12th November 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | al-Khalil, Occupied Palestine
The Feast of Sarah did not pass unnoticed for the Palestinian residents of al-Khalil (Hebron). Jewish worshippers had been arriving from Israel in large numbers for days prior, together with a consequent increase of military presence. Yesterday morning, at 9:00 AM, soldiers started to isolate the road in H1 – the area of the city that is supposed to be Palestinian controlled – from the Shuhada Street checkpoint (Checkpoint 56) up towards the bus station in order to let the feast visitors pass from the H2 area to a prayer site. Two Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) and two Jeeps surrounded by numerous soldiers, border police, and riot police blocked the intersection at the base of Bab Al-Zawiya, and snipers were placed on the roofs of the main buildings.
An Israeli soldier aims her rifle at the chest of an international observer as a tactical unit gathers in Bab al-Zawiya.
Around 1:00 PM, the worshippers started to walk down the road, many of them stopping to yell insults to the Palestinians watching the scene from behind the blockade.
Jewish worshippers, both from Israel and from the illegal settlements in al-Khalil, gather to taunt Palestinians in Bab al-Zawiya.
After the settlers went back into H2, the soldiers and police stayed in the area, and gathered at the cement roadblocks in front of the checkpoint. They continued down towards the market, which led to some stone throwing from protesters up the street. Soldiers replied by throwing sound bombs into crowds of civilians and journalists.
The soldiers ultimately retreated into the checkpoint, only because they had to carry a 25-year-old Palestinian man that they had brutally beaten and placed under arrest. The man was carried to Checkpoint 56, where he was held for almost three hours while the Red Crescent ambulance staff was disallowed from giving him medical treatment.
A protester is finally allowed access to medical treatment from the Red Crescent after being brutally beaten and kept for three hours in Checkpoint 56.
Settler tours into H1 from H2 occur every Saturday under the protection of Israeli forces, fanning Israeli support for migration to and the expansion of the illegal settlements in al-Khalil, both of which necessarily lead to the expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their home. However, during Jewish holidays, the number of Israelis increases dramatically, often forcing Palestinian civil society to come to a grinding halt without warning.
11th November 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Um al-Khair, Occupied Palestine
Last month in northern Palestine brought stories of Israeli settlers from the illegal Yitzhar settlement that, however horrifying, all suffered an important shortcoming: the scope of the stories lent to individual scapegoats, and in doing so provided a vivid, but ultimately penny-deep look at the Palestinian condition. Today’s news is flooded with such dramatic examples.
This past month, I lived in and began to learn the story of Um al-Khair, a Palestinian Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills. Again the case presented a challenge of conveyance – perhaps even more so. While it’s certainly every bit as troubled as the villages in the shadow of the Yitzhar settlement, Um al-Khair’s story is much less made for TV than the photogenic, headline-grabbing brutality of physical violence.
There’s no getting around it: it’s a small village, and reversing the injustices there wouldn’t move the needle on injustice in Palestine a whole lot.
However, it does offer itself as a worthy placeholder – an exemplary microcosm for the nation of Palestine, and what happened, is happening, and will happen to it if nothing is done.
Tariq (left) and Eid Hathaleen, with Tariq’s nephew Muhammad in his arms. Tariq’s house, which he shares with his mother, has been demolished 3 times already (’08, ’12, and ’14). Eid recently had both of his cars, one less than a week old, confiscated by the Israeli army. A tattered – but still standing – Palestinian flag waves behind them.
This isn’t to say that tragic physical violence doesn’t occur there. One of the first stories new visitors hear is that of a resident who, as his brother Tariq says, “lost his life without losing his life.” About 17 years ago the young man, Muhammad, was herding his goats and – so claimed a settler – ventured onto a far corner of settlement property. An Israeli soldier chased him down (after the fact and within his own village), and beat him most of the way to death for it. Today, the man who would’ve been one of the leading breadwinners for the village walks the roads mentally handicapped, unable to contribute to the survival of the community. As the soldier was leaving the village that day, he turned and pointed at Muhammad in the dirt – the young man already having left his body for the last time – and shouted “Look at your brother, let him be an example! I’ll make every single person in this village handicapped!”
As it turns out, the soldier didn’t have to. Seventeen years later, the pen would prove mightier than the sword, and the true kneecapping of Um al-Khair would come not in the form of an excessively forceful soldier, the optics of which might provoke international outrage, but rather bureaucratic, pseudo-legal land-grab policies.
To that end, in the 17 years since the martyrdom of Muhammad, by far the most high ranking targets of the Israeli army in Um al-Khair have been peaceful, inanimate objects – their traditional Bedouin oven, among the kind of objects Pierre Nora coined “les lieux de mémoire” in 1989, as well as a proposed community garden – the first of which has been built or rebuilt and subsequently destroyed 3 times over, and the other disallowed before construction could even begin (though there’s an international campaign to support it anyway).
As Tariq, a budding community leader, said, “The soldiers that try to break us aren’t enemies of terrorism. They don’t like us, but even they know we are not terrorists. They are enemies of life. They are enemies of our presence here. Look at the oven, the garden.”
The future of Um al-Khair. Their demands are simple: to live in peace, which means an end to the ongoing demolition of their homes, as well as an end to settler violence against them during the night.
Clearly the real threat isn’t any one person, but anything palpable for Palestinians to hold on to,and with it the motivation to continue resisting.Homes, homelands, even ovens and community gardens are brought to ashes – as Israel admits with shameless candor – to make room for people of a different ethnicity.
Taken together, what happened to Muhammad the individual and what’s happening to Um al-Khair’s lifeblood structures span the spectrum of violence, from physical to structural. Though they’re specific to Um al-Khair, they speak volumes about the post-1948 Palestinian story.
The notion that a bread oven or community garden could be threatening should be preposterously silly and, at the same time, make all the sense in the world when the very acknowledgement of a Palestinian people is threatening to an ideology whose implementation required their ethnic cleansing. After all, one of the most repeated go-to’s for stewards of Zionism – that Palestine was “a land without a people” – reveals itself as the only option short of confronting the question of what happened to those people, and who was responsible.
The result was that incorrect and racist revision: pre-1948 Palestine – a rich bastion of culture, cuisine, art, music, academia – was really a land of zero cities. After all, it didn’t even have a people.
Suleiman Hathaleen, the elder in Um al-Khair, himself 6 years older than Israel. Born in Arad, Palestine (now Arad, Israel), he was made a refugee in 1948, and has lived in Um al-Khair since.
Of course, any rational person knows that Palestinians do exist, and that they didn’t come to Palestine simply to meet the arriving Jewish immigrants with weapons. Sentient, living evidence for this – for the bustling Palestinian society and what happened to it – exists in refugee camps in- and outside of Palestine to this day.
Since 2007, roughly 20 families from Um al-Khair have joined them, after the State of Israel – not a rogue extremist, not an individual settler, but the real-life manifestation of Zionism – has come to their village to make them homeless. This, unfortunately, is what defines the struggle at large for many indigenous Palestinians –to stay and survive at all under the threat of expulsion and extermination. There’s been virtually no evidence even of an attempt to maintain a second-class, exploitable Palestinian population, making this – what’s occurring in the West Bank and Gaza as opposed to the State of Israel – not apartheid, but unvarnished ethnic cleansing.
The ruins of a family’s demolished home in Um al-Khair.
And so, ceding for a moment the possibility that Um al-Khair’s situation is controversial, the fact remains that the international community has yet to be told what justifies it. What justifies the fact that the people with the deed to the land, who’ve lived completely without sin and within the law, are forced to stand there crying out for help, physically weak from humankind’s deepest sadness – the gutting, emptying kind that you feel in your body – as a Caterpillar D9 military bulldozer thunders to life and starts towards their home.
6th November 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine
Yesterday in al Khalil (Hebron) the Palestinian group Youth Against Settlements held an event to mark the 100th years anniversary of The Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration is viewed as a foundational document of the Israeli states ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Despite promises to the Palestinian population the British government, in an act of betrayal, made a declaration that was viewed by the zionist as a promise of Palestine becoming a homeland for the Jewish people.
“The event was colourful and different,“ an ISM’er says.
A large group of Palestinians and internationals gathered at the “Beeping Gate” which is one of the closuers in al Khalil (Hebron). The “Beeping Gate” is at the bottom of “apartheid road” where a fence divides a Palestinian pathway from the road Israelis walk on. An extension to the apartheid fence finishes at a new gate which fences in part of the Salaymeh neighbourhood. The gate is locked at night forcing Palestinians to walk a longer route on foot to their houses. When the people of the neighbourhood use the gate it sets off an ear-piercing beep adding a tormenting repetitive noise to the harsh realities of discrimination and occupation the neighbourhood suffers.
“The event was colourful and different,“ an ISM’er that attended the event says. “Kids and clowns gathered to mark the Palestinian rejection of the colonial Balfour Declaration which supports the Zionist project.“
Border Police from the Israeli military push Internationals away while a settler from a nearby settlement films.
Even tough the event was light-hearted a group of Boarder Police Officers, Civil Police and Soldiers from the Israeli army showed up and watched the Palestinians and internationals. The children chanted, speeches were made and clowns interacted with the children with balloons, dances and face painting.
A settler from a nearby illegal settlement films the Palestinians at their event through the gate.
An aggressive Zionist settler from a nearby settlement, who had previously intimidated ISM activists during the day showed up at the event. His attempted intimidation failed to disrupt the colourful and joyful celebration of the Palestinian resistance of the occupation. After a while he was led away from the celebration by Israeli Border police. He continued to film from outside attempting to provoke the Palestinians behind the fence.
“I think the colourful event expressed the Palestinian’s Sumud (Arabic for stedfastness) against the occupation and discrimination they face on a daily basis,“ another ISM’er said.
8th September 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, Huwwara-team | Kafr Qaddum, occupied Palestine
During the demonstration in Kfar Qaddum today, Friday the 8th of September, a 20-year old Palestinian protester was shot with a rubber coated steel bullet in his chest, and treated at the scene, while camera drones were buzzing above the heads of the participants. The ISM-ers present also noticed how the Israeli military forces were photographing and filming the protesters. This material is usually used in order to arrest participants, often underage and denied access to lawyers.
Israeli military forces taking photos and filming the protesters.
The Israeli army is blocking the road leading from the village of Kfar Qaddum to the city of Nablus since 2003. The closure of the road has doubled the commute to Nablus for the villagers, increasing both travel time and cost. Since 2011 the villagers have protested weekly against this road closure.
The settlement of Quedummim, bulit in 1975, has expanded over the last years, and during just the past weeks new illegal mobile homes have been placed in the outskirts of the settlement annexing more Palestinian land. The caravans are placed strategically in order to connect the two parts of Quedummim, which would cause the Kfar Qaddum villagers losing several dunams (hectar) of land nourishing hundreds of olive trees.
The illegal caravans placed strategically between the illegal Israeli settlement of Quedummim and the land with olive trees belonging to the village of Kfar Qaddum.
The expansion of settlements, blocking of roads and land thefts are witnessed daily in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
5th September 2017 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Umm al-Kheir, south Hebron, occupied Palestine
Spent the last two days at Umm Al Khair, a Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills enjoying the wonderful hospitality, generosity, and loving kindness. This was not my first trip there. And as much as I hate to say it, as with most things in Palestine, things are so much worse than my last visit. The illegal colonial settlement of Carmel belonging to the entity called israel surrounds the village on almost every side. Some of the tents and housing units are less than 20 feet from the “security” fence. Housing units in the illegal settlement have increased and more are being built with plans to take more of the land owned by the village to continue expansion.
Some of the newest settler homes in Carmel
The villagers sit day after day waiting for the illegal occupation soldiers to come with their bulldozers to demolish more of their housing. People speak openly about their discouragement for their future but still stand steadfast that they will not be moved or defeated. Our tent was one of those closest to the Fence and for two nights we sat up most of the night while zionists threw stones and rocks over the fence at the tent at anything that appeared to move. The village leader says the violence is increasing all of the time and fears that one of these night something much worse than rocks will be thrown. Fortunately no one was hurt (physically) the past two nights but there was little to no sleep for us or any of the men of the village who sat up keeping and open eye and ear to try to spot the thugs doing this. The commotion would wake up many of the villagers and you could hear the crying of many frightened small children throughout the night.
The “security” fence less than 20 feet from the tent
This is an every night occurrence and everyone is exhausted, all of the time, and can only catch a few hours of sleep after sunrise. Phone calls to the police of the entity called israel Police as well as the Palestinian Authority Police are a waste of time. No one will respond to the calls for help to make the settler violence stop. Many internationals, such as ourselves go for a few nights (when we have the people to do so) to help with a protective presence but it doesn’t stop the ever increasing settler violence. The Bedouins are very peaceful people and are committed to nonviolence but they are called the terrorists by the zionists, and most of the zionist supporting governments of the world (such as the United States). More International presence is needed and more of the world needs to know the truth.
