Tag: Beit Hanoun - Page 10 - International Solidarity Movement

Independence Day in the Buffer Zone

by Nathan Stuckey

16 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Photo: Hama Waqum - Click here for more images

Twenty three years ago today the Palestinian declaration of independence was released. Written by Mahmoud Darwish, and unveiled to the world by Yasser Arafat in Algiers where he was living in exile like millions of other Palestinians. Today, in Beit Hanoun, we, the Local Committee of Beit Hanoun, the International Solidarity Movement, and local citizens of Beit Hanoun marched into the no go zone just as we have done every Tuesday for the last three years.

We gathered on the road beside the Agricultural College, raised Palestinian flags, and started to sing as we marched. We were about fifty strong. Men and women, Palestinians and Internationals, marched together to celebrate independence. As we crested the hill that lies on the border of the no go zone the person next to me commented how nice it was that the flag that we had placed in the no go zone was still there, the previous flag had been used by Israeli soldiers for target practice, we had found it laying in the dirt, it’s staff smashed by a bullet. Our flag was still there, the flag that has been flying in the face of Israeli bullets for sixty three years, through the Nakba, the Naqsa, the Occupation, the Intifada’s, the flag still flies.

We marched into the no go zone, this area of life transformed into a place of death. The scarred earth that so little is allowed to live in, ripped up every couple of months by IDF bulldozers. Beyond our flag is giant concrete fence lined with towers full of guns. Above us a giant white balloon to watch our every move. Demonstrations in Gaza are not met my soldiers with batons, or tear gas, or even rubber bullets, they are met with live fire, sometimes with tank shells.

We paused by a giant concrete block that we had painted with the Palestinian flag in an earlier demonstration. Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun climbed onto the block to speak. He vowed that the Palestinian people “continue the popular resistance and the struggle, until the end of the Occupation and the Palestinians gained their freedom and independence.” His message to the world was that “we invite you to work with us in the struggle for freedom in Palestine. Free people of the world must reject political blackmail and bribes from Israel and America as we recently saw in the United Nations.” His speech was followed by a release of balloons into the no go zone and debka dancing.

Palestine is still not free, the Occupation continues. Declarations of Independence are not reserved for peoples that are already free; they are statements of desire, of hope. The United States released its Declaration of Independence only one year into its war for independence, fighting would continue for another three years. Palestine released its declaration of Independence one year into the first Intifada. The struggle has continued for twenty three more years, it will continue until victory.

Meanwhile in Gaza

by Radhika S.

15 November 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

Beit Hanoun locals march to Buffer Zone - Click here for more images

I awoke today with the news that the NYPD was clearing out Occupy Wall Street and that Israeli tanks were shelling “northern Gaza.” In the West Bank, Palestinian Freedom Riders, inspired by the US freedom riders of the 1960s, were getting ready to board segregated buses to occupied East Jerusalem.

Here in Gaza, we head to Beit Hanoun for their weekly nonviolent protest in the buffer zone. For three years, Palestinians in the north have been marching into the barren, no-man’s land which encircles the inside of the narrow strip like a slowly-tightening noose.

We arrived around 11 a.m. and gathered in front of a bombed-out house down a dusty road leading to the border. This was my second buffer zone protest. At my first, two weeks ago, the Israeli army had fired a few shots from the military towers at the border. I wondered what would happen today. As a foreigner, I was to don a reflective fluorescent yellow vest and walk in front of the Palestinians, which seemed to provide them a degree of solace. They seem to think that the Israelis were less likely to use lethal violence when Americans, Italians, and Brits walked with them.

I was not so sure.

About two dozen people waving Palestinian flags marched down the dusty path towards the buffer zone. The landscape reminded me of home, of California, with its thorny tumbleweeds and cactus. It was hard to believe that only ten years ago fruit orchards and olive trees filled this area. But Israel had bulldozed it all, claiming it needed 300 kilometers of Gaza’s most fertile land, but in reality taking more.

Onwards we walked, the Palestinians singing songs and holding a giant Palestinian flag. I wondered what was in store for us today as Israel’s concrete wall and military towers became visible. Would they shoot in the air first? Or would they shoot at us? If they shot us, would they shoot someone standing in the middle first (as I was) or someone standing off to the side? Would they shoot us in the legs? And how good was their aim?

We past a small farm and the family waved at us. They were very brave to have stayed, I thought. Another farm had stuck a large white flag in the dirt in front of their house, as I had seen other families near the buffer zone do. Other farm houses had clearly been abandoned.

We were getting close to the buffer zone now, and the journalists that had come along moved from the front to the back. They didn’t want to get shot either. I started to imagine what it felt like to get shot. Excruciatingly painful, I decided.

At that point, I recalled that I had never made a will. If I died intestate, what law would apply? I had just moved from California to New York, but was I officially a resident of New York? And how would Gaza factor into it all? Was Gaza like the West Bank, where Israel applied a strange patchwork of Ottoman, Jordanian and Israeli military law as it pleased? Not that I really had much to bequeath.

We continued on, and I could see the Palestinian flag we had planted in the earth two weeks before. It was a windy day, and the flag billowed beautifully. The Israeli army had not shot it down. About 50 meters behind it loomed the wall and the military towers.

“Our flag is still there!” I exclaimed to Nathan, an American volunteer walking next to me. The Israelis had used the last Palestinian flag as target practice.

“Do you want to sing the star-spangled banner?” he joked. I smiled, I hadn’t intended to make the reference. Yasser Arafat had symbolically declared Palestinian Independence 23 years ago today, on November 15, 1988.

We stopped, well before the flag, at a large cement block painted red, black and green. Sabur Zaaneen from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, the leader of the march, had thought the area to be more dangerous in recent days.

He gave a brief speech on Palestinian independence and the countries that were standing in the way of Palestinian freedom. As he spoke, I stared at the Israeli towers and the wall, the Israeli flags on top and of the land beyond it on the other side. I wondered if at that moment, Palestinians were attempting to board Jewish-only buses in the West Bank, facing violence from Israeli settlers not unlike the KKK in the Jim Crow south.

The speech ended and the Israelis had not shot at us. A few of the young men broke into a dabke dance, a Palestinian line dance of sorts, as one of them played the tabla and sung, and the women clapped in rhythm. I didn’t know the words but I clapped along as well.

We head back, and I had the star-spangled banner stuck in my head. “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

One day, Palestine too would be free.

Remembrance in Beit Hanoun

by Nathan Stuckey

9 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

It is Tuesday, the third day of Eid, the Eid of the Sacrifice. We, the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative and the International Solidarity Movement, have gathered near the bombed remains of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural College like we do every Tuesday in preparation for our march into the no go zone. This Tuesday is different though, we are not gathered on the road that leads into the no go zone, but behind the bombed buildings of the College. Like much of Palestine, history is densely packed, every place has a story, today, we would learn the story of this small area. Today marks the five year anniversary of the Beit Hanoun massacre. Before us, lie the graves of its victims.

On November 8, 2006 at six in the morning the Israeli army began shelling Beit Hanoun. The shells landed on the houses of the A’athamnah and the Kafarnah families. Not just one shell, the shelling continued for fifteen minutes. Round after round fell on their houses. Nineteen people were killed, nine children, four women and six men. The youngest was only a baby of a couple of months, the oldest a 73 year old woman. Forty more people were injured. They were all civilians, not even the Israeli army bothers to claim that they were armed; they were sleeping in their beds.

The graves are just off the road, just behind the Agricultural College. They are large; each of them contains several bodies, large gray slabs of concrete with names and prayers inscribed on them. Abu Issa, from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative speaks; he prays for the dead and asks us to remember the past. This massacre is barely the past though; it is almost the present, even if forgotten in so much of the world. His words end, as they must, on the present, “we did not ask for the occupation, we have always lived here, it came to us, but we cannot accept it, we must continue the struggle until the occupation ends.” We hang a wreath next to the first grave.

We walk slowly down the row of graves; Abu Issa reads us the names of the dead. We reach the grave of Maisa, age six. I cannot help but look away, for I have my own Maisa, who was also six in 2006. She isn’t my daughter, she is my English student. He name is Maisa Samouni. Twenty nine members of her extended family were murdered in much the same way by the Israeli army, herded into a house by soldiers, and then the house was shelled by the IDF. I wonder what this Miaisa would look like today, would she be as smart and kind and beautiful as my Maisa? As we reach the end of the graves we come to the graves that have been destroyed, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in subsequent invasions of Gaza.

We turn away from the graves and look toward the border. At the concrete towers which line it, full of snipers and computer controlled guns which kill at will. Abu Issa begins to tell us about the area that we see in front of us. It was here that the men of Beit Hanoun were imprisoned during the first week of November 2006. Israeli forces had invaded Beit Hanoun; all males between the ages of 14 and 60 were rounded up and brought here. For six days the slept in the open, in the cold, while the Israeli army took them for questioning. Fifty three people were killed and over 200 injured during the invasion. The day after Israeli forces withdrew; they fired the shells which would kill nineteen more, including Maisa.

After the memorial service we piled into the van and went to the east of Beit Hanoun to visit the Al Jareema family. The Al Jareema’s are Bedouin family that lives right next to the no go zone. They have not always lived there, the used to live in 1948, but they were expelled by the Zionists during the Nakba, them and 750,000 other Palestinians. They settled in Gaza. They lived right next to the border, their houses used to be 50 meters from the border. Then, the Israeli’s decided to impose the buffer zone on Gaza, the family received a notice that they must move. There was no appeal. Israeli bulldozers came and destroyed their houses. They destroyed the pens for the animals. They destroyed the groves of trees that used to thrive in the no go zone.

Now, the family lives in a collection of tents and shacks about 500 meters from the border. As you look toward the border you see a particularly large gray tower, it is from this tower that the Israeli army shoots at them. They have nowhere to go, so they stay living here, surviving as best they can on the land that Israel has not seized. We bring them sweets to celebrate Eid, they serve us tea and freshly made bread. They ask us to stay for lunch, but we must go, there is a wedding going on in Beit Hanoun. Life continues. I pray that the children of the new couple grow up in a more just world, in a free Palestine. This is what we struggle for.

Eid children’s fair in Beit Hanoun

by Radhika S.

6 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

In the afternoon, we went to a special Eid children’s fair at a park in Beit Hanoun, in the north of the Gaza Strip. Fifty percent of the population in Gaza is under the age of 18, and as we arrived, that statistic became quite clear. There were kids everywhere. Playing, dancing, singing –riding horses — all in their brand new Eid clothes. Poofy synthetic dahlia barrettes were all the the rage among the girls. Volunteers from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, which works with children traumatized by Israeli violence (among other things) were singing and clapping as dozens of kids shrieked with pleasure as we arrived.

Then there was a sort of homemade karaoke where Arabic songs were played over speakers and kids would sing along. Everyone got a prize.

This report was excerpted from a longer post on Notes from Behind the Blockade.

Under the flag of UNESCO marched Gaza

by Nathan Stuckey

1 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

We gathered on the road in front of the Agricultural College of Beit Hanoun, one side of the road a functioning school, on the other, only the remains of destroyed school buildings. For three years the people of Beit Hanoun have gathered here every Tuesday for their protest against the no go zone and the occupation. Members of the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun, townspeople, students who had taken the afternoon off of school, and the International Solidarity Movement, all marching under the same flag, the flag of Palestine, red, white, black and green, together. For three years we have marched together, every Tuesday for three years we have went into the no go zone.

Today was different though. Today we marched under another flag as well, the flag of UNESCO. Palestine has been admitted as UNESCO’s newest member. In honor of all of the countries who voted for Palestine, and in honor of UNESCO, we marched under their flag. Above all of this, floated a third flag, the black flag of illegality which flies over the Occupation. This flag is always present; it is just that not everyone sees it. It was acknowledged in Israel only in 1956, the Supreme Court of Israel referred to it for the first time after the massacre of Kufr Kassem on October 29, 1956. Forty nine Palestinian citizens of Israel, women, children, men, were murdered by Border Police as they returned home from their fields. The black flag was always there, it was just that most people refused to see it, many still refuse to see it, yet it is always there. You only have to open your eyes to see it.

We marched down the road toward the no go zone, toward the zone of death. We sang and chanted as we marched. As we got closer we saw that the flag we had planted weeks before was no longer there, it was toppled, it was on the ground. We went to the flag, Israeli soldiers had used it for target practice, they had shot the base of the flag in two. We picked up the flag, took it even farther into the no go zone, crossed a ditch, and replanted it. The olive grove which we had planted last month was still there, green from the recent rain. Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun spoke, he praised UNESCO and the nations that voted to admit Palestine, he denounced the Balfour Declaration which was made in 1917 in support of the Zionist Movement. Shots rang out, five shots in total. This was the Israeli rebuttal to his speech, to our peaceful march against the occupation, the only language which the occupation speaks in Gaza, the language of violence and death. We walked back to Beit Hanoun, not in defeat, proud, we too had spoken, the steadfastness of our olive trees and marching contrasted with the bullets of the occupation.

Nathan Stuckey is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.