It’s nearly 3000 words, and i haven’t had anyone check it over for me, but just want to put it out there. I plan to also write a page of background details, what i understand to be key phases in the development of the situation, from the history of Zionism up until what’s going on right now. Please let me know if you know of any inaccuracies or just want to comment in any way. I’d particularly like to know how you feel during and after reading it. I feel it’s largely negative observations, and i don’t want to depress people, but I suppose we did go to expose ourselves to those things. I don’t want to just make people feel angry either. We also went to meet some of the organisations doing so many positive things in the circumstances, and that keeps people going. I will put a list of books and references when i do the background info, and you also might be interested in the PSC Palestinian Solidarity Campaign national educational event on Sat 11th July in Birmingham.
A week in Palestine
From May 23-30th 2009 I was part of a trip to the West Bank of Palestine, with a group of 12, although one of us was detained on entry by the Israeli security who police Palestine’s borders, and after 15 hours of detention and interrogation, sent home.
This young woman was planning to stay on for an extra 3 months, to live with a family, and volunteer in a school. Unfortunately, to volunteer in support of Palestinians is cause for suspicion, but it was just the simple fact that she has a Muslim name that singled her out for questioning in the first place.
This is the paranoid position Israel has got itself into. Had the rest of us made known that our trip was based on an awareness of oppression and a striving for justice, maybe none of us would have got in either.
We arrived on Sunday morning. The first organisation we went to meet was B’tselem, The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. So you see straight away, this is not as black and white as Israel vs Palestine. There are a whole variety of organisations on both sides and outside, working in a whole variety of ways towards justice and peace in that land, just as there are a variety of people who work to increase the domination, with some quite disturbing ways of justifying themselves.
At B’tselem we were ushered into a conference room with another international group, who were there for a longer stay including political science studies and volunteer placements. The man who addressed us was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who is determined in his work to hold Israel to account, but seemed quite stretched, and said afterwards, ‘we need more hours in the day’. We all know this feeling, but it isn’t more hours you need, it’s more people to take a share of the work.
B’tselem collects evidence to pressure Israel to keep to its human rights responsibilities. They are part of a coalition of Israeli human rights organisations calling for independent investigations, as the internal military investigations are insufficient, and there are only 5 prosecutors to attend to hundreds of complaints throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
When someone asked why he thought most of Israeli society allowed things to go the way they are, he said there is a strong internal dialogue of fear and defence, which is fuelled by the press, branding all Palestinians as ‘terrorists’, rather than the individuals that they are. Others claim a god-given right to the land, or seem addicted to domination. Others are just quite unaware of what is going on in their name. We heard a story later in the week about a woman who lived in West Jerusalem, who had never seen ‘the wall’. This despite the fact that the wall is over 700km long, and in many places over 8 metres high. We went to West Jerusalem for a Women in Black demonstration, and it is like a cosmopolitan European capital, a world away from the daily reality of most Palestinians.
The wall is said to be there for security reasons, and many imagine it to be along a border between Israel and the supposedly Palestinian West Bank, but it actually is twice the length of the ‘green line’, in order to encompass illegal Israeli settlements that are built inside the West Bank, and also to expropriate more land including important water sources. In fact it was planned years before there were any suicide bomb attacks.
As well as the wall, there are numerous checkpoints which people have to go through to leave or enter towns, and even to move around within some towns, and you can only pass through if you have been granted the required permit. On Monday morning we went to see the Qalqiliya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. We arrived about 8am. At this relatively quiet time there were several hundred people queuing, and it took us an hour and a half to move the 20 metres to get through. The busiest and most tense time is about 4.30-6.30 in the morning, as hundreds more people arrive to get through to their place of work.
First you wait in a big metal shed. You join a queue to get funnelled into a couple of thin caged aisles, then reach the metal detectors and conveyor belt for bags etc. At this point there is a cubicle inside which on that day sat 4 young women soldiers (presumably on military service), slouched back in chairs, some with their feet up on desks, with one facing our window to look at identity papers. There had been one sign to explain the procedure which said something like ‘put your papers in the slot’, so I looked for a slot which I couldn’t see, I gestured to ask what I should do and she shouted at me in language I didn’t understand. I took it to mean ‘Go!’ but when I did she shouted again. After I held my passport up to the window she shouted again. Palestinians have to have their fingerprints read too. We speculated afterwards about whether she was bored, frustrated, arrogant, brutalised, on drugs, or what… in any case, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but made worse by the knowledge that for us it was just a one-off, while for hundreds of others it is an unavoidable daily occurrence.
We were there with 2 EA’s (Ecumenical Accompaniers), who are part of a programme of volunteers begun in 2002 in response to a request from the heads of Jerusalem churches for international support to end the occupation. We met EA’s throughout the week, based in groups of 4 in different areas. The following day we met a man and woman based in Bethlehem, who said the checkpoint they monitored 3 days a week from 4.30-7.30am had people queuing from 1 or 2 in the morning. Imagine that before your days work. There are also 4 or 5 people everyday whose fingerprints are not recognised, often because they work in the building trade and prints get worn down. They will lose that days work and wage, upon which 10-15 people may be relying, and have to go and get their prints re-registered.
The man was from Ireland, and the woman from South Africa. She had become an EA because she felt that international pressure had been critical in shifting South Africa away from apartheid, and she wanted to give something back in a similar way. She obviously had been distressed by what she had witnessed during her placement, and told us that the EA’s no longer went through that checkpoint after one had had their ribs broken in the crush. She gave us an example of the intimidation people experienced, such as individuals getting told to stand on one side for half an hour every day, and then after a couple of weeks made an offer for this treatment to stop if they would become a collaborator, giving information to the IDF. Another example was of humiliation, an old man she had seen made to remove his belt for the metal detector, whose trousers then fell and he was unable to stoop to pick them up again himself.
This meeting with the Bethlehem EA’s was held in a very colourful and cosy room at the offices of the Palestinian ‘Holy Land Trust’, whose work is about strengthening communities through non-violent resistance. They had a good library with lots of English language books presumably for their international volunteers, and pictures of Gandhi and Martin Luther King on the way in. They currently have 40 non-violence trainers and are just beginning a year-long programme with 120 young Palestinians, and hoping to run similar training with young Israeli’s through B’tselem.
The HLT take part in weekly demonstrations near the wall, joined by Israeli peace activists who can face fines of 3000IS (over £500). Each week the demonstration is dispersed with tear gas and sometimes rubber bullets.
Later that day we were taken to Aida, a refugee camp, that is not in tents, as it has been there for over 60 years. We met an English photographer who now lives there, and ran a project taking under 16’s (who don’t need permits like the adults do) back to the villages their families were evicted from all those years ago. It was very emotional to hear of the one boy whose grandfather asked him to look for a particular spring, and to bring back a bottle of the water. Although this village is only 5km from the camp, the grandfather is not able to return.
Aida normally has a delivery of water once every 7 days, but there were 2 months last summer without delivery, and people are getting extra storage tanks in case this happens again this year. The camp is also treated like a training ground; 3 months ago 400 young soldiers came during the night with dogs to conduct house searches.
A previous photography project had been about dreams and nightmares. It was clear that while people in different situations may share similar dreams, such as young boys wanting to be football heroes, they will have very different nightmares. One photo of a young boy’s nightmare depicted him with his hands tied behind his back, which is not surprising as a large number of Palestinians spend time in prison, including many youths from Aida who were arrested during the building of the wall for throwing stones. We saw a photo of the camp with an Israeli settlement in the distance. The wall was built not around the illegal settlement or even halfway between the two, but right next to the camp, cutting off access to any open space for agriculture or play. Over 20 people from Aida were shot to death resisting the building of that section of wall.
Wednesday was unfortunately even more harrowing. We went to Hebron, the only Palestinian city in the West Bank with a settlement in its centre. Movement of Palestinians is severely restricted with 101 checkpoints within 1km². Walking through the streets we saw metal grids above our heads as protection from rubbish, bricks and even breeze blocks that have been thrown down by settlers. There were many shuttered shops with red spots sprayed on them signifying they had been closed by military order, because there would have been a way through from the back to settler areas.
Apparently many of the more extreme settlers originate from the USA, including a man from Brooklyn who entered the mosque in Hebron in 1994 and shot 29 people. Sadly we also heard of a 19 year old boy who was on his way into the mosque 2 weeks before our visit, and having already passed through checkpoints and metal detectors to get there, began to run up the steps as he realised he was late, and was shot from the top and bottom of the steps, dead.
We were taken to the house of a family who have settlers living right behind them up the slope. We saw his vines that had been cut off at the trunk, and his house windows all barricaded from attack. He said he had been threatened not to show film of settlers having attacked his family inside the house. He told how that area had been under prolonged curfews over a period of 3 years, and the short times when people could get out were used by many as a time to escape altogether. This man however was determined not to abandon his home and give in.
We saw videos of the EA’s accompanying children on their route to school past settler girls who pushed and kicked them, with boys throwing stones. Even more disturbing for me was an interview with a woman living in the settlement who said she thought of her windows as ‘motivational windows’ that she looked out of and saw what work there was still to be done. The same woman was on film accusing the man whose house we were visiting of killing her father (a twisted reference to the Holocaust?), and more of her hissing through their gate calling the man’s daughter a whore. Even though violence is institutionalised all around, I felt that these were the most extreme and hateful things we saw all week, as they were so personal.
Thursday we were going to Jericho, but in the company of our Palestinian guide and driver had to use the longer and more treacherously steep and winding road as they were not permitted to travel on the more direct route. This also meant we had to go through Bethlehem checkpoint again, and added over an hour to the journey. On the bright side we were able to have coffee again with a stallholder by the checkpoint, who told us his name was Amin Coffee (a mean coffee?!) and that he was studying English.
From the minibus we saw settlements built on what had been the land of Palestinian villages, and heard about the industrial units that produce weapons and chemicals, pollution and waste. We saw cabins that are the beginnings of new more permanent settlements. We heard that land in the past was often measured by the number of olive trees it had, and that one method of denying Palestinian claims to land was to say ok, you have the trees, we’ll have the land… We saw an area where all the trees had been cut to stumps.
In Jericho we visited a YMCA vocational college, that had been started by 5 refugees from the 1948 expulsions. Students there are learning trades such as plumbing, electrics and welding, but in the current economic times, major funding is lacking after this summer, which would have very real consequences for the young people of that area.
For a bit of light relief, we went to float in the Dead Sea, only to realise that this unique place too is controlled by Israel, with an entry charge, and IDF T-shirts for sale with slogans of such bad taste as ‘Guns and Moses’. That night we went for a meal on the roof terrace of a restaurant in old city of Jerusalem. It was also the last night of the Palestinian Literature Festival which had to move venues at the last minute as they were closed down by the Israeli authorities.
Friday was our last day. In our own time we each made our trip to the Post Office in order to avoid questioning at the airport as to why we had information and photographs relating to the struggle against the occupation, who we spoke to, where they live etc.. In the afternoon we all went to Sabeel, a Palestinian Liberation Theology organisation. We had a talk from an American woman who first went to Palestine for a pilgrimage, knowing nothing of the political situation. She now gives talks in hotels to pilgrimage groups who often have equally no idea, and really illuminates their understanding of the country they are visiting.
A Palestinian woman also gave us a talk, including the story of a house just down the road from their building, which had been home to over 70 people. They had built a porch without permission, and were threatened with demolition. Offering to dismantle the porch did not make any difference; in the middle of the night 200 police came and the house was demolished.
That night we left for the journey home. It shocked me to discover that Tel Aviv where the airport is, 45 mins by taxi, is right on the Mediterranean coast, which means it was about the same distance to Gaza. I could not believe we were so close to where such atrocities have taken place just this year, with over 1300 Palestinians killed in January, and many more still living with grief, injuries, poverty, homelessness, and continuing attacks.
At the Tel Aviv airport the only one of us who had their case searched was Sofie, who is Muslim. They took swabs from the soles of her slippers to look for traces of explosives. We saw the place where another of our group a week before had been taken away from us, and had to go down a long walkway lined with posters proudly commemorating Israel’s history of empowerment, with dates such as 1948 and 1967, which hold life-changing memories of such a different kind for Palestinians.
Back in London, I took a few days out before going back to Derby, and attended a community event where there was a stall by ‘Haringey Justice For Palestinians’. I gave them some of the fresh chickpeas I had brought back, and got a film called ‘The Zionist Story’, which is free to download and distribute, produced by a Jewish man and detailing the history of Zionism from the late 1800’s to the present day. There was also a talk by an elderly woman who had been a member of the Hagana gang when she was young, believing they were socialists fighting British colonialism, but realised after the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948 what they really stood for. She went on to help found the UK based Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, and is still involved in raising awareness.
I continue to read about the situation from as many angles as possible, and feel like I’m gradually piecing together an understanding. It’s true there are many many factors at work and it can seem truly complicated, but however much we can come to understand why it is like it is, we must stand firm in saying it should not be allowed to continue and worsen. Assist, Resist, Persist.
little boy on the bus
checkpoint
young soldiers with guns
blocks route to jerusalem