Your Help is Making a Difference in Palestine

Sharon Moves to “Settle” the Jerusalem Question

International Solidarity Gives Us Hope

If it’s Friday, it Must be a Demo in Bil’in

Qawawis: Settlers Threaten an Age-old Way of Life

We Await You in Palestine

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Your Help is Making a Difference in Palestine

By Paul Larudee

As I began to write this, four ISM volunteers were arrested in the Tel Rumeida district of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. Their crime? To accompany Palestinians to school, shopping, work, or friends’ homes.

ISM volunteers document the harassment of Palestinians, their delays at checkpoints and the denial of access to their own property. They film Israeli settlers who shout insults, throw bottles and other objects, and even beat Palestinians while soldiers stand idly by. The good news is that the presence of volunteers with cameras is often enough to reduce these crimes. The bad news is that filming is itself often considered a crime.

Unfortunately, ISM volunteers are fewer than ever, even though more Palestinian communities request them to support non-violent actions and provide protection against military and settler violence. Equally important, volunteers help to inform their home communities about the non-violent movement in Palestine, which is almost never mentioned in the mainstream media.

We need your donations to make our work possible. Your donations support volunteers with partial airfares, training, equipment, salaries for Palestinian coordinators and legal expenses. For each of the last two years, the Northern California ISM chapter has pledged $10,000 to ISM in Palestine for operating expenses and $5000 for the legal fund. We have also pledged another $10,000 for volunteers traveling to Palestine. A mere $500 can be the difference between going or not going, or staying an extra month. We are proud to have subsidized fourteen volunteers this year alone.

The generous contributions that we received during the recent speaking tour of Ayed Morrar and Jonathan Pollak were very timely, but we are still $5,000 short of our year-end commitment to ISM-Palestine. The ISM media office has also asked us to send a new laptop, video camera and 500 gigabyte hard drive within the next month. Please use the donation envelope in this issue to help us make our goal and give us a healthy start in 2006.

The four volunteers were released, thanks to our lawyer, Gaby Lasky, and our supporters around the world who answered her request to call the Israeli police and Interior Ministry. Unfortunately, Gaby still has thousands of dollars in unpaid services on our behalf.

Some donations lessen the suffering. We try to stop the cause. Please support nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Paul Larudee is a piano technician who lived and worked in Arab countries for fourteen years as a teacher and government advisor. He has been an ISM volunteer in Palestine four times since 2002.


Sharon Moves to “Settle” the Jerusalem Question

By Henry Norr

To anyone passing through East Jerusalem or nearby sections of the West Bank in recent months, it’s been painfully obvious that big changes are under way—changes that could, if not
soon reversed, all but extinguish the prospects for peace in the region.

It’s not just the Wall, growing from day to day in all its concrete ugliness, as it snakes through the Palestinian towns and villages north, east, and south of the city. It’s also the elaborate international-border-style “terminals” Israel is building to replace the once-ramshackle facilities at the major checkpoints at Qalandia, on the road north to Ramallah, and on the Hebron Road leading south to Bethlehem. And the construction cranes you see everywhere in the hills to the east of the city, as settlements like Ma’ale Adumim and Har Homa expand and giant new developments like Nof Zion take shape. All in all, as the head of the Israeli organization Settlement Watch put it recently, the Israelis are “building like maniacs” around Jerusalem.

In one sense, this is nothing new—Israel has been building on Palestinian lands around Jerusalem ever since its soldiers seized the area 38 years ago. Regardless of who’s in power—Labor or Likud in Israel, Republican or Democrat in Washington— and no matter what’s happening in the so-called “peace process,” the Zionists have been busy establishing what they call “facts on the ground.”

But if you put all the pieces together, you begin to sense what’s different: Ariel Sharon evidently thinks he has a unique opportunity, thanks to the unstinting support of the U.S.A. and the illusions he created in some circles by pulling his settlers out of Gaza, to impose a unilateral and irreversible solution—a final solution, you might say—to the question of Jerusalem, one of the most contentious issues between his country and the Palestinians.

Shortly after occupying the Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel redrew Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries: to the 38 square kilometers of the city Israel had controlled since 1948 were added not only Arab East Jerusalem (6.4 square kilometers) but also 64 square kilometers belonging to villages north, east, and south of the city. Defying international law, Israel then annexed this entire area; the U.N. Security Council (including the U.S.) declared this annexation “invalid,” and to this day few nations recognize it.

Those borders weren’t big enough for Sharon, though. In defining the route of the Wall, he has created an even larger entity the Israelis call the “Jerusalem envelope,” which combines the post-1967 municipality with the large settlement blocks of Giv’at Ze’evto the north, Gush Etzion to the south (west of Beth-
lehem), and Ma’ale Adumim to the east.

The eastern extension is especially notable. Ma’ale Adumim itself, a settlement-city that looks like it belongs in the San Fernando Valley, is the largest Jewish colony in the West Bank, with a fast-rising population already totaling more than 30,000. But the wall surrounding it will also take in the nearby industrial park of Mishor Adumim and the currently undeveloped zone known as E-1, where Israel plans to build a giant police headquarters and a whole new town. Altogether, it will add another 60 square kilometers of Palestinian land to the “envelope.”

What makes the Ma’ale Adumim salient significant is not just its size, but also its location: extending almost halfway from Jerusalem to the Jordanian border—at the point where the West Bank was already at its narrowest. In effect, it divides the West Bank in two, making it easy for Israel to block movement between Bethlehem and Hebron in the south and Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin to the north. (Actually, there will soon be three parts, because the northern section will soon be cut in half again when Israel finishes extending the Wall around the settlement of Ariel and completes a huge new checkpoint under construction at Zaatara/Tappuah, between Ramallah and Nablus.)

Surprisingly at first glance, the Wall’s route leaves a few small pieces of post-1967 Jerusalem on the Palestinian side. Why? Apparently it’s because Israel’s goal is never just to maximize the amount of Palestinian land it can steal; it’s also to minimize the number of Palestinians left within its boundaries. In a few places, such as the densely populated Shu’afat refugee camp north of the city, the Israeli planners evidently decided they’d rather give up the land than take its residents.

In all, at least 55,000 Palestinians who now hold Jerusalem ID cards will find themselves walled out of the city, while some 196,000 will be left on the Israeli side.

This is a tragedy for both groups. Those who live on the Palestinian side will lose access to Jerusalem’s religious sites, schools, hospitals, jobs, and markets, on which they’ve depended for decades; many will be cut off from friends and relatives. (Israel promises that it will build gates and create a system of permits to alleviate such problems, but Palestinians living near sections of the Wall already built know how hollow such promises prove to be.)

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Jerusalemites left on the Israeli side will be isolated from the rest of the West Bank – not just by the Wall, but by the Jewish settlements growing into a tight ring around them. Their neighborhoods will no doubt face the same treatment they’ve been getting since 1968: grossly inferior municipal services, denial of permits for new construction that’s desperately needed to accommodate population growth, and frequent demolition of housing built without permits (or for any other pretext). And new settlers will keep arriving, even within well established Palestinian communities such as Silwan and even the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. (Many of these urban “in-fill” settlements are financed an American Jewish doctor named Irving Moskowitz, whose millions come largely from a casino he runs in a poor, predominantly Latino section of Los Angeles County.)

Israelis make no secret of the underlying objective of their policy in these areas: sooner or later, they hope, their Palestinian subjects will be so beaten down that they’ll give up and move out. The Israelis even have a name for this process: “slow transfer.”

Although Palestinians, supported by the ISM, progressive Israelis, and other internationals, have mounted non-violent demonstrations against the Wall in Abu Dis and other towns around Jerusalem, the area has not seen the kind of sustained grass-roots campaign that has arisen in rural villages such as Bil’in today and Budrus and Jayyous in years past. That may be starting to change – in recent weeks (Nov. 2005) there have been major protests at the Qalandia checkpoint and in Eizarya (Bethany), one of the towns hardest hit by the Wall.

Given the present balance of power, though, it’s clear that Palestinians won’t be able to stop Sharon’s Jerusalem plan by themselves—the international community must step in. On this front, too, there are a few moderately encouraging signs: In August the International Crisis Group, an ultra-establishment NGO, issued a remarkably forthright analysis of the plan, appropriately entitled “The Jerusalem Powderkeg.” In November United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, usually wishy-washy on Palestine, issued a relatively forthright statement charging that further construction of the Wall and expansion of Israeli settlements—he singled out Ma’ale Adumim—are obstacles to “revitalizing the peace process.”

Shortly thereafter, the British press reported that the European Union’s Council of Ministers was considering a confidential memorandum prepared by the British Foreign Office accusing Israel of attempting a de facto annexation of the whole Jerusalem area. (As a friend put it to me, a confidential memo to make this point is like “a secret document revealing that the earth is round.”)

For the moment, the political forces opposing Israel’s plan for the Jerusalem area are no match for the Sharon and his American allies. But with the Bush administration imploding, Israeli politics in turmoil, and the world at last, perhaps, waking up to the tragedy at hand, there’s still a chance that the plan can be stopped.

If not, I think the conflict is bound to continue for years, perhaps generations, to come, because no one who knows Palestine believes its people will accept a peace that excludes them from their historic and religious capital.

An earlier version of this article appeared at the International Middle East Media Center (www. imemc.org).

Henry Norr, a journalist who was fired by the San Francisco Chronicle for participating in demonstrations against the war in Iraq, has spent three and a half months in Palestine over the last three years.


International Solidarity Gives Us Hope: Interview with Palestinian leader Ayed Morrar and Israeli activist Jonathan Pollack

By Jeff Pekrul

Palestinian Ayed Morrar and Israeli Jonathan Pollack are major figures in the Palestinian-led nonviolent struggle against Israel’s military occupation. Ayed led his village of Budrus in a campaign of 50 non-violent protests in 2003-2004 which resulted in moving the Wall’s path off village land and back to the Green Line. Jonathan, from Tel Aviv, has mobilized hundreds of Israeli activists to participate in nonviolent resistance alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. Both Ayed and Jonathan have been imprisoned by the Israelis for their non-violent resistance organizing.

This fall, ISM sponsored a 12-city U.S. speaking tour of the two activists. The following interview took place after a presentation to two groups of high school students in San Francisco.

Interview with Ayed Morrar
Q : what are the goals of this speaking tour?

A : We are trying to get our message out, especially to people in the U.S., about the real situation in Palestine. We believe that everyone can do something to help the Palestinian people achieve their freedom. The girls and boys at this school could help by asking their families to boycott Israeli-made products when they shop at the store; the boycott is a very big step in our struggle. They could also write articles about Palestinian rights or political prisoners in the school newspaper.

Q : what is the role of non-Palestinian solidarity groups such as ISM, and Israelis in non-violent protest in palestine?

A: Internationals are an important part of our movement. First of all, it gives us hope to see that others are standing with us. It is especially important to have Israelis participate in the protest; we used to see them only as soldiers and settlers, but now we know that there aremany good people among them in a master/slave relationship. Secondly, we need international activists to be live witnesses to what is going on, and to spread the word once they return home. All Palestinians feel very warmly towards people who take time away from their jobs and families, to come and protest in solidarity with us

Q: Is the success in budrus spreading non-violent protest to other villages where the wall is being built?

A : Yes. Actually similar tactics were used in many other villages before Budrus, but people often gave up because the military retaliation was so brutal. The majority of the Palestinian people believe in this approach. We depend a lot on diplomatic efforts, but we also must depend on ourselves to achieve our goals. With support from others, we hope to see a light at the end of this tunnel soon.

Interview With Jonathan Pollack
Q : what the relationship between the Israeli anti-occupation movement and palestinians?
A: The main point is that we Israeli activists are not a force of colonial liberators. We’re there because it’s also our struggle for freedom, and we struggle against occupation as it’s being done in our name. The Palestinians are completely capable of struggling for themselves. We don’t need to teach them anything or show them anything. Everything is completely Palestinian-led; all strategic decisions are made by and must be taken by Palestinians. We have relationships with the Palestinians that are based on our common goal of resistance to the occupation. Working with Palestinians, we are trying to put an end to the occupation because freedom and equality are not something you can grant and take away. These are universal rights and everyone deserves them. Until all are free, no one is free.

Jeff Pekrul is a technology worker who resides in San Francisco and is active in several health-related charities. Jeff was an ISM volunteer in Palestine during the 2004 Olive Harvest Campaign.


If it’s Friday, it Must be a Demo in Bil’in

By Wynd Ahimsa

Nonviolence? In Palestine? As a matter of fact—yes! There are numerous examples of nonviolent resistance throughout the entire history of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

When I first went to Palestine in 2002 as a volunteer with ISM, I anticipated that my activities would be akin to confronting Israeli tanks. Instead, I found myself in a small village helping out with a truly creative form of nonviolent resistance in the form of a children’s summer camp. During a four-month siege of the Western Ramallah region, a man from the village of Deir Ibzi’a organized the camp because he saw children traumatized and depressed. He requested international accompaniment to prevent harassment from the Israeli army. The situation reminded me of a wonderful quote by Edward Said:

“Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether.”

I returned to Palestine the following summer and gained my first-hand experience of nonviolent demonstrations protesting Israel’s construction of the so-called “security barrier”, more appropriately known as the Apartheid Wall or Annexation Wall. I was appalled by the brutality of the Israeli Army towards the peaceful and nonviolent demonstrators. Before a demonstrator could even get close to the Wall, soldiers would open fire with tear gas, rubber bullets and sound bombs.

When I returned this last summer I saw that the brutality of the Israeli Army had intensified. Five Palestinians have been killed in these demonstrations and many others seriously injured. Despite this, Palestinians have continued to organize peaceful and nonviolent demonstrations. And nowhere are the demonstrations more organized, nonviolent and creative than in the village of Bil’in.

Bil’in is approximately 10 km west of Ramallah. Every Friday, and some Wednesdays, the villagers accompanied by Israelis and internationals march to protest the construction of the Wall. They hope that their protests, along with a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court, will pressure Israel to build the Wall closer to the 1948 armistice line (the green line). Already the Wall has made deep cuts into the West Bank, essentially annexing approximately 10 % of it in order to encompass the largest Jewish settlements. More than half of Bil’in’s land (575 acres) has been confiscated to make a loop around the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Sefer.

My first demonstration in Bil’in was on the occasion of the year anniversary of the decision of the International Court of Justice that ruled the Wall illegal and recommended that Israel dismantle it. The members of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil’in had created an incredible and enormous prop depicting the scales of justice. The world (a beach ball with the world map on it) was being weighed on one side and Israel (a ball with the Israeli flag wrapped around it) on the other. The U.S., symbolized by the U.S. flag, was tipping the balance in favor of Israel. The base of the scales was a coffin. On it was written, “RIP, international law and peace.” I was awestruck by the creativity, the craftsmanship and the amount of work that went into this prop. It was a very powerful and creative image that needed nothing else to explain the demonstration that day.

The following week’s demonstration had yet another creative theme. Dozens of masks were donned by the protesters with the face of Condoleezza Rice or George W. Bush. Each mask had an orange ribbon—the symbol of solidarity with the Gaza settlers—around the eyes to symbolize how the Gaza disengagement was blinding the U.S. leaders to the increasingly desperate situation in the West Bank. Again, no words were needed to get the message across, which probably explained the anger and excessive force used by the soldiers that day.

These amazing demonstrations in Bil’in continue, as well as in many other places of the West Bank. They need our support and witness. I feel fortunate that I was able to participate and observe the thought-provoking nonviolence that is taking place there. Perhaps you should consider going to see if for yourself. Be ready to be inspired!

Wynd is Jewish American from a pro-Zionist family. She is an engineer, teacher, mother and activist. She has been to Palestine working with ISM in 2002, 2003 and 2005.


Qawawis: Settlers Threaten an Age-Old Way of Life

By Henry Norr

Life in the tiny Palestinian hamlet of Qawawis seems straight out of the Old Testament, but that doesn’t stop the Jewish settlers in the hilltop outposts that surround the place from doing their best to destroy it. And if something isn’t done soon about the settlers’ latest threat—denying Qawawis’s shepherds access to watering holes their flocks depend on—the villagers might have no choice but to abandon their ancestral homes and lands.

Qawawis, located near the southern tip of the occupied West Bank, south of the city of Hebron, is home to just four extended families and a few hundred sheep and goats. Only one of the families has a house; the others live in caves carved—originally by nature, later by human hand—out of the region’s limestone hills.

Like their neighbors in nearby At-Tuwani and dozens of other villages throughout the south Hebron hills, the residents of Qawawis have faced harassment from the settlers since the 1980s. For a while things in Qawawis got so bad that the villagers had to move out altogether. When they left, settlers promptly moved into their caves, until the Israeli military decided to clear everyone out (for “security reasons”) and brought in bulldozers to seal the caves with rubble.

But in March of this year, after winning an order from Israel’s High Court confirming their right to their land, the villagers came back to Qawawis, cleaned up the mess left by the settlers and the army, and reclaimed their homes. In hopes of deterring settler retaliation, the villagers requested help from progressive Israelis and internationals, and ever since the International Solidarity Movement has provided a steady stream of volunteers to stay in the village and accompany the shepherds to their fields.

Neither the court order nor the international presence has stopped the harassment, though. At first the settlers showed up almost daily, often wearing masks, shouting insults and threats, waving guns and throwing rocks, sometimes attempting to enter the villagers’ caves, and beating locals and internationals alike.

While I was in Qawawis in late July, the settlers came up with a new trick: two of them showed up on horseback, galloping through the village’s olive groves and right past the caves. They didn’t stay long and caused no particular problem, but under the circumstances, their very appearance on village land was an act of intimidation. As I followed them, trying to snap their pictures, I could only imagine what would happen to a Palestinian who had the temerity to approach the settlers’ outposts.

What really has Qawawis’s residents worried at the moment, however, is the threat to its always-precarious water supply. In July, after a suicide bombing in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, the settlers informed the villagers that they are no longer permitted to graze their sheep and goats within 150 meters of a road that leads to one of the outposts.

That order, which appears to have no legal basis, denies Qawawis a significant portion of its land. But the immediate problem is that the prohibited strip includes two watering holes to which the village’s herders taken their sheep and goats since time immemorial. To keep the animals alive in the area’s stifling summer heat, the villagers have had to share the water from their own wells in the village. But the capacity of those wells is limited, and the villagers say it’s insufficient to supply both them and their animals for long.

Time Standing Still
At a glance, you might wonder why the settlers bother with Qawawis. The population usually totals only about 20, though it sometimes rises to 50 or 60, depending on how many offspring and relatives are at home at a given moment, as opposed to staying in the nearby town of Al-Karmel (a 40-minute walk), sleeping in the hills with their flocks, or—as in the case of one young man I met—studying electrical engineering at the university in Hebron. If you drive by on the highway that runs near the place, all you see are the solitary house (three bare rooms, no plumbing or kitchen) and the stone walls that surround the cave entrances and pens for the sheep and goats.

There’s no running water, just a couple of wells. Electricity arrived only this summer, in the form of a generator provided by Ta’ayush, a progressive Israeli organization with both Jewish and Arab members; the generator runs for just an hour and a half or two every evening. Each cave now has a bare light bulb and an outlet, but so far they have had no visible effect on the residents’ lifestyle: there’s no radio, TV, or any other appliance except a video camera left by a visiting international.

Daily life revolves around the sheep and goats, as it has in this area for millennia. At sun-up, men from each family take their flocks—about 30 or 40 animals each—out to graze on the rocky fields that surround the village, or sometimes to the adjoining olive groves. The women, meanwhile, prepare the food and tend to the homes, crops, and kids.

All in all, it’s a simple, peaceful life—or it would be if not for the settlers and the warplanes constantly audible and occasionally visible overhead. (There’s apparently an Israeli air force training base nearby.) The planes, though, are easy to ignore. The settlers are not. The shepherds continually look over their shoulders to see who might be sneaking up on them; the boys study each car that passes on the settler road.

Running Dry
So far, the villagers have complied with the settlers’ demand that they stay away from the road and the watering holes near it—though they seem to value the presence of the international volunteers, they obviously don’t believe that we’re capable of protecting them from the consequences of defying the order.

The villagers have, however, tried to interest international humanitarian organizations in the threat they face. While I was there, a jeep from the International Committee of the Red Cross pulled up to the village, carrying an investigator, a translator, and a three-person film crew. At the time the family that owns the house was away, but one of the other elders had a key. The house was quickly opened, and a half-dozen of the men, plus the two internationals, assembled there to meet with the ICRC team.

In addition to describing past incidents of harassment, the villagers explained the impending water crisis. The ICRC investigator tried hard to get the villagers to give him exact figures for Qawawis’s population as well as for the capacity in cubic meters of each of the “water systems” in question. The men were unable to respond with the precision he wanted, but after much consultation among them, they arrived at the key conclusion: if the sheep and goats as well as the human residents have to use the village wells, they’ll likely run dry in as few as thirty days, or sometime around the end of August.

The ICRC investigator promised to file an urgent report with the Israeli authorities. Whether that will do any good remains to be seen. But unless someone intervenes, the residents of Qawawis may again be forced to leave, and the settlers will have succeeded in cleansing another small piece of Palestine of its legitimate owners.

Update: After this article was written [in early August 2005], activists from the Israeli grassroots organization Ta’ayush brought a water tanker truck to Qawawis. With the activists standing by to deter settler interference, the truck pumped a tankful of water out of one of the prohibited watering holes, then into one of the wells the residents still have access to.

This emergency response has apparently eliminated the immediate threat to the survival of Qawawis, but it’s obviously not a long-term solution. That, of course, would begin with the removal of all Israeli settlements from the occupied Palestinian territories, as required by the Fourth Geneva Convention, United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and dozens of subsequent UN resolutions.

An earlier version of this article was published by the International Middle East Media Center (www.imemc.org)

Henry Norr, a journalist who was fired by the San Francisco Chronicle for participating in demonstrations against the war in Iraq, has spent three and a half months in Palestine over the last three years.


We Await You In Palestine

By Mansour Mansour

Every day that we have a nonviolent demonstration or action, the sweat of Palestinians, internationals, and Israeli activists proves the reality of solidarity and the possibility of coexistence between people.

Force is not the language for peace. Unlike the coalition forces who claim to create democracy and global justice through their weapons and destructive technology, in Palestine, simple human beings with empty hands and full hearts face one of the strongest armies in the world, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). We won’t react towards the IOF by using the same means of violence that they use against us.

We are not teachers or lecturers, but we have the experience of 57 years of resisting the Israeli Occupation. By our continuous resistance and the hope we have maintained, we prove that force and violence is the weapon of the loser. We need you, our friends, side by side with us, to work for that peace. We await you in Palestine.