International Solidarity Movement

by Justin Podur & Neta Golan
Originally published by ZNet

You have said that one way or another this occupation is going to end. That’s far from a foregone conclusion to most. What makes you so sure?

Every occupation, every colonial society that has ever been established, has ended — with the exception of the Americas, which required a genocide to take place. I don’t think a genocide is possible in this situation. The only way Israel could expel the Palestinians is under a regional war. Under the smokescreen of a regional war, Israel could try to do the ‘transfer’ that is planned and proposed by the extreme right.

I don’t think a regional war is in the US’s interest right now, and without the US’s blessing Israel wouldn’t be able to do it. So I think eventually Israel will tire, as the British tired in India or the French in Algeria or the Indonesians in Timor. Ultimately, it will end.

There are differences between Israel’s occupation and the ones I just mentioned. 1948 Israel is a settler state and it is certainly colonial, but the difference between it and France in Algeria is that the Israelis in the 1948 borders don’t have anywhere to go. The occupied West Bank and Gaza strip, though, are more classic colonies. The settlers can, and will, come back when those occupations end.

But how many will die before that, unnecessarily? How much suffering will it cost?

Even though I’m sure it is going to end, it still needs people to make it happen. So we have to make it happen, and we also have to try to make it happen as soon, and with as little suffering, as possible.

Where do internationals fit in to making the end of occupation?

One possible way the occupation could end is by the international community pressuring Israel. There’s certainly a case under international law for doing so. Both settlements and collective punishments are illegal under international law.

International pressure played an important role in ending apartheid in South Africa. The boycotts were effective, and more important of course was the resistance on the ground. If there was a full withdrawal of the international community, I believe the occupation would end.

But where has the international community been? Until the first intifada, no one even knew Palestinians existed.

As for internationals who come independently, to work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) they’re addressing several problems. One specific problem is that Israel uses excessive force to oppress Palestinian popular resistance of any kind. Israel does not differentiate between combatants, nonviolent demonstrators, and people who are just trying to live. Everyone gets lethal force. And what happens is that the Palestinians don’t want to go as sheep to the slaughter. The occupation is a pressure cooker and it’s explosive.

If popular struggle is closed by snipers, and if the international community accepts it, then resistance will become more and more violent. The open avenues are the ones that involve people blowing themselves up. If you can’t have a dignified life, you die fighting. Killing civilians is a crime, there’s no question. But it’s important to recognize that if people have something to live for they don’t do this.

Is there proof? When Palestinians believed Oslo would bring them peace, they waited seven years. Through seven years of expanding settlements and checkpoints, expanding provocations, Palestinians waited because they thought it would bring them peace. After seven years they recognized it as a smokescreen for occupation, and it exploded into the intifada.

The intifada itself started with stone-throwing, which was met by sniper fire and machine gun fire from tanks.

What we want to do with the International Solidarity Movement is keep an avenue for popular struggle open. When we accompany Palestinians, because of the racism of the whole system, the army doesn’t treat us as targets the way they treat Palestinians. We want to expose the racist nature of the conflict by doing this, and also to simply try to protect people so they can try to resist politically.

Palestinians asked the world for an international protection force. Such a force would have reduced violence. Israel and the US prevented it, with the US vetoing it in the United Nations. Since our governments are acting to sustain the occupation, civilians have to come here themselves to work as a civilian protection force. The hope is that at some point our governments will follow.

What do you think happens if we fail?

Every Arab civilian in the world knows that their blood is cheap.

Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians. They are paying a high price for the West’s racism, being killed, humiliated. Those things create terrorism. Israeli and US state terror and the reaction in ‘retail’ terrorism are two sides of the same coin and they can’t exist without each other. We’re creating that, feeding it, in the Arab world. And one source that feeds it, that tells Arabs their blood is cheap, is what is happening in Palestine.

For Westerners to say we refuse to do this, we refuse to believe that our lives are worth any more than Arab lives, is an important message for all of us. It makes everyone safer.

Bush, Sharon, they’re leading us down a road very dangerous for our future. For our present! The West has already paid a little bit, with the attacks in New York, for the hatred they are creating. There will only be more backlash. So for those of us who want a sane world, for those of us who don’t want to live in a world that is at war, resisting this conflict in a just way is in our own interest.

Interesting that you mentioned ‘a sane world’. Here in Israel, and I guess elsewhere, we’re the ones who are thought of as ‘insane’. I’m sure you’ve been called ‘crazy’, no?

One problem is the disinformation. Hardly anybody who would call us ‘crazy’ knows what’s going on here and if they did, if they came here, they would be motivated in the same ways that we are. But they would have to get up from behind their televisions.

In the Israeli media, the only image of Arabs is violence. The human side, the suffering, is hidden from us. I believe that if they saw people, just like them, suffering the way they are, they would be motivated the same way.

I’m a Jewish Israeli. As a Jew, I carry a wound. I know my people suffered a genocide. They tried to tell the world; people didn’t come, believe, know, want to know, do anything.

Some did. A few did, and they were called ‘crazy’ at the time. I want to do for the Palestinians what those ‘crazies’ did for the Jews, I want to take their example, and the truth is that it’s easier for us to do what we do now than it was then. There are Israelis who support our work here.

Israeli society is going through a collective turn to fascism. It is supporting assassinations, extra-judicial executions, openly. These things are really scary. I feel it, I feel like we’re in the middle of an unfolding catastrophe and I think, quite often, of those ‘crazies’ in Germany who resisted. I feel closer to them all the time.

Many of the activists who have been coming here are also working on an ongoing basis with the ‘anti-globalization’ movement. If it’s all part of a movement for justice, what do you think the next steps should be?

I would love to see the tens of thousands of people who go to a G-8 meeting or a World Bank meeting come here, where the terrible decisions they make are actually being implemented. With several thousand activists we could dismantle checkpoints, break sieges of all kinds, we could make a real difference on the ground where the policies are actually being implemented. I think it would be great to disrupt the implementation of the policies rather than only the planning of them.

Politically speaking, a kind of anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal force could reach out to moderate Muslims. Muslims’ choices seem to be imperialism or resistance that takes a fundamentalist form. What about resistance that is anti-imperialist and not fundamentalist? If our ideas could reach, and interest, the Muslim community it would add strength and depth to both movements, and give new avenues and political options to people.

Click here to listen to the Democracy Now! segment with Adam Shapiro.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government of national unity has run into a serious crisis after he sacked four ministers from a key coalition party, the ultra-Orthodox party Shas.

The four Shas ministers and several deputy ministers from the United Torah Judaism party were dismissed for not backing an economic austerity plan introduced to pay for the recent military offensive against the Palestinians.

Under Israeli law, the sackings come into effect after 48 hours.

At that point Sharon could find himself leading a minority government.

Sharon’s economic proposals would have cut welfare spending and increased taxes, but were rejected in a vote on Monday night.

Correspondents say the ultra-orthodox ministers balked at the withdrawal of special government subsidies for Orthodox religious students, who do not have to serve in the Israeli armed forces.

Meanwhile, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports the army has again raided the West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Jenin this morning, and has re-occupied the entire city of Tulkarm.

We turn now to a talk given this weekend in New York by International Solidarity Movement activist, Adam Shapiro. ISM activists have been taking direct action since the beginning of second Intifada, from rebuilding demolished Palestinian homes to taking food and medicine inside besieged Palestinian areas. Two weeks ago, ten international activists brought food to the Palestinians trapped inside the Church of the Nativity. Dozens of activists were jailed and deported. Five are still in an Israeli prison.

Adam Shapiro is a Jewish-American who lives under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. He is engaged to Palestinian-American Huwaida Arraf. Shortly after Israel tanks broke into Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah compound at the end of March, Shapiro entered the compound in an ambulance. He helped build a makeshift clinic in one of Arafat’s presidential offices. Then he shared a much-publicized breakfast with Arafat in the compound.

The story of a Jewish New Yorker risking his life to protect Palestinians was picked up across the corporate media. The New York Post dubbed Shapiro “Jewish Taliban.” In a confrontational interview with Shapiro on Fox News, host John Gibson called him a “turncoat.” On CNN, Paula Zahn accused him of promoting suicide bombing. His parents received so many death threats that they were forced to leave their Brooklyn home. They now live under police protection. This is Adam Shapiro, talking about why he does what he does.

Huwaida Arraf interviewed by the Socialist Worker

Could you give your impressions of the scale of Israel’s devastation in places like the Jenin refugee camp?

Jenin is unimaginable–the level of destruction that has been wreaked on this refugee camp and the amount of terror that people have gone through.

The International Solidarity Movement was among the first people to sneak into Jenin refugee camp when it was still closed off, and those who went there said they were seeing people under the rubble–trying to pull people out from under the rubble of their own homes.

I’ve continued receiving reports from our internationals there, who have told me that even when Jenin camp opened up a little bit and people were in the streets again trying to bury their dead, women and children were walking around dazed, looking at their homes that were flattened. People say they see pieces of bone and flesh everywhere. One of our members reported to me seeing a whole midsection lying on the ground.

I don’t how you term that anything short of a massacre. It was even declared that by Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN envoy, who said that he saw the body of a child who was killed, and so this wasn’t going after the terrorists.

They arrested more than 4,000 men, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Our members got into a village on the outskirts of Jenin, where some of the men who were detained were dropped off–in their underwear on the edge of the city. Many had been detained and abused for a week at minimum, and they didn’t know what had happened to their families.

We had people collecting their personal stories, and they were all the same–they were bound, blindfolded, stripped of their clothes, tortured. You could see open flesh wounds even after a week, cigarette burns on these peoples’ necks and backs–in addition to being kicked around, denied decent food and interrogated.

And all this is justified as Israel going after the terrorists. In Israel’s mind, every Palestinian man, woman and child is a terrorist–and that’s all they have to say to justify opening fire on unarmed civilians, demolishing unarmed civilians’ homes.

I live in Ramallah, which has been quiet for the past week, but I’ll tell you what quiet is. For almost two weeks, quiet has been hearing explosions about every hour–not knowing what’s being blown up, but knowing that the Israelis are dynamiting doors and going into buildings. Everyone remains under total curfew, and if you’re seen walking around during curfew, you’re an open target for the snipers stationed in different buildings.

So people in their homes have almost gotten used to these explosions and hardly ask anymore what that was–because it’s just another building, it’s just another supermarket, it’s just another home that they’re entering.

About four days ago, we took a group of foreign civilians through the streets, marching under the banner of a white flag. We were delivering humanitarian aid, and we were walking down the streets, but people were only waving to us from inside their homes–because they were afraid to come outside.

We heard gunshots in the distance, and again not knowing what it was. But when we made our way to the local hospital, a 7-year-old boy had been brought in with a bullet to the shoulder. And they had picked him up where? In front of his house. He was playing in front of his house and got shot.

These things are almost impossible to put into words. But these are the things that we’re seeing. In Ramallah, commercial buildings have been burned to the ground, clinics shelled, lawyers’ offices turned to rubble, many of the homes, the windows broken and shattered. The first day we were actually allowed to come out of our homes and onto the streets, either you were stepping on bullets, glass or twisted metal.

There’s nothing that hasn’t been hit. If they’re going after the “terrorist superstructure,” why did they dynamite my local supermarket while no one was in there? They broke into the ministry of education and stole all kinds of files–kids’ school records dating years back.

They’re targeting the very infrastructure of Palestinian society. And this is on top of the civilian deaths. So it’s unmistakable what kind of terror the Palestinian people have been subject to at the hands of the Israeli military.

What do you think about Israel’s justification for its war on Palestinians that it’s only acting in self-defense?

There’s a lot of violence here, and violence perpetuates violence. So we must look to the source of the violence, which is occupation. That is unmistakable and undeniable. The continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, their continued harassment and abuse of human rights of the Palestinian people, stripping them of their dignity and denying them their freedom–that is violence in itself.

Even when the media claim that there’s quiet–when they use the terms “cease-fire” or “period of calm”–we who live in the Palestinian territories don’t see calm. Every time you go to the edge of your own town, you see Israeli soldiers. You face abuse. You face basic violations of your dignity at the hands of Israeli soldiers.

Yesterday, for example, our van with foreign civilians was stopped by Israeli soldiers at one of the entrances into Jerusalem, and as they were checking all of our IDs and trying to justify why they were holding us up, they said, “We live with animals.” I said, “Who are the animals?” And they said, “Those people on the other side.” And this is, I’m afraid, the mentality of some of the people who are put at checkpoints to dominate Palestinian people.

That kind of abuse, even in periods of supposed calm, is violence in itself. And then, of course, when you see any kind of resistance–any kind of march, any kind of demand for freedom–it’s violently put down by brute military force that violates international law and human rights.

That is going to breed violence, and the cycle goes on. That breeds a resistance, and there are different kinds of resistance. People are pushed to resistance that has targeted innocent civilians in Israel, which we don’t agree with that at all. But we understand. We have to understand that in order to bring it to an end. The international community, if not Israel itself, has to take uncompromising steps toward ending the occupation.

At the same time, it seems obvious that Palestinians remain committed to resisting Israel’s rule.

People have been locked in their homes, and there’s a sense of fear–but also of having seen the worst that can be dished out. I haven’t sensed one bit of willingness to give up or to submit.

I was among the civilians who went into Yasser Arafat’s compound to protest the siege and express solidarity. There were 300-plus Palestinians inside with the president, from his advisers to security to regular workers in the president’s office–all of them living with no electricity, no running water, the Israelis were surrounding the compound and firing. And they still said that no amount of Israeli terror will lead us to submit. That’s something that I heard from every security guard that I talked to, right up to the president.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not pleading with the international community to intervene. But it does mean that no amount of terror that Israel can inflict upon the Palestinian people will lead them to submit and give up the struggle for freedom.

Because it’s basically a human struggle for the basics that I think every person in the world can identify with. It’s to be able to live with dignity, with respect for human rights and free of foreign domination–to be able to raise your kids and send them to school without worrying that they’ll be harassed by a soldier.

What do you think people in the U.S. should do to show their solidarity?

Those of us here were heartened to see all of the demonstrations and solidarity and outrage over Israel’s action all over the world. The one thing we ask is that people don’t tire of putting the pressure on. And not only by demonstrating, which is widely known about, but by calling your congressional representative and the White House.

The statements coming out of Congress and the administration are so blatantly pro-Israel. And they get away with it even while Israel is committing what I’m sure will be found to be war crimes. It’s good to demonstrate. But small things like calling or writing or faxing your congressperson every day is a very effective thing to do. A combination of both, I think, will help change American foreign policy.