Tag: Electronic Intifada

Palestinian Christian struggle mapped in new book

5th May 2014 | The Electronic Intifada, Joe Catron | Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

In Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future, American Mennonite theologian and aid worker Alain Epp Weaver explores a legacy of Palestinian Christian exile, and struggle for return. The book’s terrain ranges from the ethnically-cleansed villages of the Galilee to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Weaver focuses particularly on contending geographies: how “Palestinians have been ‘abolished from the map,’ in the words of Palestinian cartographer Salman Abu-Sitta,” and the prospect of “counter-cartographies that subvert colonialism’s map-making.”

His book encompasses the work of specialists, like Abu-Sitta’s maps, the writings of Edward Said, the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedic volume All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, as well as “memory production” by thousands of Palestinians through collaborations like the web archive Palestine Remembered.

“In the face of Zionist rejection of Palestinian refugee return, international indifference, and an ineffectual and compromising Palestinian leadership for whom the refugee question is a source of irritation, Palestinian refugees pin their hopes on memory,” Weaver writes.

Significantly, he also includes extended histories of two key initiatives: the struggles for return by the ethnically-cleansed Christian villagers of Kufr Birim and Iqrit in the Galilee, and Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to “remembering the Nakba in Hebrew.”

Rites of return

The residents of Kufr Birim and Iqrit, Weaver writes, “pioneered and in turn inspired activism on the part of other internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Israel” through mass mobilizations, as well as “rites of return.”

Through the latter, ranging from personal visits to destroyed family homes to community festivals, like Iqrit’s recent Easter celebrations, villagers “carry on a dual struggle, both against the Israeli state and its institutions that deny their rights to the land and against sedentary tendencies and forgetfulness,” Weaver writes.

Later he likens Zochrot’s public mappings of ethnically-cleansed villages to “at least some practices of Palestinian refugees” as “exilic vigils.”

This content is fascinating, if unpredictable. Readers may wonder at the omission of major efforts like Kairos Palestine and the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center.

But at times, Weaver’s heavy-handed application of his own theology, and efforts to find its reflection in Palestinian Christianity, pose a bigger challenge.

His analysis is steeped in the writings of another American Mennonite, John Howard Yoder, popular among Catholic Workers and other Christian activists, as well as Mennonites. Like his Mennonite forebears, Yoder viewed nations and their political institutions critically.

At his most succinct, he told a 1957 Mennonite peace conference near Karlsruhe, Germany, “The state is a pagan institution in which a Christian would not normally hold a position” (John Howard Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility, Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, Herald Press, 2003, p. 25).

Following Yoder’s “theology of galut [exile] as vocation,” Weaver argues for “accepting one’s exilic status, even when one is at home,” and advocates a binationalism “differentiated from the one-state solution.”

Theological cartography

His prescription bears some resemblance to the description of a “very fluid model” of “overlapping claims” in ancient Palestine offered by Hebrew Bible scholar Rachel Havrelock.

And in each case study in the book, Weaver searches “for a theological cartography of land and return in which exile and return function as potentially interpenetrating, instead of irreducibly opposed, realities.”

In his section on Edward Said, Weaver may find what he seeks. In another, he fairly claims, “Abu-Sitta’s maps can (but need not) be interpreted as escaping the statist character of most national maps.”

At a low point, Weaver reproaches recently-retired Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Elias Chacour, a displaced resident of Kufr Birim and noted writer as well as community leader, for a statement of Chacour’s own, fairly standard Christian belief.

“[N]ow we have a new understanding of the Chosenness,” Chacour wrote in 1999. “Who is Chosen? Man and Woman — every man and every woman — are invited to take part in the divine banquet” (“Reconciliation and Justice: Living with the Memory,” Holy Land, Hollow Jubilee: God, Justice, and the Palestinians, ed. Naim Ateek and Michael Prior (London: Melisende, 1999), p. 112).

This clear opinion “fails to do justice to Chacour’s nuance at other points in his writings,” Weaver states, before divining the position he would prefer Chacour hold instead from his choice of a Bible translation. In such passages, it becomes painfully obvious that what Weaver hopes to find is simply not there.

In 1970, black liberation theologian James H. Cone wrote that “there can be no theology of the gospel which does not arise from an oppressed community.” Theology, Cone added, “cannot be separated from the community which it represents” (James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2010, p. 5, 9).

Divide and rule

Weaver’s account offers a testimony to both the world’s oldest Christian community’s theological response to its own oppression, and the risks of viewing its struggle through a lens that may, in another context, make perfect sense.

In Kairos Palestine’s recent Easter Alert, Hind Khoury, Sabeel’s vice-president and former Palestinian Authority minister of Jerusalem affairs and Palestine Liberation Organization ambassador to France, writes, “Each one of us is targeted in our very survival and the integrity of our community, as in the integrity of our identity and our culture. Even our memory and our future are being hijacked.”

“One of the latest such laws, for example, decreed that Palestinian Christians are not Arabs in order to further divide and rule and confuse Palestinian cohesive identity,” she added.

Palestinians facing not only occupation and exile, but also denial of their heritage and sectarian attempts to fragment it, may find belonging, identity and nationality more liberatory, for themselves and the world around them, than those of us who share Weaver’s “location within political and theological maps of power and privilege” as “descendant[s] of European immigrants who settled on land claimed by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations,” among a great many others.

And it is the commonality of Palestinian experience and destiny that politically-engaged Palestinian Christians stress, from religious figures like Greek Orthodox ArchbishopAtallah Hanna to boycott, divestment and sanctions organizer Sandra Tamari, who wrote for Mondoweiss last year: “I am uncomfortable with the identity of Palestinian Christian because — thankfully — Palestinians have not fallen into sectarian traps that divide along religious lines.”

“We must create spaces for listening to the broad spectrum of Palestinian stories,” she added. “We cannot do that by excluding the majority of Palestinians who happen to be Muslims.”

Nor, while Israel’s sectarian legislation and attempts to recruit Christians into its army, and what the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land yesterday called “a wave of anti-Christian fanaticism and violence” by Israelis continue, is it likely to happen through the detachment Yoder suggested and Weaver champions.

Instead most Palestinians, regardless of faith, may find more promise in the “firm national position of the Christians in refusing to join a military that exercises violence against the rights of the Palestinian people,” expressed Friday by Archbishop Hannah and retired Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, and in the Easter sentiments of Sabbah’s successor, current Patriarch Fouad Twal: “We are the rightful/lawful owners, and you will hear our voice before all governments worldwide.”

Joe Catron is a US activist in Gaza, Palestine. He co-edited The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag, an anthology of accounts by detainees freed in the 2011 prisoner exchange, and is a member of the Palestine Israel Network in the Episcopal Church. Follow him on Twitter: @jncatron.

Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future

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British war cemetery not immune to Gaza siege

21st April 2014 | The Electronic Intifada, Joe Catron | Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

Ibrahim Jeradeh is the Gaza War Cemetery’s longtime caretaker. (Joe Catron)

On a recent, sunny afternoon, Kath Henwood, a Yorkshire paramedic volunteering in the Gaza Strip, walked through rows of headstones at the Gaza War Cemetery with a camera and notebook.

“My regular crewmate at work, in his spare time, researches World War II,” she said. “He’s really passionate about it.”

When Henwood learned of the cemetery, she said, “my first thought was to tell him about it.”

The cemetery, off Saladin street in northern Gaza City, is one of thousands maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), a consortium of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

It contains 3,691 graves, all but 474 of them for First World War troops from the Commonwealth of Nations. A further 210 are from the Second World War.

Others include Egyptian and Turkish soldiers, as well as Canadian United Nations peacekeepers.

Their memorials, from simple headstones to an imposing “cross of sacrifice” — a memorial found in numerous CWGC cemeteries — reflect their varied faiths: Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and secular.

And the careful landscaping and quiet solitude around them make the cemetery an attractive destination for everyone from picnicking families to students looking for a place to study.

After she told him about it, Henwood’s colleague sent her a list of 19 graves, and asked that she photograph them.

Ibrahim Jeradeh, the cemetery’s longtime caretaker, helped her find them quickly.

Later, sitting on a marble bench in the shade of the cross of remembrance, he spoke about the cemetery and his life taking care of it.

“Killing is no good”

“War is war, and killing is killing,” he said, passing a hot cup of sugary tea. It was a theme to which he would return again and again.

“In my mind, war is no good. Killing is no good.”

Now 77, Jeradeh started working at the cemetery, then overseen by his father, when he was 20. He officially retired as its head gardener at 65, when his son Issam replaced him.

“I don’t know about politics,” he said of the changes that have affected the cemetery over nearly a century since its founding by British forces after the Third Battle of Gaza in 1917. “I know about the trees.”

But politics have rarely left Jeradeh or his trees alone for long.

Headstones destroyed

In 2006, Israeli troops bulldozed the cemetery’s perimeter wall and six of its headstones. Months later, an Israeli military helicopter fired its cannon at one of the large memorial stones.

“Two dozen other headstones have been pockmarked by shrapnel from Israeli artillery and several have been completely destroyed,” The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported (“Fury as Israelis damage war cemetery,” 13 November 2006).

During Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military offensive against the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and early 2009, Israeli forces bombarded the cemetery, striking it with at least five shells and singing its grass with white phosphorous (“Israel shelled UK war graves in Gaza,” The Daily Telegraph, 20 January 2009).

The bombing again damaged the perimeter wall, along with 363 headstones (“The mighty march of progress: British war graves in Gaza,” Ma’an News Agency, 9 November 2010).

“There were no fighters here,” Jeradeh said.

Rare demands for compensation

After each of these attacks, the British government lodged rare demands that Israel compensate it for the costs of repairing the cemetery.

Israel ultimately complied, paying £20,600 ($34,400) in 2008 and £40,000 ($67,000) —less than half the £84,000 ($140,000) requested — in 2011.

“We repaired it,” Jeradeh said. “All of it. Alhamdulillah [Thanks to God], it is like new.”

The Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip has also affected the cemetery. In February 2009, a year after Paul Price’s appointment as CWGC’s regional supervisor for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, he had yet to be allowed by Israel to enter Gaza (“Battle still rages where my great-uncle fell in Gaza back in 1917,” The Observer, 22 February 2009).

In May 2013, a year after a seemingly simple pump failure had left the cemetery’s grass and flowers parched, the CWGC said that finally replacing the pump “proved challenging” (“Gaza war cemetery returns to former green glory,” Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 30 May 2013).

Moshe Dayan sought to exhume the five Jewish graves in the Gaza War Cemetery. (Joe Catron)

Despite its foreign affiliations — which ultimately afforded it some protection — the cemetery has also been targeted by Israel culturally, as well as militarily.

Following Israel’s 1967 seizure of the Gaza Strip, Moshe Dayan, then Israeli defense minister, sought to exhume the cemetery’s five Jewish graves and take them to Israel.

The attempt came as Israeli forces looted thousands of historical artifacts, particularly Jewish ones, from their newly-occupied territories, an effort in which Dayan participated enthusiastically as both a military official and a private collector (“Stealing Palestine’s history,” This Week in Palestine, 1 October 2005).

“I refused,” Jeradeh said, his eyes bright. “I was young then. I told him, ‘Go to our office in London.’”

“No difference”
“They are buried here. How could he take them? The Jews here are Jews, not Israelis. There is no difference here between Jews, Muslims and Christians. They are all human.”

Surrounded by fields of grass and rows of colorful flowers and polished stones, the troubles of occupation and siege seemed as distant as Jeradeh’s clash with Dayan.

Maintaining the cemetery’s immaculate condition is hard work, Jeradeh said, even in retirement.

“This is the best, cleanest place in Gaza,” he said. “I work hard to keep it nice.”

Officially, since his mandatory retirement, Jeradeh has served as the cemetery’s night watchman. “I keep this place completely safe,” he said.

In practice, his work as a gardener has continued, if not at the same rate.

“I don’t buy plants,” he said. “I use the ones from my nursery. And I teach the people who work with me.”

“You see all that?” he asked, his arm sweeping across the cemetery. “My drawings.”

“I am always here. Where else should I go? Twenty-four hours a day.” Still, he acknowledged that his pace may have slowed. “Seventy-seven years is a long time.”

He also spends time with visiting family, including four sons and nine daughters. When asked how many grandchildren he had, he laughed.

“I don’t want to remember,” he said, gesturing at a group of small girls peering curiously from behind a row of headstones. “More than a hundred. But they live outside, in Gaza.”

“I like to study,” he added. “I read books on history, geography, horticulture, medicine, everything. I am always reading. And I like writing. Every day, I write what happened to me.”

When asked how long he has kept his journals, he laughed again. “I don’t remember. I have books like this,” he said, gesturing at the height of his shoulder.

“But I started when I was young, and continued day by day, year by year.”

“You are happy writing here,” he said, pointing to a notebook. “The head is clear for it.”

He showed his study, a detached building, behind the larger gardener’s quarters at the cemetery’s edge, equipped with a personal computer and filled with stacks of books and printed articles.

“The pencil is dangerous,” he said. “The man who succeeds in his life writes the facts.”

Returning to the lush greenery of the cemetery, he said, “I don’t feel any problems here … Any man, if he likes others, the others like him. If you do good for others, others do good for you.”

“Everybody knows that war is war, and killing is killing,” he repeated, gesturing again at the thousands of stones surrounded by his carefully-tended flowers.

“Now everything here is history. No one here hates anyone else.”

Local Israel boycott part of Gaza’s “resistance mentality”

8th March 2014 | The Electronic Intifada, Joe Catron | Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

Israeli restrictions on Gaza’s fishermen are an example of apartheid, say activists.

Agricultural organizations in the Gaza Strip are working with academic and other civil society groups to prepare for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW).

Local events, as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, will run from Sunday, 9 March through Thursday, 13 March in the besieged coastal enclave.

“On the last day, I can guarantee we’ll have a good activity,” said Saad Ziada, field coordinator with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in the Gaza Strip and its representative on the local IAW preparatory committee. “I expect 600-700 people will participate, at least.”

The Union of Agricultural Work Committees will organize the last of this year’s local events, a gathering for farmers and fishermen in the Gaza seaport on 13 March.

“Why in the Gaza port?” Ziada said. “Because Palestinian fishermen are prevented from entering and using our sea for their resources. At the same time, Israelis freely use the sea, which is our sea. This is a clear example of Israel’s discrimination and apartheid policies.”

Targeting farmers, fishermen

A joint report, issued a month ago by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rightsand the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, found “522 documented shooting incidents targeting fishermen at sea, resulting in nine civilian deaths, 47 injuries and 422 detentions” off the Gaza coast between 1997 and 30 November 2013.

During the same reporting period, the report states, “The facts available suggest that hundreds of farmers were unarmed when they were shot at and injured” (“Under fire: Israel’s enforcement of access restricted areas in the Gaza Strip,” January 2014 [PDF]

A year ago, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees held a rally in the seaport, as well as another in the so-called “buffer zone” by the separation barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip, to support a boycott of Israeli agricultural products.

These events were part of a “Farming Injustice” campaign that included actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as 40 European cities.

Activating the boycott

“This year, we want to activate the boycott of Israeli products in the Gaza Strip,” Ziada said. “We want farmers and fishermen to be involved in these activities, to know more about boycott and normalization.”

“The boycott movement will not be just for students and academics,” said Mohamed Abu Samra, an activist with the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel. “It must include all sectors of Palestinian society.”

As another member of the preparatory committee, Abu Samra has helped to plan a range of talks, films and presentations in the Nuseirat municipal hall, the Palestine Red Crescent Society building and the Women’s Development Center.

He also worked with other Gaza activists to film an Israeli Apartheid Week promotional video.

“BDS gives us a wide area for the biggest part of the population to participate in a kind of resistance, and it’s succeeding,” Abu Samra said.

Workshops

The Arab Center for Agricultural Development, another organization involved in Israeli Apartheid Week has an ongoing campaign to encourage the boycott of Israeli agricultural products by Gaza Strip farmers.

“Last year, we had three workshops on BDS with farmers and other groups,” said Abeer Abu Shawish, the center’s project coordinator and the Israeli Apartheid Week preparatory committee member. “These workshops aren’t finished. We’ll keep them going, to reach all the farmers in Gaza and encourage them to support BDS.”

The center will focus its other major campaign, organizing accompaniment for olive farmers during the harvest season, on the West Bank and coordinate it with the BDS National Committee this year, Abu Shawish said.

In the Gaza Strip, the center plans to increase its boycott activities.

“ACAD will recruit a coordinator just for BDS, to be responsible for all the activities we will have in the BDS campaign,” Abu Shawish said. “We are going to do more activities in all the Gaza governorates, in cooperation with our partners in the West Bank. We are also producing posters, newsletters, social media, radio announcements and other publicity tools. It is a main program in our strategic plan this year.”

Challenge

Despite enthusiasm for BDS by civil society groups like the Arab Center for Agricultural Development and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and their constituencies, implementing it under occupation and siege in the Gaza Strip poses a challenge.

“You cannot ask people not to buy something for which they don’t have an alternative, especially after the closure of the tunnels,” said Mohsen Abu Ramadan, ACAD’s director in Gaza and one of three representatives of the Palestinian NGO Network on the BDS National Committee. “Most of the commodities now come through Kerem Shalom [crossing from Israel].”

Abu Shawish agreed that the siege presents the biggest obstacle to boycotting Israel from Gaza.

“The main difficulty is that we don’t have alternatives to many, many products,” she said. “We can’t stop using them all. If we don’t have an alternative product, whether local, national or international, we have to use the Israeli one.”

But the local boycott has cultural value, she said, even if its economic impact is necessarily limited.

“It’s a kind of resistance. People can do it themselves, without it costing anything.”

“We try to make the boycott a culture, as part of a resistance mentality,” Abu Ramadan said.

Gaza IAW, and local BDS activities in general, contribute strength to a global effort, Abu Samra said.

“It raises the awareness of BDS among people in the Palestinian community, and support the BDS movement outside Palestine. BDS succeeded in the past, in South Africa, and we think it will succeed in ending the occupation now.”

Zionism is a “false theology,” says new Presbyterian study guide

4th February 2014 | The Electronic Intifada, Joe Catron | Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

In five months, the Presbyterian Church (USA) will consider divestment from three US companies with Israeli military contracts, at its general assembly in Detroit.

A new study guide published by the church and compiled by its Israel/Palestine Mission Network has turned a critical eye on the Zionist ideology behind the Israeli policies the divestment measure aims to challenge.

Zionism Unsettled, as the pamphlet is titled, offers much value to any Palestine activist who has not considered the ramifications ofZionism as an ideology.

Its 74 pages sketch both Zionism’s historical outlines and its complex relationships with the Christian and Jewish faiths. A companion DVD offers further commentary.

“With Zionism Unsettled, we are hoping to shine a light on the effects of Zionism as a political ideology that is justified by appeal to selective biblical texts,” Walt Davis, co-chairperson of the IPMN’s education committee and Zionism Unsettled project coordinator, told The Electronic Intifada.

“There’s a good deal of examination of various theologies in Zionism Unsettled, but through the lens of how they have been affected by a nationalist ideology,” Davis added.

“The problem now is that the issue is no longer just a secular political ideology; it has become an ideology infused with biblical and theological justifications. Therefore it now needs to be examined through a theological lens too.”

“Cloak of silence”

Davis added that because the US is a highly religious society, “we want to open a dialogue about this symbiotic relationship that has been shrouded in a cloak of silence. This is what the churches have done in the past when oppressive ideologies like Jim Crow segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa had become theologies of self-identity for their supporters.”

The publication of Zionism Unsettled does not mark a theological breakthrough. The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s liberal Reformed tradition has rarely offered fertile ground for the growth of Christian Zionism as a religious tendency.

As Zionism Unsettled says, “For decades the [Presbyterian Church (USA)] has opposed the evangelical blend of dispensationalism and Christian Zionism because it fuses religion with politics, distorts faith, and imperils peace in the Middle East.”

Rather, it indicates a political shift, a breach of what Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis calls “the interfaith ecumenical deal,” under which a significant number of Christians have supported Israel.

“In its liberal Christian manifestations, Zionism serves as a ‘price-tag’ theology providing Christians with a vehicle of repentance for the guilt accrued during centuries of European Christian anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust,” Naim Ateek, co-founder and director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, writes in Zionism Unsettled.

The study guide also analyzes the disparate threads of Jewish Zionism, first cultural and political, then political and religious, culminating in the fusion of the latter two after Israel’s military occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and other territories in 1967 — and the subsequent launch of its settlement project.

It also suggests the United States’ own history of settler colonialism as a crucial reason for its support, both political and religious, of the similar process of Zionism.

Myths of origin

“Israeli and American myths of origin are similar and derived from the same biblical sources,” Zionism Unsettled says, noting that “the history and ideology of settler colonialism have been so central to the political history of the United States that it is not surprising the political and religious leadership in the US has been predisposed to uncritical support for the Zionist movement.”

Much church activism for Palestine, like past divestment efforts within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church, has remained within the parameters of theOslo accords, focusing on the post-1967 occupation and aiming for a negotiated two-state solution.

Zionism Unsettled breaks this frame by also considering the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the apartheid facing Palestinian citizens of Israel and the one-state reality.

“The so-called peace process has devolved into a cover under which irreversible territorial and demographic facts on the ground are being implemented with impunity by Israel,”Zionism Unsettled begins. “Israel’s expansion into territory classified under international law as occupied has brought about a de facto one-state entity under Israeli jurisdiction.”

Later it reports “a growing consensus — except, notably, in the US and Israel — that the existing de facto one-state situation/solution is irreversible and that the Israeli form of apartheid (segregation and separate development) is becoming increasingly entrenched.”

“Colonizing minds”

But Zionism Unsettled’s focus remains on ideology, not the policies it inspires. Its authors quote the Palestinian writer and academic Nur Masalha: “Zionism was (and remains) not just about the colonization of Palestinian land, but also about colonizing minds — Jewish, Arab, European, American.”

Through their text, they attempt to decolonize one corner of America’s mainstream Protestant mind.

“What has been almost entirely absent from the mainstream conversation about Israel/Palestine is open, frank discussion about the ways in which ideology — that is, political and religious doctrine — has been a driving force of the conflict,” they write.

“Zionism is the problem,” Ateek states in Zionism Unsettled. “For Palestinians and a growing number of internationals around the world it is clear that Zionism is a false theology.”

Both a political ideology and a theology, Zionism has shaped and been shaped by the main religious traditions — Christianity and Judaism — it has engaged.

Zionism Unsettled is not an activist handbook. It is very much a work of theology, albeit political theology. Little of its content is prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Church members and others seeking practical steps to apply its knowledge will need to look elsewhere.

As the study guide was released, a delegation of Presbyterian Peace Fellowship members traveled through present-day Israel and the occupied West Bank on an Interfaith Peace-Builders (IFPB) tour. Over 12 days, its two dozen participants met activists on both sides of the green line (the internationally-recognized armistice line between present-day Israel and the occupied West Bank), posted updates to the delegation’s blog, and tweeted their experiences with the hashtag #PPFinAction.

“Moral obligation”

“The goal was to prepare a cadre of articulate, better informed, creative, passionate spokespersons from within the Presbyterian Church,” Mark C. Johnson, an IFPB board member who co-led the delegation, told The Electronic Intifada.

Delegates who have traveled to Palestine, spoken with residents and seen conditions firsthand can more convincingly say, “I believe the Presbyterian Church is legitimate in its witness when it supports the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] call,’” he remarked.

“Ending one’s complicity in crime is not heroic,” Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of thePalestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) told the group.

“I think the delegation’s visit will help familiarize them, and many other Presbyterians through them, with the brutal reality of Israel’s regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people,” Barghouti later told The Electronic Intifada.

He added that he hopes their experiences “will convince a much wider segment of the Presbyterian Church (USA) that divesting their funds from companies that are complicit in Israel’s decades-old occupation and denial of Palestinian rights is indeed a profound moral obligation.”

Barghouti added, “All Palestinians were inspired and moved to tears when a decade ago the Presbyterian Church (USA) became the first mainstream institution in the US to support divestment … For ten years, however, the church’s moves towards divestment have been held hostage to Zionist blackmail, including through so-called ‘interfaith’ groups and the unfounded, chilling and false accusations of anti-Semitism, preventing the Presbyterian Church (USA) from doing the right thing.”

Johnson also hopes the delegation’s participation will affect the divestment debate. “There is a division within the body, but the majority already have given evidence of supporting BDS and positive investment,” he said. “As long as the latter is not used to undermine the legitimacy of the former, this new wave of recruits can make a good deal of difference both prior to the GA [general assembly] and at the GA.”

On 24 January, the delegates issued a unanimous statement supporting a recommendation by the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Mission Responsibility through Investment Committee (MRTI) for divestment.

It quotes Palestinian businessman Sam Bahour, who warned against efforts to substitute investment in Palestinian enterprises for divestment from the occupation. “Investing in our economy is an act of resistance that helps Palestinians not to give up,” he told the group. “But don’t be fooled into thinking that it will help us to end the occupation. BDS is an important tool for that” (“Presbyterian delegation unanimously supports MRTI call to divest from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard,” Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, 24 January 2014).

The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s 2012 general assembly approved a church-wide boycott of Israeli settlement products by 71 percent. A motion to divest the church’s own holdings inCaterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola, all of which have business connections with the Israeli occupation, was replaced by a margin of two votes out of 666.

With divestment set to return to the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s agenda in Detroit this summer, two years of dialogue, education, and organizing by activists within the church may be nearing fruition.

Gaza fishermen suffer 85 percent income loss as Israeli siege, attacks continue

4th January 2014 | The Electronic Intifada, Joe Catron | Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

Small fishing boats, or hasakas, moored in the Gaza seaport. (Photo by Charlie Andreasson) — Small fishing boats, or *hasakat*, moored in the Gaza seaport. (Photo by Charlie Andreasson)

On 17 December, Palestinian fishermen and their supporters erected a tent — a traditional venue for protest, as well as celebration and mourning — inside the Gaza seaport.

“It was to highlight the situation, the crimes of the Israelis against fishermen here,” said Amjad al-Shrafi, treasurer of the General Union of Fishermen. “We wanted to send a message about the blockade against the fishermen and how we cannot fish freely.”

The protest, organized under the title Free the Holy Land Sea, ended two days later with the delivery of a letter to the nearby office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, demanding international protection for fishermen.

Over three days, hundreds of well-wishers visited a crowded tent decorated with banners and posters supporting fishermen. The organizations represented on its walls ranged from human rights centers to prisoner support groups.

Under fire

“One of our main goals was to push governments around the world to force Israel to give fishermen free lives and let us sail without any limits,” al-Shrafi said. “It’s our right to sail freely in our waters.”

“Another was to pressure the Israeli forces to release the boats and fishermen they have captured.”

Palestinian fishermen in coastal waters off the Gaza Strip frequently come under fire byIsraeli naval forces, which target their boats on both sides of a boundary imposed by Israel.

Israel deploys its gunships into Palestinian waters using an information technology infrastructure administered by Hewlett-Packard (“Technologies of control: The case of Hewlett-Packard,” Who Profits, December 2011).

Through its subsidiary, HP Israel, the US corporation won a contract to run the Israeli navy’s computer and communications network in August 2006 (“HP Israel wins navy IT outsourcing contract,” Globes, 14 August 2006).

The fishing area permitted by Israel, which doubled in size as part of the ceasefire agreement ending eight days of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip and retaliatory fire by Palestinian resistance groups in November 2012, now officially reaches six nautical miles from the shore.

But fishermen say the Israeli navy often shoots at them and sometimes captures them and their boats well within the zone it ostensibly allows them.

Captured

“We were far from the prohibited zone, 500 meters away,” said Saddam Abu Warda, a 23-year-old fisherman whom the Israeli navy captured along with his 18-year-old brother Mahmoud around 9am on 10 November.

“They were shouting, ‘You must get out of here in five minutes.’ We had to cut the net to pull it out of the water. Then they started to fire bullets close to our hasaka [small boat]. As they came close to us, their boat looked like a big building with lights.”

The Abu Wardas’ small boat had no engine. “We tried to escape by paddling quickly,” Saddam Abu Warda said. “They forced us to take off our clothes and raise our hands. They were firing bullets in the air and in front of our hasaka. One soldier was shouting, ‘You have to leave your hasaka and get in the water.’ I was shocked. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know why.”

Finally, gunfire forced the brothers into the cold water. “They didn’t stop firing bullets over our heads,” Abu Warda said. “I was far from my brother. He started shouting, saying, ‘I am injured.’ He wasn’t able to keep swimming. I swam back to my brother to try and save him. His blood was [spilling] in the water. Then two small boats came close to us. They pulled my brother from the water. They didn’t take me.”

When Abu Warda reached the Israeli gunship, he lost consciousness after soldiers bound, hooded and kicked him. He awoke in a detention facility in Ashdod, a port in present-day Israel beside his brother Mahmoud, whose right abdomen was stitched by military physicians. The brothers said that Israeli bullets caused the wound.

During an interrogation after he awoke, an Israeli soldier tried to convince him otherwise. “I told him, ‘Three of your gunboats were around us. They were firing bullets. My brother’s blood was everywhere in the water. He was injured by your soldiers.’”

After a lengthy interrogation that continued both in Ashdod port and after their transfer to a detention center by the Erez crossing between Gaza and present-day Israel, Israeli forces released the Abu Wardas into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun around 10pm — 13 hours after their capture. Their boat and its equipment remained behind.

“We have three hasakas in the Ashdod port,” Abu Warda said of his family’s prior losses to the Israeli navy.

Severe damage

The Abu Wardas’ experiences echo many more documented in a new report by thePalestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). The PCHR, which supported the Free the Holy Land Sea campaign, is translating the document — already published in Arabic — into English.

Over four years, from 1 September 2009 through 31 August 2013, the Israeli navy killed two fishermen, wounded 24, and captured 147, according to the report. The navy also seized 45 boats and destroyed or damaged 113 more.

The report also records the losses incurred by about thirty bombings of four fishing ports during Israel’s November 2012 attacks on the Gaza Strip, including damages to an additional 80 boats and destruction of a health clinic and a youth center used by fishermen.

“There was severe damage to different fishing facilities during the military offensive,” said Khalil Shaheen, director of PCHR’s economic and social rights unit.” At the ports in Gaza City, Middle Area, Khan Younis and Rafah, different facilities were targeted and destroyed.”

“The report also documents the impact of the total damage to fishermen and the fishing sector,” Shaheen added. “One of the main impacts was the loss of 85 percent of income in the fishing sector, as the result of access restrictions and the naval blockade.”

Casualties have continued to mount in the four months since the period covered by the report ended. The PCHR publishes regular reports on human rights abuses in Gaza. These reports indicate that Israel has shot at fishermen at least 37 times since September, as well as seizing six boats.

“I would like to thank all the solidarity campaigns who were involved in this action and show solidarity with Palestinian fishermen,” al-Shrafi said.

“We ask that the international community continue to pressure their governments, to ask for dignity and a free life for us.”

Joe Catron is a US activist in Gaza, Palestine. He co-edited The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag, an anthology of accounts by detainees freed in the 2011 prisoner exchange. He blogs at joecatron.wordpress.com and tweets @jncatron.