UPDATE: Huwaida Arraf released on 20 March after being illegally under arrest for 31 hours. Eight of these hours were spent standing in the cold in the illegal Halamish settlement. During this time she witnessed the border police by whom she was detained abuse the two Palestinian men who were also illegally arrested, Omar, 23, and Amjad, 22. She was treated with vulgar verbal abuse. After refusing to stare at wall, the police became particular violent. They picked her up by her handcuffed arms and threw onto the pavement. She was brought to Ramle Prison and released without seeing a judge.
X-ray image of the large rubber bullet lodged into Ellen Stark's arm. 19 March 2010, An Nabi Saleh
Friday’s demonstration in An Nabi Saleh saw an increase in violence and collective punishment from the Israeli military, as twenty-five demonstrators were injured, windows of cars and homes were intentionally shattered, and three were arrested. ISM volunteer Ellen Stark was shot at point blank range (4 meters) with a rubber bullet as she stood with medics, Popular Committee members and other internationals. ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf was arrested while negotiating with the IOF to allow Ellen through the military line to get to the hospital. According to Ellen, “we were standing on Palestinian land, in support of the village who’s land has been confiscated but we weren’t even demonstrating yet. We were standing with medics who were also shot with tear gas.”
Ellen’s had to undergo surgery to remove the bullet, which was lodged between her ulna and radius of her right arm. Her wrist is broken as a result of the bullet impact. As of 12:00 pm Saturday, Palestine time, Huwaida has yet to be located in the Israeli prison system.
Over an hour before the demonstration began, soldiers took position on a hilltop near the house of an An Nabi Saleh Popular Committee member signaling to activists that the peaceful march would likely be cut short yet again by soldiers using crowd dispersal tactics such as tear gas and sound grenades. The demonstration was able to take it’s usual course, as IOF soldiers blocked the path of the activists, and began to surround them from multiple sides. Only ten minutes into the demonstration, the army began firing tear gas and rubber bullets at a small group of international, Israeli, and Palestinian activists only four meters away, injuring International Solidarity Movement volunteer, Ellen Stark. Omar Saleh Tamimi, Amjad Abed Alkhafeez Tamimi and International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf were arrested as they asked Israeli military personnel to stop firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at Stark as she was helped to safety.
Israeli forces then entered the center of the village where they continued firing tear gas, sound grenades, and rubber bullets for several hours. Over twenty five were injured, including an 84-year old woman who suffered from tear gas inhalation after tear gas canisters were fired into her house, and three others who were shot with rubber bullets, including an Israeli activist; four remain hospitalized.
Later in the demonstration, soldiers began shooting rubber bullets through the windows of residents’ houses, shops, and cars, shattering their homes and livelihoods, as they used collective punishment to attempt to suppress these weekly demonstrations.
These incidents comes as the Israeli government intensifies repression of the unarmed, popular resistance to the occupation of the West Bank, illegal land confiscation by settlements such as Halamish, and construction of the illegal apartheid wall. Two weeks ago in An Nabi Saleh, 14-year-old Ehab Fadel Beir Ghouthi’s skull was fractured as a rubber bullet shot by the Israeli military, leaving him in a coma for several days. He remains in a hospital in Ramallah where he is recovering; his condition is stable and improving.
Today and every Friday since January, around 100 un-armed demonstrators leave the village center in an attempt to reach a spring which boarders land confiscated by Jewish settlers. The District Coordination Office has confirmed the spring is on Palestinian land but nearly a kilometer before reaching the spring, the demonstration is routinely met with dozens of soldiers armed with M16 assault rifles, tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades.
The Halamish Settlement has confiscated nearly half of An Nabi Saleh’s orchard and farmland since it was founded in 1977. According to village residents the settlement confiscates more land each year without consent or compensation of the landowners.
Last month I led a group of twenty-one human rights workers on a boat from Cyprus to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. We carried toys, medicine, olive tree saplings, toolkits, a fifty-kilo bag of cement and school supplies on our small converted ferry boat.
At 2 AM on June 30, almost eighteen hours into the 230-mile journey, a colleague awakened me. The Israeli Navy was calling our boat on the VHF radio. “You are navigating towards a blockaded area. You are hereby ordered to change your course. If you do not, we will be forced to use all necessary force to stop you.”
Nervous after a previous boat of ours was dangerously rammed at sea in December by the Israeli military, I replied, “Israeli Navy, this is Arion (the registered name of our ship). We are twenty-one unarmed civilians carrying aid for the Palestinian people of Gaza. Any blockade on Gaza is unlawful as you are the occupying force in the territory and are therefore responsible for the well-being of the civilian population there. As our boat, its cargo, and the twenty-one civilians on board do not constitute any kind of threat to Israel or its armed forces, you are obliged to allow us entry. We are proceeding to Gaza. Do not use force against us.”
Shortly thereafter our navigational systems were disabled for nearly four hours as the warnings continued. In their “final” warning to us, the Israeli Navy threatened to open fire. “Israeli Navy, we are unarmed civilians; do not use force against us. Do not shoot.” We did not stop.
We were boarded by force. Before we were separated, I saw Navy forces grabbing my husband, Adam, a filmmaker who has made documentaries from Palestine to Darfur, about the neck. Later, I learned that outside of my view, these government-sanctioned pirates pummeled Adam in order to wrest his videocamera from his grasp.
Though I know it could not have been easy for him, Adam did not fight back. He was a multi-sport athlete in high school, threw out Manny Ramirez stealing second and is one of those rare individuals who bring a football player’s intensity to peace work. But like the rest of us, Adam insists on using nonviolent means to resist Israel’s military occupation. And though in his widely hailed Cairo speech President Obama made an implicit call for nonviolence as the means to challenge the Israeli occupation, the Obama administration made no public statement on our behalf — nor did it do so three months ago, when my dear friend Bassem Abu Rahme was killed while nonviolently protesting Israeli expansionism in the West Bank that threatens to destroy his village of Bil’in.
Perhaps we were politically inept. Had we sailed toward Iran to offer assistance to civilian protesters there, we would have been a cause celebre if the Iranian government had arrested us. Iran, however, for all its troubles, is not now under foreign occupation as Palestine is. Yet as I watched the demonstrations in Iran, I could not miss the similarities to Palestine’s nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation. I cannot count the times I have marched peacefully, waving a flag and demanding freedom for my people — with only my voice and my presence as my weapons. And sadly, the number of friends I have lost — killed by Israeli forces as, like Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, they nonviolently demonstrated for freedom — is becoming too great a pain in my heart.
My colleagues and I invested time and energy in this difficult journey and put our lives at risk because for too long the international community has been complicit in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. For too long, diplomats and world leaders have paid lip service to Palestinian human rights. For too long, the Palestinian people have been told to wait — wait in the checkpoint line, wait on the peace process, wait to have your rights recognized, wait for freedom.
Students I met on a recent successful voyage to Gaza certainly did not want to wait to be slowly suffocated and drained of their dreams. So desperate were they to escape their confinement in Gaza to obtain higher education abroad that they asked us to drop them in international waters and they would swim the rest of the way to Cyprus. This was youthful madness, but indicative of how trapped people in Gaza are today.
I was born in the blanket of freedom of the United States. My parents immigrated here, knowing that I could not be free in my homeland. But today I use my freedom to struggle as a Palestinian for my friends and relatives who endure the yokes of occupation, oppression, discrimination, exile, internment and apartheid.
Most Palestinians in the occupied territories have not lived a day free of Israel’s occupation, and Palestinian citizens of Israel continue to live as a discriminated-against minority. Just the other day, Israel’s housing minister, Ariel Atias, declared, “We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Palestinians] to live together [in Israel].
This is the Israel the United States funds with billions each year. Under the leadership of President Obama–or any American president, for that matter–support for this sort of raw bigotry makes no sense and is antithetical to our most cherished principles. Yet when Israeli leaders utter such contemptible language it is ignored. When Israeli soldiers fire lethal weapons at unarmed, peaceful protesters it is too often ignored. When Israeli naval boats become pirate ships — boarding a vessel that poses them no threat, arresting and beating American citizens–it is ignored.
It is ignored and Israel continues to enjoy the patronage of the United States and to present itself as a moral beacon for the world. But my generation finds racist language like that of Atias’–and the actions that result from such outdated thinking–abhorrent.
We find it unacceptable that Palestinians continue to be asked to wait, to improve our self-government and to be patient as we build ourselves toward the same rights that people elsewhere take for granted. With the fourth Palestinian generation born into refugee camps, with a new generation in Gaza being raised poorer and more desperate than the last, with my land being carved and sliced and walled for the exclusive benefit of one ethno-religious group, I say we cannot wait.
The question facing the world now must no longer be about where to squeeze a Palestinian state. The only relevant question is how to advance the immediate freedom of ten million Palestinians. There can be no more waiting, no more prevaricating, no more negotiations on that simple, beautiful human concept–freedom.
We will be free. President Obama can expedite the process by putting pressure on Israel, or he can sideline himself and the process for the next eight years. Sooner or later, however, Israel’s subjugation of us will be overturned. The current situation is untenable. Whether we live in two states or one state with equal rights for all–as in South Africa and, indeed, the United States–we will achieve our freedom. What South Africa was to students in the 1980s, Palestine is fast becoming to younger generations increasingly repulsed by the entrenchment of Israel’s dual system of law, domination of another people and ongoing confinement of 1.5 million Palestinians to a tiny parcel of land in Gaza.
So, yes, this was only one tiny humanitarian boat to Gaza. But Israel’s heavy-handed action shows how much is at stake and how shaky Israel’s grip over another people becomes when the world’s citizens speak out and take action–even as governments fall short.
The Spirit of Humanity leaves port in Larnaca for Gaza
P. Selvarani speaks to Free Gaza Movement chairperson Huwaida Arraf to discover a woman determined to see an end to violence. She could have lived a blissful life as a successful lawyer, raising a nice, happy family in the Land of the Free. But social activist Huwaida Arraf, a first generation Palestinian-American, instead found her calling helping free her people.
For the past 10 years, Huwaida has often found herself staring down the nozzle of an Israeli army Uzi submachine gun, roughed up, handcuffed and thrown into jail — all in her quest to free Israeli-occupied Gaza and provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
A lesser mortal would have caved in under such pressure and atrocity but then Huwaida is no ordinary woman.
“It’s not going to stop me. I’m lucky to be alive and not injured like others. Some of my friends have been killed. It’s bad when that happens but what Palestinians are going through on a daily basis is more horrifying,” said the Free Gaza Movement (FGM) chairperson and founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) whose mission is to resist Israeli occupation of Palestine using non-violent tactics.
Just a week before this interview was conducted in Kuala Lumpur, Huwaida and her team of FGM volunteers found themselves once again under siege by Israeli forces.
“On June 29, we departed Cyprus in the ‘Spirit of Humanity’ ferry to provide aid such as medicines, toys and books to the Palestinians in Gaza. But the next day, we found ourselves surrounded by Israeli warships. They threatened to use force against us if we would not leave.
“I told them we were unarmed civilians who were just bringing humanitarian aid. But they kept following us and when we were about 18 knots from the Port of Gaza, their commandos jumped on board our ferry and forcefully took control of our vessel. They took away our cameras and phones and when my husband (documentary producer Adam Shapiro) tried to prevent them, they beat him up.”
Huwaida’s efforts to placate the commandos and assure them that they were on a humanitarian cause ended with her being handcuffed by the soldiers.
“They isolated me in the kitchenette of the ferry. I didn’t know what happened to the rest of the volunteers, including my husband. As the ferry shook violently while they steered it to an Israeli port, crockery and cutlery were falling all over me. Fortunately, I was not injured.”
Huwaida and another volunteer, who are both Israeli citizens, were detained in a huge warehouse near the port with six soldiers watching over them. They were released 16 hours later without being told why they were arrested.
The 19 others, including Adam, spent the next six days in an Israeli prison and were eventually deported. They included Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire and former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
It’s this type of unnecessary aggression against innocent folk that makes Huwaida, a Christian, even more determined to fight the Palestinian cause.
Understandably, although she is only 33, Huwaida wears a weary look on her face as she has witnessed this kind of brutality all too often. But doesn’t it feel like she’s flogging a dead horse?
“I can’t accept the violence of the Occupation. When you see (the brutality and oppression) every day and you get used to it, THAT would be a tragedy. I try not to be desensitized to what is happening because we cannot give up.
“Sometimes you feel a sense of guilt, especially when you have access to luxuries denied to other people. I used to feel very guilty about sleeping (she manages on about five hours of sleep a day). Now, I don’t feel as guilty as before because I have to take care of myself but sometimes I still do, especially when I find myself in a place like this,” she said, gesturing at the Club Lounge of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, where the interview took place.
(Barely hours after she landed at the KLIA, Huwaida was whisked to Putrajaya for a press conference held by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad on the plight of the Palestinians.)
Huwaida said the sight of Palestinians waiting in long queues for hours as they go through the numerous Israeli checkpoints to get to the West Bank is degrading.
“The soldiers decide everything. You see old folk, mothers and children going to school sometimes waiting the whole day just to get through.”
She recalled seeing a soldier yelling at a Palestinian man from Jerusalem who needed to get to Nablus to pay his last respects to his father who had died that morning before they buried him.
“The soldier refused to let him through but when the man kept on insisting, the soldier raised his gun. I intervened and pleaded for the soldier to let the man through on humanitarian grounds. Instead, they handcuffed and took him away. I still protested and they asked me to leave. When I refused, they arrested me.”
Huwaida’s parents — her father is an Israeli-Arab and her mother a Palestinian who both migrated to the United States as they wanted to bring up their children away from the violence in Palestine — are always pleading with her not to waste her life like this.
“I have sometimes thought about what we’re doing. But what’s happening in Palestine is so illegal and immoral. There have been times when I thought about returning to the US to practice law, become successful and build an influence, but I never thought about it for too long although I know I need to strike a balance in my life now.”
She said although she and Adam, whom she met at the Seeds of Peace youth organisation, have been married for seven years, they’ve hardly thought of starting a family because of the work they do and the limited time they spend with each other.
“I do want to have children but with so much to do now, I have not thought of starting a family. I guess I have to find a better balance in my life because I am not getting any younger!”
Huwaida confessed that when she first met Adam, they didn’t initially hit it off.
“For the first year we didn’t really talk to each other very much but I think there was a hidden attraction between us. And within a few weeks after our first kiss, he proposed! Two months after we were married, my husband was arrested in Israel and deported and not allowed to return for 10 years.”
It was a difficult period for Huwaida as she was unsure whether to stay on or join her husband in the US. She decided to stay on in Palestine and only went to the US in 2004 to read law.
“Our struggle is a long one and we need to gather as much support as we can from all over the world. Some governments support us but many are unwilling to stand up against Israel’s policies. People in power know what’s going on but they are consciously choosing to ignore it.
“But I know I can’t always be there. I tell myself not to allow this war pre-occupy me too much in order to focus on the bigger change.
“The people whom I have had the honor of meeting and working with, especially our volunteers — who come from all over the world and who’ve not given up in the face of all this persecution — offset the disappointments we face.
But what really keeps Huwaida going is the spirit and resilience of the Palestinians.
“I was in a village called Jayyous where we were planning a demonstration against the Israelis for confiscating the farms of the people to build a wall. The night before I was staying with a friend and his family and I was visibly distressed by what I saw.
“But here was my friend, who had just lost his land, trying to comfort me and make me laugh. I was bewildered! I asked him how he could laugh in the face of all this adversity.
“And he told me that although his land had been confiscated by the Israelis, what was important was that they didn’t take away his ability to laugh and live away from them.”
On another occasion when the [ISM] was trying to prevent the Israeli soldiers from conducting house-to-house raids in Nablus, Huwaida received a call from someone. “He said he could see our volunteers trying to stop the soldiers and although he felt the volunteers could not really do much, the fact that we were trying to do something was comfort enough for him. I did not know who this man was or how he got my number!
“It’s this kind of positive spirit that motivates me and tells me that our efforts are not wasted. At the very least, we are telling the Palestinians that “we see you, we hear you and we are doing what we can to help you”.
Her most challenging moment was when she had to face the parents of a 23-year-old American volunteer who was killed when an Israeli bulldozer ran over her as she was trying to prevent the demolition of a house.
“I was in the US when this happened. Having to face her parents was the most difficult thing I had to do.”
Despite the odds, Huwaida is optimistic that the conflict will end soon.
“We are going to continue to stop this blockade in Gaza. And I believe that if people unite and work together we can be a force to reckon with. Even one person can make a difference.”
An Israeli citizen who was among 21 peace activists apprehended by the IDF en route to the Gaza Strip says she was held under conditions resembling a “horror movie.”
Houida Araf, who was released on Wednesday, told Ynet that she and a fellow Israeli peace activist were separated from the group and taken to the Ashdod Port.
“They put us in a warehouse, where we slept on a cockroach-infested cement floor, as armed soldiers were monitoring us,” she said. “They didn’t say a word to us. They confiscated all our personal belongings and phones, and they didn’t let us contact anyone. A day later they left us at the Ashdod central bus station without any money or belongings.”
“What they did to us is unforgivable, but we’re not the story here,” Araf said. “The fact they threatened us with violence because we wanted to transfer medical supplies and drawing equipment for children is simply absurd.”
‘We’ll be back’
Meanwhile, 19 foreign peace activists detained on board the Gaza-bound ship are still behind held by the Immigration Authority at Ben Gurion Airport. The activists, whose vessel was seized, will soon be expelled from Israel, but they say they are determined to come back.
One of the initiative’s organizers, Ramzi Kysia, told Ynet: “We’ll be back again and again…the Israeli regime should be careful, because we’re coming. We won’t stop until this blockade is broken forever and Gaza residents have access to the rest of the world.”
Kysia added that the group’s attorney will demand that Israel hand over the vessel it seized.
Israel is planning to deport within the next few days the 21 peace activists who arrived on a boat from Cyprus with the intention of entering the Gaza Strip. An Israeli Navy unit boarded their boat and escorted it to Ashdod port. Immigration police will transport the detained activists to Ben Gurion Airport, and from there they will be deported out of the country.
Among the peace activists are two Israeli-American citizens, and 19 others, including five from Ireland, three from Britain, five from Bahrain, three Americans, and Danish, Jordan, and Yemenite citizens.
Eight immigration police arrived at Ashdod police and performed a search of the activists’ belongings. The detainees will then be transferred to the Immigration Administration in Holon. The police will take their fingerprints, and then send them to Ben Gurion Airport, where each one will face a hearing before the Interior Ministry before being deported.
Hana Araf, of Meilia village in the Galilee, uncle of Houida Araf, one of the Israeli-American citizens on the Gaza-bound boat said, “We haven’t managed to get a hold of her, and we haven’t received any information. We are worried. They can’t deport her, and we will fight for this to the very end.
“She has an Israeli passport. She is a citizen of the state, and Israel has no right to detain her. What for, exactly? For trying to help people who have no food? In the past there were a few regimes that did this, the apartheid in South Africa, for instance. Is this the regime Israel wants to be associated with?”
According to him, “She didn’t do anything against the law. She wants to lawfully help people in trouble, and they are part of her people – if the people here in Israel want it or not. I don’t know how in 60 years, people haven’t internalized the fact that the Arabs living here are Palestinians. We are the same nation. The fact that there was separation and occupation doesn’t make us any less brothers.”
In Larnaca, Cyprus, where the boat departed from, the Gerta Berlin, founder of Movement for the Freedom of Gaza, is being inundated with phone calls showing their support following the detainment of the peace activists.
“They simply kidnapped the passengers. I call the Israeli occupation forces to release our people immediately. It’s funny – what are they going to do? Deport us? The last place we wanted to reach was Israel,” she said.
Berlin still has not thrown in the towel. “It isn’t over till the fat lady sings. They took our boat, so we’ll get a freighter. Israel has no right to keep 1.5 million residents under siege, to occupy Gaza, and to turn it into one big refugee camp.
“The Israeli government does not understand that time is on our side. In the meantime, the administration is losing public support. It would be much smarter on their part if they would simply turn the other cheek and let us through. The detainment of the boat only works in our favor in the long run,” she explained.
