Shaheid Means Martyr

1. Lauren’s Journal: Shaheid means Martyr
2. Teen Shot in the Head in Nablus
3. Timeline of a Nablus Invasion
4. Human Rights Workers’ Press Conference: Escalating Settler Violence in Hebron and
Open Letter to the Israeli Military and Police
5. JPost: “Volunteers: Settler violence on the rise”
6. Tel Rumeida Journal – Sunday 23/04/06
7. Excerpts from a review of “Letters from Young Activists”
8. Outside The Fence
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1. Lauren’s Journal: Shaheid means Martyr
April 26th, 2006

Oh. God. They killed another one. Another shaheid. Another child martyr. Oh. God. Oh god. Ohgod. His blood. On the rocks. A hole in his head. It was a big hole. He is still alive after an hour from the shooting. But what does a rubber bullet 2 inches inside his brain with multiple skull fractures really offer? Oh god, when will this killing end? And I only just got here. Another mother lost a son. Another sister will cry tonight and every night. Another son only allowed to live 17 years. Prowling the streets, hunting for rocks the size of his hand to hurl at a jeep that would kill him. How does this make sense that this is all that was given to him in life?

But this boy was already free in a way before he was shot. He wasn’t afraid anymore. He stood up to the jeep. He was standing, until the bullet brought him face-down on the rocks. Maybe this is why they shot him, because the Israelis in the armored jeep were threatened by his fearlessness of them. He wasn’t suffering like the hundreds of thousands of people in Nablus from fear of their bullets.

Maybe he no longer wet himself at night dreaming of them burning down his house or killing his grandmother. Maybe he didn’t cower from the jeeps when they rolled down his street, or lose control at the sound of gunfire at close range. He was able to shake off this suffocating fear that I feel, that makes the ceiling descend and the world cease to exist beyond a few steps in front my feet – this is an admirable feat to have accomplished. And this is why he is a martyr.

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2. Teen Shot in the Head in Nablus
April 25th, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nablus, West Bank

According to Dr. Samir Abu Zarour, at the emergency room in Rafidia Hospital, a 17 year-old boy “has multiple skull fractures on the right side of his head. A rubber-coated metal bullet made a tract through brain tissue and is now lodged in the left side. There is a grave risk to his life.”

Mohamed Saqer, from Askar refugee camp, and his friend Habesh [first name withheld] were throwing stones at a jeep (registration number 611046) driving on Aman Street, the main thoroughfare between Nablus and Balata. Habesh reported that the jeep pulled up to the corner and stopped. A soldier then fired one bullet directly at Saqer’s head from 15 meters away.

Israeli Open-Fire Regulations require a minimum range of forty meters for firing “rubber” bullets. The Regulations also stipulate that the bullets be fired only at a person’s legs.

For more information contact:
Lee 054 738 5754
Mohammed 054 621 8759
ISM Media Office 02 297 1824
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3. Timeline of a Nablus Invasion
April 25th, 2006
By Lee

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/25/nablus-invasion/

At approximately 11:00am the Army arrives at Tel street in Mafea Area of Nablus.

Military Operation to search the 5 story Aljhe building, likely used by students at nearby al-Naija university, and possibly to arrest some occupants. Four jeeps in attendance.

Soldiers arrived and used live ammunition from the start. Youth stone throwing at jeeps from surrounding buildings and adjacent road thats 30m higher.

We arrive at 11:45. Timeline as follows:

11:56- Smoke bomb set off outside building. Obscures view

12:00- Jeep drives from outside building and moves 20m next to ambluance
Uses it as cover from stones

12:06- Smoke clearing from outside building

12:07- 2 soldiers enter building (more could have entered when view obscured by smoke)

12:09- Smoke pouring from 2 & 3 storey windows of building. Something said over one of jeeps loudspeakers

12:17- 2 jeeps have returned. 4 jeeps again in total

12:23- Smell of tear gas coming from building, smoke still coming from several windows, but concentrated on 4th floor
2 soldiers exit building & return to jeep

12:35- 3 jeeps drive from building and move 30m to ambulance. Stone throwing recommences, hitting ambulance and jeeps. One then drives on and pushes aside makeshift barricade (metal wheelie bin & rubbish). 2 others follow. then final jeep drives from building

12:37- enter building with ambulance crews. Its full of smoke and tear gas. 1st and 2nd story doors are open and rooms are empty except for smoke and soot on the floor. 3rd story doors still closed. 4th story doors open but impossible to see inside – too much smoke & gas and its painful & difficult to breathe. Head a bit dizzy. Need to breathe out of windows on the stair landings. Remove window panes with ambulance crew to let more smoke out. Grab some pics – not sure if any good. After maybe 7 minutes, fire brigade arrive and man in breathing apparatus ascends stairs. i gotta leave, feeling ill. Take pics of fireman and rush outside

12:50- Fire brigade begin hosing down building to wash away soot and clear smoke. Oh, and ive got a headache and painful breathing, serves me right!

Not sure if anyone was living in the apartments as all looked empty but if they were, they wont be able to live there for a few days, place is a total mess

12:52- residents, media and ambulance crews all say that no one was arrested. Just no way anyone could have stayed in the building through the operation thats a fact

Epilogue: Last Night: 7 were arrested from Askar refugee camp. Army attacked at 02.00 and left and 07.00. 3 arrested from Nablus including 50 yr old woman Wafiqa Adela.

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4. Human Rights Workers’ Press Conference: Escalating Settler Violence in Hebron
April 26th, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jerusalem: A broad coalition of activists and advocacy groups held a press conference today to call on the Israeli authorities to uphold the law and arrest settlers perpetrating violence against Palestinians and international volunteers that attempt to protect them before one of them is seriously injured or killed. Recent attacks against Palestinian residents in Tel Rumeida have increased in both degree and frequency. Adult settlers are now frequently executing planned, violent attacks. In the past month alone, two Human Rights Workers required stitches to their heads after being stoned, and another suffered a mild concussion. On the 22nd of April, a mob of 30 settler adults and teenagers attacked a Palestinian shop using sharpened metal poles, assaulting Palestinian children and international volunteers in the process.

At the press conference held at the Alternative Information Center office in Jerusalem, speakers from the Tel Rumeida Project, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) talked about their first hand experiences of settler violence. Luna Ruiz, from the Tel Rumeida Project warned that “our lives are in danger”. Mary Baxter from the ISM said that the most important people in Hebron were the Palestinian school children, who she described as the “bravest people [she’d] ever met” and the “heroes of Tel Rumeida”. Anne Montgomery, a 79 year old nun from CPT and Anna Svensson from the ISM also spoke about their firsthand experiences of settler violence. Arik Asherman from Rabbis for Human Rights, and Ruth Kedar from Yesh Din were among the speakers from Israeli organizations who made statements in solidarity with the work of the international Human Rights Workers in Hebron. “These attacks are part of an attempt by the settlers to the prevent documentation of their activities,” said Eran Zax from Sons of Abraham, another Israeli organization.

A copy of an open letter detailing the dangerous situation in Tel Rumeida that was sent to outgoing and incoming Defense Ministers Shaul Mofaz and Amir Peretz, as well as the Chief of the General Staff and several other high-level Israeli figures was distributed at the conference. [SEE BELOW]

The involvement of adults -who are more easily prosecuted than settler youth- seems to indicate a recognition by the Hebron settlers that the consequences for violence are acceptably small. Indeed, the Israeli army and police often fail to prevent settler violence, and rarely arrest and punish the perpetrators. If the Israeli army continues to turn a blind eye to such actions, human rights organizations fear that the situation will only grow increasingly dangerous.

For more information:
Luna Ruiz (Tel Rumeida Project) 054 557 3154
Yossi (AIC) 0525 210 184

Open Letter to the Israeli Military and Police
April 26th, 2006

To:
Shaul Mofaz, Outgoing Minister of Defense
Amir Peretz, Designate Minister of Defense
Dan Halutz, Israeli Forces Chief of the General Staff
Meni Mazuz, Attorney General
Yair Lotstein, Military, Legal Advisor on the Territories
Avihai Mandelblit, Military Advocate General
Ofer Mey-Tal, Israeli Military Liaison for International Organizations
Ben Artzi, Head of the Foreign Liaison Office of the Israeli National Police
Moshe Karadi, Inspector General of the Israeli Police
Gideon Ezra, Minister of Public Security
Yosef Mishlav, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories
Yair Naveh, General Officer Commanding Central Command

We call upon the Israeli Military, Police and government to immediately investigate, apprehend and prosecute violent settlers in Tel Rumeida, Hebron.

The situation in Tel Rumeida has reached a critical point. Though there have been hundreds of settler attacks since August 2005 when we first moved into Tel Rumeida, most of those were random and involved settler children and/or teenagers. Alarmingly, Tel Rumeida adult settlers are now starting to carry out carefully pre-planned violent attacks against the local Palestinian population and international volunteers who attempt to protect them from these attacks. We as Human Rights Workers (HRWs) have started to fear for our lives and the lives of the Palestinians that we attempt to protect. If the Israeli military and police do not take immediate measures to prevent settler attacks and punish offenders, then there is a grave risk that a Palestinian or HRW will be seriously injured or killed.

Israeli military and police often do not deploy sufficient personnel to areas where they know attacks regularly occur and often do not respond to calls to prevent attacks even when they are warned of imminent danger. In addition Israeli military and Police often do not act to stop settler attacks, rather they often stand and videotape the crime in progress.

Instead of preventing or stopping settler attacks, Israeli soldiers and Police often order Palestinians and HRWs to go home while settlers are attacking. HRWs have often witnessed that Israeli soldiers and Police are not able to adequately protect themselves from settler attacks. Worse, Israeli military and Police are often negligent in their duty to protect Palestinian people and property from settler attacks. Despite this, the Israeli military and Police have focused on removing HRWs from Tel Rumeida through the use of Closed Military Zone orders exclusively applied to HRWs. We have been threatened with arrest after being attacked by settlers and are regularly harassed by soldiers and police, including documented, illegal attempts to remove us from our apartment.

HRWs have on many occasions either prevented or stopped a settler attack against Palestinians. When HRWs have not been successful in preventing or stopping attacks they position themselves in front of the settlers who are threatening or beating a Palestinian and instead receive the blows or stones themselves. Palestinian families repeated tell us that they and their children feel safer when we are present.

We want to make clear that the internationals who live and/or work in Tel Rumeida are not going to leave. Though settler attacks against Palestinians and HRWs are increasing in frequency and in the level of violence, we will stand with Palestinians and their children as they defend their lives and property. The Israeli military and police must uphold Israeli and international law and protect all people and property in the Israeli controlled area of Hebron.

Therefore we demand that:

Soldiers and police should be given explicit instructions that they must act to protect all people and property while in Tel Rumeida.

Police must place sufficient forces every day in the area to prevent settler attacks against Qurtuba School children or when they have been warned of imminent danger or in other areas where attack regularly occur.

When settler attacks are imminent or occurring in their presence, soldiers and police must act immediately to prevent and stop violence. Reinforcements should be called immediately to prevent attacks from escalating and to prevent injuries. Soldiers and police should face disciplinary action or criminal investigation if they do not intervene to protect people and property against attacks.

Police must respond in a timely way when called for help.

Police must be ordered to arrest settlers even if they commit crimes on Saturdays or other Jewish holidays.

Police must document complaints at the scene of the crime.

Police must investigate the crime scene after violent incidents.

Soldiers and police should receive proper orientation of the area to which they are assigned. Soldiers and police should be informed of the relevant laws and high court decisions regarding Palestinian rights to movement in Tel Rumeida. They should also be made aware of agreements made between the Israeli military and Palestinians.

Israeli Police and military must not order Palestinians to go home when they are being attacked by settlers.

Sincerely,

Tel Rumeida Project, International Solidarity Movement, Yesh Din, Gush Shalom and Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of “Rabbis For Human Rights”
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5. JPost: “Volunteers: Settler violence on the rise”
April 27th, 2006
By TOVAH LAZAROFF,
From the Jerusalem Post

Her gray hair and slim size did not stop Israeli children waiting at a Hebron bus stop from tossing a palm size rock in the direction of Anne Montgomery, 79.

A nun from the US, she was volunteering to help monitor Palestinian interactions with settlers, the IDF and the police. Rock-throwing by settler children is so typical, she said, that “we just looked at them and we knew it was going to happen.”

On Wednesday morning, however, instead of ignoring the brief stoning, she picked up the palm-sized rock and brought it to a Jerusalem press conference on rising settler violence called by international and activist groups working in Hebron.

“Luna,” a volunteer from the US who heads the non-profit Tel Rumeida Project, said that in the past year there have been hundreds of documented settler attacks of varying severity. Initially, the attacks seemed random and involved mostly settler teens, said Luna, who prefers that her real name not be used.

“Alarmingly, Tel Rumeida adult settlers are now starting to carry out carefully pre-planned violent attacks. We, as human rights workers, have started to fear for our lives and the lives of the Palestinians we are attempting to protect,” she said.

Attacks are more likely to occur on Shabbat or a holiday, said Luna, whose organization has observed incidents each Saturday during April. Attacks include physical assaults, stoning and verbal threats. In one incident on April 1, Swiss lawyer Silvana Hogg received seven stitches in her head after she was stoned by a settler.

Last Thursday, five international workers were injured by stones, including Montgomery, while they protected children and teachers as they walked to the Cordoba Girls School in the morning.

Students and teachers are so likely to be attacked along that route that international workers with video cameras post themselves by the stairwell and street outside the school just in case an attack occurs.

Luna’s group and others, including Rabbis for Human Rights, Gush Shalom, Yesh Din and the International Solidarity Movement, are so concerned they sent a letter Wednesday to the Defense Ministry, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra and police Insp.-Gen. Moshe Karadi, asking that the security forces operating in Hebron be forced to take action.

While there have been helpful security officers, often times the soldiers or police in the area do nothing to control the settlers, said Luna. She showed a number of video clips during the press conference to prove her point.

In one, taken last August on what appears to be a Saturday, small Jewish children could be seen picking up rocks and tossing them at Palestinians and international workers.

One rock barely missed a Palestinian boy who stuck his head out of a doorway. A police van drove up to the settler children, who continued to pick up stones and throw them, and one was also thrown at the van. Off to the side, two policemen were seen recording the event and there were also soldiers on the street, but neither appeared to try to stop the stone-throwers.

In a second video, a male settler wrapped in a prayer shawl was seen shoving an elderly international volunteer to the ground.

On Wednesday, the World Council of Churches in Geneva sent a letter to Ambassador to Switzerland Aviv Shiron protesting settler violence against Christian volunteers.

In his letter, Peter Weiderud, director of the WCC Commission on International Affairs, asked the security forces to stop “abusive, unlawful and violent behavior by settlers toward Palestinians.”

He said that the root of the problem is Israel’s “practice of establishing, protecting and expanding settlements.” He called on Israel to withdraw from all settlements, including Hebron.

Neither the army nor the police responded to queries regarding Hebron. Soldiers on its streets had mixed reactions. Some said they knew nothing of such incidents, and blamed the international volunteers for inflaming an already tense situation between the approximately 500 Jews and 130,000 Palestinians who live in the city.

Others said they knew of incidents in which settlers attacked Palestinians.

The soldiers said that at times they could find themselves protecting settlers against Palestinians, and then saving settlers from Palestinians during the same day.

Ruth Kedar, who created Yesh Din a year ago to help Palestinians sue the settlers for violent attacks, said her organization had 140 cases pending against settlers in all of Judea and Samaria.

Still, a few of Hebron’s Jewish residents said they were startled to hear that the Palestinians and the international workers feared them, since they view themselves as the ones under attack.

Several Jews and soldiers have been killed in Hebron in the last five years. A spokeswoman for the Hebron community, Orit Strock, said that incidents of Palestinians acting against settlers occur every day.

“They have thrown stones at me and they have thrown stones at my children,” she said. “It happens all the time.” There are also attacks against property and bombs thrown at cars, she added.

Another Hebron spokesman, David Wilder, said that given the tensions in the city, he believed that there had also been attacks by settlers against Palestinians.

“I’m not saying that nothing happens,” he said. But he added that neither he nor his children regularly attack Palestinians. Parents are not saying to their children go attack this Palestinian or that Palestinian, he said.

On Saturday in particular, he said, “I have only three things on my mind: praying, eating and sleeping.” He had a suggestion for the international workers who feared for their lives: “The best way to prevent violence is for them to leave,” he said, because their presence in the city only inflamed already existing tensions.

Strock said that international volunteers come to Hebron with an agenda. “They want to get the Jews out of Hebron. That is their objective. Some hide it and others do not.”

Wilder wondered why the same groups hadn’t been equally concerned when the international observer group, Temporary International Presence in Hebron, was forced to leave in February after it was attacked by Palestinians angered by the publication by a Danish newspapers of cartoons against the Prophet Muhammad.

TIPH spokeswoman Eli Smette, whose organization monitors Israeli and Palestinian activity based on an agreement with both governments, said that her organization has observed violence by both parties. The number of settler incidents against Palestinians seemed to be higher, she said. But she qualified her statement by noting that while the Palestinians contact her organization when an incident occurs, the settlers call the police or the army instead. This makes it more difficult to assess the exact number of Palestinian attacks against settlers, said Smette, whose organization has only recently returned to the city.

But Luna said it had been her experience in the last six months that the violence has been on the part of the settlers. She recalled how only last Saturday she and another volunteer raced to the Abu Ishi family grocery store, when they saw a group of 30 settlers try to attack three Palestinians teens.

She said her arm was bruised by a settler, who also pushed her against the door.

“The only reason I am not in the hospital or possibly worse is because this one soldier intervened,” said Luna. She recalled how one settler shook her as she stood between him and a Palestinian. “Then a soldier came and stood in front of me,” she said.

Radi Abu Ishi, 16, was calm several days later as he described that brief five to seven minutes of scuffling that occurred around 2 p.m..

“I was slapped twice and kicked twice,” said Radi. From the back of the store he dragged out a large, almost body-length metal rail with a sharpened edge that he said settlers used against them during the attack. He held it up to show how it was thrown only a short distance and to demonstrate where it landed near a carton of flour, without injuring anyone.

He dismissed the attack as a normal part of living within a short distance of Jewish families at the top of the hill. But Luna and other international volunteers said this situation was anything but normal. More to the point, they said they believed it was increasingly becoming more dangerous.

They bristled at accusations that their presence in Hebron inflames the situation.

Holding a video camera as he stood against the closed shutters of a shop on the deserted Shuhada Street, as he waited for children to come out of school,Tom Hayes, a volunteer from Britain, said he and others were there because the Palestinians believe their presence improves security.

“If they didn’t want us here, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.

When they stand in the street, they try to be as unobtrusive as possible, said Luna. “We don’t want to provoke anyone,” she said. “A good day is a boring day.”
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6. Tel Rumeida Journal – Sunday 23/04/06
April 24th, 2006

Our group was tired out after the large settler attack yesterday and apprehensive about what might happen over the coming week. We were hoping for a quiet day, and we got that. So here’s a description of a quiet day in Tel Rumeida…

International volunteers from EAPPI, ISM and TRP on the streets at 7am to monitor the children travelling to school in case of attacks by settlers. I stay close to Tel Rumeida settlement to watch the children who live close to the settlement buildings and have to walk down the hill past the settlement buildings and two army posts. There have been attacks on these children, stonings and beatings, but this morning there are none.

More internationals monitor the children as they walk down the hill toward the school. EAPPI accompany the children to school and stay throughout the school day.

At about noon the children return from school. Again, internationals monitor the areas close to Tel Rumeida and Beit Hadassa settlements. I watch for the children walking up past the IDF guardpost towards Beit Hadassa. This is terrifying for the children as they have been attacked in this area many times. Today the soldiers are new and stop them, ask them where they are going and search their schoolbags.

EAPPI accompany several girls who live at a house only accessible on a narrow path alongside Tel Rumeida settlement. This Palestinian family have fought a Supreme Court battle in Israel for the right to use this strip of land and won. However the IDF have placed a roll of razor wire across the path. At one point the family could lift the wire to access the path to their house. Then sandbags were placed on the wire to prevent this. Now the children must step over the roll of wire, opposite the IDF guardpost and the homes of violent illegal settlers to access the path home.

This morning the IDF soldier manning the guardpost did not know about the Supreme Court decision and refused the children entry. International volunteers from ISM and EAPPI tried to explain the situation but the soldiers would not be convinced. The human rights workers called the police and army, and during the wait some settlers emerged and told the troops the children were not allowed to pass. This was an outright lie. The settlers called us “Nazis”.

Eventually a jeep arrived with an officer who confirmed that the children were indeed allowed to walk down the path.

As the children stepped over the barbed wire, a settler remarked to her daughter “I hope they trip”.

This incident highlights a reoccuring problem in Tel Rumeida; new army units are not properly briefed when they take over, and so the soldiers have to learn the ground rules, usually at the expense of the Palestinian residents who suffer yet more delays, searches, and ID checks until the soldiers learn the locals are not the problem here.

Calm returns to the area for all of five to ten minutes, then boom! Boom! Two small explosions, one right after the other, from the direction of the Palestinian souk (market) in the H2 zone, just outside the perimeter. The two bored sentries who man a concrete guard position at the top of the hill are suddenly tense and alert, guns levelled, scanning the streets in front of their position for trouble. From the old souk comes a cloud of pale smoke or dust, and the distant sound of car alarms and horns and confusion. Some kind of bomb, or a controlled explosion on a suspected bomb? We have no idea, and neither have the soldiers, who gradully relax as the cloud dissapates in the gusty air.

The EAPPI workers go off-duty and as always we’re sad to see them go. An hour or two passes and we’re mostly sat at the curbside enjoying the warmth of “sunny intervals” as the BBC would call the mixture of clouds and sunshine. Occasionally we take a stroll down the hill, past the soldiers, and down to the checkpoint. Then right onto the main street, as almost always eerie and deserted. We try to monitor both streets because of possible settler attacks.

Later in the afternoon we see three young settlers walking down Tel Rumeida hill. They seem innocent enough but as they pass they whisper “I kill you”. They meet a Palestinian child near the bottom of the hill and lunge towards him. We shout “Stop” and begin to film, they look at us and quickly move on.

The rest of the day is quiet but as we are crossing the checkpoint to buy food for supper a member of the team is detained and told they will be “arrested”. They are kept there for an hour before being released.

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7. Excerpts from a review of “Letters from Young Activists”
April 25th, 2006
by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
From Monthly Review

www.lettersfromyoungactivists.org

For the complete review see
www.monthlyreview.org/0406wrigley-field.htm

…We may not have learned the lessons of the past, but among those are the lessons of defeat; the radicals among us still believe we can change the world.

This is the spirit of the new collection Letters from Young Activists, edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow. The concept of the book is that young people in the United States, who have made a decision not to accept the world the way it is, write letters—to their parents, their movements, and Condoleezza Rice—explaining why. The strength of the book lies in its refutation of the conventional wisdom that young people have given up on seeking radical change….

To give a picture of a living, breathing movement in such a short space is no easy feat.

Yet a number of the letters rise to the challenge, and these make the book worth reading. Some letters succeed in vividly conveying the author’s sense of injustice, or of possibility. These are exciting to read because they impart their author’s inspiration to fight.

A letter by Joya Colon-Berezin “to anyone who will listen,” for example, uses the details of her own experience in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement to impart a sense of the realities of life under a military occupation. Her letter begins:

I will never forget the tension in their backs. Massaging the backs of the nine- and ten-year-old kids living in Palestine felt like massaging my grandmother. Perhaps it had something to do with having their homes constantly raided by the army, or seeing their family members and neighbors killed. Maybe it also had to do with having their land confiscated, crops destroyed, and villages erased. After being there for two weeks I was already starting to feel tension building in my own back; it is impossible for me to imagine what a lifetime living under occupation would do.

With the unending campaign by the media and politicians in this country to dehumanize those living under occupation, a letter that helps us imagine what it feels like to travel through a checkpoint, or to live under a curfew where schools and stores are closed, is a welcome contribution….

…students and young people can also play a special and important role in social movements. They exist, as the socialist Daniel Singer once wrote, in a “strangely suspended state”:

Tomorrow they will be absorbed by the productive machine, conditioned by their class interest, more or less integrated into the system. Today, not quite torn from the domestic background but not yet prisoners of their future jobs, they are in an intermediate stage, when they are more likely to question their environment.

Historically, of course, this condition of questioning, and of willingness to take action, has led students and young people to initiate struggles that go on to dramatically transform society. This spirit of resistance is alive today, and some of the best chapters in the book detail the way this is beginning to happen.

The special place in society that young people occupy can be an advantage in building social movements; but youth is not an experience sealed off from others in society. Young peoples’ activism is also soldiers’ antiwar activism, antiracist activism, organizing of all kinds: the variety of emerging struggles documented in Letters from Young Activists attests to the multiplicity of young peoples’ experiences of activism.

This comes across in the exchange between U.S. war resister Stephen Funk and Israeli refusenik Matan Kaminer, written to each other as each underwent a trial for their resistance. It has also been apparent of late in what is probably the other most visible movement of young people since 9/11: the counter-recruitment movement, in which students have led the charge against military recruiters in their schools. This movement’s force has come from its participants’ strong sense that they are being targeted, that their schools are increasingly structured not with the goal of educating them, but of funneling them into a role as disposable soldiers for a war many of them oppose. This is necessarily a movement of young people—that’s who the recruiters are targeting, after all—but it is also a working-class movement which can raise wider questions about the priorities of a society that puts profits before education, decent jobs, and even life itself…

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8. Outside The Fence
April 26th, 2006

By Asafa Peled – Yedioth Aharonot 14/4/2006
Translation: Adam Keller

The Separation Fence is closing in upon more and more Palestinian villages. Their inhabitants are cut off from sources of livelihood. Some Israelis are not willing to remain silent.

Matan Cohen lost an eye because of it. Shai Karmeli-Polak gave up for its sake a promising career. Leila Mosinzon is going to prison for its sake, next month. The Separation Fence has become their obsession. What is it about this wall, designed to separate Israelis from Palestinians, which is bringing young people to give up the well-fed bourgeois life and get tear gas blown in their face every Friday afternoon? The border inside.

For a long time, dozens of villagers – children, youths and adults – waited at the entrance to the Beit Sira Municipal Council building. They were very excited, and it burst out when the car stopped nearby. A seventeen-year old boy came out, a bit clumsy and wearing glasses who looked like a a typical Tel-Aviv high school pupil. The crowd surrounded him with shining eyes, and stood in line to shake his hand. The boy, wearing stylish jeans and Adidas shoes, seemed rather embarrassed by this very warm reception. “You were willing to give your eye for our struggle” said one of the village leaders to Matan Cohen. “You risked your life to let our voice be heard. If it was possible, each one of us here would have exchanged his good eye for your damaged one”.

This was Matan Cohen’s first visit to the village after being severely hurt in his eye by a rubber bullet shot by a Border Guard soldier a month and half ago during an anti-fence demonstration. Cohen had undergone two operations already and his sight is very limited. Only in some months will it be clear if he would be able to see with the damaged eye. Sunlight is difficult for him and he is blinking all the time.

In the Palestinian press published immediately after it happened, the photo of Cohen’s face covered in blood was published under the caption “an Israeli peace activist shot in the eye during a demonstration against the fence”. “It is very moving to see how the village people react, and all the children waiting for my arrival” says Cohen. “As far as I am concerned, this human warmth, our togetherness, is the biggest achievement of struggle. More than a struggle against the physical wall and the thousands of acres it is stealing from the Palestinians. The real struggle is against the mental wall.”

The demonstration in which Cohen was hurt, on February 24, was one of a series of demonstrations organized in different West Bank locations every Friday, organized by local committees along the route of the fence. Some call the organizers “The Palestinian Gandhis” because of their unarmed demonstrations.

Every week since the building of the fence started there is a regular ritual: after the village ends the Friday prayer, everybody leaves the mosque, together with Israeli activists from “Anarchists Against the Wall” and some sympathizers from abroad, towards the fence west of the village.

The army declares the area, which is a large part of the village lands, as a closed military area. The procession advances. Some are singing, some make speeches, some present a kind of street theatre which changes every week.

The soldiers and Border Guards form a cordon and wait for the demonstrators, to prevent them from nearing the fence. The demonstrators try to reach it anyway.There are many photographers, and nearly every minute is preserved. This material would be used afterwards in court, to defend those who would be accused of assaulting soldiers.

The sun is hot, the dust clouds go up. They call “Soldiers, go home!” and the soldiers try to push them back. There is pushing, shouting, and cursing. Soon smoke grenades and shock grenades are hurled and rubber bullets are shot. Demonstrators scatter, calling out “Go away, this is out home!”, “Thieves!”, “Don’t shoot!”. Some demonstrators are hurt, some are detained and taken to a military vehicle parked beyond the fence. The event lasts several hours until everybody disperses.

“The demonstration was in fact over when they shot me” tells Cohen. “I was left, together with three other Israeli activists, quite far from the soldiers. I shouted to them not to shoot, but one of them raised his gun and shot me directly in the eye”. In photos and video footage from that day Cohen is seen frightened and bleeding, crying out for an ambulance, between his fellow activists and the soldiers who had just hurt him and who were trying to help. Eventually, a Palestinian ambulance took him to the army checkpoint from which he was transferred to an Israeli ambulance and taken to hospital.

He is still not calm. “Yes, I am afraid” he says and tells of other cases, during the three years that he is participating in protests, when soldiers shot at unarmed civilians. Hundreds were wounded and ten killed.

– Were you willing to sacrifice your eye for the struggle against the fence?

“I don’t think if somebody told me that I was going to be wounded in this way, I would have gone to the demonstration. But the risk of being wounded or killed is always hovering above everybody’s head. As far as I am concerned, I will go on with the non-violent protests, because there is no choice. The fence leaves people totally dispossessed, in complete despair. continuing the struggle is vital in order to show that, though they use daily violence in order to break the struggle, we will go on and not let them silence us. I believe that non-violent protest has much more power than the violent oppression”.

The group known as “Anarchists Against the Fence”, to which Cohen belongs, is one of the fascinating phenomena which came into being because of the building of the fence. The term “anarchists” brings to mind a group of tattooed punkists, who run away from conscription and who protect wild flowers with as much fury as they devote to the downtrodden Palestinians. In practice, their anarchism is mainly expressed in the independent activity of every member, with many individual differences between them.

In fact, this is not really an organization, but a collection of individuals. Many of them had not been active at all until the bulldozers started to create their accomplished facts. They are between ten to a hundred people, without a leader or hierarchy, membership dues or fixed obligations. Each one finances his or her own expenses. Coordination takes place via phone or email, and anybody who wants to join is getting help in transportation and entry into the Palestinian villages.

Many of them had served in combat roles in the army. Some are lecturers, computer experts, students and pensioners. Most of them are vegetarians or vegans, and some arrived at the anti-fence struggle via Animal Rights protests.

The fence had taken them to a place far beyond the mainstream Israeli debate and discourse, the defence-minded debate on the need for the fence and the political debate on dismantling settlements. Perhaps like youngsters in divided Berlin, the fence has made a deep mental impression on them. They feel as if the fence is dividing their own lives, which they perceive as “before” and “after”. The enemy which they had known mainly from news reports became human precisely due to the building of the fence. The barrier caused the desire to meet the humans behind it, who have gone unnoticed before they were Separated from Israel. The price is high – they get beaten up, wounded, detained for days at a time and face dozens of criminal charges at the court.

It is difficult to understand what makes ordinary people, who had lived calm daily lives in the center of the country, let themselves be drawn into this daily ritual and in many ways give up their freedom. After several days among them one can at least understand what keeps them there. The scenes to which they are exposed are very different from what you can see in the news: villages cut off from their sources of livelihood – water sources, schools, hospitals, jobs. Movement is severely restricted, thousands of acres are confiscated and thousands of trees uprooted for the erection of the fence. The people which they meet are caged behind walls, with a single gate between them and the outside world. People who until the intifada had jobs in Israel are unemployed for five years already, with their families at the edge of hunger. The fence takes away also the chance to go back to agriculture as a source of livelihood. For the activists, every trip to the fence makes the going back home more difficult.

To be a bit blond

Three years ago, Matan Cohen moved with his mother from Kfar Vardim in the Galilee to Tel-Aviv. He was raised in a left-leaning, humanistically inclined home. Already as a child he was looking for his own way. After one year at Jaffa’s “Democratic Open School” he found even that rather loose framework uncongenial. He went away and prepared by himself to the matriculation examinations, which he successfully passed a year ago.

When he was fourteen he started participating in activities in the Territories. It started from basic curiosity. “I read about terrorist attacks and the killing of Palestinian civilians. When the victims are Palestinians they remain nameless. Just numbers – two Palestinians killed, seven Palestinians wounded… No names, no personal details. This language is what causes Israelis to close themselves for the suffering of the other side.

“The same is true now, in my case. When I was wounded the media reported it, but the fourteen Palestinians who were wounded in the same demonstration went unreported, unknown. If somebody who is a bit blond is hurt it arouses identitification. There, if a person is killed there is no commission of inquire. Until now no soldier had been prosecuted for killing unarmed demonstrators, their humanity is totally ignored.

I meet soldiers of almost my own age, some of them people with whom I grew up, and they have never been in these villages, never spoke to the people, have no idea of their situation. They feel that they are fulfilling a mission to defend Israel. They don;t understand that I am not their enemy. I am here to tell them that this is not a security fence, that you can’t establish security by oppressing another people who live at our side.

He says that his family supports his political stance but has asked him not to go to demonstrations. With time, however, they understood that their child is serious and not an unrestrained adventurer. His first activity was joining a relief convoy which brought humanitarian help to a village under curfew in the Nablus area. He was the youngest of the Israeli dissidents who set out. “I remember my feeling of fear and thinking that I am doing something dangerous, but the reality I saw was shocking.

We were kept and harassed for three hours at the army checkpoint. When we finally got there everything became real, concrete, real life. The dead and wounded have a real human form. The gap and abyss between us, this habit of talking of “us” and “them” is weakening and is mixing into a “we” which includes everybody. I did not see a difference between a person who suffers here and a person who suffers there.”

– Is this not a biased look? The Palestinians are throwing stones, and the soldiers are hurt.

“The presence of the soldiers is in itself violent. When people live under a daily oppression, some young people can’t restrain their anger, and I can understand that. Their livelihood was taken away, and they are forbidden to demonstrate against the theft of their lands. When an armoured jeep enters the village in order to make a demonstrative show of force, I understand quite well why people throw stones at it”.

With the building of the fence Cohen joined the intensive activity in the villages on whose land it is being built. There were whole weeks when he went there day after day, and on many occasions he and other activists stayed the night. “Staying the night in a Palestinian village is neither dangerous nor frightening” he says. “The perception of it as frightening comes out of ignorance of the real situation. We have grown up with mist forever in front of our eyes, a whole generation living under a permanent feeling of fear. The greatest thing which happened to me is to discover that I am welcome among the Palestinians. I go to the Territories, people talk to me Hebrew, I learn a bit of Arabic, and I get a friendly reception everywhere.”

Like most of his fellow activists, he is financing from his own pocket such things as travelling to the West Bank, phone calls, paying lawyers fees. In time, he had less and less friends who were not involved in all this. “Non-activists think that what I do is very strange and eccentric behaviour, that a person in Tel-Aviv just ups and does what I do”.

He does not intend to accept conscription [to which he would be liable within a year].”I have soaked up the scenes of the Territories. I saw families being cut off by the fence, children shot a short distance from where I stood and were left handicapped for life. This has become part of the reality of my life. I am still shocked that a soldier of my own age is capable of just pointing a gun at my head and pulling the trigger, even though I was shouting ‘Don’t shoot, nobody is endangering you here!’. Just because he got an order, something like ‘Teach them a lesson, don’t let them demonstrate’. How can I join such an army? The whole feeling of comfort which I had, of security in the routine of daily life, is eroded and gone. The best service I can do for our security – yes, also for our own security – is to continue the struggle for human rights and liberty.

Hell – half an hour from here

A group op of Israeli and Palestinian activists tries to advance towards the western side of the village, to the fence, near where Matan Cohen was wounded. An army force comes by and stops them. The Palestinians are angry, because it is their own lands, but nevertheless seem about to move back.

Shai Carmeli-Pollak (37), film director and central anti-fence activist, refuses to accept the army dictat. He calls the Army Spokesman’ office on his mobile phone, and explains at length that he and his companions are in a completely kosher Palestinian territory, that they do not seek a confrointation, and that it is the soldiers who are breaking the law.

Soon Lieutant-Colonel Avi shows up who authorizes the demonstrators to march another half a kilometre, albeit closely accompanied by himself and his soldiers. Pollak seizes the opportunity to talk to him and explain at length his opinions and world view. “You look at the Palestinians from a completely military angle. You are completely blind to the fact that you are facing civilians” Pollak says.

The Colonel answers patiently. The two continue talking in front of the astonished Palestinians, to whom such an eye-to-eye contact with a military man is inconceivable. A few days later Pollak would insist on conducting a no less profound talk with the soldiers at the checkpoint who refuse passage to everybody except holders of a journalist’s card. Every Thursday evening, the area around the fence construction site is declared a closed military zone, in an effort to prevent the entry of Israeli activists. Pollak insists upon seeing the order – “If you don’t have a proper order, signed by an authorized officer, you cant enforce a Closed Zone” he tells the soldiers. While he is deep in debate with the army detachment, the other demonstrators bypass the checkpoint on foot and continue on their way through the fields.

In the demonstration, he addresses the soldiers who had firmed a cordon blocking the protest procession from reaching the fence: “You are being sent to protect illegal activities. You are not protecting the country, you are protecting the interests of real estate tycoons and building contractors. You have to understand that the state of Israel has signed an intentional treaty which obliges an occupying force to care for the occupied population. Even the Supreme Court accepted some of our arguments”.

Without shouting, but quite determined, he continues a long conversation with the soldiers – a calm, non-confrontational discussion, and explains to them where he thinks they have gone wrong. When a soldier says “we are defending the border” Pollak corrects him: “No, you are not. The border is not here, it is seven kilometres behind you. You are given all these weapons not in order to defend the border, it is to act as the villagers’ prison guards, to cage them in”.

When a soldiers addresses him roughly, Pollak has no hesitation in calling the Army Spokesman’s office again, demanding that the threatening soldiers be calmed down. He says that since starting activities on the West Bank three years ago he had not stopped this talking and discussing. “In the first two years I was very much lecturing and preaching to them, I now realize I was insufferable. Of course, when you see what is going on here you can become crazy with anger. Now I try more to understand how the soldiers perceive the situation. With more talking to them I realize their ignorance is really astonishing. I suggest to them to talk to their commanding officers, to ask for clarifications about why are they sent here and what are they supposed to do, not just to follow orders blindly”.

Until three years ago Pollak was far from being politically active. True, he was leftist, but expressed it mainly through the ballot box. He served as a conscript in a field unit of the Israeli Air Force, studied cinema at Tel-Aviv University, and directed the drama ‘Avramov’. He became deeply involved in Israeli televion, directing especially humorous features such as “Zbeng”., and was elected Chair of the TV Prorducers’ Association. Three years ago he went to Holland to visit his brother Yonathan Pollak (23), a prominent anarchist active both against the fence and for Animal Rights. The younger brother was then deeply involved in a wave of anti-globalisation protests, and Pollak was impressed.

When he came back to Israel the Second Intifada was already raging, but Pollak was still “caught up in the Rabin Peace Euphoria” as he puts it. But there came the day – so he tries to explain what has shaken up his life – when he realized he could no longer believe the news broadcasts and the official claims that “there is nobody to talk to”. “I don’t know why it did not happen before. It is a kind of decision to grow up and not to believe blindly what they tell us. Or to put it another way, I saw angry Palestinians and decided to believe their anger.”

His first active step was to go into the West Bank and join a group which set out to bring food and medicines to villages under closure. “I was confused” he reacalls.” I was still new at this, I hardly knew anybody. I remember near the settlement of Susya [in the South Hebron Hills]] the police stopped us and forbade us to go on. The people of Ta’ayush [Coexistence, a joint group of Palestinian and Jewish activists] decided to just defy the police. It was the first time in my life that I turned against the law, against what a policeman told me to do and not to do. At that moment I was mainly angry at the violation of my civil rights. But when I met the Palestinians and saw under what conditions they had to live, I realized that that was completely the wrong focus. How puny was my complaint at my rights being infringed, compared with the brutal trampling over of their most basic rights.

In the first year of being active he was going out about once in two weeks, but since the anti-fence campaign started his involvement sharply increasead to several times a week. Simultaneoulsy, he continued producing “Zbeng” and various other TV programs. It became a kind of schizophrenia. “It was so difficult to go back from there to Tel-Aviv and change totally your mode of thinking. In Tel-Aviv everybody walks carefree in the street and sits in cafes. True, from time to time there is a suicide bombing in which people are hit, and this is in everybody’s subconsciousness. But over there, the people don’t have this luxury of just walking the street freely. Suddenly, friends call you in the middle of the night, friends from a village, and tell about the army coming in, about detentions, about people being beaten up. half an hour from here it is Hell, and nobody knows about it.”

-Why not choose for your personal life, for your promising professional future?

“When you are young you have a set of beliefs about the world, but gradually reality catches up with you. In that stage most people just resign themselves and say this is the way the world is and you can do nothig about it. But I felt myself waking up from the brainwashing, from being told all the time that we have no partner and there is nobody to talk to. I am surrounded by people who search for ’spirituality’ in all kinds of obscure sects and myths. I am not interested in that at all. What I am doing now – in my view, that is a real way of acquiring some spiritual merit.”

The more he was drawn into demonstrations his Tel-aviv work dwindled. Once a promising director, he had by now almost completely disappeared from the TV scene. “What I was doing were lightweight funny productions. Now, I can hardly conceive of such things. I am still attracted to making films – but films which would be part of what I am doing today, the struggle I am involved in.”

-It is difficult to understand how a young person just gives up what were his cherished dreams.

“I don’t feel that I am giving up a promising life, not at all. Perhaps for a short time I felt that way, when everything I saw was shaking me up into a reality shock. Nowadays, I feel that my daily life includes experiences which previously I could only see in fictional adventure films. Dangerous moments with angry soldiers directing their weapons at me, but also the sudden realization at the checkpoint that suddenly I see the soldiers are willing to listen to me. And the Palestinians who accept me, an Israeli, at their side. Alll this is no less worthwhile than having a career and going abroad in the wolrd. Anyway, I don’t feel that my career has ended. I feel that it has just turned in a different direction.”

From his father, actor Yossi Pollak, he has gotten a small video camera and started to document the event he participates in. At first, it was just as private mementos. About a year ago he got a producer to share the work, and is now in the process of editing for Channel 8 a film about the anti-fence struggle in Bil’in. His camera documents damage to persons and property, meetings with human rights activists, the building of the fence and the changes in its route, and especially the behaviour of the army. When he and his brother were beaten up and detained by the army, Pollak passed on the footage to the Channel 1 News. The filmed testimony proved false the army claims that it was the Pollak brothers who had assaulted the soldiers.

Pollak: “the camera helps set free Palestinian activists who faced severe charges. There were cases when the judge expressed anger with the army and police for having detained these people. When a Palestinian is put on trial, it is him who must prove his innocence much more than the prosecution needs to prove guilt. They can also remain in pre-trial detention for long months. Video footage also helps get events on the ground into media channels which often don’t bother to send their own crews. Sometimes we get to show the general public at what price the security fence is being built, how quick the army is in hurling tear gas grenades at 12-year old girls who protest the theft of their families’ land”.

Pollak himself got beaten up with clubs to the head and body, and schok grenades exploding near him. Also when he is not physically near the fence he is permanently available on the phone: coordinating with the action committees, asking about the situation of his friends in various villages, volunteering to transport international volunteers. With the Palestinians he speaks a far from bad Arabic.

“I have changed totally in these years” he says. “If you have a modicum of sensitivity, when you get to the West Bank and see the situation there is no way you can remain what you were before. It also effected me to become from a vegetarian into a vegan, not to consume any animal products whatsoever.

What I saw also gave a deeper understanding of the animal food industry. I took the decision to implement things which at first sight look like an impossible fantasy. If I would now produce a film, I would obviously choose a script about somebody who chooses to go to the Territories and meet people, a kind of character resembling myself, and make this the Good Guy in the film.”

-These is something very naive about this. You live in the reality which you chose for yourself and decide that you are the Good Guy.

“In our society, to do something just because it is a good deed, a moral act, seems to people like an idiotic motive. The hype is ‘’what do I do in order to succeed in life’. Many Israelis would have liked to ameliorate the situation but are afraid to lose their privileged positions. What is better than to be born into a privileged stratum, not into the group where you are born to be construction workers and street cleaners? The difference is that I can see this comfort as the illusion it is, and I am determined to break down the division. I just don’t accept phrases like ‘you are naive’ and ‘this is how the world is’ as legitimate. I don’t accept that there can be immoral solutions.”

-Do you also feel hurt and outraged about the suicide bombings?

Of course. It is self-evident that I oppose murder and random killings on both sides. Bu there is something very hypocritical about the common attitude to suicide bombings. Life under occupation is life under permanent terrorism. This is something people here are unwilling or unable to understand this. They are fixed on considering themselves as the victims. A man of my age in Israel is born into a reality where his people is oocupying another people, and that he has a role to fulfill in that occupation. I think everybody must ask himself if he wants to go on doing it. They must understand that they are living inside a bubble which will one day blow up in their faces. When I go around the Territories and see how people live, suicide bombings seem to me a logical outcome – notwithstanding the fact that when I am walking the street in Tel-Aviv, I can become the next victim just like everybody else.

The next stop is the home of 50-year old Wagee Burnet of Bil’in Village. He and Pollak embrace warmly several times. Burnet, a building contractor, had worked in Israel for thirty years. He speaks fluent Hebrew and could have been mistaken for an inhabitant of a Jerusalem Region moshav community. Two days after the Intifada broke out, an army bullet hit Burnet’s son, the eldest among ten children. The son was crippled and consigned for the rest of his life to an electric wheelchair, moving slowly through the cobbled alleys of Bil’in. His father was automatically denied entry permit to israel [on the authorities’ theory that anybody who might have a motive for revenge should be barred]. He had no choice but to go back to raising vegetables and herding sheep. A short time ago he suffered a heart attack, but continues to go to demonstrations.

“I know there is no symmetry between the two of us” says Pollak. “What I am permitted and can do, he can’t. Still, I feel that I am getting from him much more than I can give. I look at him with a never-ending astonishment. With all the terrible suffering he passed through, he still has a joy of life, he still can greet us Israelis. We have so much to learn from them, from their intimate knowledge of the land. Instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, we continue to confiscate lands and hold people as prisoners.”

The achievements of Pollak and his friends are minute. They try to get into the consciousness sof the public, but the public just does not want to hear. The humanitarian help which they succeed in delivering, collecting foodstuffs and vital products from the center of the country to the villages, is far from answering all needs. The fence is being built on and on, closing down upon more and more villages. many activists have been eroded and burned out during the years, and new ones took their place. Sometimes, only a handful of Israelis arrive at the demonstrations, and they must divide themselves among different villages.

“The achievements are very small” agrees Pollak. “Sometimes I get up in the morning and tell myself ‘I am tired, worn out, totally broken down I won’t go today’. But in the end I do go. I can’t do otherwise, especially when I know that only ten activists, or even less, will be coming”.

After two days of going to Bil’in and meetings with Palestinian activists, Pollak really seems worn out, Still, he continues answering his mobile phone which does not cease ringing. ” As long as I am an Israeli and I live here, I can’t be at peace with myself if I don’t do something against the occupation. It might be that I will have to do this for life, I hope I will always have the strength to carry on”.

Eleven criminal charges

At the entrance to Budrus Village Leila Mosinzon (31) pulls out a big kerchief and covers her hair.

She hides her long hair, as the Palestinian women do. With the long skirt over her jeans and the blue sweatshirt above, she could easily be mistaken for a Palestinian girl. She says she is tying the mandil over her hair in order to spare the village women the discomfort they feel when some Israeli and international women demonstrators arrive in the village wearing revealing clothes.

In the home of Sudkiya and Ahmed Abd-el-Rahim and their 15 children, at the village center, she is received with kisses and embraces and immediately becomes a virtual member of the family. In the inner courtyard of the poor house everybody crowds around her, the children waiting impatiently their turn to come and kiss her.

For a moment it is difficult to recognize the determined activist who throughout the car drive here spoke with such ideological ferocity about the iniquities of the occupation. For a moment she drops down the volume, asks questions and answers them delicately with a shining happy face.

Mosinzon, like Pollak, was born at Jaffa, in a mixed Jewish-Arab environment. Her mother is Mizrahi, originating from an Arab country. her father is Ashkenazi [European], whose parents rejected their daughter-in-law.

When she was eight years old she and her younger brother were separated from their parental home and taken to live with their grandparents. “I grew up in a racist home, my grandfather used to say: ‘The only good Arab is a dead Arab.’

For years I suffered physically and mentally, we were forbidden to see out biological parents. At the age of seventeen I ran away from home together with my dog. I tried to tell my schoolteacher how much I was suffering, she just did not believe me. It was just like now, when I come back from the Territories and try to tell what I saw and people don’t want to hear. They can’t face the truth.

When I came the first time to a demonstration and the army started shooting, I felt the helplessness of the Palestinians and it reminded me of my own helplessness as a small girl. When I stand in front of the soldiers’ guns I tell myself that perhaps due to me being there somebody else avoided being hurt, that is is a kind of tikkun (redemption).”

She is active in the West Bank as a kind of independent activist. She participates in the actions of most organized groups, but in a very personal and emotional way.

After being conscripted she was assigned to serve as teacher in an impoverished town in the north. Afterwards she went on a long trek abroad, and on her return she worked at a lot of passing jobs, from waitress at a restaurant to office cleaner.

Already then she was involved in actions for animals and volunteered in Ta’ayush and Amnesty International. She says she was a rather passive activist until the campaign at Yanun Village three years ago. The settlers of Ithamar constantly threatened, harassed and assaulted the tiny village’s 25 families, until they finally ran away in fear. She was among the activists who came to spend the night in the Palestinians’ homes until they felt safe enough to come back and re-inhabit their village. She had spent there five nights in all, and with one of the families she established a contact which changed everything for her.

Mosinzon traveled to Germany to take part in a Peace Now sponsored meeting between Israelis and Palestinians. From there she went on to Japan at her own expense, to collect funds for a Yanun family whose two daughters were born with handicapped hands and needed a complicated and expensive treatment.

When the anti-fence demonstrations started she joined in. Since then, in the past three years, she is only rarely working – finding a passing job and remaining in it just long enough to finance food, travelling expenses and a mobile phone. She has given up having an apartment of her own, and is wandering between the homes of friends in Jerusalem to those of Palestinian families in the villages, especially the Budrus family which virtually adopted her.

She sold olive oil on behalf of Mes’ha families who could not leave their village because of the army road-blocks, and passed the money on to them. She organized children’s summer camps in seven Palestinian villages and got friends who are circus performers to come and teach the children some of their tricks. She was beaten up, hit directly by a gas grenade, detained ten times and ordered to keep away from the fence and always came back. She got charged with eleven criminal charges of “disorderly behaviour” and “assaulting soldiers”, and the prosecution insists upon sending her behind bars.

Next month she will probably start serving a three-month term under a plea bargain. You can hardly ever find her calm or moderate. She is beautiful, emotional, hot-headed, suspicious towards the media and towards anybody who sees things differently.

“Of course I don’t want to go to prison, like I don’t want to get shot at during demonstrations” she says. “Often, I am very afraid in demonstrations because of the violence, but I know why I am there. I am not willing to close my eyes like the Germans closed their eyes in the Nazi period. I am not willing to stay silent when people have to wait long at the checkpoint while I can pass freely”.

She is not motivated by a very well-organized ideology, but by a personal feeling of moral responsibility. She had also volunteered and helped charity organizations collecting food for the poor inside Israel.When she still tries to talk ideology, what comes out seems a too concentrated mixture or various creeds: “Our society produces violence and then solves it with another forest cut down and another shopping center going up. The overdraft in the bank continues to grow because we don’t love ourselves and therefore we must consume more and more things which we don’t really need. And we don’t care if the milk we drink comes from a cow who suffers hell in an industrialized farm. What do we care about homeless people sleeping in our streets? We have created an alienated society. I want to break down that alienation, to cross the fences which surround the human heart.”.

Mosinzon came to know the Budrus family when she organized a summer camp in the village. “They know I have nothing to give them except to come and sit down with them and laugh together with the children with whom I fell in love and who have opened widely my heart. Visiting here returns me to myself, to my will, to nature. They are happy that I am there, and this gives me the feeling of a real family which I never had before.

In order to provide some economic help to the family Mosinzon got together with a friend who works at an ecological farm. The two of them organized a kind of workshop at the village, to let Israelis study farming and ecological agriculture at a plot belonging to a relative of the family. The Israeli pupils came seven times to Budrus, with each of them paying 50 Shekels per lesson which were given to the family and doing such work as removing stones from the plot.

At stormy periods she avoids visiting the family, for fear that her presence would anger the army and cause them harm. Two years ago, she tells, they got part of their land confiscated for the fence and 50 of their olive trees were uprooted. About a month ago Sudkia was hurt by rubber bullets when soldiers came to arrest her brother. “When Sudkiya was hurt I was on my way to a social event in Jerusalem. When I heard it I started shaking in my whole body and fell down unconscious. l decide that it might be more harmful when I am not with them. I devote to them whatever I have to give.I love them. They are close to the land, close to each other. I am here because I adopted and was adopted by a family. Our contact is without politics, and without either arrogance or guilt feeling.”

Settlers Attack

1. Soldiers Beat Non-violent Demonstrators, Arrest Three
2. Settlers Attack
3. Mary’s Journal: Daily Life in Tel Rumeida
4. Corporate Complicity in the Ethnic Cleansing of the Jordan Valley
5. Anamaria’s Journal: Not Welcome Anymore
6. Update on Nablus Incursions
7. Bil’in Demonstration Calls For Boycott of Israeli Products
8. Hamas forms new security branch
__________________________

1. Soldiers Beat Non-violent Demonstrators, Arrest Three
April 22nd, 2006

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/22/soldiers-beat-non-violent-demonstrators-arrest-three/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

At-Tuwani, South Hebron Hills-
Israeli Occupation Forces beat non-violent Palestinian, international, and Israeli demonstrators this morning after declaring the area a Closed Military Zone. No map of the Closed Military Zone was ever shown to the protestors.

At-Tuwani villagers, Palestinian activists, Christian Peacemaker Team members, Operation Dove members, and Israeli activists from Ta’ayush were protesting against the Israeli authorities’ plan to build an 80cm ‘security’ wall along one side of bypass route 317.

An Israeli high court case appealing against the wall is currently in process. Despite this, construction continues further along the road towards Susiya.

Yehuda Golan, a retired Brigadier General with 31 years of service in the Israeli military and a member of the Council for Peace and Security, said, “I do not have a shadow of a doubt that this is not an act of security. This is a wrongful and irresponsible use of the term ‘security’ for other objectives.”

The demonstration began this morning at about 10:30am when demonstrators were confronted in At-Tuwani, a village south of Hebron, by about 30 Israeli soldiers, Border Police, and Special Forces. The protestors were blocked by police and jeeps, but went around them and reached bypass road 317.

The police then told the demonstrators that they could stay along the road as long as they didn’t block it. The demonstrators obliged and stood off the road along the sides.

After 20 minutes the police told the crowd that they had to go back. The police asked the Palestinians where they were from, and told them they had to return to their homes.

A few minutes later the police started pulling people off the side of the road to arrest them. They grabbed two Israelis first, and then a Palestinian from At-Tuwani, Hafiz Haraymi.

As the police started to drag Hafiz away his 75 year-old mother tried to prevent the arrest by getting in between Hafiz and the police with members of the Christian Peacemakers Team. Soldiers and police beat everyone away, shoving Hafiz’s mother to the ground several times and stepping on her stomach. She had to be evacuated to the hospital. Hafiz was taken to a jeep and handcuffed.

Activists stayed to wait for news and were told Hafiz was arrested for hitting soldiers with a stick. Video footage shows that he did not, and it will be aired on Channel 1 in Israel this evening.

For more information contact:
Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron- 02 222 84 85

A report on the impact of the wall can be found at www.cpt.org/hebron/hebron.php

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2. Settlers Attack
April 23rd, 2006

22 April- A gang of 30 militant Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian grocery shop today, and assaulted the owner’s son and several others.

The settlers flung sharpened metal bars as “spears” through the open doorway smashing produce jars and knocking goods from the shelves. They also threw stones, punched and kicked a group of Palestinian children playing just outside, and assaulted Radi Abu Aeshah (16) who is the owner’s son.

International Human Rights workers were also attacked when they stood between the shop-front and the gang. The settlers only stopped when confronted by soldiers from the Israeli Army. The gang, composed of teenagers and older boys all in Orthodox Jewish dress of white shirts, black pants, and skull-caps and led by an adult man, then moved off into a near-by Palestinian olive grove, where several Palestinian families live.

Tension had been building in Tel Rumeida all afternoon. Settler children spat at, and verbally abused human rights workers in the mid afternoon. A group of seven teenagers then threatened the same workers, and were overheard complaining that they were “not enough,” to make a successful attack. The teenagers, who were unaware some of the HRWs spoke Hebrew, said they would meet at the home of Baruch Marzell, founder of the ultra-extremist Chayil Party (Jewish National Front) to make a plan.

Some hours later, at approximately 3:45pm, the gang marched through Shuhada Street, in the old city near the illegal settlement of Beit Hadassa. They then turned left just before the Army checkpoint and marched up the hill where they attempted to attack some human rights workers who had become concerned for local Palestinians’ safety. The HRWs were backed up against a wall and only saved by the intervention of a squad of Israeli soldiers who happened to be patrolling at the time. The gang continued up the hill, where the attack on the shop, owned by Hassin Abu Aeshah, took place.

The settlers have a long history of violence and intimidation against the Palestinian population of Hebron, but the Passover holiday period has seen a dramatic rise in the number and ferocity of their attacks. During the weeks around Passover, the settlers receive thousands of visitors, some of whom join-in attacks on Palestinians, Palestinian property, and the HRWs who attempt to protect them. Attacks have become common. HRWs report an average of two to three attacks occur each week in Tel Rumeida. Today’s attack was the third such organized attack to occur on Shabbat.

For more information:
Roger 059 994 3157
Tom 054 236 3265

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3. Mary’s Journal: Daily Life in Tel Rumeida
April 23rd, 2006

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/23/marys-journal-daily-life-in-tel-rumeida/

Everyday but Friday, we are out on the street watching as children go to school, which starts at 7.45am. It’s usually quiet, though today about 15 visiting settlers attacked Anna and BJ and 3 EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel) people. They are not badly hurt (one was kicked and another hit on the foot by a stone) and are now still at the police station making a complaint.

I went down to Shuhada street to see them and on the way back called at the house of a doctor. It has been Passover holiday and there was a closed military zone for three days. During that time, soldiers who often use his roof for surveillance hung an Israeli flag from his roof. They went into the kitchen of his house, knocked everything off the bench and attached the bottom of the flag to his kitchen window. They also abused his niece who was studying in the house and damaged the desk she was using.

When I saw the flag yesterday, it seemed like the episode in the film “Sound of Music”, when Captain von Trapp comes home from his honeymoon and finds the swastika hanging from his house! However, the doctor does not have the luxury of pulling the flag down. He would be arrested! I approached a soldier outside the doctor’s house and said the flag should not be there. Baruch Marzel (stood for the Knesset and didn’t get a quota) and two other settlers came past and spoke to the soldier. They called me Nazi etc, which is nothing new. They yelled at me and I probably yelled back! One came up really close threatening but doing nothing. I told the soldier he should be intervening. I said “It is your job to protect this settler from me”! But he obviously didn’t think that the settler needed protecting and nor did I! I usually ignore settlers but was cheesed off about the flag and knew that I was safe. An officer I like was just up the road in his jeep. He had the door open and asked me what was the matter. I told him about the Israeli flag. He didn’t seem to think it mattered. He said that I was lucky with these soldiers because I caused trouble and others might not put up with that. I said that other soldiers might like me too. We decided to agree that we liked each other but didn’t like what each other did!

So today, when I came home, after tea and very nice slice with the doctor and his wife, I rang Neta of ISM to check about the law. I can’t do anything about the flag legally but did ring the DCOs office about. I don’t expect much because I think that the nice officer is from that office. The young women who answer the telephone there are always very nice to me. And I am always polite and thank them nicely. And sometimes I get the result I want! I also had my breakfast of cold fried egg in pita bread and heated up coffee. Then I started writing this. We have a new desk top computer, with internet, so I played a few games too.

At 12.30pm, Andy and I went out to watch children coming home from school. I accompanied two small Abu Aeshah boys up to the soldier, outside the Tel Rumeida settlement. The soldier wanted to watch me instead of the children. But I finally convinced him that I would go no further if he would watch the kids. There were settlers out, which scares the children, but there was no trouble. I pray that the day will come when they feel safe enough to walk rather than run the last stretch. I waited for Samir Abu Aeshah until 2.00pm but he must have been visiting today. Then Andy and I went down through the checkpoint to buy some food. I bought bread, bananas, tomatoes, dates, walnuts and sausage for the cat. By this time it was getting rather hot. So I came inside and Anna and BJ returned from the police station.

I had a call from a man from Al Jazeera wanting to talk to Anna about the attack. He was with a man from Reuters and they were held up at the checkpoint. I went there with Anna. On the way, a young Palestinian man said “You are needed at the checkpoint”! Border police were detaining all the men and checking their ID cards. This has become a daily event during the Passover holidays! I had thought that my being there made a difference and the newsman confirmed this. They could understand what the border police said to each other when I arrived. Nobody is held more than 15 minutes after I get there! But it may be an hour otherwise. So Anna came back with the newsmen and I stayed at the checkpoint for nearly 2 1/2 hours until the border police left. I had a call from a woman at Al Jazeera. She wanted to give me her email so I decided to be cheeky. I borrowed the pen that the border policeman was using to write down IDs. I think he was too bemused to object. Then home and a bit more typing.

Postscript. Two days later the Israeli flag was removed!!
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4. Corporate Complicity in the Ethnic Cleansing of the Jordan Valley
By Tom
April 23rd, 2006

Photos soon at: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/23/corporate-complicity-in-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-the-jordan-valley/

I was convinced by a friend to take a trip to the Jordan Valley this week. This is my fourth trip to Palestine but I have never visited the region and have heard relatively little about it. This is symptomatic of the condition of the valley, it is largely forgotten by the international community and is rarely visited. This isolation serves the Israeli state’s aim of annexation and ethnic cleansing of the valley.

I travelled to the Jordan valley from Ramallah. Ramallah’s cosmopolitan atmosphere contrasts starkly with the rural isolation of the valley just 45 minutes away. The valley is impossible for most Palestinians to travel to. Only Palestinians who were born in and live in the valley have ID to travel through the checkpoint. Others must apply for a permit from the army local administration (DCO). One of my Palestinian travelling companions, a worker with a local NGO, was detained at the checkpoint at the entrance to the valley while soldiers checked her permit.

As we drove through the valley toward Al Jiftlik we saw neatly cultivated fields on either side of the road, thousands of Dunums of palm trees and commercial crops like tomatoes, peppers and herbs. Scores of greenhouses stretched along the road past the illegal settlement of Mekhora. Many of the greenhouses were neighbored by packing houses owned by Carmel Agrexco.

Carmel Agrexco (www.agrexco.com) is a 75% Israeli state owned company dealing with 70% of the exports of settler fresh produce from the West Bank. A majority of their goods come from the Jordan Valley. They are able to transport their produce from packing houses in the valley to European markets within 24 hours and have distribution depots in most countries in Europe. They distribute their produce to most major supermarket chains in the UK, but like the Jordan Valley their name is not widely known.

The price of a box of tomatoes bought from the Carmel Agrexco is the suffering of the Palestinian population of the Jordan Valley. From 1967 Israel has sought to establish settlements in the valley and deprive the Palestinians of access to the land. In 2006 6 400 settlers live in 13 illegal settlements in the valley and 52 000 Palestinians. 95% of the land is controlled by the settlers who also control 98% of the water.

Palestinians live in 36 villages which are not permitted to expand. In the
Israeli controlled areas the building of new structures is not permitted and repairs on existing structures are also forbidden. These building regulations are enforced by demolitions of structures which the IDF deem ‘illegal’.

Agriculture in the valley is being strangled by the expansion of settlements and by the fact that all Palestinian produce grown in the valley must go through Tayasir checkpoint to reach markets in the rest of Palestine.

Farmers must pay middlemen to take their produce to the checkpoint, be subjected to humiliating searches by the IDF, transfer the goods to another vehicle on the other side of the checkpoint before driving it to the market.

This whole process takes around eight hours or more and drives down profit for farmers making farming barely financially viable. The only other alternative is to work as an uncontracted, casual day labourer on one of the illegal settlements for, on average, 40-50 shekels a day on land stolen from Palestinians.

Carmel Agrexco gave disclosure in a UK court case to the effect that they
have packing houses in the illegal Israeli settlements of Mekhora, Mehola,
Argaman, Ro’I, Hamra, Gaddid and Bet Ha Arava in the Jordan Valley. These settlement are making a fortune out of the suffering of the local
Palestinian population. An international campaign is needed to challenge
Carmel Agrexco and show that the international community will not accept the ethnic cleansing of the Valley

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5. Anamaria’s Journal: Not Welcome Anymore
April 22nd, 2006

I arrived at the airport 4 hours before take off. I was through check in after just one hour and no problems. But when I went through passport control, the woman there looked at the computer screen and went away with my passport. She came back a few minutes later with 2 other women and asked me to follow them.

A man joined them and asked me where I have been, and what I have been doing. I answered the usual, and they asked no more. Then I was taken to a room, where I had to place my baggage on a table. Then they told me that they thought there was a bomb in it. Now they had control over everything in my bags, and also over my body. There were 7 people in the room to perform this action.

I was taken into a small dressing room, where one of the women examined my body, first with her hands, close and unpleasant, then with an instrument. It was beeping at my chest because of some metal in my bra. So I lifted up my shirt and bra to the shoulders and rolled down my pants and underwear. And I yelled, “Are you happy now? Do you like me? Are you satisfied? Enjoy it now, because I won’t do it again!” They seemed sheepish, but they searched my trousers and finished that part.

When I came out again they looked through all of my baggage. I had some maps and information from the UN and the booklet “Truth Against Truth, A Completely Different Look at the Israeli-Palestine Conflict.” One of the female police read some of it. Then they wanted to search my backpack without me watching, but I refused to leave and told them that I did not trust them with my things.

One of the men got really angry and shouted that if I did not cooperate they would have the police arrest me, put me in prison, hold me back so I would not catch the flight etc. I said, “Good. I don’t care, because I love to be here. Now I am your problem.” Once more the man was shouting all the same stuff and said that I could stay there until I was ready. I waited a half hour and then they came back to look through everything again.

I was escorted to the plane few minutes before take off. But not before one of the women said that I was not welcome in Israel any more.

Anamaria
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6. Update on Nablus Incursions
April 22nd, 2006

Today, April 22nd, the army invaded Nablus again, which they have done almost everyday since last Monday, evacuating soldiers in houses that they have occupied. Today 5 people were hit with rubber bullets, one of them below the eye. One of them was a reporter with Reuters, Ashraf Sharwis, who was filming an armoured vehicle the open, but far from the kids throwing stones. They hit him with a rubber bullet in the leg, and he moved closer to the TV jeep but continued to film. Then they shot him again in the shoulder and he was evacuated in an ambulance. At the same time (another shot or the same bullet, I don’t know) hit a very young kid that was standing next to the reporters and ambulance and was not throwing stones. I would estimate his age is about 11 or 12 years old.

Lauren, ISM Nablus
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7. Bil’in Demonstration Calls For Boycott of Israeli Products
April 22nd, 2006

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/22/bil%e2%80%99in-demonstration-calls-for-boycott-of-israeli-products/

Today’s weekly Bil’in demonstration was themed around the boycott of Israeli products. Demonstrators carried signs calling for a boycott, and the support of Palestinian products. Packages of Israeli snacks and drinks were also attached to the placards with large X signs crossed through them.

The demonstration approached the gate in the apartheid fence, singing and chanting. As always, Palestinians, Israelis and internationals participated together. Behind the gate was stationed two Border Police jeeps upon which several Israeli soldiers stood menacingly with riot shields, swinging their solid wooden clubs at us. Some of us got the impression that they were a new unit of soldiers since we didn’t recognize any of them and they were acting extremely aggressive, in contrast to last week’s Bil’in demonstration (although Palestinians from the village later told us they were not new).

We continued to sing and chant against the Wall and the occupation, banging stones in rhythm on the metal gate. Several of the boxes and packages of Israeli products were set alight in a symbolic act of refusal to cooperate with the occupation. After this, attempts were made to open the illegal, apartheid barrier gate, even while the soldiers beat us with their clubs, causing several injuries. Palestinians, Israelis and internationals shook the gate until it swung open. Some damage was also caused to the gate as its dislocation was attempted for a short while. Throughout all this, the soldiers were becoming more and more aggressive and violent toward the demonstrators.

After the gate was swung back, the demonstration started regrouping, singing and chanting non-violently as usual. Soon after this, the soldiers threw a sound grenade at the unarmed crowd, causing it to retreat swiftly. The reaction to this from some of the village shabab (young people) was to fight back with stones, pelting the Border Police jeeps with stones as they opened up on them with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets. This had the effect of making them retreat into their jeeps, and gave the Palestinian demonstrators a chance to retreat to a safe distance to avoid arrests. Israelis and internationals moved out of the way to avoid the crossfire. The activists moved in to perform a sit-in on the road when the exchange died down and the soldiers emerged from their jeeps en-mass, seemingly to makes arrests. They beat several of the demonstrators, causing many painful injuries and nearly breaking the hand of Abdullah Abu-Rahme, the coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee.

Three Israelis and one Palestinian (Mohammed Khatib from the Popular Committee) were arrested and released later in the day.

Photos from the AP newswire (online temporarily):
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060421/481/jrl12704211437
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060421/481/jrl12404211437
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060421/481/jrl12204211439
news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060421/481/jrl12504211428

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8. Hamas forms new security branch
April 23rd, 2006
By Laila el-Haddad
http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/

Something strange is happening in Gaza.

Municipality workers are actually working.

The streets seem a bit cleaner.

And for once, I actually saw a policeman arresting a criminal in a dramatic pick-up the other day, much to the chagrin of his gang, who stoned and shot at the police car (futilely), and the “oohs” and “aahs” of onlookers (including myself).

In Gaza, we have become accustomed to the rule of law-lessness. And people are sick of it-in fact 84% according to a recent poll, place internal security as their number priority.

This is not to say that gangs and armed gunmen somehow roam the streets as in some bad Western, as the mainstream media would make it seem. But for sure, it is brawn and bullets that win the day, and decide everything from family disputes to basic criminal proceedings.

Last week, there was a “reverse honor crime” or sorts. A man was found murdered in Gaza City after being accused of molesting a young girl (reverse, I say, because usually it works the other way around). The crime was immediately decried by local human rights organizations and people alike.

But when there is no one around to enforce the law-or rather, no one ABLE to enforce the law, other than verbal condemnations, there is little else that can be done. If the accused was jailed, his family would have inevitably intervened, hiring gunmen to break him out or taking it out against another member of his family. It’s a vicious cycle. Citizens don’t feel accountable and law enforcers are impotent.

This is where Hamas’s power of moral suasion comes into play. I’ve seen it at work in areas such as Dair al-balah, which was spared the bloody clan disputes that areas of such as Khan Yunis and Beit Lahiya suffered when the Hamas-elected Municipality leader intervened.

Of course, they have no magic wand, but they seem very effective at what they do-and their networks and ability to “talk” to people as “one of the people” resonates well.

The bigger problem is what do you do when the law enforcers themselves are the ones breaking the law?

Last week 50 masked gunmen belonging to the preventive security forces blockaded off the main street between northern and southern Gaza demanding their wages, as they have been accustomed to doing over the past few years (though the mass media would have us assume otherwise, citing the incident as “the first sign” of frustration with the new government.)

They are the same old group that has always made trouble, whether for Mahmud Abbas or Ismail Haniya, and are effectively supported by Mohammad Dahalan, which he fondly refers to in his inner circles as “little army”. Hamas and others accuse them of being a “minority” stirring trouble to attempt and speed the downfall of the new government and “score political points”.

Many of them belong to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (AMB), Fateh’s rogue offshoot.

As I’ve mentioned before, this group poses one of the biggest security challenges to Hamas. They are loyal to Fateh but seemingly answerable to no one, and a contingent of them are supported by very strong figures who want nothing else but to see this new government fail.

So what is Hamas to do? For one, form their own security force.

Yesterday, the new Minister of the Interior, Saeed Siyam, held a press conference in Gaza’s Omari Mosque in the old city (an interesting choice-the oldest mosque in Gaza, and a place for the “masses”), in which he announced the formation of a new armed “operational force” headed by Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) leader Jamal Samhadana-a brawny, bearded fellow constantly surrounded by a posse of heavily armed body guards (whom I met once), and wanted by Israel for masterminding several of the highest-profile bombings of the intifada.

The all-volunteer Force would also consist of a police arm with thousands of members of armed groups such as the AMB, PRC, and Izz-i-deen al-Qassam brigades direcly subordinate to him. As if this isn’t confusing enough, this move was meant to counter Mahmud Abbas’s recent presidential order appointing Rashid Abu Shbak, former chief of preventive security in the Strip, as head of “Internal Security” which is a new entity that unites the interior ministry’s security agencies and ensures they remain under Abbas’s rule.

Have I lost you yet?

The Israeli press was quick to condemn the move ala “wanted militant to head PA police”.

However, this is probably one of the smartest moves Hamas could make during this stage.

Why? For one, the Samhadana family is one of the most powerful clans of southern Gaza. By appointing one of their own (who also happens of course to be the leader of the PRC) as director general of the police forces in the Interior Ministry, and absorbing members of the PRC and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades-who account for two of the most volatile factions in Gaza, into the new force, Hamas is effectively ensuring their allegiance and making them “keepers of the Street” rather than “keepers of the clan”. They all pledged to fight (the word was more like “crush”) lawlessness and crime.

What about the money for wages? Well, simple. There ARE no wages. The new force is an all volunteer one, so the members are working for status and ideals rather that money (of course, at some point, there will be mouths to feed).

Of course, things could always backfire-and its not hard to see how, especially since Abbas does not recognize the new force, and factions have pledged to make a similar such force unsuccessfully in the past. But I think for the time being, it is a very interesting “think outside the box” move by Hamas, especially since it was official.

As usual, time will tell whether it will truly succeed in ensuring safety and security for Palestinian citizens or not.

Militant Settlers Attack 79 Year Old Human Rights Worker in Hebron

1. Militant Settlers Attack 79 Year Old Human Rights Worker in Hebron
2. Apartheid “Closed Military Zone” In Hebron
3. Stanford Daily: “Activists describe West Bank violence”
4. Mansour’s Journal: Yesterday I was denied entry to my village Biddu
5. Jenka’s Journal: The City of Jenin
6. New House Occupations in Nablus
7. ISM Interview on Pacifica Radio Flashpoints
8. Robert Novak: Palestinian Christians Threatened In Aboud
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1. Militant Settlers Attack 79 Year Old Human Rights Worker in Hebron
April 20th, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Militant supporters of the illegal settlers of Hebron attacked Human Rights Workers (HRWs), Palestinian teachers and children at approximately 7:40 this morning.

The small team of HRWs were on the street this morning ready to protect Palestinian children on their way to school. Attacks on Palestinian children are common, and tension in the area has been high during the Passover holiday period, when the settlers receive thousands of visitors who support their extreme militant actions.

While the HRW team waited for the children, a bus from Jerusalem full of young settler supporters arrived at the end of the street. About 15, aged in their late teens or early twenties got off the bus and gathered at the end of the street. Within minutes they walked up the street, heading for the HRWs and some Palestinian teachers and children.

They started to throw stones, and yelled “We’re going to kill you!” A Danish camerman from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) started to film, and immediately became a target for the settler group. The cameraman ran away. The settler group then attacked the other human rights workers, including Sister Anne Montgomery (who will be 80 in November) a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). She was stoned, as were Tore (29) from Norway, and Karien (46) from Germany. Soldiers from the Israeli Army watched the entire incident and made no attempt to intervene.

Despite being attacked, the HRWs managed to protect two Palestinian teachers and three children who were on their way to the nearby school, which is next door to the settlement. The Palestinians were able to shelter on the first floor of a nearby building.

The attack finally stopped when the police arrived, and the attackers ran back to the settlement. All the HRWs have bruises from kicks, punches, and stones. Anna (21) a Swedish woman from the ISM was wounded by a stone. The HRWs have reported the incident to the police, but if past experience is a guide, the police are unlikely to take effective action against this unprovoked attack.

For more information:

Anna (ISM witness): 054-3045205
ISM Media Office: 02-2971824

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2. Apartheid “Closed Military Zone” In Hebron
April 19th, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Over Passover holiday, under the guise of a “Closed Military Zone” (CMZ) the Israeli authorities in Hebron have been excluding Palestinians and international Human Rights Workers (HRWs) from the streets of the Old City and Tel Rumeida areas.

The CMZ order has been selectively applied against Palestinians and HRWs since the Passover holidays started, while Israeli settlers in the area and thousands of Israelis visiting the settlements in the Old City and Tel Rumeida areas have been allowed to walk freely around the H2 area without being subject to the military closure, making the CMZ in effect an apartheid order.

From the rooftop of their enforced confinement in their apartment in the Tel Rumeida area, HRWs have witnessed soldiers pointing their rifles at Palestinian children to drive them indoors, when they had come outside to play football. Palestinians in general have been largely forced off the streets.

Two days ago, HRWs had been physically removed from the Tel Rumeida by the military as they cleared the street for the settler-supporting Israeli visitors. At 7am on th 19th of April, the order was said by the military to have been extended until an undisclosed date. However, soldiers have yet to produce a copy of this alleged new order.

For a copy of the previously issued CMZ order, see palsolidarity.org

For more information:

Anna: 054 304 5205
ISM media office: 02 297 1824 or 057 572 0754

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3. Stanford Daily: “Activists describe West Bank violence”
April 20th, 2006

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/20/stanford-daily-activists-describe-west-bank-violence/

By Katherine Cox
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
from The Stanford Daily (http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=20094&repository=0001_article)

Two young human rights activists spoke last night about the Palestinian population of Tel Rumeida, Hebron, a West Bank neighborhood that also contains some of what were considered the most fanatical Israeli settlements. The event’s sponsor, Stanford’s Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME), brought the co-founders of a fledgling human rights project stationed in Tel Rumeida, 24-year-old Chelli Stanley and 35-year-old John Harmer, to campus as the group observes Palestinian Awareness Month.

The lecture, entitled “Tel Rumeida: Life Under the Occupation,” was the first in a series of related events extending into early May. Yesterday’s lecture — which also featured footage captured by project volunteers in the neighborhood — precedes a second lecture on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. by Palestine’s Deputy Ambassador to the U.N. Riyad Mansour in Cubberley Auditorium.

Stanley, originally from Maine, is a sociologist whose vision to establish the first permanent international presence in the neighborhood coincided with that of artist John Harmer. Harmer’s previous work examined the military industrial complex through sculpture.

Yesterday’s joint lecture, accompanied by a slide presentation, enumerated the ways in which the speakers said Palestinian residents of Tel Rumeida were terrorized — witnessed and documented by the speakers — by two bordering settler communities. The speakers related anecdotes of torture and abuse.
“One morning, a Palestinian boy was leaving to go to school and was surrounded by five adult male settlers, one of which put a battery operated power drill to his chest,” Stanley said. “This is a tactic they’ve been using against the children in the neighborhood.”

The boy survived and was not hospitalized, but the psychological impact of the act, Stanley suggested, breeds fear in the neighborhood’s dwindling Palestinian population.

Another story detailed the abuse of a small child.

“A female Israeli settler used a rock to pry open a young Palestinian boy’s mouth. She used the rock to grind down the child’s molars,” Stanley said.

The speakers named what they called the settlers’ other staple methods of abuse. They allegedly included stoning, arson, beatings, destruction of property and violence inflicted by even young Israeli children.

“Israeli settlers have found a loophole in the law that states that no one under the age of 12 can be held responsible for their actions. The attacks that appear in the most visible areas are often initiated by very young boys and girls,” Harmer said.

He explained that though many of the attacks are executed by children who are exempt from the law, violence perpetrated by adult men and women settlers is common and is in no way impeded by the local Israeli police and military.

In fact — the speakers suggested — the oppression Palestinians face in Tel Rumeida is exacerbated by the favoritism of the local Israeli military presence. The activist group reports that, though soldiers are bound by law to protect every individual in the neighborhood, violence against Palestinian residents is apparently openly tolerated.

To illustrate this point, Stanley related a tragedy in which a Palestinian woman lost two unborn twins during an attack by settlers. According to Stanley, the woman shouted repeatedly for help to nearby soldiers to no avail, and finally resorted to calling the Israeli police. Her son was attacked while the police refused to come to her home. Finally, after hearing the death threats screamed over the phone, the police arrived after a long delay. The woman later miscarried both of her twins and was forced to take a long detour around hostile settlements to reach a hospital.

Harmer claimed that the Israeli police in this area — who have come under fire from Israeli officials for their discrimination of Palestinians — often hang up on Arabic callers before their complaints or emergencies are relayed.

Both speakers began visiting Tel Rumeida in 2005, where they were immediately exposed to the daily life of local Palestinians. The speakers believed their observations warranted documenting, so throughout 2005 the activists filmed incidents of violence which will be compiled into a documentary in two to three months. Many of the clips are available on the Project’s Web site, which allows viewers to download the materially freely.

During their stay in Tel Rumeida, Stanley, Harmer and other international human rights workers acted as human shields against assailants, accompanying Palestinians through the streets and attempting to ward off attacks.

“We get in between the settler and the person being attacked. We scream at them and videotape the attack. With these settlers we know that we’re not going to stop the violence so we just try to redirect the attacks on ourselves,” Stanley said.

Stanford was just one stop along a circuit of destinations for Stanley and Harmer, who are touring the United States to raise funds for the Tel Rumeida Project and recruit new volunteers. The project seeks to raise $20,000 in the United States, which will be matched by a human rights agency. Most of the funds will go toward buying new video cameras for the project.

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4. Mansour’s Journal: Yesterday I was denied entry to my village Biddu
April 19th, 2006

Where should we go then?

After twenty days of being away from my family, I decided to go and spend two days with them. (By the way, my work is in Ramallah city and my village is 30 minutes away to the south of it)

A few weeks ago, the Israeli government closed Qalandia check point in the face of West Bank Palestinians.

Now we have to seek alternative roads to our homes and families.

I went by a road that passes through Al Jib village. Four Israeli border police stopped me on my way and asked for my ID, but after that I would have to go through two gates to reach the services that only carry the Israeli plates.

I showed the soldiers my ID and they started their interrogation: What’s your name? Where are you going? What were you doing in Ramallah? etc. At the end they gave me my ID, and they asked me IF I HAVE A PERMISSION to my village, which I don’t have because I spent time in prison 3 years ago.

All of that was okay to me, but the strange thing is that their answer was that I am forbidden to cross to my village. I was denied entry to my village. That’s what I never expected to happen to us. They confiscate our land, imprison us with their Apartheid wall, and now deny us entry to our own homes and village.

Where should we go?

-Mansour Mansour

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5. Jenka’s Journal: The City of Jenin
April 20th, 2006

I woke up two days ago to the news that a Palestinian had blown himself up in Tel Aviv, killing eight Israelis and himself, at the bus station. I thought, as I always do, of the victims…..limbs torn apart, the children crying, ambulances rushing to the scene….so terrible, terrible, terrible…….

It reminded me of a similar scene in Gaza last week, a family bombed in their home by an Israeli air strike….a little girl’s body in pieces, the rest of the family with limbs blown off……

The only difference is: that attack never made the American news.

Israeli writer Gideon Levy wrote a powerful article about it:
www.imemc.org/content/view/18108/1/

He says: “The continuing imprisonment of besieged Gaza is precisely the opposite policy that should be applied to serve Israeli interests. The current policy only strengthens support for the Hamas, just like the terror attacks within Israel always strengthen the Israeli right. A nation under siege, its leadership boycotted, will have far more determination and resolve to fight to its last drop of blood. It is impossible to break the spirit of a desperate people. Only a nation that sees a light at the end of its desperation will change its ways.”

As long as there are young men and boys who see no reason for living, and who see no future for themselves in the prison that has been made of their country, there will be bombers willing to give their lives to avenge the injustices they see every day living in Occupied Palestine.

When I saw the picture of the kid who did the bombing yesterday on the television- so young, so terribly young….he looked no more than 16. Then I heard that he was from the city of Jenin. The irony just struck me, as the words of a song by folk singer David Rovics entered my head….it is a song, ironically enough, about a suicide bomber from the city of Jenin — the site of a massive Israeli assault that lasted two months in March and April of 2002, and resulted in nearly 800 deaths, and the complete flattening of a vast portion of the city. Here are the lyrics of the song:

Jenin
——-
Oh, child, what will you remember
When you recall your sixteenth year
The horrid sound of helicopter gunships
The rumble of the tanks as they drew near

As the world went about it’s business
And I burned another tank of gasoline
The Dow Jones lost a couple points that day
While you were crying in the City of Jenin

Did they even give your parents warning
Before they blew the windows out with shells
While you hid inside the high school basement
Amidst the ringing of church bells

As you watched your teacher crumble by the doorway
And in England they were toasting to the Queen
You were so far from the thoughts of so many
Huddled in the City of Jenin

Were you thinking of the taunting of the soldiers
Or of the shit they smeared upon the walls
Were you thinking of your cousin after torture
Or Tel Aviv and it’s glittering shopping malls

When the fat men in their mansions say that you don’t want peace
Did you wonder what they mean
As you sat amidst the stench inside the darkness
In the shattered City of Jenin

What went through your mind on that day
At the site of your mother’s vacant eyes
As she lay still among the rubble
Beneath the blue Middle Eastern skies

As you stood upon this bulldozed building
Beside the settlements and their hills so green
As your tears gave way to grim determination
Among the ruins of the City of Jenin

And why should anybody wonder
As you stepped on board
The crowded bus across the Green Line
And you reached inside your jacket for the cord

Were you thinking of your neighbors buried bodies
As you made the stage for this scene
As you set off the explosives that were strapped around your waist
Were you thinking of the City of Jenin

————-
you can listen to the song here:
www.soundclick.com/util/DownloadSong.cfm?ID=756970&ref=2
————-

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6. New House Occupations in Nablus
April 18th, 2006
By Linda

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/18/new-house-occupations-in-nablus/

Today, the Israeli army has occupied three more buildings in Nablus that we are aware of. One of them is a brand new shopping mall which has not yet opened. The local youth are outside burning tyres in protest. This will have little effect on the soldiers who are at least 10 stories up. Despite this they are firing live ammunition. Yesterday’s woundings of two boys has not deterred them in the least.

I need to stress this further: the soldiers are recklessly and randomly firing live ammunition down onto an area crowded with market traders, women, children and workers. This is madness – it utterly disgusts me. Some locals may have learned to live with these army invasions – what choice do they have after all?

If they allow their ‘fight or flight’ buttons to be pressed every single time something happens they could not survive. But this is not normal, this is not OK and i can see the stress in people’s faces and an increased urgency in their movements.
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7. ISM Interview on Pacifica Radio Flashpoints
April 19th, 2006

Interview by ISM Volunteer Haley

http://flashpoints.net/index.html#2006-04-18

Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Today on Flashpoints: We hear from one voice among thousands of Iraqis now fleeing the violence in their US-occupied homeland; Israel expands its bloody occupation against Palestine, we’ll have an on-the-ground report; plus, an in-depth look at the forgotten refugees of the Iraq war, imprisoned inside refugee camps on the border between Iraq and Jordan; an interview with the cheif prosecutor of the Human Rights tribunal investigating US and UN-led war crimes in Haiti; and the Knight Report.
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8. Robert Novak: Palestinian Christians Threatened In Aboud
April 19th, 2006

“Palestinian Christians suffer, too”
April 17, 2006
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

ABOUD, West Bank — On Good Friday, I stood atop the remnant of the Santa Barbara shrine, destroyed by the Israeli army, and observed the picturesque village of Aboud. I could see properties confiscated to make room for the Israeli security wall, at the cost of centuries-old olive trees. Nearby are two enclosed, heavily guarded Israeli settlements, with four times Aboud’s Palestinian population.

Defenders of Israeli policy claimed my facts were wrong Feb. 16 when I wrote that the wall threatens Israel’s tiny Christian minority [sic. – Aboud is in the Palestinan territories, not Israel] and particularly Aboud’s Christian roots going back two millennia. Coming here for a firsthand look, I found the plight of the village’s Christians worse than I had reported.

But this is no Christian problem. During Easter week, I visited Palestinian territory in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Gaza as well as Aboud. Christians share the harsh fate of Palestinian Muslims in the wake of the disastrous second intifada. The head of Roman Catholic Palestinians, Latin Patriarch Michael Sabbah, told me: “The world has abandoned the Palestinians.”

If the world is uninterested in Palestinians generally, the plight of their co-religionists attracts the attention of Roman Catholics — with Aboud a striking example. Of the village’s 2,200 residents, 418 are Catholics and 375 Greek Orthodox. Thirty Catholic families have moved out, and more are expected to follow. With transportation to Israel for Palestinians cut off, some 100 residents of Aboud who used to work in Tel Aviv have nothing to do. Suhel Fawade, a 31-year-old Catholic, told me he has not had a job for seven years and consequently cannot marry to start his own family.

Foreign Ministry officials assert concern for their country’s Christians. But the Rev. Firas Aridah, the Catholic pastor here, worries his flock is losing its young generation. “They are after our water,” he told me, referring to Aboud supplying 20 percent of the West Bank’s ground water. The bitterness is intense. Israel’s 2001 destruction of 500 olive trees, in reaction to a settler’s murder, left scars. So did the army bomb planted in Santa Barbara’s shrine in 2002 because of suspicions that terrorists were meeting there.

Aboud is paradise compared with Gaza, where 1.2 million people crowd into one of the world’s most densely populated areas. Milk, flour and sugar are in short supply, with unemployment becoming universal. Undisciplined Palestinian militants have ineffectively fired rockets into Israel, which has responded with deadly daily artillery barrages.

Prominent Christians in Gaza told me their friends and relatives, denied access to and from the enclave, want to emigrate. Sami El-Youssef, financial vice president of Bethlehem University, said he believes there is a conscious Israeli policy of getting rid of the Christian minority, whose discomfiture is more politically embarrassing for Israel than Muslim distress.

Holy Week has been particularly difficult for Palestinian Christians. Professors at Bethlehem University were frustrated by government refusal to permit supervised student trips to the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem. Throughout the West Bank, Christians were denied travel permits to march in Jerusalem’s Palm Sunday procession.

Israeli Foreign Ministry officials asserted to me that Christians in the Holy Land suffer more from Muslims — a position echoed by the Rev. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, head of the Franciscans minding the Holy Land’s religious places. But I could not find another Catholic layman or prelate who complained of anti-Christian bias by Muslims.

Beyond cutting to pieces the promised Palestinian state, the security wall imposes an ugly scar on east Jerusalem and the West Bank. In Bethlehem, where the wall is a barbed wire fence at the Emmanuel Monastery, the sisters there and the brothers from Bethlehem University sadly parade in front of the wall, saying the rosary, once a week.

Israeli government officials argue the wall may not be pretty but saves lives. Retired army officers at the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a Tel Aviv think tank, believe the wall creates a climate of hatred. “I think it may be producing another generation of terrorists,” Brig. Gen. Ilan Paz told me. That is even worse than driving out the Holy Land’s remaining Christians.

Some Palestinian reactions to the suicide bombing

1. Some Palestinian reactions to the suicide bombing
2. The Party Line: ‘Palestinians attack, Israelis respond’
3. Palestinians commemorate Prisoners Day, as all hell breaks loose
4. Update on Occupied Home in Nablus
5. Journalists, medical volunteers and bystanders targeted, Palestinian bystander shot in the neck by Israeli sniper
6. The Surreal Story of Qawawis Continues
7. Settler Attacks and House Occupations in Hebron
8. Jab’a Ploughs its Land
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1. Some Palestinian reactions to the suicide bombing
April 18th, 2006

From Sa’eed Yakin, the coordinator of the Popular Committee in the northwest Jerusalem area:
“The first thing I would like to say is that we are categorically against the killing of civilians on both sides. The second thing is that this suicide bombing came as a result of the Israeli policy, especially that of the last two months. The third point is that murdering innocent people is an egregious crime when it is acted by a formal state like the Israeli government. They have been doing this and other violence in Gaza Strip, Nablus, and all around for over two months, by invasions, inflicting poverty on the people, the one sided racial separation, the wall, demolitions of houses, etc. The last two months more than 16 people were killed in Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation forces.”

From Mohammed Issa Abadia, Jenin District popular committee against the wall, settlements, and occupation:
“This kind of resistance [the suicide bombing] doesn’t lead to any positive result, but the reason behind it is that there is nobody and no state in the world really supporting the Palestinian Popular struggle. So that is the reason, the frustration and the need to bring attention to the situation here.”

From Fatma al Khaldi, member of the Popular Resistance in Salfit District:
“Insulting people all the time in checkpoints, humiliating them in many other situations; this led to this thing. Israel in particular, and the whole world in general, bear the responsibility for what happened today. What do they expect from us? If you plant violence, as Israel does, then you will harvest violence. We will never surrender, and we won’t allow the Israeli government to slaughter us like sheep. They are fighting us even in our daily food and basic living resources.”

From Ahmad Hassan Awad, Palestine Scientists Forum (Islamic Scholars Org.):
“We are people seeking peace, but the occupation refuses our offer and insists on not working for peace. The occupation completely bears responsibility for what’s going on right now. This is a natural reaction against the crimes of the occupation.”

From anonymous from Al Araqa, which is the village where the bomber came from:
“Most of the people here are against all kinds of violence, but violence generates violence. This [bombing] came as a result of the Israeli’s brutal acts against the Palestinian citizens.”
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2. The Party Line: ‘Palestinians attack, Israelis respond’
April 17th, 2006
by Asa

For links to facts within article and additional information see https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/17/the-party-line-palestinians-attack-israelis-respond/

In an attempt to disguise the current Israeli military operations in Nablus as a response to the suicide bombing in Tel-Aviv, the Israeli media are either directly lying that the military entered Nablus “in response to the terror attack” (Jerusalem Post) or strongly implying the same by saying the army is there “in [the] wake of [the] Tel Aviv blast” (Ha’aretz).

In actual fact, house occupations and shootings of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers in Nablus were underway well before the bombing. Furthermore, the military have been in and out of Nablus almost constantly over the last week. The Ha’aretz news timeline today directly contradicts the claim by the Jerusalem Post and even the strong implication that it was a “response” in the headline of their own story. At 12:34, the timeline refers to an AP wire report covering the military operations in Nablus: “Palestinian youth shot by Israeli troops during W. Bank protest” (note that there is no mention of the Tel-Aviv bombing in this story). The bombing does not appear in the Ha’aretz site’s timeline until over an hour after the Nablus story was filed: 13:43.

It is possible that the military operation intensified in Nablus after the Tel-Aviv bombing. But the Israeli media were ignoring the story about Israeli jeeps rolling into Nablus before it became possible for them to re-cast the incursion as a ‘response to terrorism’. A response to what is often characterised as ‘irrational, unprovoked, fanatical terrorism’. All this despite the fact that the Israeli army has been shelling civilian areas in Gaza for the past 12 days killing at least eighteen people, including at least two children with many more injured. We in the general public might be niave enough to think that terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians, regardless of their natonality, but it would seem that the major media defines Israeli bombing of Palestinians as “counter-terrorism” almost by definition.

Before the bombing in Tel-Aviv, the story about Nablus was all but ignored by the Israeli media. This currently remains the the policy of the western media, despite the fact that the army continues to occupy as many as five houses in Nablus using them as sniper posts, and have injured at least four Palestinian young people with live rounds and rubber-coated bullets.

We have been covering this story here in the ISM Media office since 10am this morning, and have watched the hypocrisy and subservience to establishment interests of the Israeli media explicitly illustrated before our own eyes. Apparently, Palestinian lives are only of use to the propaganda system. It could be argued, however, that this position is morally superior to the position of western media agencies such as the BBC on whose radar the attacks in Nablus do not even register.
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3. Palestinians commemorate Prisoners Day, as all hell breaks loose
April 18th, 2006
By Laila el-Haddad (http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/)
Posted by her on Monday, April 17, 2006

I’m very tired so instead of posting something on how all hells break loose here between one second and the next, and how just when you say to yourself-well how about that, only 20 shells today! and no gunbattles between bickering testosterone charged gunmen with nothing better to do! and no suicide bombings!…well..needless to say, things have a way of turning very bad, very quickly here. 9 killed in Tel Aviv, another Palestinian boy killed in Beit Lahiya by Israeli shelling (that makes 16 since the start of the year)… and I just heard an explosion near my house…

so..

instead, I’m going to talk about commemorations of Palestinian Prisoners Day (yes, we have so many “days”), and then go to sleep, because God knows we ALL need sleep

Thousands of Palestinians-mothers, sisters, daughters, sons-from all different factions filled the streets of Gaza City today to commemorate Palestinian Prisoner’s Day-April 17.

Palestinians marched through the streets of Gaza to the Palestinian Legislative Council, carrying pictures of their imprisoned family members and in some cases symbolically tying their hands together with chains. They called on Palestinian parliament members and ministers, human rights organizations and the world community to make the release of the prisoners a top priority.

The parliament convened a special session to address the plight of the prisoners today.

One of the demonstrators, 27-year-old Leila Dabbagh, had not seen her fiancé who is being held in an Israeli jail, for 5 years. They got legally married, but had not yet consumated the marriage, at the time of his imprisonment.

Others are able to see their detained loved ones through the Red Cross, only by glass partitions. Extended family members cannot go however. One women wept as she told me she had not seen her only nephew in 18 years. Most of those detained are very young. Children grow up without ever really knowing their fathers.

The issue of the prisoners is a uniting factor, a common denominator amongst Palestinians.

Some 8000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons or detention centers by the Israeli army, including 370 minors and 103 Palestinian women, according to the Palestinian prisoner’s rights and support group, Addammeer.

Over 750 are held without charge or trial.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian prisoners are regarded as political captives who have been arbitrarily imprisoned or detained under the broad banner of “security”, according to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem.

“If these same standards were applied inside Israel, half of the Likud party would be in administrative detention,” noted the group in a report.

Palestinians have been subjected to the highest rate of incarceration in the world-since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel-constituting some 20% of the total Palestinian population, and 40% of all Palestinian men.

According to Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Btselem, their conditions of detention are extremely poor, with many prisoners suffering from medical negligence, routine beatings, position torture and strip searches.
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4. Update on Occupied Home in Nablus
April 17th, 2006

The Israeli army has withdrawn from one of the homes occupied earlier today in Nablus, although as many as five other houses remain occupied.

The twelve soldiers left the Mushara home at 3pm, after having occupied it since 3:30am Monday. The family, four children between the ages of six and twelve, their father, and their four months pregnant mother, were held in the kitchen for the entire time. The mother has now been evacuated to a hospital.

Bassam Mushara, the father of the home, reported that their cell phones were confiscated, and that they were told that if they made any noise the soldiers would kill them. When their neighbors knocked on the door this morning, to pick the children up for school as usual, the soldiers responded by firing shots at the ceiling.

The neighbors realized that the army must have occupied the house, now for the second time this week. Word of the house’s occupation spread, and soon a crowd of about 200 youth gathered outside the house, some of whom threw stones at soldiers through the windows.

In response soldiers fired live ammunition into the crowd, which included journalists and international human rights workers. A 13 year-old boy was hit in the neck while “standing next to the wall doing nothing,” according to Chilean activist Ana Maria who witnessed the shooting. ISM volunteers saw another four people in the crowd be injured, at least one by shrapnel.

When the soldiers left at 3pm, internationals went inside the house to survey the situation. They reported that the house was completely trashed. All of the windows were broken, shells from the soldiers firing were seen under every window, and pieces of the house, including a door, were torn apart to be used as shields in front of the window. The house was filled with rocks and rubble.

19 people were injured in Nablus today during the invasion, according to Palestinian news sources. Most of the injuries occurred in the center of town, where there were not any occupied houses. The army was seen driving through the center of Nablus for no apparent reason. When children threw stones at the army vehicles, soldiers responded with live ammunition.
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5. Journalists, medical volunteers and bystanders targeted, Palestinian bystander shot in the neck by Israeli sniper
April 17th, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Israeli snipers shot live ammunition at journalists, international medical volunteers and unarmed Palestinians gathered outside of a house occupied by the army. A crowd of over a hundred was gathered in protest of this house occupation. Palestinian youth threw stones at wooden planks that the soldiers placed on the window of the house.

According to international medical volunteers from the United States, England, Germany, Chile, and Denmark, eighteen year old Islam Aktshot was shot with live ammunition in the neck while he was watching the events at 11:45 Monday morning. “He was standing next to the wall doing nothing when suddenly he put his hands to his neck. When he put his hand down large amounts of blood poured out,” said Danish volunteer Anamaria. “We, the medical volunteers and the journalists were standing together when the soldiers fired in our direction. A bullet whistled five centimeters away from me. ”

At 12:05pm Basam Balbali 15 years old with shot with live ammunition in the leg.

The house, which is situated on the eastern edge of the old city of Nablus, was occupied Sunday night. The Israeli military is currently occupying at least five homes in Nablus.

The practice of occupying a tactically important home and holding the occupants incommunicado is known in the Israeli Army as a “Straw Widow” operation. The army uses the occupied home as an observation post and sniper position. Such homes are often reoccupied several times.

For more information call:
In Nablus, Mohammad : 0522 223 374
Ism media office 02-2971824
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6. The Surreal Story of Qawawis Continues
April 18th, 2006

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/18/the-surreal-story-of-qawawis-continues-2/

Take a trip to Qawawis and you step back in time, yet remain in a surreal and frightening present.

It’s an extraordinary place of stark beauty, situated at the extreme southern tip of the Occupied West Bank. Most of the people live in ancient limestone cave dwellings, variously enlarged and improved over the centuries. Yet each is swept spotlessly clean, belying first impressions that an ancient lifestyle means dirt and squalor.

Qawawis itself is tiny, home to just five Palestinian families. The population varies depending on who’s brother, sister, aunt or other relative happens to be around, but it is usually between 15 to 50 people. The permanent residents earn a skilful but hard living shepherding goats and growing crops in a harsh semi-desert landscape.

The survival of Qawawis as a living community is a minor miracle, quite apart from the climate, and the day to day hazards and uncertainties of subsistence farming. Over the past few years two illegal Israeli settlement outposts, founded by militant and very dangerous settlers, have been established on nearby land. Since the settlers arrived, they’ve constantly harassed, threatened, and sometimes physically attacked the people.

They’ve ruined wells and poisoned livestock. Three years ago, their tactics paid off and they managed to chase the families away from Qawawis. A single settler moved in, vandalized homes, and added a building of his own. Then in a biazarre twist it turned out that Israeli Army has it’s own designs on Qawawis, wanting to turn the area into a training/security zone. The army evicted the settler, and bulldozed rubble in front of the cave dwellings, hoping to seal them off forever.

The army’s action was premature. The people of Qawawis, with the help of international and Israeli human rights groups fought back with a court case that went all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. The people won, and court found that Palestinians, not settlers or the army had the rights to Qawawis.

Unfortunately the judgment had a catch. The people were welcome to return, but on condition that no new buildings were constructed. So they returned, and they cleared the rubble, repaired their homes, shepherded their goats and sheep, planted their crops, and repaired their free-standing bread oven and outhouse. Both these structures are essential to the standard of living, which at best is very low.

Then they made a mistake; they added a simple tent-like canvas awning to both oven and outhouse to keep out the winter rains and the summer sun.

In the blinkered eyes of the Israeli administrators, these rudimentary and sensible improvements make both structures “new.” On the 27th March 2006 they served an order giving the people a month to demolish them, or the authorities would do the job themselves. So once again, there will be a court case, this time on the 27th April 2006, in Beit El near Ramallah, where lawyers will argue over the meaning of the word “new.”

Building of a very different kind has also been going on in Qawawis area. Despite the fact that the two settlements closest to the hamlet are illegal (all settlements are illegal under International Law, but these ones are also illegal under Israeli law), the authorities have been kind enough to provide the law-breakers with electricity, telephone lines, piped water, and a couple of new roads.

One of these new roads runs very close to Qawawis, and the Israeli Army, for ‘security reasons,’ has imposed a 100 meter ‘security zone’ on each side where no Palestinian is allowed to go. This means in some Qawawis homes, taking a few steps from your front door means you are in a military exclusion zone.

More trouble has come from the main road about 1km (2/3 mile) away. The Israelis have recently started building a “mini-wall” along the edge of the northern carriageway. Made of concrete blocks precisely 82cm high and built along the curb, they prevent vehicles from leaving the road and heading into the semi-desert beyond. They are also just high enough to prevent a sheep or a donkey leaden with supplies from crossing.

This poses a serious problem for Qawawis as this mini-wall will cut it off from Karmel and Yatta. These are the small towns that provide supplies and markets for produce. The mini wall itself is something of a mystery, it doesn’t appear on any publicly available Israeli or UN maps, and enquiries about its design, length, purpose, and on who’s authority it is being built have so far been fruitless. An ISM volunteer spoke to some of the workmen last week, and they said it will run from Karmel to Susya (approximately 10km, 6 miles). As one of the people of Qawawis said “we’re going to be in a prison here.”

Cave dwellings, a road, an outhouse, a bakery, and mysterious wall 82 cm high and six miles long (maybe). Only in the surreal world of the Occupied West Bank would such insignificant structures cause so much trouble.

_________________

7. Settler Attacks and House Occupations in Hebron
April 16th, 2006
by Tom

Settlers attacked Palestinian houses and targeted the Palestinian residents of Tel Rumeida today, the first Shabbat of the Passover period.

A Palestinian boy was attacked at 4.30pm by five settlers on Shuhada Street. The settlers knocked him off his bicycle and attacked him in full view of the IDF.

Later in the afternoon fifteen settlers were seen by Human Rights Workers attempting to break into a Palestinian home near Beit Hadassa settlement, the settlers became aware of the internationals and moved on, crossing into H1. H1 is the Palestinian controlled area of Hebron and settlers are restricted from being there.

Human Rights Workers monitored the settlers as they walked through the Palestinian neighbourhood targeting Palestinian homes. When the settlers became aware that they were being observed they left H1. However, they then attacked the Human Rights Workers, and tried to steal their camera. The internationals were kicked, punched and subjected to threats. Israeli police were nearby but did not pursue the settlers.

At around 8pm the IDF occupied the community centre in Tel Rumeida. The troops unloaded a large truck of equipment and sleeping bags, signifying that they were to stay for a long period of time. They draped an Israeli flag over the roof of the building. Three ISM activists approached the door of the community centre with rackets and ping pong balls, requesting that the army let them in to play ping pong. After the troops refused their request, the activists asked them if it would be possible to enter only the first floor while the troops occupied the roof and until when the troops would be occupying the building. After several minutes of persistent request a local resident approached the commander of the unit and explained to him that the first floor of the building should be made available to people in the community, while the army continued to occupy the other floors. The commander agreed to allow us to enter the first floor and told us that the floor would be kept open to the public for the immediate future.

ISM activists were called to another house in the Abu Sneineh neighbourhood which was being occupied by a unit of soldiers. The flat was home to five people including three children. ISM activists and local residents attempted to negotiate for the soldiers to take the roof of the apartment and leave the flat free for the family. This was refused but the soldiers promised to be sensitive around the children. One Human Rights Worker is staying in the Abu Sneineh neighbourhood tonight in case there are more problems. Two more houses have been occupied by the IDF in Hebron.

The Palestinian residents of Hebron are afraid that further tensions may arise over the Passover period.

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8. Jab’a Ploughs its Land
April 18th, 2006

This morning I travelled to the village of Jab’a, just South of Bethlehem, where local Palestinian farmers have faced intimidation by settlers when trying to access their land. Jab’a is a village of 900 people facing annexation of part of its land by the Apartheid Wall. It is near the Gush Etziyon settlement block and faces frequent problems with settler violence.

This morning about 50 Internationals, Israelis and Palestinians converged at Om Al Jamjoum below the illegal settlement of Beit Ain to plough the land. Settlers watched from the hilltop settlement as Palestinians brought a tractor onto the land for the first time in five years.

The army and border police arrived at about 10.30am and spoke to the activists. There was talk of a closed military zone in the area but Israeli activists convinced soldiers that this would be illegal in light of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling on land disputes.

The Palestinians ploughed the land up to about 200 feet from Beit Ain. Settlers tried to intervene, sitting in front of the tractor and blocking the work on Palestinian land, but were outmaneuvered. The action was very calm, passing with the minimum of confrontation. And the Palestinians successfully accessed their land.

Many of the activists were Israeli, from Ta’ayush, Anarchists Against the Wall and Rabbis for Human Rights, and the settlers tried to convince them in Hebrew that they had been fooled by the Palestinians and that they had no problem with the Palestinians accessing the land. However, the land told a different story, it was completely overgrown and untended to. Settler intimidation and violence had prevented the farmers’ access before today… If we had not had large numbers of activists then the settlers would have behaved very differently.

Overall a very successful and productive act of resistance to the occupation

The Wall Must Fall

Bil’in Breaks the Chains (Digest)

1. Bil’in Breaks the Chains
2. Two Bil’in Teens Arrested During Night
3. Bil’in Children Arrested
4. Protest at Beit Sira
5. Jane’s Journal: Inside a Balata Invasion
6. Justice for journalists
7. Sir Gerald Kaufman MP: Israel “would be a rogue government” if Refuses to Prosecute Killer Soldiers
8. The Lobby and the Bulldozer: Mearsheimer, Walt and Corrie

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1. Bil’in Breaks the Chains
April 15th, 2006

On Friday the 14th of April, the villagers of Bil’in held their weekly demonstration against the apartheid wall that is de-facto annexing over half of their land to Israel. That land the government of Israel is using to build illegal Israeli settlements on.

The Popular Committee in the village organises different creative themes that illustrate the plight of the village and the Palestinians in general. This week, they wanted to draw attention to the economic strangulation of the Palestinians by the international community after the recent Palestinian elections. Palestinians, Israelis and international demonstrators bound themselves together with iron rings, and were led along by other demonstrators bearing US, EU and UN flag symbolising the control and oppression of the Palestinians people by the international community.

When we got to the gate in the fence, the way was barred by two jeeps on the opposite side. When we approached, singing and chanting, several soldiers with clubs and riot shields emerged and stood on the jeeps threatening to beat the demonstrators over the razor wire. Several of the demonstrators soon opened the gate and started trying to move the razor wire out of the way. Soldiers swung their clubs at the demonstrators, though they were usually too far away to make contact because of the wire.

After about half an hour standing-off in this way, we started to demonstrate around the perimeter of the fence. At several points along the way, demonstrators tried to crawl through gaps in the razor wire to reach the patrol road fence and access the annexed village land. The first attempt was thwarted by a wall of soldiers, but at two other points demonstrators managed to get through before the soldiers could take action and we held sit down demonstrations on the patrol road.

The soldiers tried unsuccessfully to drive us away with beatings, but since we were already on the road, there was little they could do. They hit one Palestinian, giving him a bloody nose. After about 20 minutes, we decided to end the sit down protests and retreat back to the village side of the razor wire, one by one in a calm fashion (Palestinians leaving first to avoid arrests). Four Israelis and a Jewish American student were detained for an hour and released without charges when the demonstration had finished.
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2. Two Bil’in Teens Arrested During Night
April 14th, 2006
By Jane

Just when I thought I was in for a quiet night, saying good bye to the resisters in Bil’in, the Israeli army came into the village and arrested 2 young men, Yassar aged 16 and Tariq aged 19.
It was a beautiful warm night at the outpost. R and I arrived just after dark. We tried to collect some wood and we built one of the smallest fires the outpost has witnessed. As we finished our supper of aubergine dip, yoghurt and bread the shebab begun to to come out of the night in two’s and threes. Ali arrived in his truck bringing his young son. They got the fire going and the kettle on. A typical outpost night of being taught arabic words, sweet tea, rich coffee, cigarettes, sunflower seeds and loud stories of which I could only understand the final burst of laughter. The full moon shone and we came out from under the shelter to bathe in it’s light.

At midnight I pulled myself into the cab of Ali’s truck. Shebab climbed into the back and we left R and 2 young men from the village behind. We took the slow, bumpy ride back to the village. Through land belonging to Ali’s family, now piled with stones and rubble, 300 year old olive trees uprooted and gone. Onto the security road by the fence, up the hill, round the fence and down to the gate and the site of the Friday demonstrations. Along the old tarmac road, unmaintained, pot holed, passing fields then houses. They dropped me outside the ISM apartment. We called goodbye, they told me to bring all my family to visit Bil’in.

I read till late and finally turned out the light at about 1.30am. No sooner had I closed my eyes than Abdullah was banging on the door. Soldiers are outside. I grabed my camera, bag with notebook, pen and cigs, stuck my feet in my trainers, pulled on another top and I was out of the house. Abdullah was standing in his red pyjamas, two armed soldiers next to him. He was demanding they leave the village. There were 3 or 4 military vehicals in the street. It was hard to see behind the glare of their headlights. Soldiers with nightsights and guns pointing at roofs, round walls, at trees and shrubs. Abdullah went up on his roof, “Get off the roof” yelled two soldiers, “No I won’t, this is my house, what are you doing here, we don’t want you here , go away”. I’m walking up and down the street, between soldiers. Soldiers emerge from a building, they all climb into vehicals and drive past the mosque and up the hill. It’s only now that I can see a group of shebab and a camera man by the mosque. ” Hello Jane”, I recognise a few of them. “Did they take anyone” they ask me. “No I didn’t see anyone with them”. We start to follow the military vehicals up the hill.

Five hundred yards and the soldiers have stopped again. I look at the cameraman and we go forward. Again I’m walking in among the soldiers asking what are they doing, why are they here. It’s the middle of the night, the occupying military force is armed and on the streets of a small West Bank village and I’m walking around in the middle of it all. It’s very strange. Then from a track soldiers are bringing a young boy, Yassar, he is frightened, he’s a child. On his face are the tracks of a few tears. His eyes, like headlights, beam out fear. “What are you doing with that child, let him go, let him go, he’s a child, why have you got a child, let him go”. They try and put him in the back of a vehical. There’s me shouting and getting in the way and a whole lot of big soldiers but my white skin, my english voice means they hesitate. At one point I managed to get my arm round they boy and we begin to walk away. For a split second I think they will let us go. Hands get hold of us, they start to pull us apart, we are holding onto each others arms and hands, the distance between us gets bigger and bigger till we can’t hold onto eachother any more. A soldier twists my arm behind my back. “You are interfering with our operation, go away”. “Yes I am interfering with you trying to take away a child”. A woman in a nightgown appears, she is pleading with the soldiers. A man in his night time clothes approaches. We are in a chaotic bundle around the child.

So many soldiers. Were there 16, 18, 20. I don’t know. They took the child. Later I found out he was 16 years old. In the night, surrounded by soldiers he looked about 13.
As the door of the vehical closed on the boy the stones started flying. Soldiers fire teargas at the shebab. Stones seem to be coming from all directions. I find myself crouched behind a wall with a soldier. The vehicals start turning, the soldiers run to them and off they go, stones bouncing of the metal and scattering across the road.

The shebab congregate back at the mosque. Abdullah appears in his pyjamas. News comes that Tariq, 19 years old, has also been taken. The soldiers drive through a couple more times and are met by stones raining down from behind every wall and gate. The stones of the shebab are shouting “get out of our village, get out of our village.”

Bil’in has been targetted by the Israeli military because of it’s continuous non violent resistence to the annexation fence/apathied wall. This week, in addittion to Yassar and Tariq, 2 children were arrested whilst tending their goats. ISM supports Bil’in’s ongoing struggle by standing side by side with the villagers, trying to prevent arrests, witnessing, media work and legal support. This legal support is expensive as it costs 1000’s of sheckles to get villagers released from Israeli detention.

The ISM urges all its supporters to continue raising money for the legal fund, so that we can continue to support non-violent protest against illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land, and continue to free jailed children.

To donate see the PayPal link at palsolidarity.org
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3. Bil’in Children Arrested
April 12th, 2006

Two Palestinian children from the village of Bil’in were arrested mid morning on Tuesday April 12th.

Mohammad Abd Al Fattah Burnatt, aged 17, and Mohammad Ahmad Hamad aged 13 were tending a herd of goats close to the illegal Israeli settlement of Modi’in Elite. The settlement is built on land that has belonged to the village for generations.

According to Hamad’s father, the boys picked up one of the pieces of scrap metal that litter the fields next to the construction site. One of the settlers noticed and called the police accusing them of theft. The police arrested the pair and later made additional charges of entering Israel illegally, and of throwing stones at a recent demonstration in Bil’in against the apartheid wall.
In an ironic protest against Israeli settler tactics, the village has established it’s own settlement outpost on land stolen for settlement construction. Villagers and a peace activist from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) were at the outpost, and ran across in time to witness the arrest. Afterwards, they shepherded the goats to a safe enclosure.

The ISM secured the release on bail of Mohammad Ahmad Hamad (13) for a cash payment of 5,000 NIS early this afternoon. It is not known when the boys’ trial will take place. The ISM has been active in supporting the village of Bil’in’s non violent protests and legal action against the building of the settlements on village land, and the construction of the apartheid wall. If Israel completes the wall and the settlements, about half of the village’s pasture and olive groves, including a holy site, will be stolen.

The ISM urges all its supporters to continue raising money for the legal fund, so that we can continue to support non-violent protest against illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land, and continue to free jailed children.

To donate see the PayPal link at palsolidarity.org
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4. Protest at Beit Sira
By Jodi
April 15th, 2006

For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/15/protest-at-beit-sira-2/
On 14th April, my second day in Palestine, I visited the small village of Beit Sira, near Ramallah.
In many other countries the inhabitants of such a village would spend today tending their farms, being with their families and friends, or popping down to the local shop. But Beit Sira has lost 70% of its land since 1948.

The nearby Kibbutz is built entirely on former village land, and more recently the settlement of Makkabim has been built on yet more village land. Now another swathe of land has been stolen to build the grotesque apartheid wall.

A well, that was crucial to the water supply of the village, is on the far side of the wall. Israel pumps the water from the well and sells it back to the Palestinian Authority. So the people of Beit Sira now have to pay 4 shekels/cubic meter for their water, whilst people in the illegal Israeli settlement of Makkabim pay just 1 1/2 shekels/cubic meter for water stolen from Beit Sira.

The village now holds a weekly demonstration to protest against the building of the wall, and I was with a group of internationals and Israelis who had come to support them. As we walked down from the village we could see the massive coils of razor wire, a wide gravel track (soon to become a ‘security road’) the other side of the wire, and beyond that the illegal Makkabim settlement.

Bizarrely the Israelis have uprooted hundreds of olive trees to build the wall, and then dug up part of the village’s existing road to replant the trees. The scheme hasn’t worked; the replanted trees are all dead.

As about 50 of us walked down the road with nothing but our cameras and water bottles we faced a line of armed police bearing riot shields and behind them some soldiers and jeeps – completely incongruous on a country lane surrounded by fields of crops and olive and almond trees.

Since the villagers started their demonstrations several weeks ago they have been threatened by the Army, to the extent that they could not even open the Community Centre for us to congregate in. The Army is clearly aiming to quash any resistance to the building of the wall and theft of the land. The villagers have already taken their case to court requesting that the wall be rerouted, but the court rejected their application.

When we reached the line of riot police we all sat down peacefully in the road in contrast to the violent intents of the armed police who faced us.

It was clear that we would not be able to go any further down the road, and after a short while the villagers declared the demonstration over and we returned to the village.
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5. Jane’s Journal: Inside a Balata Invasion
April 12th, 2006

I was awoken at 3.15am by the sound of gunfire in the streets nearby and then two explosions, one that made our apartment vibrate. I and three other activists lay in the darkness of the ISM apartment in Balata refugee camp listening intently. We are not from communities under constant military attack. We were not bought up in Balata where lives are lived to the sound track of live gun fire, rubber bullets, explosions, sound bombs, jeeps and armoured vehicles. I couldn’t tell what was happening. Was it a clash between fighters and Israeli soldiers? Were they on the street outside the apartment? What was that explosion? It sounded so loud. If we opened a window to look out would we be able to see anything? Would a sniper fire at us? What vehicle’s engine was running in the street below?

Then bang, bang, bang, thumping on metal. Israeli soldiers voices shouting. Were they at the metal door at the bottom of the steps to our building? The metal door crashed open. Was this a military invasion that would last for days or just a night operation? Were the soldiers going from house to house? Heavy footsteps up the stairs and then across the roof. They must be using the roof of our apartment building as a vantage point for snipers. The building was silent except for the voices of soldiers and the sound of their movements.

How does it feel to lie in the dark, uncertain of what is happening? Feeling surrounded
by the power of a military force. Not knowing if the door will crash open and soldiers pile in. What if one of our neighbours shouts or cries out in distress? Will we act, shout in English, say we are opening the door and are coming outside? We waited, concentrating on the sounds. We knew we had the protection of our international status. How much harder it is to imagine waiting in your own home, not knowing if the soldiers will explode your front door or a wall into your front room. Then what will happen? Do they want your son, your brother, your Dad? Will they abuse you and beat you and your family?

Again the silence of the families in the building. Coughing, a few short crying sounds from a baby. Was a helicopter circling the camp or was it just the fridge humming? Occasional bursts of gunfire.

After 40 minutes we heard the footsteps back across the roof, some clanking and steps down the stairs, their voices, the vehicles slowly leaving. Had all the soldiers gone? Would there be more explosions? Was that it for tonight?

How wonderful daylight is. Fear retreats to the dusty corners. Bright sunshine and the sound of our neighbour’s voices banishes anxiety.

Mohammed, our ISM Co-ordinator arrives. He tells us four young men, under 18, were arrested in Balata during the night. Two young men are now wanted. To be wanted means to be even more caged in. These two young men will not be able to pass through any checkpoints. They will live daily with the knowledge that they could be arrested at any time. Perhaps the soldiers will return in the night. To be arrested… to be beaten… to be tortured… to be imprisoned for months, years.

Soldiers also raided the neighbours of Ahmed, an ISM volunteer. He told me quietly that he had got dressed, got his ID and waited. He wasn’t able to sleep till the light came.

Jane
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6. Justice for journalists
But Israel must also be held to account for the deaths of innocent Palestinians.
By Ewa Jasiewicz
April 13, 2006

From The Guardian (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ewa_jasiewicz/2006/04/the_palestinian_hurndalls_and.html)

The verdicts of intentional killing and murder over the deaths of journalists Tom Hurndall and James Miller are small victories; but what about the unaddressed and unresolved killings of hundreds of Palestinian civilians?

Activists within the International Solidarity Movement have in the past relied upon the racism of the Israeli state to keep themselves untargeted. White faces were waved through checkpoints and white western activists were able to halt tanks temporarily, monitor house searches and arrests, and check on prisoners during refugee camp round-ups, visit families who had had their homes turned into military bases, and accompany and facilitate the movement of Palestinian ambulances. We could move amidst stone- and Molotov-throwing youths, as observers and hopefully as deterrents to the by turns indiscriminate and targeted shooting by Israeli soldiers.

Uncomfortable and possibly selfperpetuating as it was, white supremacy was our weapon, shielded with the myth of Israeli democracy on the one hand, and the professionalism and humanitarianism of the Israeli Defence Forces on the other. They wouldn’t kill a westerner, not a peace activist, not a journalist; the bad PR would be devastating.

Enter the Iraq war. With global media attention fixated on the heavily propagandised but never materialised shock and awe attack on Iraq and the unfolding nightmare of America’s first direct occupation of a Muslim country, Israel was once again pushing the limits of international law on two fronts. The first was the construction of the Separation Barrier, AKA the Apartheid Wall, accompanied by hundreds of home demolitions, land confiscations and the ghettoisation of entire villages; and the second was the alleged targeting of western activists, long regarded as an increasingly emboldened interference in the military operations of the Israeli army.

Within six weeks, three International Solidarity Movement activists were attacked. The death of Rachel Corrie, who was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket when she was bulldozed to death, was followed by the shooting in the head of Tom Hurndall, also easily identifiable in fluorescent orange.

And then there was Brian Avery, 24, who narrowly escaped death when Israeli soldiers fired a 50 calibre bullet into his face. He too was wearing a high-visibility vest, and was standing in the middle of a crossroads in Jenin town centre along with four other Western activists with their hands raised in the air. I was one of them, and I witnessed the armoured personnel carrier stop before us, slow down, undoubtedly see us, and open fire.

So far Brian’s case has not been granted a criminal investigation despite a Supreme Court challenge to the initial military investigation last February. So far he has had no compensation for his injuries.

Another case left in legal limbo is that of 13-year-old Baha al Bahesh, gunned down by an Israeli soldier in the West Bank city of Nablus in September 2002. If western citizenship can afford the victim media attention, then a white witness, or three in the case of Baha, can carry the same weight.

I was one of those witnesses. I wrote about it, and spoke about it on Israeli television, independent radio, BBC radio and to the international press; but his killer has yet to be brought to justice. There has been no public inquiry, no trial and no independent investigation.

The IDF military investigation found, six months after Baha’s death and burial, that the boy was in fact still alive. Why? Because allegedly no death certificate had been presented to the IDF. This was the final insult to a family devastated by their son’s death.

The judicial process afforded Tom Hurndall and James Miller’s families needs to be applied to the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces. The fact that the rule of international law does not appear to cover Palestinian lives means the Israeli army can act with impunity and unaccountability.

Racism has long been a driving force within the conflict in historical Palestine, both in terms of creating the conditions for the Nakba in the first place; to underpinning the way human lives are valued, represented, remembered and lost.

The rule of international law will be rendered meaningless if it is not applied equally. We should never lose sight of the fact that it is not just internationals who get killed in this ongoing, tragic struggle.
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7. Sir Gerald Kaufman MP: Israel “would be a rogue government” if Refuses to Prosecute Killer Soldiers
April 13th, 2006

We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished
We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes
by Sir Gerald Kaufman MP

www.commondreams.org/views06/0412-26.htm

In a marvellous book of essays, “The Slopes of Lebanon,” the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz advanced an audacious thesis. He contended that the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust – they included many members of my own family – must not be used as justification for the oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.

Recent Israeli governments, led first by Ariel Sharon and now by Ehud Olmert, have launched a new twist on the argument refuted by Oz. They operate actively on the policy that the murder of 1,000 Israeli Jews by Palestinian terrorists allows the Israeli forces to do anything they think fit in what their government claims is national self-defense. Over the past few days they have killed 13 Palestinians, including a five-year-old girl.

Those of us who believe in a two-state solution, a secure Israel alongside a free and internationally recognised Palestine, are denounced as sympathisers with terrorism – or, in cases such as mine, self-hating Jews – if we attack the appalling suppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis.

We point out that the evacuation of the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops last summer was not a move towards a two-state solution but simply self-defensive action. We point out that Olmert’s plans to base Israel’s permanent border by the year 2010 on the illegal Israeli wall is not a peace formula but an imposed settlement that the Palestinians will never accept. We point out that every withdrawal of funding from the Palestinians by the European Union and the US increases support for Hamas among the Palestinians. We point out that the road map for peace in the Middle East, of which our own government is a key initiator, is moribund. We are all but ignored.

But, when it comes to the murder of Britons by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, the self-serving apologia of Israeli atrocities by right-wing Israelis and their sympathisers loses all credibility.

New territory is opened by the verdict of the inquests in Britain that the British peace activist Tom Hurndall and the British film-maker James Miller were murdered by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. As Britons we have the right to require action by our own government when our own nationals are stated by legal authorities in our own country to be the victims of homicide by a foreign power. If the Speaker allows me when the Commons reconvenes next Tuesday after the Easter recess, I shall be asking my friend and colleague Jack Straw what action he proposes to take about the murder of Hurndall and Miller.

It seems to me that we have three choices. We can ask for these killers to be extradited for prosecution under war crimes legislation in this country. After all, even Colonel Gaddafi agreed eventually to the Libyan Lockerbie killers being put on trial. Alternatively, we can demand that these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes before an international court, as Slobodan Milosevic was. If the Israelis cooperate in neither of these courses, then we should impose sanctions on what would be a rogue government.

Those of us who have visited the Palestinian territories in recent months know that there is an element in the Israeli armed forces which is trigger-happy and well nigh out of control. Last November I led the first ever British Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to the Palestinian National Authority. Twice, during our period there, our group of three members of the Commons and two members of the Lords was held at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers, even when we had explained our mission.

I pointed out to my Parliamentary colleagues that we were being subjected to only transitory harassment, that we were going home on Friday, while for the Palestinians this was their life, much worse, and permanently. And of course brief annoyance for a British team of parliamentarians is less than a minute fraction of what happened to Hurndall and Miller. But it is a meaningful symptom.

Apologists for the Israeli government say that that country is a democracy. So what? The United States is a democracy, yet it almost routinely tortures prisoners held in violation of international law at Guantanamo Bay. A democratically-elected French Government suppressed the Algerians for years.

This current Israeli government, posing as moderate when it is extremist, is, like President Bush’s administration in Guantanamo, also in violation of international law. I look to my own British government to take action on behalf of its own murdered nationals and their families. They must ensure that the Israeli government is made to abide by international law and international decency.

Sir Gerald Kaufmanis Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton, and former Shadow Foreign Secretary, 1987-92.
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8. The Lobby and the Bulldozer: Mearsheimer, Walt and Corrie
April 14th, 2006
Published on Thursday, April 13, 2006 by Common Dreams
(http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0413-20.htm)
by Norman Solomon

Weeks after a British magazine published a long article by two American professors titled “The Israel Lobby,” the outrage continued to howl through mainstream U.S. media.

A Los Angeles Times op-ed article by Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot helped to set a common tone. He condemned a working paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that was excerpted last month in the London Review of Books.

The working paper, Boot proclaimed, is “nutty.” And he strongly implied that the two professors — Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at Harvard — are anti-Semitic.

Many who went on the media attack did more than imply. On April 3, for instance, the same day that the Philadelphia Inquirer reprinted Boot’s piece from the L.A. Times, a notably similar op-ed appeared in the Boston Herald under the headline “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard.”

And so it goes in the national media echo chamber. When a Johns Hopkins University professor weighed in last week on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, the headline was blunt: “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic.” The piece flatly called the Mearsheimer-Walt essay “kooky academic work” — and “anti-Semitic.”

But nothing in the essay is anti-Semitic.

Some of the analysis from Mearsheimer and Walt is arguable. A number of major factors affect Uncle Sam’s Middle East policies in addition to pro-Israel pressures. But no one can credibly deny that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, where politicians know that they can criticize Israel only at their political peril.

Overall, the Mearsheimer-Walt essay makes many solid points about destructive aspects of U.S. support for the Israeli government. Their assessments deserve serious consideration.
For several decades, to the present moment, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian people has amounted to methodical and despicable violations of human rights. Yet criticism of those policies from anyone (including American Jews such as myself) routinely results in accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry.

The U.S. media reaction to the essay by professors Mearsheimer and Walt provides just another bit of evidence that they were absolutely correct when they wrote: “Anyone who criticizes Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle Eastern policy — an influence AIPAC celebrates — stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby.’ In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-Semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.”

Sadly, few media outlets in the United States are willing to confront this “very effective tactic.” Yet it must be challenged. As the London-based Financial Times editorialized on the first day of this month: “Moral blackmail — the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and U.S. support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism — is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters.”

The Financial Times editorial noted: “Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defense of open debate and free enquiry shut down — at least among much of America’s political elite — once the subject turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby’s role in shaping U.S. foreign policy.”

The U.S. government’s policies toward Israel should be considered on their merits. As it happens, that’s one of the many valid points made by Mearsheimer and Walt in their much-vilified essay: “Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided U.S. support and could move the U.S. to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.”

But without open debate, no significant change in those policies can happen. That inertia — stultifying the blood of the body politic by constricting the flow of information and ideas — is antithetical to the kind of democratic discourse that we deserve.

Few other American academics have been willing to expose themselves to the kind of professional risks that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt took by releasing their provocative paper. And few other American activists have been willing to expose themselves to the kind of risks that Rachel Corrie took when she sat between a Palestinian home and a Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza three years ago.

The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish the home, rolled over Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same U.S. media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In sharp contrast to the high-tech killers who run the Israeli military apparatus and the low-tech killers who engage in suicide bombings, Rachel Corrie put her beliefs into practice with militant nonviolence instead of carnage. She exemplified the best of the human spirit in action; she was killed with an American-brand bulldozer in the service of a U.S.-backed government.

As her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, said in a statement on her birthday a few weeks after she died: “Rachel wanted to bring attention to the plight of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, a people she felt were largely invisible to most Americans.”

In the United States, the nonstop pro-Israel media siege aims to keep them scarcely visible.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com