Tag: Digests

Action Alert: The New York Times Distorts Key Facts About Cancellation of Play on Activist Rachel Corrie

Please read, write, and forward widely!

In his March 6, 2005 New York Times article “Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot Not to Handle”, New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein comments on the New York Theatre Workshop’s “postponement” of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” about American activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003.

Requested action

Write to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com and to the Times’ Public Editor Byron Calame at public@nytimes.com.

Suggestions when writing to him:

  1. You appreciate that The New York Times is following the important story of the postponement of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” in New York City. However, the New York Times needs to get central facts right.
  2. Contrary to Edward Rothstein’s innuendo, Rachel Corrie was killed while defending the home of a Palestinian family that had no relationship to arms smuggling or terrorism.
  3. Despite Rothstein’s attempt to defend the Israeli government’s policy of large-scale home demolition in Rafah, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli organization B’Tselem have all documented that Israel’s large-scale home demolition in Rafah violated international law and could not be justified as a defense against arms smuggling.
  4. Rothstein attempts to discredit Rachel Corrie as “naïve” and “radical.” Rachel was killed while using nonviolence to stand against a clear injustice and widely recognized violation of international law. If using nonviolence to support international law made Rachel “radical” and “naïve,” then the world needs more naïve, radical people.
  5. Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006 should not be twisted to serve as a rationale for “postponing” a play about an American activist killed in Rafah in 2003.

The article: “Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot Not Too Handle”

Edward Rothstein hints that the New York Theater Workshop was naïve in not understanding that the play was politically charged, an obvious, but valid point.

Oddly, however, Rothstein then seems to turn around and blame the playwrites Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, suggesting that they disguised the political content of the play. Rothstein suggests that the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” is “disingenuous” and that the playwrites “elided phrases” “to camouflage Corrie’s radicalism and broaden the play’s appeal.”

But here Rothstein himself is guilty of camouflaging the truth, or at least of naiveté. The primary example Rothstein cites of the play’s supposed “disingenuousness” is Rothstein’s assertion that in the play “there is no hint about why such demolitions” of Palestinian homes in Rafah were taking place. Rothstein then explains that “dozens of tunnels leading from Egypt under the border into homes in Gaza were being used to smuggle guns, rocket launchers and explosives to wield against Israel.”

Thus, Rothstein leaves open the possibility that Rachel Corrie herself may have been killed while preventing the demolition of a home hiding an arms smuggling tunnel, and that the Israeli military’s wholesale demolition of thousands of homes in Rafah was aimed only at destroying arms smuggling tunnels and preventing terrorism.

Rothstein is wrong on both these crucial points. Rachel Corrie died defending the home of a Palestinian family who she knew well – Palestinian pharmacist, Samir Nasrallah, his wife and children. There was no tunnel in the Nasrallah home, and the Israeli army never asserted that there was a tunnel in the Nasrallah home. Nonetheless, the Nasrallah home, like thousands of others, was eventually demolished by the Israeli army. The international organizations Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all documented that homes in Rafah were bulldozed as part of an Israeli government policy of systematically demolishing entire Palestinian neighborhoods, irregardless of any relationship to arms smuggling, in clear violation of international law.

In their October 2004 report Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch noted that:

Sixteen thousand people — more than ten percent of Rafah’s population — have lost their homes, most of them refugees, many of whom were dispossessed for a second or third time…

The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law. In most of the cases Human Rights Watch found the destruction was carried out in the absence of military necessity…

Under international law, the IDF has the right to close smuggling tunnels, to respond to attacks on its forces, and to take preventive measures to avoid further attacks. But such measures are strictly regulated by the provisions of international humanitarian law, which balance the interests of the Occupying Power against those of the civilian population. In the case of Rafah, it is difficult to reconcile the IDF’s stated rationales with the widespread destruction that has taken place. On the contrary, the manner and pattern of destruction appears to be consistent with the plan to clear Palestinians from the border area, irrespective of specific threats….

The IDF has failed to explain why non-destructive means for detecting and neutralizing tunnels employed in places like the Mexico-United States border and the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) cannot be used along the Rafah border. Moreover, it has at times dealt with tunnels in a puzzlingly ineffective manner that is inconsistent with the supposed gravity of this longstanding threat…

Rothstein attempts to discredit Rachel and the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” by mentioning her “radicalism,” Rachel’s “more contentious view,” and her views that seem “naïve.” He further confuses the issue by directly comparing the conflict over staging the play in New York City to the conflicts over “Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine to the Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad.” Thus Rachel and the play, already “disingenuous” and “radical” are made sacrilegious and even obscene to some readers. Despite all Rothstein’s efforts at distraction, the simple truth is that Rachel was an idealistic woman who used nonviolence to support international law.

Finally, Rothstein implies that Hamas’ recent victory in the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council somehow should have some bearing on whether or not the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” should be staged in New York City (“and when the election of Hamas provided proof that all was not simple, perhaps that was when the play became more clearly understood”). It is a significant stretch to understand how the election victory of Hamas in 2006 should influence the cancellation of a play in the US about an American woman who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer almost three years earlier. Indeed the random, brutal deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, and a few foreigners like Rachel Corrie, at the hands of the Israeli military from 2000 – 2006, help to explain the dissatisfaction and anger that contributed to Hamas’ election victory in 2006.

Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: March 6, 2006

The polemics and outrage in the theatrical community last week after the New York Theater Workshop postponed its production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” might have been as intense as the uproar the company feared had it actually presented the play. The postponement of this one-woman drama about a 23-year-old pro-Palestinian American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003 has been attacked as an act of censorship. One of the play’s creators compared the decision to backing down in the face of a McCarthyite “witch hunt.” Hundreds have sent e-mail messages accusing the theater’s directors of everything from cowardice to being “Zionist pigs.”

Think of what might have happened had the theater actually presented the play later this month, fresh from its sold-out success at the Royal Court Theater in London. Then the controversy might have been over other forms of political blindness. There might have been assertions that the company was glorifying the mock-heroics of a naif who tried to block efforts to cut off terrorist weapon smuggling. Donors might have pulled away. And the New York Theater Workshop might have been accused of feeding the propagandistic maw of Hamas, just as it came into power in the Palestinian territories. Is it any wonder the company got jittery?

The surprise, though, is that there was so much surprise on the theater’s part: surprise, first, that the play might cause controversy, then surprise that the postponement actually did.

That much should have been clear from other conflicts over artworks and images ranging from Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine to the Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad. First, there is outrage, followed by either defense or retreat. Then there is much discussion of censorship and freedom of speech (which in many cases — the cartoons aside — is really more about public financing). And throughout, intermittent fear of giving offense mixes with frequent eagerness to give it; there is name calling and, occasionally, nervous back-pedaling.

Of course, there are some important distinctions in this case: the postponement was not in response to riots but to worry over what might happen to the theater’s reputation or to donors’ enthusiasm. The theater also suggested that the postponement was just that — not a cancellation — and that it was in response to sensitivities expressed by Jewish leaders and to the rawness of these issues given the electoral victory of Hamas; more planning, the theater said, would be needed to present the play in a broader context.

But what made it a more volatile act was that by declining for now to offend with the play, the theater violated the most sacred principles of our artistic temples.

Those principles are: Thou shalt offend, thou shalt test limits, thou shalt cause controversy. If there is an artistic orthodoxy in the West, it is that good art is iconoclastic and provocative, and that any pull back from this orthodoxy is cowardly and craven. In this distended context, the New York Theater Workshop’s act was heretical.

How could this happen? How could a theater take on a play like “Corrie” and not know what it was getting into? How could it then postpone the production and not know that the outrage of its colleagues-at-arms would be as fervent as the imagined reaction of patrons and protestors?

To understand this a little better, consider the play itself. At first, it must have seemed a safe choice: safe with its aura of leftist frisson, and safe too in that its championing of a pro-Palestinian activist had become so mainstream that the London press hardly recognized anything was at issue. The play’s political stance was treated as invisible, something its creators — the actor Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, an editor of the newspaper The Guardian — seemed to desire. “The play is not agitprop,” Ms. Viner wrote last week in The Los Angeles Times. “It’s a complicated look at a woman who was neither a saint nor a traitor.”

And indeed, judging from the script — edited from Corrie’s e-mail, letters and journals — Corrie’s is an unusual voice, engrossing in its imaginative power, hinting at adolescent transformations and radicalization. “My mother would never admit it,” she says in the play, “but she wanted me exactly how I turned out — scattered and deviant and too loud.”
She names the people she would like “to hang out with in eternity”: Rilke, Jesus, E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald and Charlie Chaplin. She announces to her accomplished older brother that instead of high salaries, she is “steadfastly pursuing a track that guarantees I’ll never get paid more than three Triscuits and some spinach.” Midplay, she is a budding literary bohemian who suddenly finds herself on Gaza’s front lines.

What could be less controversial than this heroine, with her Utopian yearning to end human suffering and her empathy for Palestinians living in a hellish war zone, their homes and lives at stake? Her death becomes a tragic consequence of her compassion and, apparently, in performance, has the power to spur tears.

But there is something disingenuous here. In an apparent effort to camouflage Corrie’s radicalism and broaden the play’s appeal, its creators elided phrases that suggested her more contentious view of things — cutting, for example, her reference to the “chronic, insidious genocide” she says she is witnessing, or her justification of the “somewhat violent means” used by Palestinians.

As a dramatization of a young woman’s political education, the play also never has to hold itself accountable for what seems naïve. “I’m really new to talking about Israel-Palestine,” Corrie says soon after arriving in Israel, “so I don’t always know the political implications of my words.” She is also earnest. Children “love to get me to practice my limited Arabic,” she says. “Today I tried to learn to say, ‘Bush is a tool,’ but I don’t think it translated quite right.”

But while she fails to see things fully, the play wants us to think she ultimately does. We are not meant to doubt the thoroughness of her account or to think too much about what she notices but does not explain. Though Corrie went to Gaza with the Palestinian-led organization the International Solidarity Movement to act as a human shield and to prevent Israel from destroying Palestinian homes, and though she died while trying to stop a bulldozer, there is no hint about why such demolitions were taking place.

But dozens of tunnels leading from Egypt under the border into homes in Gaza were being used to smuggle guns, rocket launchers and explosives to wield against Israel. These demolitions often caused controversy, even in Israel, but the play’s omissions make them seem acts of systematic evil, rather than acts that were, at the very least, part of a more complicated and contested series of confrontations.

That is where the disingenuousness comes in: not in the stand the play takes, but in how it cloaks it as not really being a stand at all, but only high moral sentiment. Ms. Viner, asked what she wanted audiences to come away with, said: “To feel inspired to go and do something about the world’s inequalities themselves.”

It would have been more interesting to imagine an activist’s growing awareness of nuance, particularly given what is at stake. Is it possible that a growing awareness might also have been behind the postponement? When the directors of the New York Theater Workshop began to hear from staff members and outsiders that the play invoked issues it did not explain, and when the election of Hamas provided proof that all was not simple, perhaps that was when the play became more clearly understood. The company discussed staging other plays about the conflict alongside this one; attempts were made to arrange post-performance discussions, too. But that required time. So, awkwardly, the company betrayed aesthetic orthodoxy — declining, for now, to give offense, and in the process doing just that.

A Wave of Non-Violence

1. Protesters Hang Themselves on The Wall, Friday, March 3rd
2. Bil’in and Beit Sira March Together For Peace, Friday, March 3rd
3. Aboud Stops Construction on the Wall Friday, March 3rd, By Harry
4. Soldiers shamed by checkpoint, Saturday March 4th , By Harry
5. Beit Sira Replants Trees in the Shadow of the Wall Tues February 28th, By Henry
6. Israeli activist shot in the eye by Israeli soldiers at Beit Sira, Friday February 24th
7. Two articles on Matan from the Israeli press
8. Of Shabbat, Settlers and Destroyed Homes, Sunday February 26th, By Mary
9. Harassment of Palestinian Non-Violent activists – part one, Testimony by Monsour
10. Conversations at the Palestinian “Outpost,” Tuesday February 29th By Ashraf

*************************************

1. Protesters Hang Themselves on The Wall
Friday, March 3rd

For pictures see https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/03/03/protetors-hang-themselves-on-the-wall/
At 9:30 AM Friday morning, Palestinians and Israelis hung themselves from the annexation barrier being constructed illegally on Bil’in’s land. The protestors wrapped themselves in shrouds symbolizing the death sentence that the barrier represents to the Palestinian people and economy.

Other protestors chained their arms into metal tubes and attached themselves to the wall. Israeli soldiers beat the chained demonstrators with batons and rifle butts and wounded two of the protestors. Mohammad Khatib from the Bil’in popular committee and Yossi Bartal from Israeli Anarchists Against the Wall both sustained injuries from the beatings.

The route of the wall in Bil’in was designed to allow for the further expansion of the illegal outpost of Metityahu Mizrah on Bil’in land. The fence in this will annex the Modi’in Elite settlement block that is currently under construction.

After the protest in Bil’in the villagers of Bil’in joined the Beit Sira demonstration see report # : Bil’in and Beit Sira March Together For Peace

Abud village also had a parallel demonstration see report# : Aboud Stops Construction on the Wall
_____________________________________________________________________

2.Bil’in and Beit Sira March Together For Peace
Friday, March 3rd
by Henry and Sara

For pictures see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/03/04/bilin-and-beit-sira-march-together-for-peace/

The weekly non-violent protests against the Israeli Apartheid wall continued this Friday in Bil’in and Beit Sira, with Palestinians from both villages uniting once again with Internationals and Israelis in a display of resistance to the ongoing theft of their villages’ land for the construction of the Apartheid Wall.

After the morning direct action against the Wall in Bi’in, the focus moved to Beit Sira where the village has begun its wall struggle in the past weeks. The Route of the wall in Beit Sira is designed to annex the Makabim settlement and more of Beit Sira’s land to Israel. Ismael Mahmoud, a member of the popular committee against the wall, told ISM that the Israeli military previously uprooted more than 1500 of the village olive trees to build a barrier that will isolate more than 800 dunnms of land from the village.

Today’s march was attended by over 500 people, including many Palestinians from Bil’in and Israelis that were injured in the morning action, and International activists. The crowd marched from village to lands destroyed by wall construction, alongside the settlement of Maccabim.
Soon, the crowd approached Border Police and Israeli Military, but were able to pass them, despite their shoving and walk around to the adjacent road. A were dismayed to see some of the same border police unit who had shot from close range both Matan Cohen, 17, from Tel Aviv, and a member of the “Anarchists Against the Fence” organization in the eye and Hussni Rayan of Beit Sira .

After changing direction and moving onto the road, the demonstrators were able to surround a military jeep by Palestinians with only olive branches, flags and a megaphone against a full array of Israeli weaponry.

The Border Police stormed the demonstrators in an attempt to break the peaceful crowd up, using their batons and sheilds to beat the unarmed people as well as throwing sound bombs. While doing this, a few border police fell off the road into the olive orchards and number of people were injured by further Israeli violence.

In a few minutes the situation calmed down, and the people of Beit Sira were able to give speeches, discussing the wall and the political situation in Palestine. While this was happening, ISM volunteers observed the border police getting their sound bombs and tear gas ready for use against the unarmed demonstrators.

As the protest ended and the people began to walk away, they began their assault, which provoked stone throwing by the local young boys. The struggle of Beit Sira will continue, with more protests scheduled for the coming weeks.

Activists left for Bil’in after the Bet Sira demo ended, with reports of soldiers entering the village. When we reached, it turned out to be inaccurate, but the IOF was confronting stone throwing youth with tear gas and rubber bullets in a very dangerous manner.

About thirty Israeli, International and Palestinian activists then marched towards the soldiers and were able to draw the attention of the soldiers and stop their firing at the boys.
Once they reached the wall, the Palestinians showed court papers to the soldiers supporting their right to access land which has been closed off by the Wall.

Citing a closed military zone order, the protesters refused to leave and sat down in front of the army jeeps and a large number of Israeli Military.

After 20 minutes, the Popular Committee decided to leave the area and return to the village. Some tear gas was fired after the activists’ departure, but for the most part things remained calm.

Recently, Bil’in has expanded what is the first Palestinian settlement, located west of the barrier, as well as a second outpost nearby. Abdullah Abu Rahma, coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall, says that they installed the house near the Wall as yet another way to protest against land expropriation for settlement construction and expansion. With over a year of struggle behind them, their will to resist the Occupation and the Apartheid Wall has not diminished at all.

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is inviting volunteers to come to Palestine for a conference on Joint Nonviolent Struggle in Bil’in and for ISM’s Spring and Summer Campaigns. ISM’s Spring Campaign is taking place between March 1st and April 23rd, 2006, and Freedom Summer will be from July 2 until August 5, 2006.

______________________________________________________________________

3. Aboud Stops Construction on the Wall
Friday, March 3rd
by Harry

For pictures see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/03/04/aboud-stops-construction-on-the-wall/

The people of Abud recieved a court decision on Thursday by the Israeli High court to cease construction og the wall in that area for 14 day. Despite this on Thurday at around 11am villagers still saw the bulldozers hard at work, destroying their lands. A rally of 100 Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals marched down holding the court decison in their hands to make sure the decision was enforced.

We marched down from the village and onto the road but the millitary were expecting us to march over the hill. When the Army couldn’t physically block us because they were too far away, they resorted to tear gas, but the rally pushed through. The army finally caught up with us. After a sound bomb was fired and a lot of shouting they were finally prepared to talk. They promised that they had ceased construction 1 hour ago and that they were no longer going to violate the court order (maybe it was just because it was the start of their weekend). The villagers said they would be watching and that they would be back if the court order was violated again.

The barrier near Aboud has already been completed on the Green Line 6 kilometers west of the village and now an additional fence on Aboud land close to the village will annex the Israeli Bet Arye and Ofarim settlements. These settlements were illegally established in the 1980’s on Aboud’s land. The separation barrier will annex more of the villages farmland to Israel in violation of international law.

4.Soldiers shamed by checkpoint
Saturday March 4th
By Harry

For pictures see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/03/05/soldiers-shamed-by-checkpoint/

Yesterday there was a demonstration against the wall and checkpoints in Tulkarem. All residents of Tulkarem region have been denied the right to leave their area and access the rest of the West Bank from four months now. We were at a checkpoint called Jebara where the wall has cut off the village of Jebara and its 500 residents. Obviously 500 people aren’t a self sufficient economy and they desperately need free access to the town of Tulkarem and surrounding villages for basic supplies and things like school. When we got there the army was hardly pleased to see us. They had already fired shots in the air and unlike most demonstrations where the army keeps their fire arms by their side, here they kept them raised upwards. They were rather annoyed by the fact that there were so many press and activists with cameras.

The Army kept threatening to have peoples camera’s confiscated and they even threatened to “break” me if I proceeded to take pictures. But there was nothing they could do as we continued to take photo’s whilst chanting and gathering around the checkpoint. ‘
The people of Tulkarem are planning on making this a weekly Saturday demonstration, which is great especially given that there are already so many Saturday rallies. There was also a very healthy number of women at this rally, which I think was in no small part due to an active Women’s Union in Tulkarem.

One thing which hit home for me just how this Apartheid system works was a sign at the checkpoint with the words “Dear Citizen: Entrance to this village is forbidden for Israeli Citizens by order of the IDF commander of the region. I could not help thinking about the South African Apartheid regime. They didn’t want White South Africans to see how the Black population lived, Israel also denies its citizens from seeing how the Palestinians live.
_______________________________________________________________________

5. Beit Sira Replants Trees in the Shadow of the Wall
Tues February 28th, 2006
By Henry

For pictures see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/02/28/beit-sira-replants-trees-in-the-shadow-of-the-wall/

The demonstration today in the village of Beit Sira was a peaceful march of one hundred people to the village land where olive trees are being uprooted to make way for planned route of the annexation Barrier. The Route of the Barrier in Beit Sira is designed to annex the Makabim settlement and more of Beit Sira’s land to Israel. To the left of the crowd, on the hill bulldozers were seen working on the wall’s foundation throughout the day.

We walked in the direction of the site until they reached the line of Israeli soldiers waiting to block us. We were dismayed to see that the same border police unit who had shot Matan Cohen in the eye and Hussni Rayan from close range waiting for us.( see report# Israeli activist shot in the eye by Israeli soldiers at Beit Sira)

A stand off ensued in which both the soldiers and the demonstrators behaved in a restrained manner. A village elder negotiated that a group of us would cross the road (which had been partially destroyed by the Israeli Military) in order to replant trees. While one group planted trees, the rest of us chanted, while being flanked by mostly border police.

After finishing, the internationals formed a line between the border police and the demonstrators, and after approximately 20 minutes, the people all moved back to the village. As opposed to the previous demos in Bet Sira, there were no injuries at today’s demonstration Another demonstration in Bet Sira is scheduled for this Friday.
______________________________________________

6.Israeli activist shot in the eye by Israeli soldiers at Beit Sira
Friday February 24th

for pictures see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/02/24/israeli-activist-shot-in-the-eye-by-israeli-soldiers-at-beit-sira/

17- year- old Israeli Matan Cohen and American Sara were both shot with rubber bullets in the legs and were retreating when Matan was shot again this time in the eye. Maria from Sweden who was standing next to them said later: “We were at least 200 meters away from any stone throwers. It was very obvious that we were Israeli and Internationals that we were completely peaceful and that we had separated from the demonstration.” Matan is currently in Tel Hashomer hospital. Doctors say that his eye is in danger but it is too early to assess the damage.

The demonstration today in the village of Beit Sira started with a peaceful March of three hundred people to the village land were olive trees are being uprooted to make way for planned route of the annexation Barrier. The Route of the Barrier in Beit Sira is designed to annex the Makabim settlement and more of Beit Sira’s land to Israel. No work was taking place today.

The demonstrators walked in the direction of the site until they reached the line of Israeli soldiers waiting to block them. A stand off ensued with both the soldiers and the demonstrators behaved in a restrained manner. Everything was peaceful but for some mutual pushing, until a group of border policemen arrived on the scene.

The border policemen began to beat the crowd with batons and when people dispersed as a result they shot at them with large amounts of rubber bullets and tear gas. When people tried to take cover between the olive trees the border police ran and shot between the trees. Some people including Israeli and International activists tried to walk away from the place the border police followed them and continued to shoot.

14 people were injured by rubber bullets during the demonstration. Including thirty-year-old Hussni Rayan who has a metal-coated rubber bullet lodged near his kidney and will be operated on tomorrow in Sheik Zaid hospital in Ramallah.
___________________________________________

7. Two articles about Matan from the Israeli Press:
Injured anti-fence ‘anarchist’ speaks outby Meital Yasur Beit-Or

Originally published 25th of February on Ynet see: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3220888,00.html for the original article.

Matah Cohen has sustained eye injuries while protesting the security fence near Ramallah; Says: ‘I feel like the blood of Left-wing activists is cheap’

Matan Cohen, 17, from Tel Aviv, and a member of the “Anarchists Against the Fence” organization, was injured while demonstrating against the security fence near Ramallah.
“My feeling is that the blood of Left-wing activists and the Palestinians is cheap,” he said.

Cohen was shot by Border Police and injured in his eye, and has been hospitalized in the Tel Hashomer Medical Center since Friday.

If bleeding does not stop within 24 hours, Cohen will undergo surgery. In either case, doctors believe his eye has sustained damage. In the best case, his visual range will be affected, and in the worst case, he would lose complete vision in the eye. “Up until now I can’t see out of the eye, and they’ll be able to see if there’s damage only in a few days. I’m worried about damage in my eye and I really hope the bleeding stops,” said Cohen.

Members of the organization have begun documenting their demonstrations due to past experiences with violence. “We have recordings of an army commander who said that he doesn’t want the situation to turn violent, and who tried to calm things down, saying not to shoot. But a Border Police is also heard saying ’shoot everyone one of them with a rubber bullet.’ When I was shot I was standing with three people, within around a 20 meter range from a Border Police force. We said: ‘Don’t shoot, we are not threatening you and we are not endangering you,’ but they opened fire, and also directed it to the head, violating all of their rules of engagement. I felt the impact in the eye, and with the remainder of my strength, I managed to run from them. My entire hand and head were filled with blood,” said Cohen.

‘No connection to Amona’

Cohen says there is no connection between violence of soldiers against Right-wing demonstrators in Amona and Left-wing demonstrators: “In our demonstrations, they shoot live bullets in order to kill. In Right-wing demonstrations, no gas or shock grenades have ever been thrown. This is violence which is many times larger. The feeling is our blood is cheap. But violence which takes place when the life of a police officer is not under threat should be condemned, it doesn’t matter from which side it occurs.”

Three soldiers and Border Police officers were injured by rocks thrown at them. One police officer was taken to hospital.

According to police, two disturbances of the peace took place on Friday in the Ramallah area, as part of protests against the construction of the security fence. Hundreds of Palestinians, Left-wing activists, and foreigners took part in the disturbances, whom entered a closed military zone. Demonstrators threw rocks at security forces, who responded with crowd dispersal means.

Soldier lost eye

A few months ago, a soldier lost his left eye in similar protests after a rock was thrown at him by demonstrators.
Cohen, who completed his high school studies, has been taking part in protests against the route of the fence for three years, and says he witnessed harsh violence on the part of soldiers and Police officers. “The approach is that it’s legitimate to fire at demonstrators, even when they are nonviolent. The IDF and Border Police use live ammunition, tear gas, and rubber bullets, and hundreds of people have been injured in this period. In yesterday’s demonstration another 11 Palestinians were injured, one of them was even operated on at a hospital in Ramallah,” he said.

***********
Youth, 17, says shot in the eye by Border Police officers
By Jonathan Lis

Originally published in Haaretz see the original article at www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=687066&contrassID=1&subContrassID=5
Matan Cohen, an Israeli demonstrator against the separation fence, told Haaretz on Saturday that doctors are not sure if he will be able to see out of his eye again after he was reportedly shot the day before by a Border Police officer during a protest.

Cohen said he was shot Friday in his eye with a rubber bullet during clashes between anti-fence demonstrators and Israeli security forces in the West Bank village of Beit Sira, southwest of Ramallah. He was taken to Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer.

“We went to a nonviolent demonstration against the separation fence on portions of the village land. We reached an agreement with the military representative that the demonstration would remain nonviolent. We told them we wanted no confrontations. The request was honored until a Border Police force arrived,” Cohen said.

“At that point, the clashes began and the Border Police officers fired live fire into the air and rubber bullets from point blank range. Ten officers then began running toward the demonstrators that had already begun dispersing. Me and three other international activists were standing far from the demonstrators. A Border Police officer stood 20 meters from me, and I heard him cock his weapon. I yelled to him, ‘Don’t shoot, nobody is endangering you,’ but he shot. I felt a sharp pain in my eye, lost my vision and fainted.”

“He simply shot me in the head. The bullet hit half a centimeter above my eye. It’s utter contempt for human life, when in the name of the defense of something or other the army has a right to hurt demonstrators,” Cohen continued.

Border Police sources refused to respond to the statements, saying that only Israel Defense Forces spokespeople had the authority to respond to the affair. IDF sources said a preliminary examination revealed Cohen was injured by a stone thrown by an unruly demonstrator. They said that since he was standing closer to the forces than to the demonstrators, it is likely that he was hit by demonstrators aiming for forces.

IDF sources also said that the demonstration in Beit Sira, along with one nearby in Abud, constituted a violation of order because the area had been declared a closed military zone. The demonstrators said the sources threw stones at the security forces, which prompted the dispersal by security forces.

During the clashes, three soldiers were lightly injured in Abud and one in Beit Sira.

____________________________________________________________

8. Of Shabbat, Settlers and Destroyed Homes; Reports From Occupied Hebron
by Mary, Sunday February26th

It was Shabat (25/02/06). In the morning, I was at the crossroad at the top of Tel Rumeida hill, waiting to escort Palestinian children to their homes near the Tel Rumeida settlement. When two girls, who live opposite the settlement arrived, I walked with them up to the soldier outside the settlement. The soldier said to go no further and that he would see the children to their house. I turned to come back to the crossroad. There were three teenage settler boys coming, followed by about ten settler adults. While the soldier’s back was turned, a boy of about 16 came over to me and spat in my face; he was laughing. I called to the soldier and showed him the spit on my glasses. I also indicated which boy was the offender. The soldier was shocked, and the settler adults spoke to the soldier as they passed behind the boys into the settlement.
Later, when I took another group of children up to the soldier, he seemed frightened and asked me to please not come up there. He said that he would see that the children were properly looked after and safe, and more soldiers arrived. I do not know who the settlers threatened – the children, the soldier or me. But I would not want to be the cause of danger so I stayed back.

Beer il Haia 25/2/06

I went with a Palestinian friend to Beer il Haia in H2 ( Israeli controlled Hebron), where the Ajlum and Gait families now live. Four years ago, they moved to Beer il Haia, when they were forced to leave their previous homes behind the Ibrahim (Abraham) Mosque. The families concerned need more accommodation and have been obliged to build without a permit from the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces). The IOF will not grant permits, saying that the land is zoned for agricultural use. A few days ago, the IOF came with a bulldozer and destroyed a house, a well and a stone shed, which provided shelter for sheep and goats. They are supposed to give notice for such action and they say they did. However, the notice was left on the ground and not handed to the owners of the land and buildings to be destroyed. The owners did not see it.

There are two more houses, which are inhabited but not completely built and which are to be destroyed because they have been built without a permit.

There is great inconsistency between the IOF behavior when dealing with settlers and Palestinians. Here, in Tel Rumeida, we have settler caravans assembled on a street, without permit, and left there for years. Palestinians families, living on that street, are not allowed to use the street and have difficulty reaching their homes. At Beer il Haia, there is plenty of space to build and the land is owned by the families. There are plenty of houses about and there seems to be no good reason why there should not be more. It’s not near a settlement, so that’s not the reason for the IOF’s decision. And, if it is to be agricultural land, why did the IOF destroy the well and animal shed?
____________________________________________________________________

9. Harassment of Palestinian Non-Violent activists – part one

Mansur’s Testimony, Monday February 27th

I decided to join some of my international friends and sleep in the new Palestinian houses built on the land that will be cut off from Bil’in by the wall. We were hanging out and chatting when an Israeli military jeep showed up around 8pm. After they left we went to sleep. At 3am, the Israeli jeep showed up again and I woke up to see who it was. They asked for my ID and then they left for around 20 minutes. On returning they told me to go to Ofer prison after 6 hours.

The morning came, and I start walking to the village, having to pass the construction site of the wall. Two Israeli security men stopped me and threatened that they will shoot people if we kept annoying them by coming to and from the Palestinian houses on the “wrong” side of the wall. I couldn’t argue with them because I didn’t want to be late for the interrogation in Ofer prison as it would result in a black point in my file.

I reached Ofer and waited about 1 hour outside until the soldiers called me and started searching me. They put me in a room with a camera on the wall where I stayed about an hour and a half, until they called me in. An Israeli soldier came who seemed to be nice .He informed me that his name was Captain Amjad and asked if I wanted something to drink. I replied “no thanks, I had some”,”What is your name?” he asked “Mansour Mansour” “What is your work?” “Different things” He started by pretending that he was a nice person talking in a friendly way. He said that he wouldn’t interrogate me but wanted to talk as “friends”. Of course, we Palestinians know this scenario and have much experience with these tactics. He asked me how I survive. , how I get money? what had I achieved ?.Who I was working with? Who are my friends and what was my relationship with the internationals? He asked about my group and about our relationship with Hamas. He asked what I was doing in Bil’in, in Bit Sira and in Aboud and wanted to know how we contacted internationals to join us. He asked many other questions which were intended to make me feel that they knew everything about me.

In fact I felt bored whilst he was questioning me, as both of us knew why I was there and why they wanted to interrogate me.

At some point I told him that he should be smarter than to believe his lying soldiers. He then spat in my mouth and told me to think again before they changed their “nice way”. He left the room and then two huge soldiers came in. They looked at me as if I were something disgusting and told me :” IT SEEMS YOU PREFER THE OTHER WAY OF TALKING, WE DON’T HAVE THAT NICE WAY OF THE FIRST GUY WHO WAS TALKING WITH YOU.” They held my arm and then pushed me against the wall. They hit me against the wall twice. Hard. I said “why are you doing that ?, I didn’t do anything wrong. They told me to shut up. Before long Captain Amjad came back and started questioning me about Hamas. He asked many questions, including what I would do with the new government, how I would work with them, what contact I have with them.

He told me that he would check what I said with my cousin who would be interrogated the following morning in the same place. They then gave me my stuff and led me out of the prison.

I walked calmly and didn’t look back. I expect I will be back. I headed for my house it had been a hard day and I needed to relax. I’m not trying to ignore their humiliating treatment or forget how they violated my human rights but I want to keep on doing effective work for our oppressed people. What they did to me actually inspires me to continue.
____________________________________________

10. Conversations at the Palestinian “Outpost”
By Ashraf, February 28th, 2006

It’s been almost a year of the nonviolent struggle for the Bil’in residence against the illegal Israel wall. Beyond the wall, on land owned by the Bil’in community, the people of Bil’in have built a room referred to as the ‘outpost,’ adjacent to the illegal Israeli settlement outpost Matityahu Mizrah. The land on this side of the wall will be rendered inaccessible to the villagers by the annexation barrier.

Palestinians, Internationals and Israeli activists maintain a permanent presence in the outpost which has since been described as a place for shared popular resistance against the wall over Bil’in’s land.

When I was staying in the outpost, we (a friend, a boy from the village and I) walked through a gap in the fence created during one the protests against the wall. As we reached the other side of the wall an Israeli Hummer Jeep followed us through the field and stopped a few meters ahead. Three soldiers got out of the jeep and asked the boy, who was around 17 years old for his ID.
Boy: “I don’t have my ID”
Soldier: “where is your ID, why you don’t have it?”
Boy: “there is no need for my ID, why should I have it on me when I’m in my village?”
Soldier: “this is not your village, don’t play dumb and give me your ID”
Boy: “I left it at home and we are going to visit friends in that small house (the outpost)”
Soldier: “your land is back there, and that room is not for you”
Boy (pointing with his finger): “do you see that land over there? It belongs to my dad and it’s our land!”
Soldier (making a rude look): “stop the crap, next time you bring your ID with you” The soldier then looked at me and my friend and asked the boy for our IDs, I was very nervous because according to the Israeli policy I am not allowed to travel outside Tulkarem, where I come from. The soldier looked at my ID for more two minutes and then he let us go peacefully.

That night while we were sitting around a camp fire night at the outpost, another Hummer Jeep stopped by and three soldiers walked towards our tent. One of the local activists I admire and respect very much, a farmer called Waji , was there to have this conversation in Hebrew with the soldiers for more than twenty minutes.

The first soldier (apparently the commander): “Hello, how are you?”
Wagi: “We are good, but it would be better if you drop your weapon and join us to drink tea”
The commander: “Why you still sitting here?, we gave you your land back”
Wagi: “You did not give me anything, this is all the land of Bili’n”
The commander: “Your land is the village, this land is not for you it’s for the government”
Wagi: “ How come this land is for the government, did you buy it? Did you earn it some way”
The commander: “I don’t care, this land is for the government and how you want me to drop my weapon when all Arabs hate me?”
Wagi: “ You are stealing our land, our water, our trees, and demolishing our homes and lives, how you want us to feel towards you?” “
The commander: “Well, I have to protect my country and it’s my duty to join the army”
Wagi again: “OK! there is something mentioned in the Jews history, the golden age, do you know about it?”
The commander said: “No, then the next soldier smiled and answered, “Yes, I heard about the golden age”
Wagi: “Do you know what is it?”
The soldier replied, “yes, but you tell me about it.”
Wagi: “It’s the age when the Jews where living under the Muslim empire and you never felt the justice and took all your rights like that time, right”
The soldier answered: “Yes, it’s true.”
Wagi: “Is this how you treat us back now, why we can’t live like we were in the past?”
The soldier: “You have started it, you want to fight us”
Wagi: “It doesn’t make sense, If you gave me all my rights would I fight you? Why you are here with your gun then?”
The commander: “What about the suicide bombers, do you want me to let them blow them selves up in Tel Aviv?”
Wagi: “Do you think a 100 years old man would prefer to die? Naturally people love life. Why you think these people blow them selves up, why do they want to finish there lives”?
The commander: “They do this because they hate us.”
Wagi: “They do this because you have killed their friends, maybe their family or someone close, do you think throwing a bomb in Gaza the most over populated place in the world and killing women and children is different than the suicide bombing?”
The commander again: “Yes, this is a military operation done by soldiers but suicide bombing is different”
Wagi: “Let me tell you this personal story, I have a disabled son moving in a wheelchair, few months ago your army invaded my house and one of your soldiers aimed at my son while he was sitting and shot him in the shoulder”
The other soldier: “Only the border police do that, they are crazy!!! We are not like them, we are regular soldiers”
Wagi: “Regular soldiers!! Don’t you have this saying in the army “Shoot then Cry”? What makes you different?.”
The soldier smiled and didn’t say anything, Wagi added “Do you know how my son became disabled?, at the beginning of this Intifada he joined a peaceful demonstration against an illegal checkpoint in Ramallah and he was shot with a “dumdum” bullet by an Israeli sniper”
The same soldier again: “What is a ‘dumdum’ ?”
Waji with a smile: “You don’t know what is a “dumdum”? It’s an explosive bullet, it makes an explosion once it hits something. This illegal bullet shattered my son’s spine”
The soldier: “We don’t have these kind of bullets in Israeli, we don’t use them maybe it was a rubber bullet?”
Waji: “Do you think that bullet came from the sky and hit my son?, Do you know my son was dying and I wanted to take to Jordan to get better medical care but your authority did not give me a permit to save my son’s life! Let me tell you something else, what weapons do you use against peaceful demonstrations in Bil’in? Rubber bullets, coated steal bullets with salt, bean bullets (an illegal bullet splits into plastic pieces to poison the body, used once in the US and killed one woman”,) sponge bullets, the scream weapon, electric weapons. my other 12 years old son was shot with a “dumdum” bullet too in one of the demonstrations? Are you going to tell me that you don’t have these weapons too? My other son is in prison now for three months because he participated in peaceful protests against stealing his land. If you were in my place as a father, what would you do?!!”
The commander (nodding his head): “It’s been good talking to you, we have to go now. I hope we can see again and talk”
Waji: “If you come next time, come with your car without your uniform and you are welcome to visit me in my house”.

END

Silenced Truth

Reflections on the Balata Invasion:

1.Simply. Not. News. by neta Golan
2.Report of Balata Invasion by IWPS
3.Watching your tax dollars at work by Katie
4.A few days in a war zone by Harrison Healy

Remembering Rachel:

5. A Message Crushed Again by Katharine Viner
6. Rickman Slams ‘Censorship’ of Play about US Gaza Activist by Julian Borger
7.Why are people afraid of Rachel Corrie’s words? by Ann Petter and Jen Marlowe
8. Spreading Rachael’s words
9.Remembering Rachel Corrie- Third annual memorial

Reflections on the Balata Invasion:
____________________________________________________________

1.Simply. Not. News.
March 4th, 2006
By Neta Golan

I work in the ISM media office. On February 19th 2006 the Israeli milit1ary once again invaded Balata Refugee Camp.
I remember the first invasion that Sharon orchestrated into the camps during this intifada, in February 2002. I remember that I could not believe it was happening. Never in my worst nightmares would I believe, had someone told me, that four years later such horror would become “normal.”
IWPS and ISM volunteers called me in the office as they accompanied Palestinian medics in their efforts to give medical treatment to the wounded and sick in the camp. They called me when the Israeli military shot towards ambulances and denied them access to Balata. They called me when they witnessed unarmed 22-year-old Mohammad Subkhi Abu Hanade being shot in the chest by a sniper through his bedroom window. I wrote a press release, emailed and faxed it and then called the news agencies and journalists.
No one wrote about it. Not even the Arabic press which is always more responsive.
The next morning I looked everywhere for news of the invasion and found none.
That day Sixteen year old Kamal Khalili was shot and was clinically dead by the time he made it to the hospital. The woman that answered the phone at Agency France Press said “call us back when he dies” and hung up.
The volunteers called me when soldiers refused to let them treat ill people in families whose homes had been occupied. They called me when people in the camp ran out of food and baby formula. They called me when the youth of the camp who defended their homes with stones and makeshift barricades were shot at wounded and killed. They gave me the names and the ages of children shot at with live ammunition.
I wrote it all down even though I knew that the mainstream media did not want to know.
I wrote it down knowing that wounded, hungry and imprisoned Palestinian civilians are simply. Not. News.

______________________________________________________________

2. IWPS report on the Nablus invasion

For pictures see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/02/25/take-a-virtual-tour-of-the-2006-balata-invasion/

March 5th, 2006 |
Sunday 19th of February

At approximately 1:30 a.m. of the 19th of February, the Israeli army started an operation named “Northern Glory.” The IDF invaded Balata with helicopters and drones as well as about 50 army vehicles, including four armored personnel carriers (APCs) and two bulldozers, starting to block of the camp with its 30 000 residents from its surrounding and from Nablus City. The UNRWA schools of the camp were turned into a military base and a number of civilian houses were occupied.

In the early morning, the army surrounded the house of the Hamami family in search of Ahmad Abu Ras, 28, and arrested him and another person. In an act of collective punishment they then destroyed the house.

The army declared a curfew on the refugee camp the following morning and enforced it for 64 hours, until leaving Balata in the evening of the 21st of February. An unknown number of houses were occupied and used as sniper position, while holding the families inside and restricting them to one room. In some areas of the camp house to house searches were conducted, causing property damages to varying degrees.

Children and youth inside the camp and in its surrounding started resisting the invasion by throwing stones, bottles with paint etc. on the armored army vehicles and building barricades. The army responded with excessive use of rubber coated steal bullets and live ammunition, resulting in about 35 injuries, most of them youth, on the first day of the invasion. IWPS volunteers also witnessed soldiers in a Jeep with the number 611 338 inciting youth by cursing their parents and threatening the youth to make them martyrs.
Around 2 p.m. Mohammed Ahmad Natur and Ibrahim Ahmad Sheikh Issa, both 17 years old, were killed by a sniper shooting from an occupied house while being on the roof of one of their houses, watching the confrontation. One boy was hit by a live bullet in his neck, the other in the chest. The brother of one of the boys was shot in the thigh when he tried to come to their help. The army later clamed they were planting bombs. However, while the army tried to block the fatally injured boys from being carried to the ambulance, no attempts were made to enter the house and no bomb squad were brought to either the house or the streets around it.

Monday 20th of February

The operation continued throughout Monday and Tuesday, the 20th and 21st of February, with the army using tear gas, sound bombs, rubber bullets – often shot with a device that spray shoots several bullets at once – and live ammunition against youth throwing stones, resulting in more injuries.

Between 2.30 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the 20th of February the army searched the house of the Kitawi family, looking for their wanted son. The whole family, including children, were forced on the street, while the army destroyed much of the family belongings. Food and clothing were thrown on the floor and furniture damaged, a fridge, TV, electronic equipment smashed. Sound bombs were exploded inside the house. The father of the family reports being cursed by soldiers and threatened that his wanted son would be killed unless he turned himself in. He also reports that 4500 Shekel and 550 Dinar were stolen from the house.

In the same night the army also entered the old city of Nablus and killed Islamic Jihad militant Ahmad Mohammad Nayef Abu Sharkh, 29.

Around 17.00 p.m., when the situation had quieted down, international and medical volunteers sitting outside a field clinic in the Balata Market Street witnessed two shots being fired from an occupied house on the house across the street. A 22 year old man, who was standing at the window of his room, was hit in the chest and seriously injured. Army jeeps drove up to the house, but did not interfere as the injured youth and his heavily pregnant sister, who went into labor due to the shock, were evacuated by ambulances. Shortly afterwards the soldiers forced the rest of the family, including two small children and two babies, into the street, while searching the house and shooting live ammunition inside. They later threatened the ambulances on the scene and the family with shooting and throwing tear gas to make them leave the area. An explosion was set in front of the house.

Late Tuesday afternoon the army pulled out of the camp, injuring more youth in the process. Many people had taken to the streets thinking the army had left, when some jeeps came back to evacuate an occupied house.

Wednesday 22nd of February

On Wednesday 22nd, the army conducted an arrest operation in Kufr Kalil, a village on
the outskirts of Balata Refugee Camp, lasting from the early afternoon till after midnight. The Amer family house, where four fighters from the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades were hiding, was surrounded and the two resident families, about 22 persons including children, were called to leave the house and kept under the trees in the area. Four surrounding houses, each home to 2-3 families with many children and babies, were occupied by the army and the families were kept inside, forbidden to turn on the light or to use their phones to contact family members outside the house. The operation ended with the arrest of the four fighters.

Thursday 23rd of February

Thursday around 3 a.m. the refugee camp was re-invaded and army bulldozers again blocked most of the entrances.

Thursday morning Ibrahim Saideh, 19, was killed in ad-Dahiyyeh, a neighborhood
overlooking Balata Refugee Camp. The youth was hit by two live bullets in the abdomen and back, damaging his liver, intestines and one of the main veins.

At 1.30 p.m. on Thursday, Naim Abu Saris, 29, was killed by a live bullet in the heart,

shot by a sniper from an occupied house, while being on the roof of his house. The army claimed he was armed, but eye witnesses deny this. No confrontations were going on in the area of his house at that time.

During the morning an area close to the Balata Camp cemetery was sealed off and house to house searches were conducted. The Israeli Army surrounded the house of Mohammad Amar Abu Hamis, 32, where he and two other fighters of the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, Hammoudeh Ishtawi, 32, and Hassan Hajaj, 21, where hiding. Around 11.45 a.m. the army set of an explosion in the house, without prior warning to the civilians in the area, which caused a fire. The smoke also affected the families in neighboring houses, two of whom had to be evacuated with the help of medical volunteers. The army forbid the medical team from checking on the residents of other affected houses and prevented the Palestinian firemen who arrived to the area shortly afterwards from approaching the house, attempting instead to put out the fire with water brought in cooking pots and buckets by women from the neighboring houses.

At 12.30 more explosions were set of. Reportedly, there was an exchange of fire between the army and the surrounded militants, resulting in the injury of two Israeli soldiers.

At about 2 p.m., after a quiet period, an explosion followed by live fire hit a group of medical workers, international volunteers and journalists who where observing the events around the house from the end of the narrow alleyway next to the cemetery. Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (PMRC) ambulance driver Jareer Candola was hit by shrapnel in the hand and the leg, cutting nerves and veins under the knee. Ihab Mansour, a medical volunteer with the Scientific Medical Society, was hit by either shrapnel or a live bullet in the head and lost consciousness. Another PMRC volunteer was lightly injured by shrapnel in the chest and two IWPS volunteers from Holland and the United States also suffered light injuries by shrapnel, one in the shoulder and the thigh, the other in her arm. The army blocked the rescue efforts, causing a delay of at least 30 minutes. The ambulance transporting Ihab Mansour was then stopped again on its way to the hospital and Mansour was arrested from the ambulance. At the time of writing he is reported to be under arrest in critical condition in Beilinson Hospital inside Israel.

At around 3.30 p.m. the army evacuated the area and the camp after dragging the bodies of the three militants out to confirm their death. As the army left, residents and medical teams rushed to the scene to recover the bodies, which were all severely mutilated by the explosions.

Throughout the invasion at least 12 persons were arrested, two of them from ambulances.
Number of injuries during the invasion

Dr. Samir Abu Zaroor from Rafidia hospital gives the following data on the injuries throughout the invasion. These numbers are not complete; due to the large number of casualties some cases were transferred directly to other hospitals in Nablus.
About 100 people were injured during the invasion. Their ages range from 12 to 63, though the majority of casualties were young boys and men between 15 and 25.
Injuries included:
14 cases of severe bruises and fractures caused by jeeps driving into people
28 cases of injuries by beating
4 cases of injuries caused when people fell while running away from the army
37 injuries caused by plastic coated steel bullets (so called rubber bullets)
21 cases of live bullets
Severe cases included:
a 17 year old boy shot with a live bullet at short range into his left shoulder, breaking his shoulder and damaging a main artery, which caused heavy bleeding;
a youth, who suffered multiple fractures in his thigh by a live bullet and will be permanently disabled;
a man, 26 year old, hit by live bullets in the throat and the head, who was transferred to Ihloff Hospital in Tel Aviv in critical condition;
a 63 year old taxi driver, who was injured by bullet fragments in his left shoulder and a live bullet in his head;
a youth who was transferred to Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem who was shot in the throat.

Restrictions on medical access

Apart from the injuries directly inflicted by the Israeli army, the several day long siege and curfew of the camp and its population of about 30 000 people created a more general humanitarian crisis. Families were running out of bread and milk for the children and some patients out of medicine. Women in labor, sick children and chronically ill people, suffering from Asthma, Diabetes, high blood pressure or needing dialysis, were all cut of from the normal medical infrastructure, the army often preventing or delaying their access to medical treatment. In addition, severe restrictions were imposed on the movement of ambulances and medical volunteers. Ambulances, medical teams and the UN clinic in the camp were attacked several times. The most severe case, resulting in the injury of two medical workers on Thursday 23rd, is described above. Following are other cases of preventing or delaying access to medical care and attacks on medical workers that where witnessed by IWPS volunteers or reported to them by Palestinian medical workers. More cases may have occurred.

Sunday 19th of February

At around 11.30 two injured, Mahmoud Rajeh and Saleh Abu Alfa were arrested out of Ambulances on their way to the hospital. A PMRC ambulance was later called to Huwara Military base to pick up Rajeh, while Abu Alfa was arrested and transferred to Beilinson hospital inside Israel.

At around 12.30 two jeeps cornered an ambulance carrying an injured person and a women with labor complications. The jeeps pushed the ambulance from the front and the back, fired a shot in its direction and forced it to stand between the jeeps for about half an hour, while youth were throwing stones at them.

At around 1:00 pm two ambulances were held stopped by several jeeps outside Balata camp. According to the ambulance team they were detained for about 40 minutes and a young man with a bullet wound in the shoulder was beaten inside one of the ambulances. The soldiers forced the ambulance personnel to undress his wound to prove he is injured, making the wound start bleeding again. The ambulance was held until the family, with the help of the ambulance team and the IWPS volunteers, brought his ID card. After his ID was checked, the ambulance continued its way, only to be stopped again by the next jeep on the road.

At around 1:30 pm two boys, aged between 11 and 14 years, were injured in their legs with live ammunition. One had a flesh wound, while the other had his femur crushed by the bullet. The soldiers did not allow the ambulance to reach the injured, who had to be carried about two kilometers out of the camp by medical volunteers using a stretcher and a mattress.

Around 6 p.m. a boy hit by a plastic coated bullet in the head also had to be carried out of the camp to reach the ambulance.

Monday 20th of February

At approximately 7:15 am, a military jeep shot in the direction of the ambulance from a distance of about 200m preventing it from approaching the area close to the main entrance of the camp.

At approximately 11:15 the army attempted to close the UN medical clinic by shooting warning shots and percussion grenades. They also prevented patients from entering the clinic.

At approximately 11.35 a team of medical and international volunteers was shot at with tear gas.

At approximately 15:40 Israeli soldiers denied entry to a medical team attempting to deliver food and medicine into the camp. The Israeli soldiers also threatened to shoot them.

Tuesday 21st of February

Around 1 p.m. soldiers in a Jeep with the number 611 323 shot tear gas at an ambulance delivering medical supplies and pointed their guns at a team of medical and international volunteers accompanying patients including a small child to the UN clinic.
– – – – –

Witness/es: IWPS and Palestinian Medical Relief workers.
Report written by: Clara and Vera
Edited by: Grace
Contact details: IWPS withholds this information as a courtesy to those involved – we will do our best to furnish you with all the relevant information you might need to begin action.
The International Women’s Peace Service, Haris, Salfit, Palestine.
Tel:- (09)-2516-644. Mobile:- 067-870-198
Email:- iwps@palnet.com Website

__________________________________________________________________

3. Watching your tax dollars at work….
By Katie
For pictures see:
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/02/25/watching-your-tax-dollars-at-work/
February 25th, 2006
Three days of IOF invasion in Balata refugee camp.
On February 19th, I received a call from M.M. saying the IOF had invaded the Balata refugee camp and killed two teenage boys. They were using the girls school in the camp as a base of operations. M.M. said ISMers were needed in Balata to help with the medical evacuations because often the IOF will not allow ambulances to leave the camp. The military has arrested injured persons on their way to the hospital before. Our presence would hopefully pressure the soldiers to regain their humanity in these situations. In addition, the presence of internationals has the effect of making the soldiers less likely to unnecessarily kill Palestinians. Three other ISMers and I soon headed north to Nablus, the city next to Balata refugee camp.

Once in Nablus, we were picked up but couldn’t be driven up to the camp. We had to get off about 200 meters from the entrance. I called M.A. to ask for further instructions. He said that two medical volunteers would come out to meet us and escort us to the clinic inside the camp. We began walking towards the entrance while residents of Nablus were waving to us, asking us to stop and that we should not go in there because it was dangerous. A tank and a jeep were blocking the main entrance to the camp. We stopped when we saw the two volunteers coming out. They motioned for us to follow and we began walking in the direction of the tank. I was not feeling very happy about this when a voice from the tank shouted on a megaphone “GO AWAY.” I felt a little bit scared but I followed the volunteers anyways as they changed course and headed down a series of narrow alleys. We emerged onto a wide street and saw the tank had moved to intercept us about 200 meters away down the street. They fired shots in the air. I screamed, grabbed Wendy’s hand and we dashed across the street.

We continued to follow the two volunteers but I was beginning to not feel confident in them. At one point they lead us straight down a street towards an army jeep whose driver demanded to see our passports. I knew if they got a hold of our passports it would be all over. We would be arrested for being in a closed military zone and/or blacklisted- which means we could never enter the country again, and would be removed from Balata. I yelled to my four friends, “we have to leave NOW, yalla!” I ran down the nearest small alleyway followed by the others and bumped into a group of surprised and confused young men. I attempted to ask if their house was a place we could hide while at the same time calling M.A. on the phone to ask where we should go. I was really freaked out at this point but fortunately we were quite near M.A. and he found us immediately.

M.A. took us to the clinic and explained that we would be helping the medical volunteers evacuate the injured and take food to families in occupied houses. Let me explain what an occupied house is. When the IOF wants to use someone’s house or roof as a base of operations, they lock the family in one room and use the house to their heart’s content. Often they will refuse to let the family out to use the toilet or to eat. This is a very traumatic experience for the families. The volunteers go to these houses and attempt to reason with the soldiers, try to see if anyone is sick or injured and needs to go to the hospital, and bring food and medication.

There is garbage and squalor everywhere in Balata. Other than this, the two most unique aspects are the density of the population (25,000 people in two square kilometers) and the martyr posters on the walls of all the buildings. Most of these men (and some women) have been killed during the military invasions of Balata. A small number died in attacks against Israelis. The tragedy of Balata is apparent in these posters. Some of the martyrs are boys and most are posed with guns. These are photo studio portraits with guns as props (the guns are photo studio props here just like teddy bears are photo studio props elsewhere.) All the boys and men have them taken “just in case.” Just in case, like 17-year-old Ibrahim and Naim whose funeral I would later watch. Nablus and Balata have had approximately 500 martyrs since the start of the second Intifada in 2001.

During the day, we went out in groups of two or three internationals and two or three Palestinian medics looking for injured people. I was surprised that there were not more injuries that day during the clashes between the IOF and the kids. When the American media reports these types of clashes, they portray Palestinian kids behaving badly by throwing rocks at soldiers who have no choice but to shoot back to defend themselves. This is not exactly how it is. These kids, who range in age from 5 to about 25, have no school to go to during the invasions. (Perhaps because theirs is occupied by the soldiers ?) All they can do is hang out in the streets collecting the only ammunition available with which to defend their city. If you can condemn them for this then I would have to ask you the following question: If soldiers invaded your city, would you do nothing while they occupied your houses and killed your young men? Or would you fight back using the method of your choice ? These kids are fighting back with rocks as weapons, garbage and debris as roadblocks, and I salute them in their bravery. They have nothing to lose. When the jeeps needed to go down the street, a bulldozer would go in first and clear the way. The kids would then gather rocks and pull chunks of cement from the houses and pelt the bulldozer. Then the jeeps would come through, firing tear gas, rubber bullets and sometimes live ammunition. We would hide in alleys until the vehicles had passed and then emerge to see the kids collecting rocks again and chanting “Allahu Akbar,” God is great. This happened over and over and over. At first it was terrifying, then it became only slightly alarming, and then it just became normal.

What was the IOF doing in Balata? Apparently their mission was to kill and/or arrest fighters. The media would probably call the fighters “terrorists.” Other people might use the term freedom fighters. It probably depends on whether you ask the occupier or the occupied.

At night we had to stay inside the ISM apartment in Balata. We could hear shooting going on until 1 am, but we had no idea what was happening outside. Two others stayed awake the whole night in case something happened we and we needed to help.
That night was the scariest I have ever lived though. I say this with the guilt that comes from someone who lives with much privilege. For the people of Balata last night was just another in a lifetime of traumatizing military actions. The Palestinian medical volunteers often tried to soothe the internationals for whom all of this was a new experience.

On February 20th, I woke up to the sound of kids laughing and playing in the street and thought, “the invasion must be over.” I was wrong. This is an example of the most disturbing part of the Balata invasion. It was normal that kids would be out laughing and playing in the street even if there were military jeeps and humvees one block over. People were calm because this was nothing new to them. The next thing I heard as I was waking up was “Nablus….itnayn shaheedayn”, Nablus has two martyrs. Two fighters had been killed in the city of Nablus, adjacent to the Balata refugee camp where I was and which was currently under siege.

All nine international volunteers and several Palestinian medics were all sitting in the clinic listening to the sounds of jeeps and rocks outside when we heard live ammunition fired. It was so close by that after I was done screaming and leaping three feet into the air, I had to look around to see if anyone had been hit. Everyone in the clinic was fine, but, across the street, the target of the fire had been hit. He was shot through the window he was sitting next to. The bullet deflected off of the metal grill outside the window. He must have been shot by an IOF sniper from a nearby roof. We dashed across the street into the house. Everyone was in a panic; women screaming and children crying. I tried to comfort a little girl as the medics were running in and out. A few minutes later the victim was carried out on a stretcher. He had been shot in the chest and he had lost a lot of blood. He was put into an ambulance which was waiting outside. A few minutes later another member of the same family who appeared to be eight or nine months pregnant was taken out and put into an ambulance. She hadn’t been shot, fortunately, but the stress induced labor. The military, which had been waiting outside in the jeeps and humvees watching the chaos ordered the family out of the house and us off of the street. From inside the clinic, we could hear more gunfire and explosions coming from right outside. I was so scared I started crying. After they were done ransacking the house, the soldiers left and the family was allowed back in. We had received an update from the hospital and Mohammad, the man who’d been shot, was going to live.

The next day it was more of the same. We put a teenager who’d been shot in the chest onto a stretcher and sent him off to the hospital. We attempted to bring food to a family in an occupied house but after knocking on the door for five minutes and explaining that we were volunteers trying to bring food and check on the family, we were told to go away.

As we were walking down an alley, a man pulled Ahmad, one of the Palestinian medics aside, and they motioned for us to come into a house where we saw four women sitting on the floor, quietly crying. I thought they were just scared. They didn’t appear any more upset than any of us had been the night before, just sitting there and quietly crying… Ahmad tried to comfort one of them. We were called out after only a few minutes and it was then I learned from Ahmad that this was the family of one of the boys who had died two days before. Knowing that slammed me hard in the stomach.

At one point, Ahmad was detained for thirty minutes for an ID check. The soldiers insisted that these ID checks take a long time, they have to put them through a database to make sure they are not suspected terrorists. Hey soldiers, you can’t fool me, I’m a pro now at watching Palestinian ID checks!! I know how long it takes to run someone’s ID through; in Tel Rumeida, if the soldiers are in one of their rare good moods, it doesn’t take more than five minutes! One ISMer argued with the soldier until Ahmad was released.

That night the soldiers decided to leave a home they had been occupying near the clinic. We were told to stay inside the clinic as the soldiers are very nervous and vulnerable when they exit an occupied house. They often bring the residents out with them as human shields until they can get in their vehicles and get away. More rocks, gunfire and explosions, tear gas coming into the clinic. Someone was shot in the head with a rubber bullet.

To cope with the stress I drew offensive cartoons in my sketchbook, we made sick jokes, and Wendy and I talked about which martyrs were the cutest. My kuffiya became my security blanket and I cuddled with it at night.

We were all a little bit crazy when on February 21, M.A. told us the invasion was over. Five dead total, forty injured, five of M.A.’s friends arrested. I have to hand it to M.A., he was in charge in Balata, everyone looked up to him and he did an awesome job. I’m also amazed at the international volunteers I worked with, everyone did what was needed, none of them went crazy and for most of them it was their first time in an invasion.

That morning we watched the funeral procession of Ibrahim and Naim from a roof and when I saw those kid’s faces it was time for a long overdue cry. They were so young, so beautiful and I can’t get their faces out of my head. What if they were going to be the ones to lead their people to freedom? I wish I had gotten an opportunity to learn about who they were.

In less than 24 hours of returning to Tel Rumeida, the invasion of Balata has resumed again. A fellow American ISMer has been hit in the arm by shrapnel from an explosive in Balata. The Israeli secret service interrogated and beat a Palestinian ISMer for three hours while accusing him of having terrorist connections. An Israeli activist was shot in the eye by the rubber bullet in Beit Sira. Four hundred settlers in Hebron had a huge parade where they spoke about how they would not rest until all of Hebron controlled by “the Jews.”

If you have read this far, I thank you. Your knowledge of this event means the rest of the world has not abandoned Balata.

Please help in any way you feel you can!

__________________________________________________________________

4. A few days in a war zone
by Harrison Healy
March 1st, 2006
www.palestinepal.blogspot.com

Last week was a conference on “International Struggle Against the Occupation of Palestine” held in Bil’in. Unfortunately, many of the ISM and IWPS (International Woman’s Peace Service) activists in Palestine including myself, were unable to attend due to an “incursion” taking place in Balata refugee camp. Balata Refugee camp is basically a cramped suburb of Nablus although people here always see the areas as separate. It has a population of about 30,000 crammed into 2 square kilometers. Many refugees from the 1948 Al Nakba (catastrophe), and others displaced from 1967 ended up in Balata.

It doesn’t fit your standard vision of a refugee camp. Unlike those temporary ones that you often see on television with tents etc. The displacement has become permanent for these people and a whole impoverished town has been set up. According to the Palestine monitor one fifth of all civilians and fighters who have died at the hands of the Israeli government, since the second Intifada come from this place. Unlike Ramallah where the majority of posters around were for the elections, here they were martyr posters and memorials.

The entire refugee camp was under curfew when I arrived on the second day of the “incursion”. The Army had instructed people not to leave their homes. All the shops were shut but people roamed the streets in open defiance of the curfew. Many people didn’t feel safe so they stayed at home, peering out of their windows. Before I had even made it to the camp 2 boys had been killed on the roof of their house by a sniper. The Israeli army frequently occupies houses in Balata(even when not involved in a full on “incursion”). They hold families hostage to prevent the houses from being attacked. During the invasion there were 5 occupied houses. Jeeps were driving up and down the street. This is all despite Nablus and Balata being Area A, meaning that after Oslo these areas were supposedly meant to be under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Still all the Israeli Army need to do is contact the Palestinian Authority and instruct their police to get out and they have to comply. Jeeps moved up and down the streets of Balata whilst tanks surrounded the perimeter. I was working with the Palestinian Medical Relief Committee (UPMRC), an initiative which sees Palestinians working as medics, giving them something constructive to do in a situation that makes you feel really helpless. We were walking around on patrol with the UPMRC, helping them get medicine to sick people and carrying people to Ambulances. During a patrol we bumped into someone who had just been hit in the head with a rubber bullet and was bleeding. Someone else had just been shot with another rubber bullet in the leg. It felt like being in back in St. Johns Ambulance when I was a kid only we weren’t dealing with cricket injuries or some guy who just got a bit too drunk.

The Ambulance’s rather then carrying non-smoking signs, had a no rifles sign. We were waiting for the inevitable casualties. Sometimes we would be out on patrol and at other times we were waiting in the Medical bay. We sat and talked about all sorts of things, joking around and ate a lot of chocolates like I used to do as a first aider waiting for something to happen. Only this sitting around and doing nothing was occurring with the background noise of large explosions and tear gas occasionally filling the room.
We tried to get medicine to one family but the tanks tried to stop us at every road, instructing us to turn back. We had to Indiana Jones style run past a tank on a major road and climb over a stone barrier the army put in place to get back into Balata and deliver the medicine. We lost one of our team in the process who didn’t quite make it. Thankfully he made it around another way.

That night, we were debriefing we heard gun fire across the road. A man was shot by a sniper whilst watching television in his home across the street from the medical centre. The army was hesitant to let the ambulance pass, they did so after much coercion. The man was shot in a major artery and was loosing a lot of blood. At that time we weren’t sure they hadn’t hit him in the heart. The ambulance passed as family members screamed, even a few of the ambulance workers became really angry towards the soldier in the jeep. But it wasn’t useful, we needed to get this person out and so we powerlessly carried the stretcher past an Israeli armored car. They weren’t even after this person. Shortly after a women in the family went into labour and we also had to rush her to an ambulance.

But the story doesn’t end there. The army then forced the family out of their home. The ambulance crews, myself and another international waited with the family outside. After half an hour in the cold, the army tried to instruct us to leave the family there. We refused and they pointed rifles at us from the jeep, placing the laser sight on my fore head. They also constantly gestured that they would throw grenades of some description out of the car.

Despite these threats we didn’t leave, the soldiers threatening to return in one minute. After this threat didn’t eventuate the family returned to their home. The family were so generous that despite just having their son shot they tried to offer us tea. We slept that night in the medical centre and I ended up on the early morning patrol. The narrow entrances to Belata camp were now all closed off. We managed to get out by traveling through a friends house but it wasn’t easy. The army prevented all but one of the ambulances from entering Balata so we would have to carry people to that ambulance or to the edge of the camp.

On the way back from our patrol we bumped into a man who had just had his house searched. Apparently his son was one of the men the army was “interested in.” This search demonstrated no respect for the family or their possessions. Electrical equipment was dismantled and left on the floor, wardrobes were emptied, their clothes and draws scattered across the room. The man inside wanted to spend ages talking to us, he was saying things about Jewish conspiracies and stuff that I find offensive, but how do you criticize a man who has just had his home raided, had everything he owns smashed and is having his son hunted by the “Jewish State” for being racist (let alone the incursion and all the previous problems in Balata).

We responded to distress calls from more people that day some had been shot, an old women who had trouble breathing because of the tear gas. We ended up going into an occupied house because we heard that one of the medical team had been kidnapped. It turned out that he was just giving medicine to a diabetic person. When we were in the occupied house my friend talked to one of the soldiers about where he was from in Israel etc. The soldier was clearly upset and we could tell he didn’t want to be there.

We tried to get into another occupied house where we heard someone was injured. We couldn’t get there because a soldier outside threw a sound bomb at us and threatened to shoot us if we moved closer. We found out later that person was ok. Many people were injured and some were killed, several people were also arrested. According to residents of the camp despite all the Israeli Army’s talk of needing to arrest fighters none of the people they were after had ever been involved in attacking past the green line or even attacking Israeli settlements or checkpoints. They were primarily defensive fighters, who fought back when the army attacked.

Finally the army withdrew from 4 of the 5 houses and all of the jeeps left. One of the boarder police jeeps came back to remove their people from the last house. They came in guns blazing and shot a kid in the head with live ammunition. They drove off Tuesday afternoon, none of us were sure when they would return.

I went back to Ramallah before the second invasion started however I came back later in the week for the funerals. The people of Balata gathered for the funeral of those that had died in the incursion.. Statements from the various Palestinian factions were passed around those gathered stating what they thought that the deaths meant in terms of the ‘peace process’ about the need to resist the occupation etc. They put these deaths into the broader context of the occupation.

Far from it being taboo to talk politics at the funeral or discussing the details of death the people of Balata are so used to it that they will share what ever information they can at such times.

After the funeral we were taken around to a house where some of the fighters were killed. The army surrounded the house and exploded everything inside killing the fighters who were hiding in the roof. Palestinians are aware that the choice to become a fighter is the reality that they will either die young or face life in prison.

We then proceeded to the hospital where we met many of the people that were injured during the “incursion.” Many of them were just young kids shot with live rounds.

Remembering Rachel:
_________________________________________________________________

5. A Message Crushed Again
From the Los Angeles Times
By Katharine Viner
March 1, 2006

THE FLIGHTS for cast and crew had been booked; the production schedule delivered; there were tickets advertised on the Internet. The Royal Court Theatre production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” the play I co-edited with Alan Rickman, was transferring later this month to the New York Theatre Workshop, home of the musical “Rent,” following two sold-out runs in London and several awards.

We always felt passionately that it was a piece of work that needed to be seen in the United States. Created from the journals and e-mails of American activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey from her adolescence in Olympia, Wash., to her death under an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza at the age of 23, we considered it a unique American story that would have a particular relevance for audiences in Rachel’s home country. After all, she had made her journey to the Middle East in order “to meet the people who are on the receiving end of our [American] tax dollars,” and she was killed by a U.S.-made bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the production – or, in its words, “postponed it indefinitely.” The political climate, we were told, had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As James Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, said Monday, “Listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy situation.” Three years after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored for political reasons.

I’d heard from American friends that life for dissenters had been getting worse – wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing antiwar T-shirts, Muslim professors denied visas. But it’s hard to tell from afar how bad things really are. Here was personal proof that the political climate is continuing to shift disturbingly, narrowing the scope of free debate and artistic expression, in only a matter of weeks. By its own admission the theater’s management had caved in to political pressure. Rickman, who also directed the show in London, called it “censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences – all of us are the losers.”

It makes you wonder. Rachel was a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded American woman, writing about ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents and a journey of political and personal discovery that took her to Gaza. She worked with Palestinians and protested alongside them when she felt their rights were denied. But the play is not agitprop; it’s a complicated look at a woman who was neither a saint nor a traitor, both serious and funny, messy and talented and human. Or, in her own words, “scattered and deviant and too loud.” If a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else? The non-American, the nonwhite, the oppressed, the truly other?

Rachel’s words from Gaza are a bridge between these two worlds – and now that bridge is being severed. After the Hamas victory, the need for understanding is surely greater than ever, and I refuse to believe that most Americans want to live in isolation. One night in London, an Israeli couple, members of the right-wing Likud party on holiday in Britain, came up after the show, impressed. “The play wasn’t against Israel; it was against violence,” they told CindyCorrie, Rachel’s mother.

I was particularly touched by a young Jewish New Yorker from an Orthodox family who said he had been nervous about coming to see “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” because he had been told that both she and the play were viciously anti-Israel. But he had been powerfully moved by Rachel’s words and realized that he had, to his alarm, been
dangerously misled.

The director of the New York theater told the New York Times on Monday that it wasn’t the people who actually saw the play he was concerned about.
“I don’t think we were worried about the audience,” he said. “I think we were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position their arguments.”
Since when did theater come to be about those who don’t go to see it? If the play itself, as Nicola clearly concedes, is not the problem, then isn’t the answer to get people in to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship? George Clooney’s outstanding movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” recently reminded us of the importance of standing up to witch hunts; one way to carry on that tradition would be to insist on hearing Rachel Corrie’s words – words that only two weeks ago were deemed acceptable.

KATHARINE VINER is the features editor at the Guardian in London and the editor, with Alan Rickman, of “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in April 2005. Because of the cancellation of the New York run, the play is transferring to the Playhouse Theatre in London’s West End.

__________________________________________________________________

6. Rickman Slams ‘Censorship’ of Play about US Gaza Activist
February 28th, 2006 By Julian Borger
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 by the Guardian / UK

A New York theatre company has put off plans to stage a play about an American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza because of the current “political climate” – a decision the play’s British director, Alan Rickman, denounced yesterday as “censorship”.
James Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, said it had never formally announced it would be staging the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, but it had been considering staging it in March.

“In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation,” Mr Nicola said.

“We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn’t want to take.”
He said he had suggested a postponement until next year.

Mr Rickman, best known for his film acting roles in Love, Actually and the Harry Potter series and who directed the play at London’s Royal Court Theatre, denounced the decision.
“I can only guess at the pressures of funding an independent theatre company in New York, but calling this production “postponed” does not disguise the fact that it has been cancelled,” Mr Rickman said in a statement.
“This is censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences – all of us are the losers.”

Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old activist from Washington state crushed in March 2003 when she put herself between an Israeli army bulldozer and a Palestinian home it was about to demolish in Rafah, on the Egyptian border.

The International Solidarity Movement, of which she was a member, claimed the bulldozer driver ran her over deliberately. The Israeli Defence Forces said it was an accident, and that she was killed by falling debris.

The Israeli government said the demolitions were aimed at creating a “security zone” along the border. The Palestinians say they are a form of collective punishment.
“Rachel Corrie lived in nobody’s pocket but her own. Whether one is sympathetic with her or not, her voice is like a clarion in the fog and should be heard,” Mr Rickman said.
My Name is Rachel Corrie consists of her diary entries and emails home, edited by Mr Rickman and Katharine Viner, features editor of The Guardian. It won the best new play prize at this year’s Theatregoers’ Choice Awards in London.

____________________________________________________________________

7. Activism Call: Why are people afraid of Rachel Corrie’s words?
by Ann Petter and Jen Marlowe, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2006

AND HOW CAN WE WORK TOGETHER TO ENSURE THEY ARE HEARD EVEN MORE WIDELY?

The Background
The play My Name is Rachel Corrie was scheduled to open in New York on March 22nd. It has been “postponed indefinitely”.

In a New York Times article on February 28, James C. Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) which was hosting the play, said he decided to postpone the show after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feelings about the work.

In the Guardian, the play’s director Alan Rickman denounced the decision as “censorship”, stating “Rachel Corrie lived in nobody’s pocket but her own. Whether one is sympathetic with her or not, her voice is like a clarion in the fog and should be heard.”

James Nicola stated “I don’t think we were worried about the audience, I think we were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position their arguments.”

Strange that he should be worried about people who have never encountered her writing, and so removes the opportunity to let people encounter her writing and decide for themselves. What kind of pressure could Mr. Nicola have faced that would lead to such a decision from a theatre with a history of producing controversial works?

Rachel’s mother Cindy wonders, “Why are people so afraid of Rachel’s words?” We ask the same question and are determined to give people the opportunity to hear those words.

The Coalition
We are coordinating a broad-based coalition of peace and justice groups, human rights groups, theatre groups, civil rights groups, and individuals to respond to this censorship of Rachel’s words with a strong and unified approach. March 16, the third anniversary of Rachel’s death, is a compelling date on which to do this. We are looking at a multi-pronged approach, encompassing both AN EVENT and A WORLD-WIDE ACTION.

The Event
A staged theatrical reading in New York City (on or near March 16th) of My Name is Rachel Corrie. We are inviting Megan Dodds and Alan Rickman, the actor and director of the Royal Court production to do the reading, but because they are mounting the show now at a theatre in London, it is unlikely that they will be able to come. In that case, we are working on finding high-profile actors in New York to do a reading of the play. If rights are not granted for the play itself, a highly publicized staged theatrical reading of Rachel’s e-mails and writings can still take place. The NYTW claimed, among other reasons, that they didn’t have enough time to put on the show. Let’s prove them wrong. We are doing outreach so this event can be staged in multiple cities nationally and world-wide if the correct permissions are granted.

The World-Wide Action
Over a 24-hour period throughout March 16, the third anniversary of Rachel’s death, activists in cities world-wide in a public space reading (with or without a loud-speaker or microphone) Rachel’s e-mails and journal entries. Fliers can be distributed to passers-by encouraging them to ask the question for themselves: Why are people so frightened of Rachel Corrie’s words? New York activists please note that March 16th coincides with the gala opening of the Made in Palestine exhibition (6-9PM), and the Free the P Hip-hop Slam & Party (show starts 9:30PM). Please plan accordingly so as not to overlap events.

What We Are Asking
Please endorse this initiative, and join this coalition. It’s not meant to replace any plans that groups may already have for March 16th or individual responses to the cancellation of the play (expressing feelings to the NYTW, writing op-eds, etc.) but to support them. In fact, we are hoping that a unified action, world-wide, and with press coverage will ensure that Rachel’s words are heard more widely than ever and, through her words, her message of human rights and justice will be heard as well. If you already have an event planned for March 16, perhaps reading from Rachel’s e-mails can be incorporated into or before/after your event. Groups and individuals can sign on.

What Has Been Done
• We are in direct contact with Cindy and Craig Corrie (Rachel’s parents) and are proceeding with their support and permission on all aspects of this event/action.
• We have sent a proposal to the Royal Court Theatre in London about the rights to the show. We will update you when we receive their response.
• We are approaching progressive theatre groups like THAW (Theaters Against War), with the hopes of developing contacts in the New York theatre community who can help pull this off.
• We have spoken to people from multiple groups and media outlets to get an initial feel about this action/event. People are enthused.

We are all outraged by what has happened. But we have the opportunity to harness our energy toward a very positive end. We are setting up a “Rachel’s Words” listserve and website to help facilitate joint communication. We will send regular updates as to which groups and individuals are signing onto this joint coalition and progress in the action/event. Please let us know if you want to be a part of this coordinated response.

Looking forward to working together in solidarity,
Ann Petter and Jen Marlowe
Please contact us at: rachels_words@yahoo.com

_______________________________________________________________________

8. Spreading Rachael’s words

Because we feel Rachel Corrie’s story and message are so important, we have created “Rachel Corrie Cards” for people to distribute in their communities. We’re asking a small donation toward the printing costs, but will ship the cards to anyone who can help get them out to the public, with or without a donation. It will take all of us doing all we can to tell people the facts.

Text on Front of Card:
Rachel, we won’t forget you.
Rachel Corrie (1979-2003)

Rachel was killed when an Israeli soldier bulldozed her. She was trying to protect a family’s home in the Gaza Strip.

Text on Back of Card:

“Let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with the rest of my life.”
– Rachel Corrie’s last email to her dad:
There is a quiet battle going on for the memory of a young woman who could have been my daughter, or perhaps yours.

On one side are those who would like to erase her from history; her actions, her beliefs, her murder. If they are unsuccessful at that, they will settle for posthumous slurs on her character, falsifications of her death.

On the other side are those who feel her shining principles should be praised, her courage honored, her death grieved. On this side are those who believe that heroism is noble, bravery admirable, and compassion for others the most fundamental form of morality.
To those of us on this side, Rachel Corrie will never be forgotten. She was 23 when she was killed. We won’t forget her young idealism, her sweet bravery, her needless death. And we won’t forget her beliefs, the third of which killed her: that good would triumph, that justice would prevail, that Israeli forces would not kill her.

She was wrong on that last one. On March 16, 2003, two Israeli soldiers drove a house-crushing bulldozer over her, twice, crushing her into the Gaza dirt. With five other nonviolent human rights defenders, Rachel had spent several hours in front of a family home in Palestine, pleading with Israeli soldiers not to demolish it. They didn’t (until later); they demolished her instead.

Her friends ran to her screaming. They dug her out of the dirt. One told me that Rachel’s eyes were open; her last words were, “My back is broken.”
Far more, of course, was broken. The day was broken, the universe was broken, her sister’s world was broken, her brother’s life was broken, her parents’ hearts were broken. All the things were broken that break when someone is killed.
Since fall 2000, over 3,800 Palestinian lives, days, worlds have been broken; over 1,000 Israeli ones. We hear about the Israeli tragedies; we rarely hear about the many times more Palestinian ones; the mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters and brothers who are killed and mutilated during all those wonderful periods of “relative calm” our news media lie to us about.

I wonder how much (if at all) we’ll hear about Rachel Corrie on March 16th, the anniversary of her death. Israel, as with all those it kills, claims that her death “was an accident” or “was necessary for security” or that “she was a terrorist” or that “she was protecting terrorists”… As fast as these Israeli fabrications are refuted, new ones are produced. Never mind that they’re self-contradictory – our complicit media never question.

Change is coming, however, and it is gathering momentum. Americans of every race, religion and ethnicity remember Rachel, and grieve her death. While Congress is intimidated into denying her parents’ right to an investigation of the American “ally” who murdered their daughter, people in towns throughout the country are planning commemorations and future actions. One by one, people are rising up. We are reclaiming our nation, our principles, and our souls. We won’t forget Rachel. And we won’t be stopped.

Read Rachel’s letters: www.IfAmericansKnew.org
To order cards go to: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/rc-cards.html

_______________________________________________________________

9. Remembering Rachel Corrie- third annual memorial

The International Solidarity Movement Support Group in Northern California invites you to join us at the third annual Rachel Corrie Memorial.

We will celebrate the life of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old ISM volunteer who was killed by an Israeli soldier while nonviolently resisting the demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. The event will also honor victims of violence everywhere and those unjustly imprisoned. Its objective is to raise awareness to and make connections between various global and domestic issues of social justice particularly the issue of Palestine.

Remembering Rachel Corrie

Thursday, March 16th 7:00pm
Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts
(formerly the Alice Arts Center) at 1428 Alice Street (cross street 14th), Oakland
(near 12th Street Bart, see Map)
Suggested Donation: $10-$20
See below for speakers and performers.
This event is accessible for disabled persons in wheelchairs.
There will also be ASL interpretation for the hearing impaired.

Speakers: Huwaida Arraf, Dolores Huerta, Maria Labossiere, Todd Chretien,
Kiilu Nyasha, Mary Jean Robertson.

Performers: Dennis Kyne, Stephen Kent, Ras K’ Dee, Lorene Zouzounis, Andrea Prichett, Dave Welsh, Dabke Dance Troup,

For speakers and performers bio’s see: http://www.norcalism.org/events.htm

Sponsors of the Rachel Corrie Event
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee-San Francisco, Bay Area Women in Black, Breaking the Silence, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Copwatch, Corpwatch, Faculty For Israeli-Palestinian Peace (FFIPP), Friends of Deir Ibzia, Global Exchange, Haiti Action Committee, International Socialist Organizing, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for a Free Palestine, KPFA 94.1FM, KPOO 89.5 FM, Labor Committee for Peace & Justice, Middle East Children’s Alliance, Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Not In Our Name, Palestinian American Congress, Rebuilding Alliance, SUSTAIN, Students for Justice in Palestine, Veterans for Peace

Palestinian and International medical volunteers shot at and wounded in Balata

1. Stage Two: Balata Refugee Camp Reinvaded
2. Stage One: The Invasion of Balata Camp
3. A victory for Non violence in Beit Sira
4. Ten anti-separation fence protesters hurt in clash with IDF-from Haaretz
5. More Arrests in Bil’in
6. The Joint Struggle and the Non-Violent International Struggle Against the Occupation
7. Jordan Valley Farmers March to live
8. Pictures From a Tour Bus Window

***********************

1. Stage Two: The reinvasion of Balata Camp

“We were standing in the alley way, everything was quite when suddenly without warning we heard a big explosion and heard gun shots. I then saw Jarar and Ihab liying on the floor. Ihab wasn’t moving.” Wounded Dutch medical volunteer

Balata Refugee camp was reinvaded at 1:30 in the morning on February 23rd.

19 year-old Ibrahim Saadi was shot dead while throwing a stone at the Israeli armored jeeps

20 year-old Naim Abu Sarif was shot dead by a sniper while standing on the roof of his house.

Five refugee camp residents were wounded, including a 36 year-old taxi driver, Farach Kawa, who sustained multiple fragments of a live bullet to his head and shoulder.

At 11:45 this morning an explosion set off by the Israeli military inside the house belonging to Muhammed Abu Hamis Abu Amar caused a fire in the house. Occupation forces prevented fire trucks from accessing the area and told them that they will be detonating further explosions in the same house. Emergency teams accompanied by international volunteers treated children in some of the adjacent houses who were effected by smoke inhalation. Neighbours attempted to put out the fire by bringing buckets of water.

At 12:30 the military set off a series of additional explosions inside the house of Muhammed Abu Amar.

At 1:00 A medical team including two Palestinians and two international volunteers were trapped in an alleyway adjacent to the house belonging to Muhammed Abu Amar. They were standing behind an Israeli Jeep that soldiers had vacated.

At 2:00 without any warning shots they were fired at and a grenade was thrown at them from around the corner. According to the volunteers the shooting came from the direction of the Alleyway where the Israeli soldiers were. A twenty two year old American student was wounded by Shrapnel in the hand a twenty nine year old Dutch volunteer was wounded by shrapnel in the thigh and shoulder, Jirar Candola an ambulance driver with the UPMRC was shot in the arm and leg and Ihab Mansour, a medical volunteer working with the Palestinian scientific society, was shot in the head and taken away by the Israeli soldiers.

At 3:00 the soldiers blew up Muhammad Abu Amar’s house, thus killing three Palestinian fighters who were inside.

Israeli forces withdrew from the camp in the early evening.

*************************

2. Stage One: The Invasion of Balata Camp

The incursion in Balata refugee camp started on 1:00 am February 19 when Balata camp was put under curfew. The Israeli Military has made medical emergency work impossible. All entrances to Balata refugee camp are blocked. The one ambulance left in the camp brings the wounded only to the edge of the camp, as medical workers fear that the army would prevent the vehicle from re-entering. The wounded are carried on stretchers to the entrance of the camp and transported to hospitals in Nablus. Normal ambulance traffic has come to a complete halt.

International volunteers are working with ambulance personnel to transport the wounded to an emergency field clinic inside the camp and to hospitals in Nablus and other cities. They witnessed all of the following incidents or heard and confirmed them with ambulance personnel of the United Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UMPRC) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS).

Two youth were killed and over thirty injured when the Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition at the youth who were confronting soldiers with stones. Medical volunteers were called to the site where Mohammed Ahmad Natur and Ibrahim Ahmad Sheikh Khalil had been shot. One had been shot in the neck and the other in the chest. They were later declared dead. According to the IOF the boys were planting bombs. The volunteers have witnessed no explosions or bomb squads in the area and the army has continued to use the road in question throughout the day.

In the morning, an ambulance carrying a woman in complicated labor and an injured person was ambushed by two jeeps. The jeeps drove into the ambulance from both sides and shot at it. The soldiers forced the ambulance to stand still for half an hour to use it as a shield against youth throwing stones at them.

07:15-An Israeli military Jeep shot in the direction of an ambulance and prevented it from approaching the camp.

11:15-The military attempted to close the UN medical clinic by shooting warning shots and percussion grenades. They also prevented patients from entering the clinic.

13:00 pm two ambulances were held up by several jeeps. According to the ambulance team they were detained for 30 minutes and someone with a bullet wound in the shoulder was beaten inside one of the ambulance. The soldiers forced the ambulance personnel to undress his wound, which had just stopped bleeding. The ambulance was held until the family, with the help of the ambulance team and the IWPS volunteers, brought his ID card. After his ID was checked, the ambulance continued its way, only to be stopped by the next jeep on the road.

13:30 pm the IWPS volunteers arrived inside Balata refugee camp on foot, where they witnessed the shooting of two boys shot in the leg and the side. One of them had a flesh wound and the other’s bone was crushed by a bullet. A medical team and the IWPS volunteers ran two kilometers with the two injured boys, because the ambulance that was carrying them was not allowed to move.

13:45-Mohammad Yousef was shot with a rubber coated metal bullet in the head while throwing stones at a military jeep on Jamal Abdel Nasser Street near the entrance of the camp. The bullet entered several centimetres into his skull. There were an additional 12 young men injured while throwing stones at the military jeeps, in Balata village. Another five were injured by rubber coated steal bullets.

15:20-Four youths are injured by rubber coated steel bullets. One of them is shot in the head.

15:40-Israeli soldiers denied entry to a medical team attempting to deliver food and medicine into the camp. The Israeli soldiers also threatened to shoot them.

18:00- large group of soldiers surrounded a house in the Magdush neighbourhood in Balata camp. Soldiers broke into neighbouring houses and broke windows and doors.

19:10 Twenty-two year old Mohammad Subkhi Abu Hanade was shot in the chest with live ammunition while he was in his home by a sniper in an occupied house adjacent to his. A medical team and international volunteers who were in the vicinity say that the atmosphere was quiet when they heard two shots followed by screaming coming from the house. They immediately came in and found Abu Hanade bleeding heavily. After Mohammad was evacuated, a pregnant woman in the house went into what seemed to be shock induced labor and was also evacuated to hospital. They saw no weapon, nor any apparent reason for the shooting. Israeli soldiers subsequently ordered Mohammad’s family, a total of 12 people including two small babies, out of the house at 20:45 and detained them in the street for an hour and a half.

In several instances, soldiers drove through the camps cursing the residents’ mothers and sisters in Arabic in what seemed to be an attempt to provoke the youth to throw stones. The volunteers have witnessed no armed resistance, only youth throwing stones and building barricades.

On the third day of the military invasion, Feb 21st, 16 year old Kamal Khalili was shot in his chest with live ammunition at 11:00 this morning in Balata Camp while throwing a stone at Israeli soldiers. He is now brain dead.

According to Dr. Ghassan Hamdan head of the Nablus UPMRC nine other youths were injured today, at least four of them with live ammunition. Dr. Hamdan Says that this brings the total of injured people to 64. The military has occupied over 60 homes.

After three days of confrontations between the camp youth and the military the Israeli military withdrew from Balata at 17:00 on February 21st. They wounded at least another four people during there retreat. However, this was only round one of the invasion of Balata. See next report for information on the second invasion.

**************************

3. A victory for Non violence in Beit Sira

In the village of Beit Sira Monday night, February 20th, the Israeli forces began tearing up the road connecting the village to the Latroun Area. The Route of the wall in Beit Sira is designed to annex the Makabim settlement and more of Beit Sira’s land to Israel. The villagers have responded with continuous non violent resistance and have succeeded in stopping the destruction for considerable lengths of time.

At 8:30 the following morning around 100 villagers gathered near the portion of the road that had been destroyed.

The DCO arrived and informed the people that the road would be destroyed in order to make space to replant some of the several hundred trees which are scheduled to be bulldozed as part of the construction of the annexation wall.

The village responded to this news by setting up a protest tent between the olive trees slated for destruction next to the road.

For most of the day there was little interference from the soldiers. In the afternoon soldiers arrived with an order stating that the road and the land between the road and the path of the wall was a closed military zone and the tent needed to be moved. After some negotiations between members of Beit Sira’s Popular Committee and the soldiers, the tent was moved out of the closed military zone and the non-violent demonstration continued.

Eventually the situation escalated with soldiers firing rubber bullets at youth throwing stones. Israeli forces also fired tear gas at non-violent demonstrators after the villagers had ended the demonstration, packed up the tent and were heading back to the village. No one was injured or arrested.

The following day, Wednesday the 22nd, the non-violent protest continued. At 11 am approximately 60 Palestinians, and ten Israeli and international solidarity activists marched from the village to the road. When they reached the road they found bulldozers at work tearing up more of the road. A protest tent was set up in the middle of the road and demonstrators sat in the tent and in the road. The village succeeded in stopping the work of the bulldozers for the entire afternoon.

A group of youth were returning to the village and soldiers began violently pushing them off of the road. While attempting to de-escalate the situation, an Israeli and an international were violently detained. Several soldiers held the international, pushing his face into the gravel road causing his face to bleed. They were released soon after without being charged.

The demonstration was completely non-violent, not a single stone was thrown all afternoon.

On Thursday February 23rd, At 9 in the morning the demonstration began, marching from the village to the road. The demonstration succeeded in stopping the work of the bulldozers on the road. The Israeli army fired live ammunition into the air, threw many sound grenades and violently pushed the peaceful demonstrators. The village continued to peacefully block the road. The peace tent was brought and again set up in the middle of the road.

There was a sort of agreement between the DCO and the village Popular Committee that the bulldozers would leave the site and the villagers would return to the village. The bulldozers left the road, and for a moment seemed to be following the agreement. But they turned into the field of olive trees and began to uproot them.

The villagers returned and attempted to reach the bulldozers, but the soldiers pushed the demonstrators back and beat them with clubs and sticks. The soldiers fired live ammunition into the air and rubber bullets directly into the crowd of people. They shot tear gas as some people dispersed. 10 people were injured by the rubber bullets, including one hit in the back of the head and one in the face. Several Israeli activists were detained and beaten, 2 were released about 20 minutes later, 2 others, Yonatan Polak and Kobi were arrested and held in police custody until the evening. In response to the soldiers extreme use of violence, only 5 or 10 stones were thrown.

Matan, an Israeli activist said of the demonstration ‘I have never seen anything like it, accept for when the army attacked us not one stone was thrown. 10 year old boys were watching over the telling 6 year old boys and telling them not to throw stones.’

The villagers regrouped on the road and continued to demonstrate peacefully until the popular committee decided to return to the village and continue the struggle tomorrow.

**************************

4.Ten anti-separation fence protesters hurt in clash with IDF
February 23rd, 2006
By Arnon Regular, Haaretz Correspondent see: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/686587.html

At least ten people – Israelis and Palestinians – sustained light injuries Thursday afternoon in a clash with Israel Defense Forces troops at a separation fence construction site, between the Palestinian village of Beit Sira and the town of Maccabim, within the Green Line.

Dozens of “Anarchists Against the Fence” activists and some 200 village residents clashed with the troops, who were securing the bulldozers paving the route of the fence.
The forces fired rubber coated bullets and sprayed tear gas at the protesters. The protest delayed construction work at the site by several hours.

According to a report published this week by the human rights groups B’Tselem and Bimkom, the main consideration behind the route for “numerous segments” of the separation fence was settlement expansion.

The report, entitled “Under the Guise of Security: Routing the Separation Barrier to Enable Israeli Settlement Expansion in the West Bank,” looks at four areas: the settlements Tzofin and Alfei Menashe near Qalqilyah, Modi’in Illit and the separation fence surrounding the Neveh Yaakov neighborhood in northern Jerusalem. The conclusion: a direct link between the route already built by the Defense Ministry and the future master plans for those settlements.

**************************

5. More Arrests in Bil’in
February 23rd, 2006
The Israeli Army entered the village of Bil’in last night at 3am and arrested 2 people as they were walking home from the Bilin outpost, Sharar Hassan Dawoud Mansour, age 22, and Wal’el Fahmi Abd Almajid Naser, age 29.

Earlier yesterday, 6 Bil’in villagers were released after serving a sentence of 4 months in prison and paying a fine of 1000 NIS each. The 6 released people are three brothers, Faraj, Fadel, and Hassan Awad Yasin, ages 20, 26 and 29, Jawad and Mohammed Emran Khatib, also brothers ages 20 and 23, and Mohammed Khalid Abu Rahma, age 20. There are still 6 additional people in jail from the village of Bil’in, bringing the total number to 8.

Last nights arrests are part of an ongoing intimidation campaign by the Israeli forces against the Palestinian Non-violent resistance to the confiscation of their land by the annexation wall.

**************************

6. The Joint Struggle and the Non-Violent International Struggle Against the Occupation
February 20-21

Over the past two days, an international conference was held in Bil’in about and in solidarity with the struggle against the Wall. It was organized by the Bil’in joint project of struggle against the fence, which for the last 12 months has been carried on by the local popular committee.

The conference was held over two days at the public school in the village of Bil’ín. It consisted of a few opening presentations followed by workshops focusing on the non-violent struggles taking place in different locations. The workshops were the main part of the conference and were where activists shared their experiences and discussed new ideas.
Besides local activists and AATW activists, the conference in Bil’in included participants from many Western countries and, more importantly, from people in local struggles from the other regions of Palestine – from Hebron (Halil) in the south to Jenin in the north.
Talks were given at a preliminary session by former and current Palestinian Legislative Council members and by international guests involved in our common struggle in their own countries. Grassroot activists reported on their local struggles. The main discussions took place in workgroups, each centered on the struggle along a specific part of the separation fence.
And true to the Bil’in mode, the conference could not end without a march towards the route of the fence, which took place around noon on the second day of the conference. Surprise, surprise it met with no resistance from the State forces. We crossed the route and continued on to the Bil’in centre for joint struggle for peace which was recently built on the western side of the fence. The centre was built on a plot adjacent to the building site of a sector of the illegal settler colony, Modi’in Illit, being built on land stolen from Bil’in.
But no, the Israeli State’s armed forces did not totally desert us. Though they did not try to block our march, they circled around us, putting a line of soldiers west of our meeting at the Bil’in centre, arranging it as if to block our way if we tried to rush and attack the adjacent illegal buildings in the nearby section of the Modi’in Illit settler colonialist town. (This section is currently under an injunction from the highest court, banning all construction work and occupation.)
At the meeting near the centre some more speeches were made. After the talks ended, a soccer game was played and an opportunity was given to media workers to take their photographs, videos and interviews. People then got back to Bil’in and made their way home.
Below is the conference program:

Day 1: Monday, February 20th
9:00-10:30, Opening session: Overview
Welcome message : Abdullah Abu Rahme
The history of the Palestinian popular struggle: Kadura Faris
The history of Joint Israeli Palestinian struggle: Uri Avnery
Israel’s Apartheid wall: Dr. Mustafa Bargouti
The political situation after the Palestinian elections: Qais Abu Leila
World media and the popular struggle in Palestine: Kasem El Hatib

11:00-12:15 Presentations session
Representatives of struggles at different areas of Palestine and outside of Palestine gave short 5-10 minute introductions to the struggle in their area.
North Palestine: Nawaf Suf
Bil’in: Muhamad Khatib
Mesafer Yata: Hafez Hereini
Tel Rumeida: Hani Abu Haikal
Outside Palestine: Neta Golan
12:45-14:00 First workshop session:
The pros and cons of joint struggle. What constitutes a joint struggle, what advantages it has and what disadvantage? What problems are encountered in the course of joint struggle and how they can be dealt with? The list of workshops were:
Salfit,
Hares,
Bil’in,
Jerusalem Region,
South Hebron,
Outside Palestine and Israel.

15:30-16:45 Second Workshop session:
The practice of non violent resistance in the struggles and brainstorming for new ideas and methods, a discussion of tactics which have been tried and how successful they were.
17:15-18:30 Concluding session:
Representatives from each workshop presented the results of the discussions to the whole assembly.
19:30-21:00 A presentation of a movie by Bil’in photographer Imad Burnat.

Day 2 Tues February 21st
9:00-11:00 Presentation of findings Beir Zeit university researchers about weapons used against demonstrators in Bil’in.
11:00 Bil’in villagers will inaugurated a football field on land cut off from their village by the route of the Annexation Barrier. The football game was played by the Israeli, Internationals and Palestinian participants of the Conference as Israeli soldiers sulked in the background because they could not join the fun!

THE END

***********************

7. Jordan Valley Farmers March to live

Wednesday February 22nd at 11:00 Jordan Valley Farmers marched to the Bradala checkpoint to non-violently protest the annexation of their lands to Israel. Approximately 40 farmers faced Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint. Farmers in the Jordan valley have been Isolated from the rest of the west bank and at the same time prevented from selling their produce to Israel.

“Israel is leaving no way for these farmers to live” Says Ahmed Sawaft Director of PARC (Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees) in Tubas: “This closure is causing an agricultural and economic disaster for the area.”

The Israeli military has defacto annexed the Jordan valley to Israel by denying access to the Jordan valley to any Palestinian but registered residents for the last seven months and has prevented the Palestinian farmers from transferring their produce through the Bardala checkpoint for four months.

Israel’s acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmart has announced that in his parties vision of “the final borders of Israel” The Jordan valley will remain within Israel’s borders.

****************************

8. Pictures From a Tour Bus Window

February 22nd, 2006

For photos taken from a bus window in Beit Hanina/Jerusalem on Saturday see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/02/22/pictures-from-a-tour-bus-window/
These photos of Palestinian men forced to lie face down on the ground by masked Israeli police ,were taken from a bus window in Beit Hanina/Jerusalem on Saturday. the eyewitness who took these photos spoke with Neve Yaakov Police Station. They said it was an undercover operation against “suspects”.

The Struggle Continues Through ups and Downs

* Help Respond to Inflammatory Attack on Nonviolent Solidarity Groups
* The Price of Nonviolence in Bil’in
* Victory for Palestine Solidarity Activists
* Who Really Controls the Rafah Crossing?
* The House is Full of Holes – poetry from the Occupied Territories
* High School Students Attacked by Jerusalem Police
* Budrus Tears Down the Wall, One Villager Shot With Live Ammunition
* The Politics of Race and Power in Palestine

_________________________________________

Help Respond to Inflammatory Attack on Nonviolent Solidarity Groups

On Sunday, February 12, 2006, the Washington Post published a defamatory op-ed by two academics, Eric Adler and Jack Langer, calling for the cancellation of the upcoming Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) conference at Georgetown University and accusing the PSM of being a “dangerous”, “pro-terrorist organization”.

The authors also used their forum to disparage the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and claimed that the ISM purposefully puts the lives of young international activists at risk in order to attract media to the Palestinian cause.

“Tragically,” the authors write, “the group got its wish in 2003, when ISM member Rachel Corrie, 23, was killed while trying to block Israeli bulldozers from demolishing Palestinian houses in Gaza.” It does take a certain special kind of chutzpah to cynically exploit Rachel Corrie’s killing to accuse the ISM of cynically manipulating its activists!

Please write to the Washington Post and share with them your thoughts on the ISM/PSM and the underhanded attacks they have endured from a crowd in whose eyes Israel can do no wrong, no matter how criminally they behave. Letters may be sent to letters@washpost.com

A copy of the Washington Post editorial is attached at the bottom.

ISM and PSM talking points:

*The PSM and ISM are on the side of international law and numerous UN resolutions blatantly violated by decades of Israeli Occupation.

*The FBI does not consider the PSM to be a terrorist organization nor does any other government agency in the US or abroad.

*Divestment is a non-violent way to oppose Israel’s ever-expanding colonization of the West Bank.

*Communities in Norway and Ireland have taken steps to divest from Israeli interests.

*The PSM is joined in its call for divestment from mainline Christian churches, university faculty unions and student governments around the country.

*South African Jews such as Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky have highlighted the similarities between Israel’s system of control over Palestinians to South African Apartheid, as have respected South African leaders, such as Bishop Desmond Tutu.

*Calls for divestment have come from Israeli University professors, like Ilan Pappe, and from well-respected human rights lawyers, such as Shamai Leibowitz.

*The Israeli government has not declared ISM an illegal organization.

*ISM works with several groups who advocate for a just peace in Palestine: Rabbis for Human Rights, The Christian Peacemakers Team, International Women’s Peace Service and the Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions.

*One of ISM’s founders, Dr. Ghassan Andoni was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition.

For tips on writing letters, go to:
www.pmwatch.org/pmw/tools/T_WritingLetters.asp>http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/tools/T_WritingLetters.asp

Please also feel free to share with us your letters or a summary of your conversations with editors at letters@pmwatch.org

You can also call: (866) DIAL-PMW

Palestine Media Watch
info@pmwatch.org
(866) DIAL-PMW
www.pmwatch.org

===

Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?

Washington Post Op-Ed Section
Sunday, February 12, 2006; B08

This month Georgetown University plans to host the annual conference of an anti-Israel propaganda group called the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM). The PSM certainly is controversial. It is also dangerous.

The purported aim of the PSM is to encourage divestment from Israel. To this end, its conferences boast a cavalcade of anti-Israel speakers whose speeches often degenerate into anti-Semitism. At the 2004 conference at Duke University in North Carolina, for example, keynote speaker Mazin Qumsiyeh referred to Zionism as a “disease.” Workshop leader Bob Brown deemed the Six-Day War “the Jew War of ’67.” Not to be outdone, Nasser Abufarha praised the terrorist activities of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The PSM maintains that it is a separate organization from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which sends foreign students to the West Bank and Gaza to foment anti-Israeli sentiment.

All the same, the two groups seem to have intimate ties. At the 2004 PSM conference, for instance, the International Solidarity Movement ran a recruitment meeting called “Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International Activists.” In that session, the organization’s co-founder, Huwaida Arraf, distributed recruitment brochures and encouraged students to enlist in the ISM, which, she acknowledged, cooperates with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Another ISM co-founder, George Rishmawi, told the San Francisco Chronicle in a July 14, 2004, news story why his group recruits student volunteers.

“When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore,” he said. “But if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice.”

Tragically, the group got its wish in 2003, when ISM member Rachel Corrie, 23, was killed while trying to block Israeli bulldozers from demolishing Palestinian houses in Gaza. The Israelis said the houses were covering tunnels used to smuggle weapons.

Nor is this an ancillary part of the PSM’s mission. In the aftermath of the 2004 PSM meeting, conference organizer Rann Bar-On — who is an ISM member — informed the Duke student newspaper, “I personally consider the Palestine Solidarity Movement conference a huge success, as it brought about a tripling of the number of Duke students visiting Israel-Palestine this year, making Duke the most represented American university in the West Bank this summer.” By Bar-On’s own admission, recruitment into the ISM is the PSM’s raison d’etre.

In agreeing to host the PSM from Feb. 17 to Feb. 19, Georgetown can’t even claim that its regard for free speech and expression trumps all. In 2005 the university’s conference center refused to host an anti-terrorism conference sponsored by America’s Truth Forum on the grounds that it was “too controversial.” So why is free speech and expression of cardinal importance now? Perhaps it is related to the recent $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a prominent financier of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

If Georgetown President John J. DeGioia is concerned for the safety of his student body, he will reject the 2006 Palestine Solidarity Movement conference. Pleasing donors is an important duty of a university president, but preventing the recruitment of Georgetown students into a dangerous, pro-terrorist organization is a more vital obligation.

— Eric Adler — Jack Langer

are respectively, a lecturer in the history department at Rice University and a doctoral candidate in history at Duke University.

_________________________________________

The Price of Nonviolence in Bil’in

Bil’in was not always impoverished. In the last five years many villagers have become cut off from their sources of income due to the closure of Israel to Palestinian workers, the Israeli siege on Palestinian cities and villages and the theft of farmland for settlement construction.

For one year, villagers have engaged the Israeli military through a variety of creative nonviolent tactics to interfere with the construction of the annexation barrier on their land. The barrier, justified by Israel as a security measure, will separate villagers from more than half their land in order to absorb the illegal Modi’in Illit settlement and surrounding land to allow for its expansion into Israel .

However, the use of strategic nonviolent direct action has come with a price. Since October 22, 2005 the military has being conducting night raids on Bil’in village, arresting young men and children. Those arrested reported they have been abused or tortured in confinement. Recently 18 villagers were charged with one to four months in Israeli military prison and 1,000 to 2,000 NIS each in fines. Every 1,000 NIS ($213) left unpaid results in an additional one month of imprisonment.

Many economically devastated families are unable to pay this fee, and are left feeling helpless and humiliated, unable to prevent further weeks of abuse.

Following a legal struggle within the Israeli military system some prisoners were offered release on bail of between 2,000 and 10,000 NIS each. With the help of generous donors the ISM Legal Fund, was able to support the community of Bil’in, showing the community they are not alone in their non violent resistance. We posted 39,000 NIS ($8,300) in bail for the release of community leaders and activists and 18,000 NIS ($3,800) in fines to allow Bil’in families to release their loved ones. ISM would like to thank you for your support and ask that you continue to give so we can prevent other instances of needless incarceration. Following is a list of people the ISM Legal Fund helped using your contributions:

Rateb Abu Rahme was released on bail for 5,000 NIS after being arrested while lying down holding a cardboard tomb stone that read Bil’in R.I.P. 2005. Assault charges were dropped and his bail money returned after video evidence proved his innocence.

Abdullah Abu Rahme was released on bail twice adding up to 11,000 NIS after being arrested out of an installation of a bridge that read “Peace needs bridges not walls” and a second time while holding a tombstone.

Abdel Fatah Burnat was released from custody on 2,000 NIS bail after he was arrested from a cage built on the route of the annexation barrier.

Tamer was released on 2,000 NIS bail after being arrested from a metal tube palced on the route of the wall.

Riad and Elyan were released on 15,000 NIS bail, (5,000 paid by the ISM and the 10,000 by Israeli peace activist groups.) after being arrested out of a nonviolent crowd by undercover provocateurs.

Akram Khatib was released on 4,000 NIS bail while trying to protect in Abdullah from arrest.

Hamze Samara was released from custody on 10,000 NIS bail and is awaiting trial. He was arrested from home and charged with causing damage to the “security fence” and released on 10,000 NIS bail.

Ashraf Ibrahim Abu Rahme, Abdullah Ahmed Yassin, (14), Faraj Yasin (19), Khalid Shokat Khatib (20), Mohammed Abdel fatah Burnat, and Wajdi Khatib (17) have been released after serving a jail sentence of one to four months in Israeli military prison and 1,000 to 2,000 NIS each in fines

Fadel Awad Ali Yassin(23), Iwad Imram Khatib, Jawad Khatib (19) Nour Mahmoud, Yassin (19), Nayef Gazzi Al Khatib (18), Basem Ahmed Issa Yassin (28), Baasil Shokat Al Khatib (21), Hasan Awad Yassin (26) Mohammed Omran Khatib (23) and Saji Mohammed Ali Nasser Are still in prison and have paid 1,000 shekel each.

Issrar Samara (22) and Khelmi Abu Rahme are imprisoned and awaiting Trail.

_________________________________________

Victory for Palestine Solidarity Activists

According to Green Left Weekly, “Seven activists who blockaded the British distribution centre of Israel’s biggest state-owned agricultural export company Agrexco in November 2004 were acquitted of all charges on January 26. The activists had been charged with “aggravated trespass and failure to leave land” for their protest, which aimed to highlight Israeli apartheid and the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. According to Agrexco, it lost £100,000 as a result of the eight-hour blockade. ”

The protesters argued as a defense that they were acting to prevent crimes against international law, that are also offences in the UK under the International Criminal Court Act. In the end, the activists were acquitted because British Land Registry documents showed Agrexco (UK) had built entrance and exit gates on other people’s land and had no legal right to ask them to leave.

Agrexco is Israel’s largest importer of agricultural produce into the European Union, and it is 50% Israeli state owned. Amos Orr, Agrexco UK’s general manager, said in court that Agrexco imports between 60-70% of all produce that is grown on illegal settlements in the occupied territories. At the same time Israeli forces have blocked Palestinian exports on grounds of ‘security.’ Israeli state sponsored settlements have appropriated land and water resources by military force from Palestinian farmers in a deliberate policy of colonial settlement.

In a well planned operation, using wire fences and bicycle D-Locks the protesters succeeded in blockading the Agrexco (UK) distribution centre, blocking all motor vehicle traffic in and out of the building before being arrested. Before taking part in this action many of the defendants had witnessed first hand the suffering of Palestinian communities under the brutal Israeli occupation, having served as volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), documenting human rights abuses by the Occupation Forces in the West Bank and Gaza, and taking part in non-violent civil resistance to the occupation organised by Palestinian civilian committees.

The international campaign to boycott Israeli goods is growing across Europe. In December 2005 a whole region of Norway voted to cut economic relations with Israel. The US administration has threatened ‘serious political consequences’ against Norway if the boycott should develop into a national policy.

_________________________________________

Who Really Controls the Rafah Crossing?

By Kate

My friend Patrick and I arrived in Cairo last night and left early this morning for the Rafah crossing into Gaza. We didn’t leave as early as we had planned, due to a comedy of errors involving hosts who could not be woken up with vigorous shaking and shouting, drivers with non-working cars, and the ubiquitous fighting/scamming of taxi drivers.

I decided I will cover my head for the border, and maybe the whole time I’m in Gaza if it seems people prefer it. A Palestinian friend who was planning to meet us at the border had asked me to, because she’s afraid of our being kidnapped. My friend Nagwan, whom I stayed with in Cairo, tied my scarf for me. She used to wear hijab, so it looked much more authentic than if I had done it myself. At the many checkpoints we passed en route to Rafah, the driver would say, “They’re Americans,” and the soldiers would be very confused about why my head was covered.

We finally reached the border at about 2 p.m. Initially everyone assumed we were Palestinians. People were motioning to us to go one way, but I spotted a sign that read, “Exit Tax,” and thought maybe we were supposed to pay the tax there. That’s how it works at the Jordanian border, and if you don’t have the stamp that indicates you paid the tax you have to go back and wait again. As we were standing and looking around a guard took our passports. He asked Patrick where we were from, and Pat said in Arabic that we were Americans, and the guard said, “Well, does she have a hawiyya?” referring to the Palestinian ID card. He didn’t even seem to believe Pat when he said no.

The Egyptian security guards, wearing armbands that read “Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities,” looked at a list and said we were not on it, which we already knew from our friend Laila, who has been pressuring the Palestinian Border Ministry to get our applications approved. They told us we couldn’t enter, and seemed ready to hustle us back to Arish, the nearby resort town.

We persisted and wound up sitting in the little security office calling everyone involved to find out what the story was. Later it occurred to us that if we had not stopped, we might have been able to just walk by; maybe at the next point they would have assumed we were on the list. Hard to know.

We talked to Ashraf Dahlan, the person responsible for processing applications by foreigners to cross through Rafah. He is the nephew of Mohammed Dahlan, a powerful figure in the Palestinian Authority. Laila said she’s never seen an office as big as Ashraf’s in Gaza. Ashraf told Pat that the papers had been sent to the Europeans, who he said have the ultimate authority to decide whether to let us in or not.

In case you are not familiar with the arrangement, the Rafah border crossing was opened because James Wolfensohn, formerly head of the World Bank and now U.S. special envoy to Israel-Palestin, visited Gaza about two months after the much-hyped disengagement. He noticed that it was a prison, with no one allowed in or out. So Condoleeza Rice flew out and by all accounts basically forced Ariel Sharon, who still had brain waves at that time, to agree to a border between Rafah in Palestinian Gaza and Rafah in Egypt. The border was to be controlled by the Palestinian Authority with oversight by the European Union and Egypt, with Israelis allowed to surveil from a nearby room using video cameras. The border opened on Thanksgiving weekend, to intensive televising, and viewing audiences around the world watched Palestinian border police stamp the passports of smiling Gazans who rushed through and hugged their Egyptian family members and bought cigarettes.

But that is only how it works for Palestinians (when it does work, because it’s been abruptly closed a number of times, leaving people stuck on the other side from where they lived, not knowing when they could go home). For foreigners it is trickier. A friend was told twice by representatives of the PLO that foreigners cannot use the crossing under any circumstances. I called the PLO mission in Washington and was told it was absolutely no problem, you can go, you don’t need a permit, it will all be taken care of at the border. Fortunately, Pat didn’t believe them and asked around. He learned about the official process: you submit your application to the PA, who sends it to the Liaison Office, which is composed of Palestinians, Europeans and Israelis. From there, no one exactly knows who makes the final decision, and on what grounds. Some say it’s the Europeans, some say it’s the Palestinians; Palestinians, not surprisingly, say it’s the Israelis, though it’s definitely not supposed to be. When Ashraf told us it was out of his hands, Pat heard him say, “Now it’s up to the Is—the Europeans.”

Some people have reported that getting in through Rafah was “easy,” which I’m sure means they did not go through this bureaucratic process. Pat was told that fewer than 5 percent of applications are denied. Before the election, a number of foreign journalists were turned away, but during the election many people gained easy entry. Immediately afterward, the border tightened up again.

So back to our story: we called an EU Liaison, who Pat had talked to before we came. He had told Pat that decisions was made case by case. He said he would check on our applications and Pat should call him back in a few minutes. Pat finally reached him about an hour later, and he said the papers had never been delivered to the Liaison Office. Pat called Ashraf back, and he said, “There is some problem with the coordination between the Europeans and the Israelis, and I’ll have to check on it.”

We called a well-connected friend who works in the Palestinian Authority. He had someone in Gaza encourage Ashraf to help us, saying we are in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

Another man told Pat he did not think we would qualify to get in because our invitation was from a Palestinian NGO, and the current regulations require it to be from an “accredited international NGO.”

I became incensed. Why is access to Gaza limited entry so carefully? This is the international community’s hard-won agreement. Disengagement is supposed to mean freedom for Palestinians, and they cannot even have visitors. We have invitations from at least ten Palestinians: come whenever you want; happy to see you; “from Rafah with love,” said one email, sent by a woman I had never met. Why isn’t that good enough? Why is friendship not a good enough reason to visit someone?

The people of Gaza can get passes to go and come, though they can only enter the West Bank through Jordan. But Gaza is still a prison. While we sat there, I watched people streaming in and out, with luggage and packages, and I know it is much better to go through a border controlled by Palestinian police than to have Israeli soldiers asking invasive questions at gunpoint. But even in most prisons, you are allowed to see the visitors you want.

We returned to Arish; one of the Egyptian guards got us a taxi to a hotel he recommended (from which presumably received a little kickback). For not much more money than we were hoping to pay we got a pleasant room right on the sea. We walked on the beach for a long time, looking at Rafah, just out of reach, and talking about how crazy it is that this quiet resort town, which presumably in the summer is teeming with Egyptian vacationers and the tourists, sits thirty kilometers from Rafah Camp, which must be one of the most traumatized places on earth.

It emphasized for us the artificial nature of the “conflict.” There is nothing about the landscape or the culture that creates danger for the people. Once, the people of Palestinian Rafah and the people of Egyptian Rafah lived as one community. Then the colonizers stuck a border in between them, and then a fence, and then a wall, then some gun towers, and now they are tortured pawns in an international game of “mine’s bigger than yours.”

Scenario is replicated around the world. For example, Alta California and Baja California – family members on one side of the fence belonging to the richest country on earth, those on the other side, to the “Third World.” This situation is so recent, and the distances are so small, it puts the whole insanity in perspective.

_________________________________________

The House is Full of Holes

By David Wylder X

This is one project in my continuing performance of the role of writer and artist within society. It is for my friends, family, and to ALL OF HUMANITY AND ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN about nothing less than THE MYSTERIOUS EXPERIENCE OF LIFE ON EARTH.

===

AND SO THE STORY GOES. . .

How much you risk is how much you win or lose
but how much you love is how much you learn.

*

Why did you go?
Because I wanted to see Rafah again,
because I still believe in peace
although there are times of fighting
to which we can see no end. . .
(and what the hell, maybe I fell in love.)

Anyway I don’t have what it takes
to bring a child’s bicycle to Gaza:
few people do
otherwise Gaza would be full of children’s bicycles–
No, we left the little bike with the bent training wheel
and one missing pedal
under the frozen stars of a london night
laughing until there was no more cold. . .

*

I thought the rubber bullet was an olive
when I saw it lying in the orchard.

*

THE HOUSE IS FULL OF HOLES

HUMAN NATURE

“What is human nature?” He asked rhetorically.
“Look around you,” He continued, “Everything that people are doing, this
is human nature.”

*

The IDEA was to go and live among THE PEOPLE
and listen to the buzz and hum of their talking
to car horns and dishwashing and footsteps and grind
to the laughter, arguments, and crying children
of their LIVING,
until it became possible to hear the RHYTHM and MUSIC
within, underlying, all of this
and to write songs of THE PEOPLE LIVING.

*

I returned to another narrow street
lined with concrete housing blocks saturated by poverty and trauma
ground-floor falafel stands too small for furniture
lit-up portraits of posturing fighters, rifles on display
like low-budget home-grown ‘Join the Army’ ads–
except that everyone knows the men in the pictures are dead– hung
from archways spanning alleys where children play football or burn
garbage–
Oh refugee poverty under occupation
I walk your streets again a foreign white-faced man
and see how my eyes and mind have aged–
I have mortgaged my AMERICAN birthright again
for airplane tickets and taxi fare
to come and live briefly in an Arab ghetto
which, like all ghettos, is constantly under attack–
SO WHAT?

The saga of occupation is written with refugee spraypaint on concrete walls
and punctuated with gunshots and bulletholes.
The boys in the street say they are 20 but look 14
they put their arms around each other and say they are fighters
one pulls out a cheap little switchblade with a plastic handle
says, “How do you like this?”
his eyes go wild like a street cat–
“No thank you,” we say, and walk away.

Then the foreign soldiers come in the night
drive jeeps into Balata refugee camp,
which is built atop the ruins of a 4,000 year old city–
They shoot their M-16s, break into a house,
and haul another Arab to jail.

*

In the village the Patriarchs walk over limestone hills
worn smooth by a million footsteps
and remember the days before their was a nation called Israel or
settlers in single-wide trailers with high-power security lights
over there, across the valley, lighting up the desert night
in bright electric pools of paranoia–
They wear suit jackets over traditional robes
and the Matriarchs bake bread over the embers of sheep-dung fires and
everyone praises god in conversational litany:
Thanks to Allah there is sun, thanks to Allah there is rain
Thanks to Allah there are olive trees, thanks to Allah there are sheep
Thanks to Allah there are houses, thanks to Allah there is food
Everything is from Allah!

Then the settlers come in the night with saws
and cut down olive trees in the village orchard.

The wound on Ibrahim’s ankle, left by a soldier’s bullet years ago,
has healed and grown into a thick mass of scar tissue
and a lingering ache–
He wraps it with a threadbare ace bandage
his dusty feet in a pair of work boots made into sandals
by cutting off the back part down to the sole.

*

East Jerusalem at this hour is a desolation of paving stones
chiseled with irregular divots for better traction
Orange streetlight haze over retro-fit electical conduits
snaking over and into 500-year-old stone walls–

The women have gone inside the houses
a few men stand in groups and pairs smoking in the shadows
or closing down the last restaurants and shops–

At the quiet coffee stand the man with a cleft upper lip
invites you to sit in a plastic chair in an alley
and the boy makes the coffee in a long-handled metal pot–

And the hustlers on this side of town are right out on the street
in your face interrupting you in mid-sentence
with the hustler voice that grinds and slices into your brain–
“HELLO, HELLO!”
“TAXI TAXI! You want taxi! Where you go!
TAXI TAXI TAXI!!!” Nerve shattering as a TV commercial.

*

They were friendly and wanted to help
but could not speak the language
so we filled their mouths with sweet tea and bread.

*

AL QUDS

I have nothing to say about Jerusalem,
except that it is where a lion-faced tomcat paused on limestone steps and
peered into my eyes for 3 minutes.

Jerusalem is ancient and exhausted from religious wars.
You can read a fanatical text written in blood
on the Old City’s fortress walls
but it ain’t worth the effort–
if you want to see the cruel face of GOD
stare directly into the sun for 1 hour.

Everything that could have been said about Jerusalem
someone has already said.
Everything that can be said about Jerusalem
Someone is now saying.
Everything that it will ever be possible to say about Jerusalem
Someone will say soon enough.

The man behind the counter at the art supply store says:
“Jerusalem is a most holy place for 3 great world religions
Christianity Islam Judaism
GOD made it that way for a reason
so if people are fighting over it
this is because of money and politics.”

A damn fool or a wise man came here one time
and scratched these words in the dirt:
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE JEWS THE MUSLIMS AND THE CHRISTIANS
IS THE STYLE OF THEIR HATS.

_________________________________________

High School Students Attacked by Jerusalem Police

On Friday (the Muslim Sabbath) Israeli police refused to allow Palestinians under the age of about 45 or so to enter the old city. Hisham Jamjoum ISM coordinator and manager of the Faisal Hostel next to the old city commented “that there were 300-400 Muslims peacefully praying outside the Old City, because they couldn’t get in. There were police everywhere due to fears that there might be a demonstration against the slander towards the prophet Mohammed.

Whilst police expected demonstrations on Friday what they didn’t expect was a quickly organised demonstration of 300 High School students the following day that took up the issue of slander. Jamjoum commented that the police built up there presence gradually without provocation the police threw sound bombs as the demonstration and fired rubber bullets into the crowed. Increasingly more students joined those at Damascus gate. The rally ended after an hour and a half, 7 people were injured including one person that was hit with a rubber bullet to the leg and 20 people who were arrested. “They attacked everyone, I saw a 60 year old man who was just trying to pass being struck by police. Not even street vendors were safe.”

_________________________________________

Budrus Tears Down the Wall, One Villager Shot With Live Ammunition

Villagers of Budrus gathered after the Friday prayers for a demonstration called for by Fatah against derogatory images of Mohammed the Prophet, February 10. When the march reached the annexation barrier, villagers began tearing down the fence.

Later the military invaded Budrus village and were confronted by youth throwing stones. Israeli soldiers shot 24-year-old Mohammed Taha Morar with live ammunition below the left knee. Morar underwent three-hour surgery at Sheik Ziad hospital in Ramallah where he is awaiting another operation.

_________________________________________

The Politics of Race and Power in Palestine

By Fairouz, With contributions by Dillion

I would like to be writing about nonviolent struggle in Palestine. I want to be shedding light on the many injustices of Occupation. I am irate that astounding daily stories of creative and courageous resistance are trampled under this issue in the news: however, it is important to address the proliferation of anti-Muslim cartoons and the resulting commotion.

Many people in the West are flabbergasted by the intensity of the Arab and Muslim worlds’ reaction and cannot understand how a few drawings caused such an uproar. The reasons and the response are far deeper than Western news corporations care to dig.

The issue is not a question of free speech versus censorship, but moving past band-aid explanations to the root of the problem. The cartoons released a pressure valve for accumulated outrage. Muslim populations have withstood colonization, occupation, and imperialism for centuries, from Napoleon’s occupation and culture theft in Egypt to victims of the war in Iraq. Themes from the months following 9/11 are resurfacing in Western news: a mosque accused of manufacturing terrorists in London; anger in the Middle East once again boiled down to a hatred of American and European liberties. Presenting the story as primarily a free speech debate frames the situation as cultural, not political in nature. It reveals a bias, an initiative, by choosing to ignore the historical context. But it is also disingenuous. Western media outlets are not really defending free speech, but the West’s use of free speech. Arabs and Muslims exercising their freedom to assemble in demonstrations united across national and cultural borders are represented as extremist.

Many international activists groups operating in the Middle East are attempting to patch long-built trusts. In Palestine, solidarity groups recently issued a collective public condemnation of anti-Muslim cartoons, and called for the newspapers responsible to apologize.

Still, we must be careful not to exercise double standards while reproaching the West for doing the same. Concerns have been raised about the threat of kidnappings, for example – an unlikely but not unrealistic possibility. In many ways, international activists can become apologists for the ugly parts of Palestinian society. We want to show the cause in a favorable light, and sometimes fear fueling anti-Palestinian sentiments by critically discussing existing problems. It’s a disservice to this society, these people, however, to paint issues as black and white.

Many Muslim societies otherize darker ethnicities. I am from a culture that prefers fair skinned girls to the darker variety. Bleaching creams and SPF 150 sunblock abound. Globally, racism is the result of hundreds of years of colonization based on racist assumptions – which are now transmitted through popular media and race politics.

My experience is that Palestinians are much more capable of discerning my ethnicity from my features than Americans- I am often greeted by “Hello, India!” or “Pakistan!” Yet, the ever present, irritating question Where are you from? still haunts me. When I say “Ana Amrikiye buss Hindeya” (‘I am American BUT Indian’ – this qualifier drives me insane, as if the two identities are fundamentally incompatible) I am asked which one of my parents are Indian. When I say both, they are surprised. When I am occasionally invited to Islam and I say I had accepted that invitation at birth, they are surprised. “Wallah!” (‘Well! By God!’) Ironically though, having brown skin lately carries its own benefits.

Danish, Scandinavian, European, and any other light-skinned people face the risk of daily harassment and, yes, the vague possibility of abduction. This is a form of collective punishment. Many verbal threats have been made against Danes. A group of French nationals were recently subject to stone throwing in Hebron.

But let’s keep things in perspective. Palestinians are constantly threatened with imprisonment, death, and theft of land and livelihood under Israeli Occupation. The moment race discrimination refocuses on those with the privilege to remove themselves from the situation, they often do just that. The distinction here is between systematic racism and incidental discrimination. Even conservative-militaristic organizations operating in Palestine – ones considered “terrorist” by the West, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas – have begun espousing nonviolence. However, institutions such as the World Bank and many governments are pulling funding from the Occupied Territories. Some NGOs with hierarchical decision making structures are removing volunteers.

The primary risk posed toward international activists is from the Israeli Occupation Forces. Yet once a threat from Palestinians is detected, people on the outside become much more concerned for our safety. Our work in Palestine functions on the assumption that whether internationals are exercising skin privilege or passport privilege or both, the Israelis see us as their “own” – as possessing “Western” culture. Soldiers (and sometimes settlers) are less prone to harm us than Palestinians, who are perceived as the “Other.” Internal divisions are united against an external enemy. It is a system of institutionalized racism that roars when an international is killed in Palestine, but looks the other way when thousands of Palestinians are murdered every year.

Israel is hailed as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. Democracy in this sense means capitalistic industrialized nations that share European cultural ideals. “Democratic nations” have and continue to commit some of the world’s greatest atrocities.

Recently two 15 year old boys in the Salfit region were taken in the night by the Israeli Occupation forces. One was returned, but the other, with a reported mental disability, is still being held at Huwara prison. In the past, Israeli soldiers beat the boy’s older brother to deafness and his mother to miscarriage. These news stories are drowned out in the din of the West’s “clash of civilizations” jargon.

Going through Israeli checkpoints, I am often asked whether I speak Arabic. There is no room in the soldiers’ worldview for Muslims who are not Arab. During a recent experience through the checkpoint I decided to see what would happen if I didn’t flash my passport, my blue and gold ticket to unlimited destinations, immediately. The soldier barked loudly, “HAWIYYE! WAYN HAWIYYE?” (Arabic for ‘Where is your ID?’) I produced it. She relaxed immediately and in a surprised and mellow tone said, “Oh. Go ahead.” Entering the country, I was immediately taken aside by an Israeli border police agent, and asked if I had a second passport. The question more accurately stated would be, “Are you Arab?” or, “Why are you brown?” A woman of South Asian ancestry, primarily raised as Muslim, however bred with the innate tendencies (and passport) of Americans, living in Palestine, completely upsets the system with her complexity.

I used to find my fractured identity a great source of teenage angst. While traveling I have seen the privilege I possess, having the cultural material to find common ground with many different people. I do believe that as the world becomes more globalized, survival will come to depend on our ability to work through differences. This occurs every day in Palestine in the form of Palestinian, Israeli, and international nonviolent activists struggling together to end the Occupation.

Despite the injustice, hate, and racism I have witnessed and experienced in the past five months, I have retained a strong faith in humanity to work for social justice. Power works because one harmful action can trump the peaceful, nonviolent lifestyles of a million people. We must become capable of looking past violent actions. We must learn to give the respect that nonviolence demands.

_________________________________________
end*