“Palestinians won’t give up the struggle”

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.

International Activists Reach the Door of the Church of the Nativity

By Larry Hales

We walked right in to Manger Square–“right through the front door.” The writer in me wants to create some suspense, but I am ecstatic–my heart continues to beat at the rate it was when we were walking through.

We were planning the night before and were planning around another demonstration led by clergy. Our plan was to walk to the checkpoint before Bethlehem and protest. This morning we decided to participate in this action but to also continue on if the participants of it were stopped.

Well, we were stopped and the clergy weren’t so much interested in pushing through as they were in just challenging the checkpoint.

After this action, which lasted only about 30 minutes we decided to take a route through a monastery. No one expected us to get through this way either because the soldiers were very close, and if they were looking, would be able to see us. But, they didn’t and we continued on into Bethlehem.

The city was a ghost town, it was on curfew and it was almost completely quiet–at first. As we walked on, people began appearing at their windows and cheering us on. It was very powerful to see these people looking out and throwing up peace signs, children and elderly people. Our presence gave them hope and as we continued we began to see more and more people, mostly children coming out of their homes. They wouldn’t come out on the streets but they were coming out.

We stopped after having walked for quite awhile, and we began to plan for the march on the Church of the Nativity. No one thought that we would have gotten as far as we did. We planned and planned and waited and planned; finally, some of us decided to talk to some families that had gathered just in front of their homes, a few of them were fluent in English.

They were entirely full of gratitude–they let us into their homes and served us coffee–these people are resilient. Their lives are being put on hold by an occupying force; they can’t go to work; their children can’t go to school, yet, they were so willing to share with us. Some even invited me to stay with them.

Time began to get short; so, we had to go with the plan we had, which was for five of us to cross the barricade with water and food but we didn’t think that we would get through; and so, we were considering that the action would be symbolic at best. We waited some more and finally set on our way with a box of water and a bag of rice–meant to be symbolic of course because in the church there is barely any water, let alone a way of cooking the rice.

People began coming out more. I guess the word had gotten out. There was a group of Palestinians just before the barricade and some walked to it with us, holding down the barbed wire so that we could walk over it.

When we saw Manger Square we thought the siege had ended. It was empty except for an M1 Abrams tank. We walked on and at the halfway point, Israelis began yelling for us to stop. These soldiers doing the yelling didn’t have on their Kevlar helmets or their rifles–they were caught off guard.

We continued on through the yelling and made it to the door of the Church. When there we were instructed to sit by Huwaida. We did and the soldiers threw smoke canisters to block the press from seeing us. We knocked at the door and yelled that we had food; the soldiers looked on, the smoke rising. The tank moved so as to scare us. The media began moving so the smoke wouldn’t block their view. We held our hands up while yelling at the people inside to open the door, then, the soldiers moved towards us started pulling us up and throwing the food away from the door.

They were attempting to hold us but we were leading them more than them us. They tried to confiscate cameras, but we refused and they capitulated. However, they did drag some people. The soldier holding me was telling me how he didn’t agree with what was going on but that it was his job. He seemed to be a good man.

We were put in one area and Ted Koppel came over and interviewed Huwaida. He got the entire incident, all the cameras did despite the smoke. When he finished we came to the conclusion to walk out. The soldiers weren’t prepared for this. They tried to stop us but we defied them and kept on walking ’til we were clear of them.

The action was one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen, and the people I was with are some of the most brave people I have ever known. Tomorrow we will begin to try and get some people in Hebron and the Gaza Strip. I will be going to Hebron. More to come.

* Larry Hales is one of two members of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace who have joined many internationals in Palestine to nonviolent resist Israel’s illegal military occupation of Palestine.

Voices in the Wilderness

By Jeff Guntzel

We left for Ramallah yesterday morning. In order to enter the city, our little group had to avoid the Israeli checkpoint by walking (and sometimes running) through the brush just south of the checkpoint. Once we were safely inside the military zone, a taxi driver with whom we had made advance arrangements drove us about a mile into Ramallah and stopped. He would not go any further for fear of Israeli snipers who were situated in many of the city’s tall buildings. A Red Crescent ambulance driver offered to take us to the Sheik Zayed hospital where we had arranged to meet two organizers with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Huwaida Arraf and her fiancé, Adam Shapiro. We had heard that tanks and troops surrounding the hospital might block our passage.

Those of you who have been following the news carefully might remember the Sheik Zayed hospital as the site of a mass grave dug, several days earlier, in the parking lot as a temporary burial ground for 29 Palestinians, including one American citizen. The morgue at the hospital was full, and there was nowhere else to put the bodies. Coming down a steep hill about three miles from the hospital, we spotted a tank and an armored personnel carrier (APC). These days, in Ramallah, the only vehicles on the streets are tanks, APCs, and ambulances (I guess you could also count the mangled cars peppering the roadside that tanks had rolled over during the invasion). Suddenly a soldier appeared. He crouched on one knee, aimed his M-16 directly at us, and fixed his eye to his gun’s sight. We stopped. The driver began slowly backing up the hill and several more soldiers appeared some of them taking aim and some motioning us to come closer. We all held our passports up to let them know there were internationals in the car.

Israeli troops had been harassing, arresting, and even shooting ambulance drivers since the start of the invasion. We had no idea what to expect. When we got to the soldiers at the bottom of the hill we stopped again. Eight M-16s and a tank were aimed at us. The soldier directly to my right looked tired and scared. That scared me. Our driver was ordered out of the car and asked a few questions in Arabic. Then we were ordered out, with all of our bags. We laid our bags out on the ground and opened them. After a not-so-thorough search several soldiers asked us a few questions while others encircled us. The soldier who at first struck me as tired and scared now just looked cautiously curious.

“Why are you here?” he asked, not quite meeting our eyes.

“We came to bring medicine and food to people under curfew,” said one member of our group.

“Don’t you know there are terrorists here, it is dangerous,” he replied, “do you think you can bring peace?”

“We don’t know,” we said, almost in unison.

Then Kathy, my roommate and co-worker, stepped in, “We are here because we know that our government pays for much of what is going on here and we feel a responsibility to intervene nonviolently in this terrible situation.”

“We did not ask for this, it is the Palestinian leadership, bad leaders, they are responsible for this,” replied the soldier.

“But over half of the people here are children,” Kathy said, “and children can’t be bad leaders, they can only be children!”

“I know there are children here,” he replied solemnly, looking off into the distance, “but there are also terrorists. You cannot drive to the hospital,” said the soldier.

“Then we will walk,” replied Greg, another member of our group, who then began walking towards the tank and APC that partially blocked our path.

“Stop! You cannot walk either,” demanded the soldier, who then paused and looked around. Directly in front of us was a soldier on one knee, holding each of us briefly in his cross-hairs, one person at a time.

“Don’t you understand that you make the terrorists happy when you come here to help them?” the soldier continued.

“We are here to help the innocent people in Ramallah who are being terrorized and killed every day,” replied Kathy.

“We do not kill innocent people.”

“We read Ha’aretz [an Israeli paper, printed in Hebrew and English] every day and we know innocent people are being killed,” Kathy said.

“Do you think I like this?” the soldier demanded, “I don’t want to be here.”

At that moment there was an enormous explosion and sustained machine gun fire. It was coming from directly behind us, and it was really loud. Two members of our group stepped away to smoke, and the others drifted back towards the ambulance. Kathy and I remained with the soldier.

“Do you know what Arafat wants, he wants murder, why do you want to help a murderer,” he asked.

“Maybe there is another way to look at our presence here,” I replied, “We are here operating beneath the level of the leaders who we believe do not want real peace. I think you and I have more in common than you have with Sharon, or than I have with Arafat, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, I agree.”

“So let us go to the hospital,” Kathy responded.

Silence. Then the soldier spoke again, “You know, it is not just the Palestinians who are suffering.”

“We want a just peace for both sides,” we responded, “We want an end to *all* of the violence.”

“It is too late,” insisted the soldier, “there can be no peace now.”

“It is difficult to see a way out, but…”

“Why don’t you work on behalf of the Jews, why can’t you be objective?”

At that moment, another soldier came up to us and began speaking in Hebrew. Then, suddenly, we were told we could get back into the ambulance and push ahead towards the hospital.

The hospital is actually two buildings separated by a road. It was in that road, just yards from the hospital, that an elderly woman with a walker was shot dead by an Israeli sniper just weeks ago. In the parking lot we saw the mass grave we had all read about. It was empty; the killing was less frequent 11 days into the siege, giving hospital workers the window they needed to dispose of the bodies properly.

***

For our second day in Ramallah, we agreed to divide our efforts. Some of us could accompany ambulances making house calls while the rest would defy the curfew by walking to the office of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) to assist in deliveries of food and medicine to families. We had walked about one block when we spotted an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) at the intersection three blocks ahead of us. On top of the APC were a mounted machine gun and a soldier; another soldier, bearing an M-16, crouched in front of the APC. Both were aiming at us. We stopped. A soldier yelled something. Adam yelled out, “I’m sorry I can’t hear you.” One of the soldiers fired. “I hear your bullets,” Adam replied, “We’re going to deliver food, we are all foreigners.” We waited. There were shots in the distance. The soldiers ahead of us seemed to be engaged in some sort of operation that drew them out of the APC. They were moving around. We were a distraction. We began walking very slowly, then stopped, and again called out our intent to deliver food. Adam asked to speak to the commander, with whom he has spoken before. Then he asked for some signal that we could pass. Nothing. We resumed our slow march, white flag held high. We heard a dynamite explosion nearby. The soldiers were blowing their way into a building. We stopped again and Adam continued, “Soldiers, we wish to proceed, may we approach to speak to you?”. After a long silence we decided to turn back and try again later. We worried that the soldiers would do something stupid to deal with their “distraction.” Turning around, we walked back slowly, in the direction of yesterday’s snipers.

While we were engaged in our sort-of-stand-off, Alexandra had ducked into a refugee camp and returned with a heart medicine prescription for a middle-aged woman who couldn’t reach the hospital to fill it because of the snipers and the soldiers. The hospital was one block away. We returned to the hospital, got the heart medication, and decided to head back to the refugee camp, which was just in view of our friends with the APC. We began again, white flag waiving, and arrived at the entrance to the camp (really indistinguishable from the rest of the neighborhood) and were pleased to see that the soldiers had moved on. We decided to again attempt making our way to the UPMRC offices. Just as we were getting ready to walk on, a man approached us to ask if we could get an ambulance to take his feverish son to the hospital. We decided to escort the boy to the hospital since it was so close.While we were regrouping in the parking lot, two ambulances sped into the driveway. Inside one was the body of 28 year old Manel Sami Ibrahim, who was standing near her window when an Israeli sniper shot her through the heart. Her husband and three children were in the apartment.

“This,” as one Palestinian relief worker said to me, “is the occupation.”

We started off again for the UPMRC offices. I felt a small sense of victory as we passed the location of the soldiers we had confronted just an hour earlier. We turned left and headed up a hill. The streets of Ramallah were empty and ruined. Bullet casings of all varieties littered the streets. The Israelis had shot up banks, internet cafes, bars, clothing stores, medical relief offices, civil service organizations, and homes. Tanks had bulldozed power lines, dumpsters, and street signs. But the houses were full. Every once in awhile, somebody would lean out of an upper window to say hello or just look at us, wondering. A woman from Los Angeles came down for a quick visit. A man planting a tree in his garden showed us the bullet casings he had collected around his yard. It was surreal.

Occasionally, an APC would rumble by us on a nearby street, but we didn’t encounter any soldiers until the very end of our walk. It was right out of a war movie. Two young men in fatigues with a lazy grip on their M-16s. Clearly bored out of their minds and blasting Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” They made us open our bags and barely even looked into them. Soon we were on our way.

At the UPRMC offices, workers took us on a tour of the damaged building. Two family apartments were heavily hit with damage to the ceilings, walls and floors, which were covered with debris and broken glass. The clinic’s reception room and examining room were similarly damaged, but had also been ransacked. A ruined copy machine had crashed to the floor. All of the patient files had been stolen. And every window was shattered. After seeing the damage, I was assigned to an ambulance and given a UPMRC/Red Crescent vest to identify me as a medical relief worker. Alexandra and I accompanied a doctor and two UPMRC volunteers on food and medicine deliveries to various homes that had requested help. The trip through Ramallah neighborhoods was successful and without incident.

Returning to the Sheik Zayed Hospital, we learned that IDF soldiers had shot Arduf Mussa Khandil, a 23 year-old mentally retarded man whom we had seen on the hospital grounds just hours earlier. Apparently he had wandered out into a street behind the hospital. Witnesses saw 11 Israeli soldiers chasing him. They speculated that the young man ran because he was scared when he saw armed soldiers. He was unarmed. They shot him dead.

Scott, a member of our group, visited the morgue to confirm the details of the day’s deaths. A third body was delivered to the morgue while we were out. It was the body of Mahmoud Farid Bawatma, who had been dead 7-15 days, his body only recently discovered. He was shot, but the details of his death are unclear except that the bullet had entered through his buttocks and exited through his head. The morgue was full again and the doctors were talking about a second mass grave. As we were leaving the hospital to attempt a return to Jerusalem, two APCs rolled up the street and parked at the intersection nearest the hospital. It was the same army unit that had stopped us on our way in. Now they were telling us we couldn’t leave. After five minutes of talking and ten minutes of waiting while they struck war poses, we were allowed to leave.

Now I am back in Jerusalem, working on getting to Jenin with Kathy and several others. They say there has been a massacre there.

Witness To The Israeli Military – Is Adam Shapiro A Traitor?

by Laura Flanders
Originally published by TomPaine.com

For days they’ve been calling one of my fellow New Yorkers “traitor.” For city dwellers who’ve been encouraged to feel pretty darn protective of one another, such dangerous talk comes as a shock.

It began when Adam Shapiro from Brooklyn talked to the international media from inside Yasser Arafat’s compound Easter weekend. Shapiro, 30, is one of the founders of International Solidarity Movement a volunteer group that has helped to bring nonviolent activists from the world beyond into besieged Palestinian communities. After living in Ramallah for months, he entered Arafat’s office accompanying a doctor in an ambulance, later telling The New York Times that he’d had breakfast on Saturday with Arafat.

The Israeli shooting was relentless, electricity was cut and food and water were running out, he reported. Live on CNN, he described the Israeli raids on Palestinian communities as “terrrorist” attacks. Israeli troops, he said, go “house to house, much like the Nazis did.”

Almost as soon as the media account appeared, the vitriol started flowing. Pro-Israel protesters, who massed outside the Israeli consulate with members of the Jewish Defense League, called Shapiro names and threatened to picket his family’s home. “Shapiro is a traitor, a piece of garbage. We are going to make his life and his parents’ lives a living hell,” one told the New York Post.

Rather than seek to diminish the threats and fury, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser fanned the flames, calling Shapiro, “the Jewish Taliban.” She railed at Shapiro in person when he appeared by telephone on the radio with Peyser, on a program hosted by hate-jock, Bob Grant (Grant’s relentless race-baiting got him ousted a few years back from New York’s powerful WABC). “Our latest traitor must live with his vile choice,” headlined Peyser’s second column on the topic, the next day.

The other of New York’s two city tabloids provided no relief. There, Daily News columnist Zev Chavets called Shapiro’s father to account for the treachery of his son. “The similarities to John Walker Lindh are inescapable,” wrote Chavets. FOX TV and New York One have all jumped in on the savaging of Shapiro, whose family no longer stays at home because of fear of retaliation from emboldened thugs.

There is no commercial TV, radio or print journalist in this city with anything close to the passion for Palestine that Peyser, Chavets, Grant and Co. express daily for the government of Israel, right or wrong. In the absence of such a person, may I say that as a New Yorker, I’m offended by this talk?

Shapiro’s use of the word Nazi was certainly inflammatory. But so is this talk of treachery in the USA, 2002. Traitors can be strapped naked to stretchers and kept for hours in metal boxes, as we’ve seen in the case of John Walker Lindh. With the United States at war, and the Constitution-shredding PATRIOT Act in effect, a dissenter’s life can be made a living hell, in fact.

The real purpose of hurling such invective is to silence the accused — or, at the very least, to distract the public from what he or she has to say. Peyser and Chavets, et al, haven’t refuted Shapiro’s account of what Israeli forces in Palestinian territories are doing. They can’t; the evidence is just too plentiful.

In the name of preventing terrorism, Israel’s Ariel Sharon has launched an assault on all Palestinians, shelling neighborhoods, markets, hotels and hospitals, and sniping at families and members of the press. Mass arrests, forced evictions and lock-down curfews have been captured on television and radio around the world, in part thanks to Shapiro. He and more than 100 other Westerners now in occupied Palestine are sending back stories that we, whose money and support makes Israel’s military actions possible, need to hear if we’re ever to understand so-called “Arab” anger (it is not only Arabs who are full of rage). The same media now lambasting them has defamed and dehumanized Palestinians themselves for years.

“I have witnessed the execution-style killings and the house-to-house searches and destruction the military has carried out,” writes Caoimhe Butterfly from Ramallah. Prior to leaving for Palestine, Butterfly spent much of her time protecting New York’s public gardens from private development.

Jordan Flaherty, who’s been staying in the Al-Azzah refugee camp in Bethlehem, spent Easter weekend in Christianity’s most Holy city, dodging Israeli sniper fire to bring supplies to Palestinian families under curfew. Who is Jordan? He lives around the corner from a friend of mine in the East Village. He’s been an organizer for a union local, my friend says, and has been involved in the Seattle movement for fair trade.

Natalie Krombach-Williams, 70, is a retired Manhattan nurse. She found herself on the front lines April 1, when she attempted to march with Flaherty and 100 other unarmed “internationals” into the Beit Jala refugee camp, and were fired on by Israel soldiers. Their protest was filmed by the BBC.

“We were going to give [besieged Palestinian villagers] support, to find out if they needed anything,” Krombach-Williams told Long Island’s “Newsday” April 2. When protestors attempted to negotiate with the Israelis, the soldiers fired live rounds their way.

“They shot us! They’re shooting at people with their hands up! Oh My God! They are shooting at pacifists in Beit Jala,” an internationalist reported live on WBAI, New York’s community radio station. One Australian woman ended up in critical condition with a shrapnel wound to the stomach. Zaid Khalil, 26, from Glassboro, New Jersey, received a shrapnel wound to the leg.

Israel’s Ariel Sharon has made it clear that his target is all Palestinians: “Only after [the Palestinians] are beaten will we be able to conduct talks. We have to cause them heavy casualties,” the Israeli Prime Minister told Israeli nightly news, a month before the start of the most recent assault.

Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but by any legal or moral standard, collective punishment is wrong. When it happens to Americans, the American media call it terrorism.

From what we can tell, the killers of September 11 targeted innocent office workers, waiters, artists and firemen for what they perceived to be “crimes” committed by people like them, namely Americans. We call those who rush into help the victims of the September 11 attacks “heroes.” Israeli forces are targetting West Bank innocents for what they perceive to be crimes committed by people like them — namely Palestinians. Are those who rush to protect the victims traitors? No. The opposite.

Laura Flanders is the host of “Your Call” heard on KALW-FM in San Francisco, and on the Internet, and author of Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species, published by Verso Books in March 2004.

Adam Shapiro Ranks As a Mideast Hero

by Sheryl McCarthy
Originally published in Newsday

Wherever Stuart Shapiro may be, he gets my vote for father of the year.

His son, Adam, is a Jewish child of Brooklyn who in the last few years has been living in the Mideast and advocating for the rights of Palestinians. Last week, he spent a night in Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah while Israeli soldiers shelled the town. Arafat’s bunker was filled with the dead and dying, and Adam Shapiro went there, he later explained, to try to persuade the Israelis to allow ambulances in to treat the wounded.

But after saying on television that he ate breakfast with Arafat and comparing the house-to- house raids on Palestinians in Ramallah to Nazi raids during World War II, Shapiro has become a villain. He’s been branded a traitor, denounced as “the Jewish Taliban” and compared to John Walker Lindh, who’s charged with having been a soldier in Osama bin Laden’s army.

The death threats to Adam Shapiro’s parents’ home in Brooklyn were so numerous that they were forced to flee the state temporarily. But, amid all the excoriations of his son, Stuart Shapiro said the greatest thing any father could say.

“Of all the people in the world,” he told a Newsday reporter, “I believe my son.”

Some parents would be ringing their child up in Ramallah: “Have you lost your mind? What do you think you’re doing? Do you know what people are saying, how this is going to hurt us with our friends? You pack up and come home right now!”

But Stuart Shapiro, convinced that in a place of endless hatred and endless revenge his son is one of the few who are trying to understand the other side, is standing by him.

“If my brother says these human rights atrocities are taking place against innocent Palestinian children, then we have to believe him,” says Noah Shapiro, who’s acting as spokesman for the family.

“But in no uncertain terms does that sympathy toward Palestinian children mean that we support suicide bombings.”

The Middle East is a region whose troubles the world has grown sick of. The Palestinians are now terrorizing Israelis through random acts of violence, and the Israelis respond with tanks and guns, bombardments and house-to-house raids.

The two leaders in this war are loathsome in their intransigence. Arafat is incompetent, cowardly, ineffectual and more concerned about his own survival than about a workable peace for his people. He probably doesn’t have the ability to stop the terrorist attacks, but he hasn’t even tried.

Ariel Sharon is a malevolent former terrorist himself and the worst possible prime minister Israel could have now. He thinks he can bomb the Palestinians into submission and hates Arafat so badly that the only thing keeping Arafat alive is pressure from the United States and other Western countries.

Few in this war can argue anything but their own long-raging grievances, and almost no one in a leadership role is willing to reach out to the other side.

Into this melee came Adam Shapiro. Raised in a non-observant Jewish home, he became interested in the Middle East and went to Yemen to study Arabic – not Islam, as some have written. He was affected by what he saw there, and started working with a program that brought Jewish and Palestinian kids to a camp in the United States: the idea being that, if they actually got to know each other, they might like each other.

Upset to see Palestinians barred by Israeli security forces from going to work, and their homes and villages razed if a relative was suspected of being a terrorist, he was drawn to protest the Israeli government’s actions. Most recently, he was trying to get ambulances to wounded Palestinians in areas ravaged by Israeli shelling.

Noah Shapiro says his brother believes in the teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and is at the opposite extreme from Hamas, Hezbollah and bin Laden. If Sharon had asked him to breakfast, Noah Shapiro said, he would have gone.

So who is Adam Shapiro a traitor to? Not to Israel. He’s not an Israeli citizen. Not to his religion. He’s not a practicing Jew. And not to the United States government, which claims to support equity in human affairs and the rights of innocent citizens. By condemning Arafat for not stopping the terrorists, but only mildly rebuking Sharon for waging all-out war on the Palestinians, we’ve betrayed our own values.

Adam Shapiro wanted to restore a little equity to this equation. And, in a season already long on heroes, this makes him another one in my book.