Strip one has to have a special authorisation stamp in one’s passport and all the Rafah activists have one.]

ISM: What if one of them gets killed? Will you hide behind your excuses then?

Ingrid Barzel: They’re not excuses. It’s State Department procedure endorsed by the Secretary of State.

ISM: So what you’re saying is you take no responsibility for the welfare of your nationals dong peace work in the Gaza Strip even if this means one of them gets killed because of your inaction?

Ingrid Barzel: We do not accept any responsibility for anyone who ignores our travel advisories and illegally enters the Gaza Strip.

ISM: What is your name?

[Pause]

Ingrid Barzel: I’d be happy to give you my name. It’s Ingrid Barzel.

ISM: Right, now I know how useless you are I’ll never phone you again. I also got in touch with the British consulate who said they’d phone me back but seem to have got in touch with the Gaza military headquarters and the Dutch consulate which was on holiday and had an answering machine operating.

Meanwhile the ISM activists had reached the building that the bulldozers were demolishing while the tank and the towers had fired warning shots at them every step of the way. Two of the activists then stepped into the partially destroyed building preventing the bulldozers from any further destruction while the tank fired its machine gun over their heads. The bulldozer then retreated but then the tank rolled forward to within three feet of them and an uneasy stalemate followed until the tanks backed away. Then the bulldozer came forward again as the other five activists rushed to join their companions in the building and the tank resumed firing its machine gun.

This time the bulldozer didn’t stop and five of the activists were able to scramble away while two others became trapped by the bulldozer in a corner of the building. When the bulldozer found its path blocked by rumble and backed off before resuming its advance the two were able to get away and stand on some barrels next to the building to photograph and film the destruction but the bulldozer then began ramming the barrels.

By this time the tank had begun firing its machine gun at some nearby houses which the activists knew were inhabited by families so the activists went to stand between the tank and the houses so that the tank was unable to continue terrorising the people in the houses although it resumed firing its machine gun at the feet of the activists.

At this point a member of the Palestinian resistance seems to have thrown a pipe bomb at one of the bulldozers. This development increased the risk to the activists because there was now a danger that they would be caught in a fire fight between the Israeli occupation forces and the Palestinian resistance so they retreated to a nearby house to watch and film the demolition. They were joined in the building by two old women who were the owners of the houses that were being destroyed who wept at the sight. When the bulldozers finished their demolitions of the block of six houses they withdrew with the tank.

When they had gone, the community who lived in the neighbourhood rushed out to the site of the wreckage to help its former residents salvage what they could from what had once been their homes. Among the items they retrieved were a bicycle, a water tank, and electrical cord and some planks of wood. After 20 minutes of searching the rubble the soldiers in the towers began firing at them, forcing them to abandon the wreckage. A man told one of the activists that this was the pattern of such salvage operations: the sentinels generally give the people about half an hour to retrieve what they can before firing on them.

Nablus
At 3.50 pm, just as the Rafah crisis was drawing to a close, 12 ISM activists based in Rafah were trying to deliver chocolates to the Abu Sanfar house in East Nablus which the Israeli army of occupation had been using as a firing position for forty days while detaining the three families resident in the house in two of its rooms.

When the activists approached the house they were confronted by Israeli soldiers commanded by Ariel Ze’ev who is known by Palestinians and ISM activists living in Nablus to be an insane sadist. Ariel and his men quickly became violent toward the activists and then, at 4.10 pm, seized Hussein Khalili, a Palestinian member of the ISM, and dragged him back to the house before firing warning shots at the activists, forcing them to fall back.

Immediately, the activists phoned the ISM Media Centre to alert me of their situation and I immediately called the Hamoked and Gush Shalom human rights organisations (the ISM’s allies in the struggle against the occupation) and Dennis Brenstein of Flashpoints Radio in the USA before drafting an email to our supporters informing them of what had happened. Through our combined efforts we were able to alert people around the world of Hussein’s plight and issue a joint appeal for them to phone the District Coordination Office of the Israeli Army in the Nablus area to demand Hussein’s immediate release.

Meanwhile, an Israeli member of the ISM and another activist returned to the Abu Sanfar house to negotiate Hussein’s release. When Ariel realised that one of the activists was an Israeli Jew he became furious and promised that he would make Hussein suffer more because of her and that he would arrest a Palestinian every time he saw her. He also said that he would hold him for two weeks if necessary “as revenge” for what she had done.

He then went into the house and took Hussein into he garden of the Abu Sanfar house where his men bound his hands behind his back forced him to kneel on the rocky ground in the rain while Ariel Ze’ev kicked him in the back.

Hussein was forced to kneel in the rain for what he estimates were forty five minutes. Eventually, Ariel went inside and a new group of soldiers released his hands and took him under shelter where they verbally insulted him and told him that the only good Arab was a dead Arab and that he was just a fucking peacemaker. They also told him that the Israeli activist was a whore for helping the Palestinians and that what she had done made her no longer Israeli and that she should be kicked out to the country. When Hussein protested that the activists had only come to the house to comfort the children the soldier said that they did not care and that they were in Nablus to kill all the Arabs.

“Even the women and children?” Hussein inquired.

“Yes!” they replied. “They throw petrol bombs and stones at us and threaten our lives so we will kill them too!”

While Hussein was being abused, the Nablus area DCO was being inundated with phone calls. We have no way of knowing exactly how many people phoned in to demand his release but ISM activists watching the Abu Sanfar house saw an Israeli lieutenant-colonel arrive in a hummer soon after the phone-in campaign started. He told the activists that he had made a decision that Hussein would be held in the house until 10 pm and then released.

Shortly thereafter I began receiving calls from people from around the world asking what more they could do. I said all that they could do was to forward the email to their everyone in their address book. One man told me that he had already emailed it to over 200 people. A woman asked me if she should contact the US consulate in Tel Aviv but I told her it would be futile since they no longer accept responsibility for their own nationals in the ISM.

At 8.50 pm Hussein Khalili was set free. He told his captors that he was afraid to go out into the streets in the dark because there were tanks and soldiers on the streets who might shoot him if they saw him but was told that all the soldiers in the area had been warned about him and that he would be safe. He then made his way across the road to a neighbouring house where he was given tea and water and used the phone to phone his companions in Nablus who came over to take him home.

As soon as I received word of his release I alerted his wife and then sent out an email to our supporters informing them of the success of our phone in campaign. Even so the Nablus area DCO continued to be flooded with phone calls until mid way through the following morning. Two supporters have informed me that as soon as she got through the officer on duty said: “Hussein Khalili has been released before they could even state the reason for their calls.

Conclusion
On February 14 2002 the ISM’s mission in Occupied Palestine came as close as it has ever come to collapse. Though its international activists have often encountered a level of hostility from their missions in Israel which are expected to protect them, this is the first time a consulate has stated explicitly that it will take no responsibility whatsoever for the welfare of its nationals performing peace work in the Occupied Territories.

Had Ariel Ze’ev made good on his threat to hold Hussein for two weeks and had the ISM proved powerless to protect one of our own from such arbitrary abuse, it would have proven to both the Palestinians and their occupiers that we are now an irrelevant movement.

Yet thanks to the efforts of our supporters throughout the world we were able to confound Ariel’s threats and secure Hussein’s release and safe passage in less than four hours. Though many activists made their calls to the DCO after Hussein’s release, they should not feel that their calls were wasted. This marks the first time the ISM and its allies have organised a phone-in campaign on such a large scale at such short notice and with such an effect.

Throughout Occupied Palestine but particularly in the Nablus area, ISM activists have come under increasing pressure from the Israeli occupying forces in an effort to intimidate them into ineffectiveness through threats and low-level violence. We believe that this is part of an Israeli plan to step up its campaign of terror against the people of Palestine once the US commences its invasion of Iraq.

The remarkable effectiveness of the campaign to free Hussein Khalili on Friday has demonstrated to the architects of this terror that the ISM can no longer be considered as only a handful of brave activists scattered throughout the Occupied Territories but has now matured into a truly global movement capable of mobilising a very large number of people around the world in defence of Palestinian human rights.

Thank-you to everyone who participated in the phone in. Thank-you for your messages of support. And thank-you for forwarding the emails to your friends. We’ve still got a long way to go before Palestine becomes a free country but, because of your efforts, ISM activists working in places like Rafah and Nablus can continue their work in the knowledge that they are not alone, even if their governments have now renounced their responsibility to protect them.

Ha’aretz: Until the bulldozers stop

By Uri Ayalon
Originally published in Ha’aretz

I met M. last month at an Israeli-Palestinian encounter at Neve Shalom. It seemed that most of the Israelis who came to the weekend did so mostly out of curiosity. The Palestinian participants, however, most of whom were students from Nablus, had left at seven in the morning in order to arrive by the afternoon: They walked for hours and ran the risk of arrest just to have the chance to tell the Israelis their occupation stories, in the naive belief that anyone who heard them could no longer remain silent.

The next day, an Israel Defense Forces soldier driving an American-made bulldozer ran over American student Rachel Corrie, 23, who was an activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). For several years now, this movement has been trying to come to the aid of Palestinians in the territories by means of direct, non-violent action. Right after I heard the news on the radio about Corrie’s death, which occurred as she tried to prevent the demolition of a house in Rafah, I found the ISM’s Web site and embarked on my journey to Nablus. (Since Corrie’s death, two other ISM activists have been shot and badly wounded; one of them is in critical condition.)

It was a personal journey I was making as a friend of M., not as a journalist. The journey from Tel Aviv to Nablus included a one-night stopover in Jerusalem with a weekend of training in Beit Sahur, then passage through the Hawara checkpoint at the entrance to Nablus and finally a visit to the village of Yanoun. By Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, there is an especially cheap hostel that is used as a temporary base from which the movement’s activists are launched. Foreign journalists on their way to the territories and eager to be brought up to speed, newly arrived activists who’ve come straight from the airport or from Jordan, and veteran activists who want to take a time-out from the pressure of their dangerous activity in the territories all converge here.

In the morning, the hostel’s balcony is strewn with empty beer cans. In the territories, in deference to Muslim sensitivities, the activists are not permitted to drink alcohol, so the time-out in Jerusalem is also a chance for them to indulge that habit if they are so inclined.

When it’s OK to retreat

Because of the checkpoints on the way, you have to take three separate taxis to get to the hotel in Beit Sahur, where the weekly training workshop for new activists is held. Along the street, the walls are plastered with posters of the newest martyr: 12-year-old Christine Sa’ada of Bethlehem, who was killed the day before while riding in her parents’ car. A car carrying two Hamas activists was driving behind the family’s car, and the militants’ car was being followed by a vehicle carrying undercover agents from the Border Police, who shot the Hamas men to death. The young girl was also struck by the gunfire.

On the way to the hotel, we’re reminded to reset our watches: The Palestinian Authority has not yet announced the start of daylight savings’ time, and meanwhile some of the Arabs in East Jerusalem are also still living on Palestinian time. The volunteers from abroad don’t understand how there can be an hour’s time difference between two parts of such a small land, and the taxi driver explains: “Just because the Israeli government is switching to daylight savings’ time, this doesn’t have to obligate Palestine, too.”

The workshop that is supposed to prepare the activists for an extended stay in the territories lasts two days. It begins with a brief round of introductions and an attempt to define personal goals. The oldest volunteer is Jean, 76, who hails from Canada and has been an anti-nuclear activist since 1949 (all of the volunteers asked not to use their full names, to avoid possible harassment by the Israeli Border Police). Jean is well aware that even the stoniest soldier will have a hard time remaining firm at the sight of someone who resembles his beloved grandmother. Alison, a 36-year-old from London, works for a computer company. She came here for three months equipped with cameras and a portable computer in order to report to the British media. Twenty-four-old Jens took a three-week vacation from the window manufacturing plant where he works in Sweden so he could join a group of Swedish activists in the territories.

John, 50, a socialist from Canada, ignored the pleas of his wife and two daughters to stay home and came here “to be present at the heart of the struggle against imperialism.” H., who was formerly in the Marines and currently works as an airline pilot, came from Olympia, Washington, where Rachel Corrie was a student. His girlfriend had wanted to join the ISM activists in the territories and he worked hard to dissuade her, because he feared for her life. When she gave in to his persuasion and dropped the idea, he felt a need to come in her place.

Unwanted visitors

Many Israeli soldiers have already grown accustomed to the presence of foreign activists in the alleyways of the refugee camps, on the streets of Palestinian towns and at the checkpoints. The Israeli government tries to make their entry into the country difficult; many are detained for long interrogations and many have been expelled. The activists learn from the experience, come back in groups, and have a cover story prepared ahead of time, that includes names, addresses and details about the purpose of their visit to the Holy Land. The Jews among them say they’re coming to visit relatives (the Passover holiday provides an excellent excuse for a family visit) and the others insist that, despite it all, this is the time to take a vacation in Eilat.

At the workshop, once the introductions are complete, they start out by teaching the “basic terminology of Palestine.” The political correctness of ISM doesn’t recognize any such thing as a “separation fence” or a “security fence,” just an “apartheid fence.” One is not to speak of the Israel Defense Forces, but of “the occupation army” or simply “the Israeli army.” As in Palestinian society, a “shaheed” is anyone killed because of the occupation, and not necessarily a suicide bomber. Then they learn about the history of the region (a hundred years are covered in the space of one hour), the doctrine of non-violent resistance (as preached by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King), Palestinian culture (if you’re a man, don’t shake a woman’s hand, and if you’re gay, it’s better not to reveal it), the laws in the territories (touching a soldier is grounds for arrest) and how to deal with the media.

All of the lessons are accompanied by simulations, in which I get the chance to play a soldier at a checkpoint, a pregnant Palestinian woman, a hostile journalist and an international activist staying in a house slated for demolition. The most important rule: Don’t run – if you come under attack, it’s best to lie flat, because running away in the territories makes you a moving target, a dangerous suspect. There are just three situations in which it’s important to retreat: “when a gun battle develops between armed Palestinian forces and the army, when the locals ask you to go and when your God tells you that it’s dangerous.”

The Palestinians suffer more

The workshop leader is Starhawk, 51, a feminist and veteran peace activist from San Francisco who has published six books that combine spiritual guidance with preaching for social activism. “I grew up in a Zionist Jewish family and when I was 14, I spent the summer studying Hebrew in an ulpan in Israel,” she says. “When I got older, I started to realize that Israel is different than what I was taught. It pained me to realize that the big dream wasn’t real. I have the sense that to Israelis, Jewish lives are worth more, and I feel that in my activism here I am raising the price of blood and lowering the level of violence. So I believe that my presence in the territories also contributes to the security of my relatives in Israel.”

It seems that some of the activists see the trip to the territories as a kind of adventure vacation in the Holy Land.

“I’m aware that we have the privilege to be here without truly endangering ourselves. At least, that’s how it seemed before Rachel died. But it’s hard to call the activity we do here a vacation. We go for days without sleep, because by day we are helping the population break the closure and escorting kids to school and by night, we’re riding in ambulances. There have been times when I got to the end of the day and said, `I want to go home.’ I’ve witnessed so much violence, and it gets to you. It’s not a real vacation, but it’s truly a great privilege to come into people’s homes and to get to know this culture from so up close. Jews and Muslims have something in common, which is the culture of hospitality and a tremendous desire to feed you.”

As the war in Iraq loomed, rumors spread that Israel might exploit the opportunity to carry out a “transfer” of Palestinians, and so the flow of volunteers into the territories picked up speed. The increase in the number of activists – about 10 new ones were coming each week, led the movement to increase the frequency of its training workshops.

After two days of intensive lessons and training, the new recruits are posted to the various areas where ISM operates: H. the pilot and John the socialist are assigned to Tul Karm, where the residents are fighting against massive land expropriation for the sake of “apartheid fence.” The week they were in Tul Karm, the war in Iraq was at its height and the activists had a hard time interesting the world media in the “temporary transfer” of more than 1,000 men from the refugee camp.

Jens, the Swede, is sent to Jenin, where a number of his countrymen are already stationed. A few days after Rachel Corrie was killed, about 30 Israeli soldiers raided the movement’s offices in Jenin. The IDF Spokesperson initially accused the ISM members of giving shelter in their office to an armed Palestinian, but later retracted the charge and confirmed that though the man was indeed a suspect, he was unarmed.

Less than a week after he arrived in Jenin, Jens saw his colleague Brian Avery, a 24-year-old activist from the United States, get seriously wounded. “Brian wasn’t supposed to be here at all this weekend, but he got stuck in Jenin because of the curfew,” Jens says by telephone from Jenin. “We came to the city center because we heard shooting from there. A few weeks before, the Israeli army killed a 16-year-old boy who threw rocks and another 10-year-old boy was shot in the leg, and we wanted to prevent this from happening again. We were six internationals and we all put our hands up when we saw two Israeli tanks opposite us, that kept coming closer. It was toward evening, but it was still light out and Brian was wearing a bright-colored vest. I didn’t think at all that they’d start to shoot, because there were no Palestinians on this street.

“When we were about 50 meters from them, one of the tanks shot about 15 volleys, which isn’t a small amount, even against the Palestinians. The shooting was aimed at the ground and broken rocks and bullet fragments flew at us. After the shooting started, I heard someone yell. We ran to Brian, who was hit in the face, but the tanks kept coming closer and I was afraid they would shoot me, too. His whole face was bleeding. It was a horrible sight. He couldn’t talk but he moved a little so we saw that he was alive. We rode with him in the ambulance and stayed in Jenin for about an hour and a half until we got permission from the army to take him to an Israeli hospital. Now he can’t talk, because the bullet went through his tongue, but he’s conscious.”

Have you asked yourself if this is a price that you’re willing to pay for the objective that brought you here?

“I don’t want to suffer like that, even for the loftiest goal in the world, but I feel now that my presence here is maybe more important than what I thought when I first got here. I’m still in shock. I can’t understand why they fired. They didn’t have any reason to.”

All of the activists who were present at the incident are furious over the IDF Spokesperson’s version of the event, which says that exchanges of gunfire were taking place there with armed Palestinians and that the soldiers did not discern the ISM activists. At the end of our conversation, Jens asks that I quote him on one more thing: “It’s clear to me that what I’m going through here, and what happened to Brian, are nothing compared to what the Palestinians go through every day.” At the workshop in Beit Sahur, they taught us to insert this sentence into every interview with the media.

Stuck at the checkpoint

The volunteers pay their own airfare and for the costs of their stay. In the Rafah sector in Gaza, which is considered the cheapest of all (only one shekel for a serving of falafel), no more volunteers are needed at the moment. Several of the activists who witnessed Rachel Corrie’s death left the area afterward, and the organization quickly sent reinforcements to buttress its representation there. Last Friday in Rafah, British ISM volunteer Thomas Hurndall was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper and he is considered brain dead

After the workshop, Alison and I travel to Nablus, along with Starhawk, whose Israeli friend Neta Golan has been living there for almost a year. Golan, who married a Palestinian resident of Nablus, is due to give birth any day and Starhawk wants to be there to help her. There are currently about 10 activists in Nablus, including two who are staying all the time in a house that is slated for demolition and do not take part in the organization’s daily activity.

At the Hawara checkpoint at the entrance to Nablus, two soldiers stand and check the slow stream of cars wishing to enter the city, and about a hundred Palestinians wait quietly for hours in a line that doesn’t move. After about half an hour, I realized that if we didn’t sidestep the line and ask the soldier to let us pass, we’d be standing at the checkpoint until dark. After we passed through, I overheard the soldier, a blue-eyed conscript, shout at the Palestinians: “What is this, a whorehouse? I’ll blow your brains out if you move.” He found the Hebrew-speaker among them and demanded that he translate for the others. When the “interpreter” hesitated, the solder aimed his rifle at their heads to get his message across.

On the way to the Jasmine Hotel downtown, where an urgent meeting of ISM activists was being held, I am asked to conceal my nationality and to pretend to be a Greek journalist instead. It seems that due to a misunderstanding at the organization, I entered Nablus in violation of a decision not to permit Israelis to join in the volunteers’ activity in the territories. Despite their basic openness and desire to accept everyone’s help, the activists are not willing, or not able, to guarantee my safety. “It’s a difficult situation in Nablus,” they explain. “Not all the people there can make the distinction between soldiers and Israelis who want to help.”

All of the activists have gathered to discuss my presence in the city. All decisions in the organization are made by unanimous agreement, which promises a very long discussion where I’m concerned. One of the main activists in the city is actually an Israeli citizen – Neta Golan, who famously managed to penetrate the encircled Muqata compound in Ramallah last year. In addition to her pregnancy, she also has to contend with questioning and a trial: Israelis are forbidden to enter Area A without permission from the IDF. The fact that her husband is a Nablus resident does not exempt her from the prohibition.

Golan was Rachel Corrie’s instructor in the Beit Sahur workshop when Corrie arrived in Israel three months ago. “All the people who were there near the bulldozer say there’s no doubt that the soldier hurt her deliberately. It’s hard for Israelis to believe that another Israeli would do a thing like that. It was hard for me, too. A year ago, I was told that a child had been killed by the IDF on his way to the grocery store in the Balata refugee camp. I remember saying to myself, `That’s murder, but surely he must have thrown a rock on the way to the store.’ I had to justify it to myself. A few months ago, this defensive barrier I had finally broke down.”

She suddenly halts her story midstream when the waiter approaches. “I don’t want to scare him with our Hebrew,” she explains. Golan speaks fluent Arabic and a lot of people in town think she’s an “international” (one of the international activists). “I imagine that something in you dies or is extinguished when you’re in the situations that the soldiers are in. I see kids at the beginning of their service who you can still talk to, and then I see what happens to them after a few months. When I stand at a checkpoint for half an hour, I want to explode, and the soldiers stand there all day. It’s even worse for the driver of the bulldozer whose job it is to raze families’ homes. In Rafah, they don’t make any prior announcement about the demolition. The demolition order is the fact that the row in houses in front of you has been taken down. It’s not like here in the West Bank. The soldiers have no contact at all with the people. I see this process, how people put up walls and convince themselves that the people around them are animals.”

Our blood is worth more

Rachel Corrie’s death and the shooting of the two activists since then appears to have undermined the presumption upon which ISM’s activity was built – the belief that the soldiers would not dare to harm foreign civilians. “It was obvious to me that it would happen sometime,” says Neta Golan. “The occupation operates on two parallel value systems, but this can’t continue forever. We’re clearly exploiting the fact that our blood is somehow worth more, but it doesn’t seem like this can continue. The main difference is that when the violence is directed at Israelis or at an American woman, you suddenly hear about it. That’s the whole difference.”

A Palestinian activist enters the room and says that there has been a terror attack in Netanya. In Nablus, this means an immediate trip to the market in case the suicide bomber was a local resident or set out from the city, in which case the populace can expect an extended curfew. When M. and I arrive at the market, it’s already crowded. I met M., a 25-year-old lawyer, that weekend in Neve Shalom and we’ve been corresponding frequently by e-mail ever since. The alleyways here in the casbah of Nablus, which is M.’s hometown, look like a copy of those in Jerusalem’s Old City. Several of the houses, including some that were more than 1,000 years old, were destroyed during Operation Defensive Shield.

Before the present intifada erupted, the Palestinian Authority planned wide-scale renovations for the city and hoped to make it a bigger tourist attraction. Nowadays, the walls are adorned with posters of the shaheeds. Across from the big bakery is a large poster of Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein, both in uniform and saluting. In the afternoon, several thousand young people gather in the city’s main square to mark Land Day and to show their solidarity with the Iraqi people.

“I haven’t slept for a week. I’ve been watching television all night,” the taxi driver tells us on the way back to the Hawara checkpoint. His two daughters live in Baghdad. “A few years ago, I went to Baghdad to have my daughter treat me – she’s a dentist with her own clinic. Who knows what will be left of Baghdad? Who knows what will be left of my grandchildren?”

M. says that since the start of the war, things have actually been quiet in Nablus. “For three weeks now, there has only been a curfew at night. Every day, you see a tank passing through the city, but we’re used to that and there’s no trouble. This week, we’re marking a full year of closure. There was a period when we had 160 days in a row of curfew. The last time I left Nablus was for that meeting in Neve Shalom, and the next time I leave will also be for a meeting with Jews. I haven’t seen my fiance in a year. She lives in Jerusalem and we chat with each other a lot on the Internet. I tried for a long time to find a way to meet her, but I finally gave up. And now I’m just praying that the situation will improve so that I’ll be able to see her again.”

M. asks Alison, who came from London to spend three weeks in Nablus, how she feels now that Rachel Corrie has been killed. “I knew there were risks before I came and before the bulldozer ran her over,” she answers. “I asked myself what the chances are that I will die and how I feel about that. Rachel died for the sake of another people, not for the sake of her own people, and therefore I feel as if she died for the sake of justice.”

Alison, a devout Catholic, says she didn’t used to be a political activist. “It’s funny, but it was actually the Israelis that made me want to try to help the Palestinians. I was in Israel for work and the Israelis I was working with started explaining to me that `the Arabs are like animals.’ This racism made me start asking questions about the conflict, which I didn’t know anything about before then. The questions led me to feel the urgent need to act.”

Are you a Jew?

Before darkness falls, I am asked by the ISM consensus to leave town. A friend of M.’s calls to say that the rumor that there is an Israeli in the city is spreading and that I ought to leave as soon as possible. At the Hawara checkpoint, I again go to the front of a line of about 200 Palestinians who are trying to leave the city before the night curfew goes into effect. From Nablus, I travel to the small village of Yanoun, which was briefly in the media spotlight about five months ago when eight families left their homes due to harassment and threats by settlers.

The trip from Nablus to Yanoun takes about 15 minutes in normal times, but in the territories, normal times are a bygone concept. The road is blocked and the trip by indirect routes takes two and a half hours in a Palestinian taxi. Here, too, there is no refuge from checkpoints. Four Border Police soldiers, who have built a makeshift checkpoint on a side road, stop the taxi. One of the soldiers aims his rifle at my head. The taxi driver explains to him that I’m an “international.” I’m compelled to admit that I’m actually an Israeli.

The soldier, a Druze, keeps his gun pointed at my head. “Are you a Jew?” he shouts at me. Even my blue identity card could not spare me the humiliation of having all the contents of my bag spilled on the back seat of the taxi. Afterward, the driver, Sa’id, scolds me for having lied to him about my name and nationality, and for having forced him to speak English the whole time when he can speak a much more fluent Hebrew. He worked in Israel for many years and is ready to give up the dream of a Palestinian state if things could return to how they were before the intifada.

By the way, Neta Golan had her baby. Her daughter is named Nawal, a word that means “a deeply-held wish come true.”

Budrus Has A Hammer

By Kobi Snitz
Originally published in Zmag

Last afternoon, the Israeli army invaded the village of Budrus during the course of a wedding at which most of the village was present. Many shots were fired, three injuries were suffered and one youth was arrested. Concerned for their friend, a group of people left the village and followed the jeep which took him away. When they were unable to retrieve their friend, the people took out their frustration on the fence which comprises part of the Israeli separation barrier. As a result, about 150 meters of the fence were dismantled and two victory parades were held in the village on the following days. Confidant that world is watching, the villagers addressed themselves to it: “no to the wall” in Hebrew, their trademark “Budrus, we can do it” in English, and in Arabic, they praised the strength of god: “Allah hu akbar” but also sang about their own strength.

This is not the first time that parts of the fence are dismantled. On several occasions, Palestinians supported by Israeli anarchists and by international activists managed to dismantle parts of the fence in meticulously planned actions. However, this time it was different, the young people of Budrus did not wait for Israeli or international activist support or even for the village elders to plan or approve the action. Furthermore, the amount of fencing dismantled goes beyond the symbolic level which often passes for direct action.

Spontaneous action, by which people directly dismantle the structures which oppress them, is often the stuff of songs. Most of the time though, the singing is done at a safe distance from political relevance. For example, American media has romanticized the struggle against legally sanctioned segregation to the point that the singing of its movement songs has become a “hallmark moment”. At the same time, current, relevant struggles are either ignored or demonized. It is probably the case that the words “Palestinian civil rights movement” or “Palestinian non violent demonstration” were never combined on American mainstream media.

Much has been written about the popular resistance to the Israeli separation barrier and about Budrus in particular. Over the last year Budrus has become the most successful example of Palestinian popular resistance, leading some to talk of a renaissance in the popular struggle, reminiscent of the first Intifada. For several reasons, the current demonstrations cannot match the incredible levels of participation in the first Intifada but the current popular intifada has seen important advances. First of all, in several cases concrete gains can be attributed to the resistance and secondly, international and Israeli activists have finally joined Palestinian demonstrations. Indeed those visitors who are able to see the Budrus struggle for what it is, felt lucky to be there to see the people of Budrus tear down the wall. For the few Israelis activists present, it felt like their private version of 1989 at the Brandenburg gate. Back in Tel-Aviv however, it seemed that the celebration will remain a private one. The military censors forbade the Israeli media from mentioning that the fence was dismantled, one mention slipped by in the Saturday evening news and the indymedia carried pictures and reports.

Several months ago, army commanders had informed the village that no more demonstrations would be permitted. In order to make this point the village was essentially put under curfew for two weeks. The people of Budrus are very familiar with the toll that the army can extract, in the course of over 50 demonstrations 212 people were injured from rubber bullets alone in a village of 2000 inhabitants. The number of people hurt from tear gas inhalation is too large to keep track of and last year a, 17 year old, Hussein Mahmoud Hussein Aweideh from Budrus, was shot dead at a demonstration in Beitunia. It is expected that the army will want to retaliate against the village for the latest action with more invasions and perhaps more administrative detentions of village leaders. Another possibility, the one that the Israeli censors must be afraid of is that Budrus will in fact turn out to be Palestine’s Brandenburg gate, the place where the wall began to fall.

Captain, Please Use The Door!

by Robin

All around the Old City of Nablus, the operations are taking place. Large groups of heavily armed soldiers with their involuntary human shields, dart around corners and down alleys. The phone rings continuously with yet more reports of occupied houses and detained medical volunteers.

Someone of one of the families who live in the building comes downstairs looking worried, “Soldiers are making a hole in the wall on the roof,” she tells us. A group of Internationals and medical volunteers climb up to the roof to investigate.

On the roof there is a chicken coop. She points at it. I peer through the mesh, and sure enough, there is a small hole in the wall, and through it I can see the knees and gun of a soldier. I yell out: “This is a medical clinic, there are Internationals and medical volunteers here”. There is no response from the hole.

Further down the wall, a window opens, and people see, briefly, a soldier on the other side, before the window is pulled shut, to obscure him again. We sit down near the window, and ask to speak to his captain. We attempt to engage him. I tell him that this is a clinic, that there are Internationals and volunteers present, that the door is wide open, and that they are welcome to come through the door. Volunteers and Internationals try various lines, but there is no response. Time ticks by, coffee arrives and we sit there, seeking to engage the soldiers, sipping the sweet black coffee out of intricately patterned tiny cups. Around the city we hear sound bombs, machine gun fire and the occasional explosion.

Fifteen minutes later, we get a response. A Palestinian man from next-door pops his head over the wall. He tells us that there are 32 people locked in a single room in the house, and the soldiers say that if we do not leave immediately, they will make an explosion in his house.

Bloody charming. We talk quickly and decide to leave the roof, as we don’t want the explosion to occur. I go and sit with the family. We can hear the chipping at the wall resume. I start making phone calls. First it’s “Physicians for Human Rights”, they listen and promise to get back to me soon. A friend is phoning Hammoked, an Israeli Human Rights Group. Then I phone the media office and ask them to start the phone banking. “Get people to phone the IDF and ask them to USE THE DOOR”, I ask.

The mother of the household, a teacher, tells me that the house has been entered three times in the last 12 months by soldiers breaking in through the wall on the roof, running down the stairs, faces painted black, locking the family in a room, and turning everything over, destroying many things. The kitchen is still being repaired after the last time in October.

I get a call from Mutaq, the Divisional Command in Tel Aviv. They are responding to the calls that have started coming in. I tell them who is in the building, what the building is, that I can hear the soldiers chipping away, that the door is open, that we know they’re coming, and that the door would be the most appropriate method of entry if they need to search the building. He “will see what he can do”. After a while the chipping sound stops. I am called away to deal with other matters, and leave for the evening.

At 7.15pm my phone rings. An Italian International is on the other end. He tells me that a group of about eight soldiers came to the clinic, knocked on the door, entered, asked if they could search the building, allowed him to accompany them, turned on a few lights, opened a few doors, checked the ID of a 10 year old boy before shaking hands with him and his brothers, thanked everyone and then left!

At 9pm another group of soldiers comes knocking at the door, they are less polite, and do not allow an International to accompany them, they check the IDs of all the Palestinians, search a few cupboards and then leave, leaving no mess behind them.

It’s a hollow victory. Hundreds of homes have been violated throughout the area, by soldiers bursting in through freshly made “entrances”, scaring the kids, locking up the families, turning the place over, exploding the insides of many homes so that hundreds are homeless, and then leaving through yet another freshly made “exit”. For many families it has almost become a routine. Many men are arrested, interrogated, tortured, released. Till the next time.

Many doors are exploded, many shops are searched and then left untended as the soldiers move on in to wreak havoc on another home, another shop, another family, another screaming two year old.

The next day they are still there, systematically wrecking, torturing, beating, and violating. Many homes are ransacked; valuables and money go missing all over. Terror has hit the streets of Nablus again.

No one is left without a tragic tale to relate. We interrupt many break-ins in progress. Sometimes the soldiers are embarrassed and behave; sometimes they are totally uncommunicative, sometimes a sound bomb tells it all.

Two Internationals end up spending hours with a family whose home is done over, at first they are detained, then they refuse to leave. It pays off, the damage is minimal in comparison to the many awful ones we witness everywhere, as distraught people call to us from the streets to witness their tragedies and losses.

I feel drained. Witnessing this level of terror, this number of attacks on these many families, is harrowing. Sleep has been hard to get.

The next morning they are gone. We debrief, we are all stretched, and shocked and disgusted.

I do a news search on the Internet; at most the story was a by-line in reports of the Gaza operation. Mostly the terror campaign in Nablus is completely ignored.

Susan Barclay says thank you to supporters

Susan issued the following statement today:

I just wanted to write a very quick note to let people know that I am indeed fre’ and beyond happy. I just wanted to say an immediat’ incredibly sincere THANK YOU to all the people who worked so very hard to support me. I can not tell you how much it means. I have been very busy and will be meeting with my lawyer tomorrow to discuss various legal possibilities and then I hope to find the time to write an account of exactly what happened. THANK YOU AGAIN.

Salaam,
Susan

At the time of writing, Susan’s story still has been conspicuous by its absence in the American press although other media concerns in the US have taken up her story. The British press has not overlooked her case as you can see if you read the following story in ISM in the Press: Foreigners bring in the harvest and the wounded

Please e-mail any American newspapers that you know of and ask them why this story is not of any interest to them? Do they wish to be complicit in human rights abuses of their own citizens? It is particularly surprising that the press in Washington state has been very quiet on the fate of one of its citizens.