Remembering the Nakba, and Calling for Solutions

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions:

Anti-Apartheid Organizing Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine

Over the past five years, I have written countless articles in the Bard press describing in horrible detail some of the most destructive and pervasive policies of Zionist colonialism in Palestine.

A short list of Israeli abuses against the Palestinians include: the massive ethnic cleansing campaign of 1947-1949, during which over one million Palestinians were forced from their homes, and to this day are prevented from returning, even though a UN resolution was passed supporting their unassailable right to return and reclaim their properties; water confiscation and well destruction en masse; agricultural theft and destruction en masse; cultural imperialism and colonialism (i.e. language, culture, food, relationship to the land); mass imprisonment and torture of civilians, including children; the wholesale destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, many of which now lie under so-called “Israeli National Forests” composed of post-1949 planted pine trees (an invasive species); and complete Israeli domination over Palestinian time and space, executed through control over personal and commercial freedom of movement, identification systems, surveillance and brute military force, among many other means.

Another, central element to Israeli oppression in Palestine is terrorism, marked saliently by the Israeli tendency towards collective punishment. Israel ignores international law as it does all of these things, and continues to press towards the complete de-Arabization of all of Palestine through its government and right-wing supported colonial movement in the West Bank, which comprises only 22% of historic Palestine. That is to say, although Israel took more land than it was offered and much more than it needed for its minority population, it has never once stopped taking more from the Palestinians.

As it has since 1948, Israel stands on the brink of formal apartheid, which will occur when the Palestinian population surpasses the Jewish Israeli population. In order to counter this so-called “demographic threat,” the Jewish state offers generous packages to potential Jewish immigrants to beef up the Jewish population. In other words, the Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed to make room for people who have yet to become Israeli citizens, or even express an interest in wanting to move to Israel. Today, the ethnic cleansing campaigns that began in 1947 continue, albeit through less obvious means than forced expulsions and massacres. Now, mystical, meaningless military orders and permit regulations are held up as “legitimate” means towards the de-Palestinianization of Palestine in its entirety.

I am one of billions of people on this planet who find Israel’s behavior, historically and through to the present day, unacceptable, illegal and immoral. For various reasons both real and imagined, US Americans, particularly whites, have a very skewed perception of what happens (and what happened) in Palestine. As Ilan Pappe cautioned in his groundbreaking new work, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” I hold no illusions that telling the truth about Zionism and Palestine will change the views most Americans hold. It is incredibly difficult, approaching impossible, to convince the public that a people who have been colonized, dispossessed and oppressed for 60 years are not the victimizers. Equally difficult is convincing people that those who do the colonizing, dispossessing and oppressing are not heroes.

Noel Ignatiev, author of “How the Irish Became White,” argues that the goal of “those commonly associated with whiteness” (i.e. white people) should not be to convince other white people of the ills of white supremacy. This is a waste of energy and time. Instead, white radicals should make every effort to find other whites who are “dissatisfied with the terms of membership in the white club” and develop solid bases from which to organize meaningfully against white supremacy.

In the same vein, I do not believe that educating the Zionist masses about Palestinian suffering under their boots will do much to stop the domination or reverse the racism inherent to Zionist ideology. Instead, people who are already committed to real and lasting justice in Palestine, with peace to come later, must band together and call in a loud and unified voice for a widespread “BDS” campaign. Boycott, divestment and sanctions worked in South Africa, and there is no reason to suspect that it cannot work in Palestine.

White South Africans did not want to be boycotted or divested from. In the USA, the racist bus companies in the South did not want to be boycotted, either. Obviously, the Zionist organizations and individuals who “support Israel” will reject the “BDS” strategy from the outset. And this is good. The moment radical justice organizations are praised by the powers that be, we should all quit and go home. Only real economic and political pressure from the outside will force Israel into complying with international law and UN resolutions. We must act now…before it is too late.

For information on various boycotts, see www.boycottisrael.org

For a Palestinian perspective on the necessity of the boycott campaign, see Omar Barghouti’s article “Why Boycott Israel” at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6898

For an Israeli perspective on the necessity of the boycott, see the debate between Israeli historians Baruch Kimmerling (opposed to the boycott) and Ilan Pappe (in favor) at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7741

Re-occupation of Nablus

Early Sunday morning, before the February 25 dawn, Israeli army bulldozers, armored personnel carriers (APCs) and jeeps began to roll into the Palestinian city of Nablus. The personnel and heavy equipment came from two military bases on either side of the valley city, from atop mountains that surround it to the south and north.

At one in the morning residents of Nablus’ impoverished Old City began to hear the noises of screeching, clunking bulldozers building make-shift walls around the medina. Large trash receptacles and cars were destroyed on top of one another, blocking all paths and roads in and out of the winding streets and alleys. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, “Soon after, [Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF)] bulldozers placed sand barriers and cement blocks in the middle of Faisal Street in the east of the city, dividing the city into two parts. IOF then besieged the National Hospital in the center of the city and Rafidya Hospital...”

Soon after they had sealed the city, the Israeli army exercised their control of the electro-magnetic waves by interrupting local television and radio broadcasting. The local news was stopped short by a broadcast from a commanding Israeli military official, who told viewers and listeners to stay inside their homes. Under no circumstances, he said, were civilians to go to the street. The total curfew, he said, would keep the people “safe.” He then told people that the army was occupying the city in order to rid it of “bad elements.” He warned civilians not to leave their homes, and not to hide wanted men. This marks the first time the army has used their control over the airwaves to deliver messages to the Palestinian public in Nablus. Previously, they have used the less effective and more expensive method of dropping leaflets from the sky.

The army also arrested Sheikh Nabegh Nafez Braik, 43, the owner and manager of Sanabel Television, after they broke into the television station. The Sheikh’s wife reported that the army took her husband and also “confiscated a number of computer sets and video recorders and cassettes” from the station.

Meanwhile, the army had begun to do what are euphemistically called “house-to-house searches” throughout the Old City and the Rafidia neighborhood. These searches, many conducted by 18 and 19 year old Israeli soldiers, involve military units breaking into homes in the middle of the night, screaming to get everyone in the house into one room, and then thoroughly ran-sacking the house or apartment. Palestinians frequently report having money and gold stolen during these searches, as well as humiliating behavior such as soldiers defecating on mattresses, and destructive behavior, like shooting into electronics and breaking china.

Each and every home would be searched until the eight wanted men are in Israeli custody, the Israeli official said in his broadcast. Thus far the army has not found any of the men, though it has arrested at least six others. As usual, no charges have been made against any of the arrested men beyond affiliation with an Israeli-banned party or organization. The army has also occupied the Jamal 'Abdul Nasser School, and is using it as an interrogation center for young men between the ages of 18 and 35, who they are rounding up for questioning and perhaps arrest. Both Nablus universities and all schools were closed on Sunday and Monday; a local superintendent said that schools will remain closed for the duration of the curfew.

In addition to occupying the Jamal 'Abdul Nasser School, the army has also occupied several homes and rooftops in the Old City, locking the homeowners into one room and using the homes as temporary military bases and sniper positions.

Home occupations and house-to-house searches have been proven to cause severe post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly among children. Extraordinarily large numbers of children wet their beds and have fitful nightmares of the army invading their homes. Fifty percent of Palestinians living in Nablus are under the age of 18, and for many children this invasion is not the first they have experienced. The re-traumatization of children caused by the recurrence of home occupations and searches cannot be overstated for its deleterious effect on the psyche of child, family and community.

For the duration of the siege, children are forced to remain indoors along with the rest of their families. In Israeli occupying language, ‘curfew’ means constant, 24-hour siege during which civilians are prevented from leaving their homes. Defiance of the curfew by Anan al-Tibi, 50, and his son brought them death and injury. Israeli soldiers shot the father in the neck and killed him on impact; his son, walking next to him, was shot in the leg and then denied access to medical assistance. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that they were both unarmed and shot without any provocation or warning.

The raid is the largest in Nablus in the past year or so. Over 100 Israeli vehicles are taking part in the invasion and re-occupation of the ancient city. All public commercial, civic and educational life has come to a complete halt for the more than 205,300 people who live in the metropolitan region.

Saying Goodbye

Leaving Palestine is like nothing else. There are so many unanswered questions and unfortunate truths in my mind as I gather my belongings. Sorting through my things, I make sure that there is no sign of Palestinian life in my baggage. Passing through the airport is difficult enough; I don't want the Israeli authorities to have any excuse for their rude behavior. It is so sad, this erasure of my friends and their culture. It is such a symbol of what Israel has done and continues to do. They cannot be reminded of the existence of the Palestinian people. They will be angry to see that I have not removed my kuffiyeh (Palestinian scarf) from my bag. I guess this is a small act of resistance. It is both the least and the most I can do under the circumstances.

Leaving Palestine is always difficult. The last time I left, I took pictures of the 'progress' of Israeli construction of the apartheid wall. Upon my arrival one month ago, I was dismayed but unsurprised to find the monstrous, life-taking barrier had grown immensely while I was gone.

A few nights ago, after watching a documentary on the violence in Iraq and then news programs describing the fighting among Palestinians in Gaza, I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamt that Palestine had become like Iraq, with people of different factions causing chaos and wreaking havoc on the peace-seeking civilian population. There were explosions everywhere; one's only thoughts focused on bare survival. When I go to get bread today, will I come back? Should I go to the market now, or wait a few hours until the inevitable bomb strikes? Will my children come home from school today?

I hope that this nightmare will stay forever in the realm of the subconscious. My greatest fear for this land is that the Americans and Israelis will succeed with their plan to destroy the Palestinians from the inside. If the power-struggle catapults into all-out war, how will people here continue to have even a glimmer of hope to get them through the worst of Israeli ethnic cleansing policies? How will people resist Israeli occupation if their guns are turned on one another?

So this time, in January 2007, leaving Palestine worries me in manner that is completely new and terrifying. We activists in the West, and all Palestinians at birth, understand well that Israel is not a benevolent partner for a just peace for all people in the Holy Land. Leaving Palestine has always been difficult; I have always expected that the occupation's mechanisms of control will be more difficult, more crushing, when (and if) I return. But this time it is different. Now, the unknown is the greatest fear.

Antonio Gramsci once wrote of the "pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will." He could not have better described how I feel today, packing my things to leave my friends in their open air prisons.

My pessimistic side, apparently manifest in my subconscious as well as the nagging thoughts in the forefront of my brain, sees the worst. It knows full well what will happen. The Israelis and Americans will get their wish: the Palestinians will kill one another and this place will spiral out of control. Resistance to the occupation will come to a virtual halt as civic, education, peace and intellectual leaders scramble to put bandages on the US-sponsored gunshot wound to the heart of Palestine, solidarity among the people.

In the US, my government is sending more than 17,500 troops, most of them reserve soldiers, to Iraq. Bush continues to terrorize the American public, cutting social and education spending and fattening the pockets of the fat-cats who bought his election. One in three homeless Americans is a war veteran. Ninety percent of soldiers being redeployed to Iraq are heavily sedated, taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications. The divorce rate among veterans of the Iraq war is over seventy percent. The war on the poor and on people of color continues unabated. Over two million Americans, most of them people of color, languish in prisons where torture is commonplace and access to health care virtually non-existent. The fastest growing prison population is Black women. Most of the incarcerated are serving time for non-violent crimes.

My optimistic side, that which allows me to rise in the morning hopeful for a better tomorrow for all of the world, clings to positive developments. Palestinian leaders are calling for calm; they are calling a spade a spade, denouncing nefarious American and Israeli involvement in intra-Palestinian affairs. They are pleading with the factions to end the fighting, and the majority of the Palestinian population (as far as I can tell) support these pleas and add their voices to the cries for solidarity.

In Washington DC this weekend, half of a million people demonstrated against the illegal and immoral war against the Iraqi people. Four congresspeople made courageous statements to the effect that Bush is a liar and a coward, and that they will see to it to do all in their power to follow through with the American public's demand to end the occupation. Organizations representing the poor, people of color, and women rallied together to denounce American imperialism and demand that we fight poverty and AIDS instead of Middle Eastern people. Slowly, Americans are beginning to realize that the terror/security paradigm so flagrantly abused by the US and Israeli governments is simply a veil, covering their lofty plans for domination and violence.

These things are all well and good. But, as the Palestinians know after nearly sixty years of occupation, talk is cheap. It is time for justice and peace seeking Americans and Israelis to stand up, to denounce firmly the actions of their governments, and to turn the tide away from violence and towards reconciliation. It is the responsibility of people of European descent to combat the racism that lies at the heart of so many of the world’s problems. It is the responsibility of all Americans to end the US siege of the Palestinian government, as it is ours to demand and work towards an end to the occupations of both Palestine and Iraq. Palestinians and Iraqis are capable of defending themselves up to a point. But, due to extraordinary biased American involvement in the region, they cannot do it alone. We must stand in solidarity with them, for them, for ourselves, and for our collective future.

Palestinians fight and Israelis smile

Israel's plan is working. Nineteen Palestinians were killed in internecine fighting yesterday in the Gaza strip; seventy-something were injured. Here in the West Bank, twenty-five Hamas activists were captured by Fateh armed men. I'm sure you've read this, or will read it, in American or European press. I will therefore tell you some things you probably will not read there.

Firstly, in a development that I cannot quite understand yet, as soon as it became apparent that Fateh was going to do their dirty work for them, the Israelis slightly eased travel restrictions on Palestinians traveling throughout the West Bank.

Second, an arms race, led, as usual, by the United States and its ally, Israel, has begun in the Palestinian occupied territories. Ha'aretz reported today that in yesterday's fighting, Fateh men were able to ward off a group of Hamas militants using 'armored vehicles and personnel carriers' (in other words, military jeeps and small tanks). Never have the Palestinians, any of them, had access to such weaponry. The arms race is a central part of the United States' and Israel's plan to overthrow the Palestinian elected government in a violent coup. Like many of their most brilliant and sinister ideas, this one revolves around the age-old colonial tactic of employing one faction of the dispossessed to do their bidding for them and crush those who are slightly more radical in opposition to the colonists. Fateh is this easy-to-control faction, and they are indeed following through with the Bush-Olmert plan to destroy the legitimacy of the Palestinian government---and along the way, distract the Palestinians from doing what they should be doing. That is, fighting the occupation and developing, not demolishing, their society.

I wrote a while back about how this is happening but for simplicity's sake will say it again. The US has pledged 80 million dollars to the Palestinians. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, ALL of the money will be controlled not by the Parliament, but by Abbas himself. Most of it is earmarked for the military training, by American commanders, of Abbas' 'Presidential Guard'. Death squad, anyone?

Meanwhile, as the US beefs up Fateh's so-called 'security' services, Iran and Syria are reportedly following suit in increasing their military aid and weapons shipments to the Hamas fighters.

Sounds like Afghanistan, huh? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if, and in fact will predict here for the world to see, that these weapons, both those of Fateh and Hamas, someday end up killing or targeting the occupation. Unfortunately, that day is not today. In the meantime, Palestinians are engaging in a West-driven power struggle over the keys to the government. Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens are still under occupation, and the government seems to have forgotten about its responsibilities to its people.

Finally, and most horrifyingly, I read today on the Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper the following headline, 'A Relative Win', followed by the byline 'For the first time since clashes began, Hamas casualties outnumbered those of Fateh'.

I click on the link to the story, nervous about what I assume I will find therein---Israelis gloating about how this one tactic in their larger strategy to destroy the Palestinians is succeeding. (Hurrah!) Unfortunately, my assumption is mostly correct. And even more disturbing are the comments left by Israeli and foreign readers. Just a sample of the racist remarks: 'Sadly, this is how the Arabs of Palestine communicate' and 'May it continue to be a back and forth battle'.

Check out the article for yourself if you like: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/818366.html

But! If you are going to read those half-truths, please also see this brilliant piece by Hasan Abu Nimah, the former Jordanian representative to the United Nations:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6433.shtml

And see this one, too, by longtime MidEast reporter Jonathan Cook:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6272.shtml

Or, for a primer of the 'civil war' situation and how it developed, see the ElectronicIntifada sourcepage at:
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/654.shtml

One Dead, 7 Injured in Nablus Raid last night

The Israeli occupying army invaded the Old City of Nablus last night, looking for wanted men. They didn't find whoever they were looking for, but perhaps as a consolation they killed one man and injured seven others, one critically. We here in Balata didn't know about the invasion until this morning, but it apparently raged on all night into the morning.

The streets of the Old City were quiet today for a Thursday. Shops closed their doors, and the few that remained open left only small signs that they were in operation. Since the beginning of the second intifada, shops have closed their doors on days following operations during which people were killed, out of respect for the dead. This was the first person Israel has killed in the West Bank since the January 4 invasion of Ramallah, which left four dead and twenty-something injured. Inshallah he will be the last, though this is an unreasonable hope.

In the past year, during which the intifada has basically ended, Israel has killed more than 400 Palestinians. In this time, the Palestinians virtually ceased all violent attacks on Israeli civilians (minus, of course, the silly rocket attacks launched from Gaza, which rarely do any damage at all, usually landing somewhere in the desert).

In other developments, it appears as if Israel is going ahead with its master plan to divide the West Bank into three separate cantons (or bantustans). No one in the American (or European, for that matter) press will mention these developments, and it is hard to be sure of exactly what they mean for the future of this country. But from the ground, up, one cannot miss the unmistakable signs of Israeli construction and cement laying.

The plan involves taking away most of the 100-something barriers and checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from moving within their ever-shrinking territory. Instead of operating all of these costly checkpoints, the Israelis are opting for a simpler solution. A 'Final Solution,' if you will. If the plan goes forward to completion, there will soon be only three or four, major checkpoints in the West Bank. They've already finished construction on the first, the Kalandia checkpoint, between Jerusalem and Ramallah. It looks more like an international border crossing than a checkpoint. Apparently the Israelis will construct two more of these monstrosities, dividing the West Bank into three. Passage between the cantons, like nearly everything else here, will be arbitrarily decided by the occupiers.

Each time I return to this scarred landscape, it is changed for the worse. I can't imagine what it will be like the next time I come.

Meanwhile, discussion of the conflict here is in 'official' America reduced to the following:
do we wait until the PA has completely destroyed itself, or should we intervene now and help it destroy itself? No discussion of occupation exists. There is no historical context for what occurs here, unless of course the discussion returns abruptly to the ancient Kingdom of David or the 20th century Nazi holocaust of the Jews. The two-thousand years between these two events have disappeared from the record.

Fortunately, not everyone forgets these years. Perhaps this is why Israeli scientists have for years been attempting to prove that Jewish and Palestinian DNA strands show a close, nearly familial relation. Unfortunately, this science is not read as we may hope it would be---you are brothers! You should unite! No no no, it is instead used to justify the presence of a racist, Zionist state inside of Palestine. Instead of serving as an opportunity to unite the people of this land, this science, and numerous others, is used to erase Palestinian history and cover it with the however thin skin of Jewish right to the land---and even to the extermination of the people in it. 'See,' the Israeli media and scientific establishment proclaim, 'we were here! They are our relations, and that proves that Jews have a right to kill them and take their land!'

The Palestinians, and most other people in the world, do not see it in this light. When will American foreign policy-makers wake up to the realization that our official support for Israel does nothing positive for anyone? All we can do is continue to work against racism in every form---in our hearts and minds, our government at home and its exportation to other lands. It pains me to see racism tear apart communities in the US, and the same thing happening here, three thousand miles away. What began in Europe during the so-called 'Enlightenment' is spiraling out of control in an age we euphemistically refer to as 'globalized'. If we are only globalizing neo-liberal economics and European racism, I vote against it.

Luckily, here in Palestine I witness a different kind of globalization. This one revolves around concepts such as peace based on political, racial, social and economic justice. I am fortunate to have been able to travel here and witness this other, explicitly political form of globalization. It is my hope that oppressed peoples all over the world will be able to take back what is theirs, building a better world together through a united front against all forms of oppression and for a better world for all of the world's children. Meanwhile, we white people (even those of us who are among the oppressed) need to confront ourselves and our institutions and call them what they are: racist, dehumanizing and wrong. Then we've got to step aside, for once, and stop being in control.

Tomatoes, Coffee, Gas, Horror and Silence

Every single object carries significance that goes far beyond those things we would normally associate with them. Here, in occupied Palestine, life is hard. Objects tell stories just like the people do: constant, beating stories. Like fierce monsoons, they pelt at you, daring you to challenge their significance. And yet like individual raindrops in a monsoon, each story is but one of millions. They ultimately roll off your back; you must shake them from your shoes when you enter the house. Like raindrops, each story takes a slightly different shape, but they all carry the same pollutants. Life here in occupied Palestine is hard.

Objects carry significance here that a visitor could not imagine. Each object carries with it millions of stories; they fill my heart and my head and make me feel at once like crying and screaming.

Take first tomatoes: the Israelis have started a sinister campaign of buying nearly all of the Palestinian farmers' tomatoes. They are then sold to Europe, for prices ten times what the destitute farmers receieved for their toil. This has had a double effect on the Palestinian economy: it has made local, Palestinian tomatoes so expensive that Palestinians cannot afford to buy them. Thus, they buy cheap, GMO and pesticide filled Israeli tomatoes, injecting millions of shekels into the Israeli economy and boosting the subsidy-fat Israeli agricultural industry. (Bear in mind that the land upon which 'Israeli' tomatoes are grown has all, all of it, been confiscated from the Palestinian fellahin.)

A similar game is played with gas. Most Palestinians rely on gas to survive. In the camps and villages, as in other parts of Palestine, there is no central heating or cooling in any of the homes. People use gas powered heaters on rollers. Everyone uses gas to cook. The Israelis play a dangerous game with people's lives; each month, there is no gas for at least one or two weeks. Why? The Israelis close off the Jordanian and Egyptian borders to gasoline only. Israel will not sell gas to the Palestinians. 'What do people do without?' I asked. 'They don't cook, and they stay in bed,' a friend said. No hot food, no hot showers, no warmth beyond the waves emanating off of loved ones, or the smile of a child. There is a slow, painful genocide happening here. I can't bear to think of the US, where the events of the day, of the year, of the decade, of the century, are boiled down ultimately to the inherent evil of 'the Arab mind', or 'terrorism', or, not least, 'Jewish suffering'.

Another example: coffee. I watched a film tonight, made by a Nablusi university student. The five minute short tells the agonizing story of a young man, twelve years old, from a village near Nablus. The best student in his class, his life changed drastically when his father became ill. Life in the villages is very difficult. Not only are the people almost universally impoverished (economically, of course), but they bear the brunt of the worst kind of Israeli racism. Settlements tower over them, or lie hostile on the hilltops next to them. Settlers frequently make a game out of terrorizing Palestinian villagers, beating children, harassing women, killing men. This all occurs under the protection of the Israeli occupying army.

After his father became ill, the young boy, the eldest of 15, became the breadwinner for his large family. With little options for work, he set out to sell coffee at the Huwarra checkpoint, south of Nablus. Each morning he rises with the sun, sets out on his bicycle, and makes for the checkpoint with his two thermoses of hot, sweet, Arabic coffee. He sells until his classes begin. After school, he returns immediately to the checkpoint to sell again. In the film, he tells of the trials of selling coffee. More than three times has he been beaten by soldiers, his thermoses cracked, the brown, gooey coffee spilling out on the dirty ground. His crime? Delaying Palestinians who were ordered to 'COME!' by the scared, angry teenagers who rule the checkpoints like evil little princes.

During the shooting of the film, the young boy's father died. The young boy tells of his life: 'After I started working at the checkpoint, my grades plummetted. I was making A's, and now I am making B's and C's in all of my classes. I cannot play with my brothers and sisters. I cannot watch TV with them. I have no time for myself.' Those meager free moments he cherishes he spends at the cemetary, visiting his late father's grave. There is little hope for this young man, though he manages to crack a smile through his tears as he stares wide-eyed into the camera.

Before you become bored by the monsoon, indulge in a few more stories. Allow yourself to feel a few more of the genocidal raindrops on your shoulders before you brush them off, as we all must in order to wake in the morning and smile with those we love.

Horror films. A friend of a friend came over to the flat tonight to help us do a few things on the computer I brought here, to leave here. His English was impeccable (a rarity in the camp), and he seemed excited to talk with me about American films and rap music. He is somewhat of a computer whiz, and opened up his server on our laptop, providing me with a plethora of American films to choose from for our (bootlegging) viewing pleasure. He spoke of a few, and then his eyes widened.

'Do you like horror films?' he asked. 'Sort of,' I said, 'depending on my mood.' He pointed to one of them and told me that it was positively terrifying, that if we were to download and watch it, we should keep the lights on. In half jest and half earnest, I mentioned in an aside that it seemed silly to watch horror films in a place plagued by so much true, everyday terror. At first he laughed and shrugged, saying, 'What is there to be afraid of here?' 'The army,' I replied, without hesitation. He immediately responded: 'No! The army isn't to be feared. They are cowards.'

'Maybe so,' I said, 'but they kill people without abandon. They are truly terrifying, more so than any American horror flick could even aspire to be.' This friend of a friend became suddenly quiet, and I saw tears budding in his chocolate brown eyes. 'I suppose you are right,' he said at last. 'It is something to watch your own brother take his last breaths and slip away from you, right in between your two hands.'

'I suppose you are right.'

Finally, I'll end with another story, one that says everything and nothing all at once.

A good friend and I were just talking, wading together through the ocean of tears, walking head on together into the monsoon of polluted water without anything but the cover of our friendship and his unbreakable spirit to keep us afloat.

We ended up, as we usually do, speaking of the tragedy of occupation and dispersion and death and violence and poverty and racism in more broad terms, taking in the shapes of the monsoons of yesterday and of those breaking through into the horizon that will be tomorrow. Without the flowers, what I mean to say is that we ended by discussing 'the conflict' as it is felt by Palestinians and Israelis both.

He told me, 'You know as well as I do that this will not stop just because we fight against it. It must stop because they too want to make peace with us, a real and lasting peace based on mutual respect, dignity, and most of all, trust.' Of course I agreed with him, and he continued.

'But it is not easy, and sometimes it is hard to shake my hopelessness. You know me,' he said. 'I am a good man, I want nothing but peace for my children, for the children of Palestine and for Israel's children as well. But how can we have peace if we cannot even stand to talk to one another?'

'I had a friend,' he said, 'who worked with an Israeli group called Breaking the Silence. This is a group of former Israeli occupying soldiers who have come out against the occupation, and who publicly repent for their sins by telling their own stories, telling of how they individually and of how their army collectively abuses the rights and dignities of each and every Palestinian each and every day. They speak in America, in Europe, in Israel. This friend of mine, she knew that I had been involved with the resistance. And she knew one of the soldiers who had come out and broken his and his nation's collective silence. She asked me if I would meet with him. I oblidged, excited to have the opportunity to speak with one of the men who occupied and terrorized a house of people I know, here, a few years ago. The soldier said that he wanted to personally apologize to the people who lived in that house. Anyway, we went to meet one another. Me, a Palestinian radical who spent time in an Israeli prison. Him, a colonial soldier who participated in human rights abuses against my people, my neighbors, and me. We met with a larger group of people, and we sat together in that group for four hours.'

'Do you know,' he said to me, 'that I could barely look at him? We came together because we wanted to talk, we wanted to hear one another and try to understand the other man, and by extension, his nation, his people, his sorrows and his joys.'

'So how did it go?' I asked.

'We did not say one word to one another for the entire time,' he said, mournfully but with purpose. 'I could not speak. I did not know where to begin.'

Balata scenes

Since arriving in Balata, things have been relatively calm. The camp looks much the same to me as it did 1.5 years ago when I was last here.

Balata is the densest place on earth, in human terms. It is the size of about two football fields, approximately 1.5 square kilometers. In this small space, wedged between the Tomb of Jacob to the east, the Jerusalem-Nablus road to the north, and Balata village to the west, live about 30,000 Palestinian refugees. These people are decendents from people who fled villages near Jaffa, a city now known as Yaffa, which lies inside the borders of Palestine '48 (otherwise known as Israel). Some of the people in Balata are old enough to have actually made the trek themselves; there is a film on the Balatacamp.net website that includes interviews with older women who still remember the fragrant orange and lemon trees of their former home.

Dense as it is, people have little choice but to build up. When a Palestinian man gets married and has a family of his own, he must either live with his parents or build a flat on top of his parents' home. The blueprint of the camp is like a maze to outsiders. This is because in 1952, when Jaffa refugees finally settled here after nearly four years of poverty stricken wandering, the UN gave them tents in which to build their new lives and community. Those tents form the foundation of the camp today. In 1956, after four years of suffering through cold, rainy winters, and hot, mericless summers, the refugees of Jaffa finally accepted the UN's offer of concrete blocks with which to build homes. The people had perceptively denied accepting the offer even through great suffering; they did not want to build permanent structures here because they were determined to go home.

Well, fifty years later, they and four generations of their decendents are still here. Grandparents and great-grandparents pass down stories to the younger ones about what life was like in that pristine, beautiful oceanside land they still call home. Even four year old children know about their people's troubled past. When asked where they are from, most children do not say Balata. Without hesitation, they say 'Jaffa!'

Because the camp started as a tent city, the buildings are impossibly close together. Some alleyways are so narrow that fat people cannot pass through them. In many houses in the camp one cannot ever tell the difference between day and night; the sun rarely shines into Balata.

The past few nights have been on par with what is considered normal here. The night before last, the army came. They drove through the streets in about 15 jeeps and then drove away without doing much of anything. Last night they came again. This time, they brought with them a few bulldozers and set off five soundbombs. The purpose of these missions? Purely to terrorize, to remind the people here that they are here, that they have not gone away. Not that the people could forget; only a few kilometers from here is one of the largest occupation military bases in the West Bank. From the camp each night, you can hear the occupiers training their young thugs. Between this gunfire and the shots the fighters in the camp ring out each night, many people go sleepless. Others are simply accomstomed. I must admit I am in the latter camp. There are only so many times that aimless gunfire can startle you. A famous poet once remarked that human beings get used to war faster than almost anything else. It's true.

Today, M. and I head out to speak with a few people who we want to become involved with the school project. Due to the miserable situation among the Palestinian factions here, we have cancelled the idea of starting a full-on school. Instead, we plan to do an after school program with many of the same goals. A large part of the project will still be college prep work, with an eye toward assisting students in applying to, gaining acceptance to and finding funds to attend universities throughout the world.

(Speaking of the in-fighting among Palestinians, I have some pretty harsh condemnations of the US, the EU and Israel to unleash. I don't, however, have the time. Instead of writing something now, I am copying an article I wrote for the Bard paper a few months ago. I hate to say it, but I was right. Please read on if you'd like to know how this situation became so bleak. I'm sure the NY Times is not telling you what is really going on...)

The New Contras

November 6, 2006

The liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz recently reported that US military advisors have for about a month been working to train Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Presidential Guard in expectance of what the US and Israel believe will be an inevitable---and bloody---civil war between the ruling Hamas government and Abbas’ party, Fatah.

The US government and the EU, presumably at the behest of Israel, have since the Hamas’ democratic election to Palestinian government in January of 2006 done everything possible to oust the democratically elected leaders. Israel, for its part, has arrested and jailed more than 30 Palestinian Parliament members from the Hamas party. Israel refuses to acknowledge the Palestinian right to democratically elect its own leadership, evidenced by these arrests, the state’s endorsement of international sanctions against the PA, and the general intensification of the occupation throughout the West Bank and Gaza. The international community and the Israeli occupying forces are punishing the Palestinians for voting their conscience.

The results of US/EU sanctions against the Palestinians have been shocking. Hunger and malnourishment in Palestine have skyrocketed. The unemployment level is higher than it ever has been. All public school students (more than a million pupils) have stayed at home since September, some students being turned away from the schools each morning, fighting with hope against hopelessness that their teachers will have stopped their strike. Why are teachers striking? The Palestinian government, shrunken and penniless, cannot pay their salaries. This situation is even more devastating to Palestinian youth and families because the major checkpoints that separate Palestinian cities from one another have been near impossible to pass.

A Palestinian friend of mine from Nablus, for example, has not been out of the city-prison since April 2006. The soldiers at the checkpoint south of the city have informed him that ‘no men’ are allowed to leave Nablus for the foreseeable future. To put this in context for readers unfamiliar with the terrain, it is important to note that Nablus is in the dead center of the West Bank. Therefore, the situation has nothing to do with Israeli ‘security’ interests. Palestinians are prevented from traveling even within the larger prison that is the West Bank. In Gaza the situation is even worse, as Israel bombs without hesitation what it cannot or will not understand.

The same Nablusi friend who has been trapped inside his city for months told me that the situation inside the city is worse now than ever before. Besides the crippling poverty, unemployment and restrictions on movement between towns and cities, the army has gravely stepped up its violence against Palestinian civilians. During the holy Muslim period of Ramadan, for example, the Israeli army killed four people at Huwarra checkpoint, south of Nablus. One of these men was planning to go to neighboring Ramallah to meet his wife and visit with her family for a holiday dinner to break the fast. The man was denied passage through the checkpoint at Huwarra, and proceeded to do what many Palestinians do in such circumstance: he started to walk through the hills, trying to go around the checkpoint. Unfortunately, he was shot point-blank from a military sniper tower and killed. Within the Israeli military, no questions were asked. Now, for his family, none are answered.

In this context of increasing oppression and violence, US involvement is striking. Never before has the US military engaged with the Palestinian via military training camps. So why are they doing it now? According to Ha’aretz, the “U.S. administration is…certain that the sanctions against Hamas will inevitably result in a violent confrontation between Hamas and Fatah, and in such a scenario, they would prefer to strengthen the "good guys" headed by Abbas.” In other words, they, along with Europe and Israel, are forcing a civil war on the Palestinians (via sanctions) and then choosing the victor (via the training of death squads).

The US hopes that Fatah’s Presidential Guard Force 17, under the supervision and leadership of American military man Keith Dayton, will grow from 3,500 to 6,000 men. One only has to look back at the numerous examples of US military training intervention throughout Latin America to see how this spells disaster for the Palestinian people. Disaster, spelled: flagrant human rights abuses against Palestinian civilians and the enactment of widespread US-sponsored, US-supported and US-educated terror.

A friend connected to the conflict remarked on what may result from such terror: “One might imagine that hundreds of thousands [of Palestinians] would flee an internecine bloodbath; then Canada and the EU-- or Jordan and Lebanon-- take them in as refugees, and later they aren't allowed to return home. Voila! Greater Israel's problems are solved.” While such a terrible ending may not result from these US meddlings in its ‘New Middle East’, the terror is surely to come. And when it does, it would benefit us all to remember that it is not, in a certain sense at least, the Palestinians’ problem. Responsibility for intra-Palestinian violence lies squarely upon Israel, the US and Europe. Let us not forget it in the coming months.

Day One: Invasion, Poetry, and other news

I left Jerusalem this morning without my missing luggage. Instead of wasting a bunch of precious days in the holy city I will return to collect my belongings (if they still exist) on Monday.

When travelling to the West Bank from Jerusalem, the first monstrosity of occupation one encounters is the Apartheid Wall. It starts in the Jerusalem suburb of Abu-Dis, a Palestinian town that has for centuries been closely connected in every way to the center of the metropolis. Not anymore. Now, the wall separates one side of the town from the other. When driving to the first, most odious of West Bank checkpoints at Kalandia, the wall runs down the middle of what was once a thriving, busy, two-lane mini-highway. Now the two lanes are broken into four, two on each side of the twenty-five meter tall concrete barrier. On the way to the checkpoint, the wall is so close outside the bus window that I can barely read the graffiti sprawled accross it. I could, however, lean out the window and touch it.

Our mini-bus passed through the checkpoint without delay. This is because Israel has said recently that they will ease restrictions at some checkpoints in the West Bank. Unfortunately, this is not the case for Palestinians heading south from the north, or north from the south. That is to say, when they are attempting to travel outside of and not into their respective bantustans. We arrived in the cultural capital of Palestine, Ramallah, without incident. I grabbed a falafel for breakfast and headed to another bus, this one taking about twenty of us farther north to Nablus. Ramallah was busy as usual for a Thursday when I passed through. Unfortunately, when I arrived in Nablus a few hours later, the streets were empty save about 25 Israeli armored jeeps, 5 armored bulldozers and 40-something Palestinian rock-throwing youths. A few minutes later the abulances came to collect the wounded, of which there were around 25. Most of these people were injured severely. They were all civilians, and many were shot above the waist. Many, if not most, were youths. Four people were murdered in the square where only hours before I had passed through a bustling market and traffic dense city center.

The Israelis claimed to have been looking for specific people to arrest. I wondered when I heard this about how I would feel if the Boston police were looking for some murder suspects and ended up shooting and killing my mother and my dog while they were out on their nightly walk. More accurately, they could have killed my mother and seriously injured at least one of my friends. The occupying army left the scene without the men they were after; they both escaped. They left behind four grieving families and 25 others who will spend the night in the hospital looking after their loved ones and praying for the best. This, not to mention the countless cars that were indiscriminately destroyed by bulldozers as they lay, parked in the street like trash to be kicked around by angry five-year olds. Ramallah has not seend an invasion like this for four years.

All of this, in the midst of supposed 'peace' talks with Israeli PM Olmert and Egyptian president Mubarak. Some peace.

Additionally, Israel announced yesterday that it will begin construction of a new Israeli colony (sometimes euphemistically dubbed 'settlements' or 'neighborhoods' for those NY Times readers out there) in the occupied West Bank. Settlements are built on land confiscated from Palestinians. The settlements make life for Palestinians difficult to say the least; they also prevent the realization of the two-state solution Israel claims to work towards.

As the Palestinian permanent representative to the UN said tonight on Al-Jazeera english news station, the Israelis must be judged not by their words but by their actions. In other words: don't believe the hype.

Finally, I will end tonight with something my dear friend said to me tonight in Nablus. He was describing to me an interrogation session he endured at the hands of an Israeli secret service agent this past May. He was attempting to cross a checkpoint, on his way to Ramallah to get a visa to come to the states. They denied him passage, but kept him for twelve hours in the middle of the night, forced him to strip naked, and then interrogated him.

My friend, M., is a very smart guy. During his 'discussion' with the agent, M. asked him about what he thought the Palestinians could do right. They are always seeming to do wrong, at least from the Israeli perspective. The agent couldn't answer. But he asked M. to tell him about what he thought of the conflict overall. M. said this:

'Imagine this: there is a man, and he is trapped in a burning building. He is on the second floor and he rushes to the third floor as the flames get higher and higher. He keeps running from the flames up and up until he reaches the seventh floor. Then he finds himself on the roof, the flames licking at his heals. Beneath the building, to the side, there is a beautiful garden. Inside the garden is a man, sleeping on a bench after having a nice meal. He looks down at the man and without hesitation he jumps. He lands right on the sleeping man's stomach and survives. The sleeping man dies.'

'What does this mean?' the agent asked him.

'The burning building is Nazi Europe, the man in the building is the Jews of Europe, the garden is Palestine, and the man sleeping on the bench is the Palestinians,' he said.

'Goodbye, M.' the agent said. 'I wish you the best of luck.'

Safe Arrival, and yet Incomplete

I made the mistake of flying with the Israeli air carrier, El Al. Supporting the Israeli economy is one bad mark on my record. Foolishly, I assumed that the 'security' examination I would receive at the airport would be no different from the trials and tribulations I have become accostumed to during my travels to Palestine.

My flight was scheduled to leave JFK at midnight. I arrived early, another mistake. The more time you give to the authorities, the more they will take from you. And take they did. I sat through a two hour interrogation, and then simply sat for another two hours while they had my bags, passport and cellphone in some basement office. They rummaged through my things, as usual. But in a new twist, they made two surprising decisions regarding my belongings. The first was patently ridiculous and a poor attempt at intimidation and discomfort-making. They would not allow me to travel with my jacket. That's right, folks, my parka. I asked why and they predictably responded, "We cannot tell you. It is a security secret of the State of Israel." Ok, whatever. So they sent my jacket home, to my home in the states.

The second move was much more understandable, at least from their insane perspective. They took out everything from my suitcase, packed it into another suitcase that they gave to me ("This one is a nice bag," the woman said---as if that were consolation!), and took my laptop, my cd player, and a travel mug. These three items were apparently security risks. They were repacked into my original suitcase. The authorities said that they would undergo some more examination at another security location in NYC, to be shipped on the next flight to Tel Aviv. Well, I called the airport in Tel Aviv this morning and---surprise!---they have no record of my baggage even existing. I wonder if my jacket will ever make it home...

Besides this utter BS, I was treated to not one, but two strip searches. The second was clearly aimed to humiliate me because I had not left their sight during the two hours between searches. I was made to drop my pants. Lucky girls, those El Al security agents.

Anyway I've made it to Jerusalem. The baggage problem is quite an annoyance for me now because I cannot make my way into Nablus until it is settled. Thus I will stay here in Jerusalem probably through the weekend. So that is four days of missed work opportunity. The Israelis are quite good at stealing people's time. Time is for Palestinians one of the most severe casualties of the occupation. This is simply my visitor's taste.

Wrong wrong wrong

A Mr. Rafi Nulman responded to my article on the Balata invasion with this:

Framing the Question of the Middle East

by Rafi Nulman

I am a left- wing Israeli. As such, Mrs. C's article concerning the invasion of the Balata refugee camp (Israel Attacks Balata Refugee Camp in West Bank, the Bard Free Press Feb. 28) would have pleased me greatly if I had read it in Israel. As a mater of fact, I might have written on a similar topic myself. But written in its current format, I take exception to the articles for two reasons. First, I find the implication that the Israeli army is arbitrarily and intentionally cruel, offensive. And second, the article, like many others of its kind, is not reflective of the full scale of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.
Mrs. C’s article paints the details of Israel’s incursion into the refugee camp of Balata. The article highlights the cruelty of the Israeli army. Now granted, the IDF (Israel Defense Force) has many sins to atone for. From poor strategic planning to individual soldier’s cruelty, the IDF’s conscience is far from clean; but it crucial to remember that these are mistakes. When a soldier is caught acting cruelly, he is tried and put in jail. It is a perverted kind of wishful thinking to believe that Israeli soldiers are, as a rule, inhumane. The policy of the IDF has ever been to intentionally target only “ticking bombs” (proven terrorists with intentions) and people who already have blood on their hands. While accidents do occur, common sense can assure you that the IDF does not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the purpose of killing innocent civilians.
Mrs. C's article tells a tale of terrible suffering. And there is no doubt that the Palestinians are suffering. And yet, is there really a need to pile more rhetoric onto this already- charged situation? This conflict is not, and should not be, a competition to see who is suffering more; though we should not forget that Israeli victims of suicide bombings suffer as well. Moreover, how does Mrs. C expect the IDF to react? Palestinian ambulances have been used numerous times for the smuggling of weapons, for the transport of suicide bombers and as bomb- trucks in themselves. Female suicide bombers have disguised themselves as pregnant women to avoid suspicion. These cynical exploitations of human decency beg for the use of extreme measures.
While the IDF has killed many civilians accidentally, how does Mrs. C expect the IDF to react to a perceived enemy that intentionally kills civilians? It should be stressed that the IDF enters populated regions in reaction to the firing of rockets or the dispatch of suicide bombers from within those civilian areas; the Palestinian “freedom fighters” intentionally attack from within densely populated areas, so as to cynically use their own people as a human shield. Now these explanations might not satisfy you, they certainly don't fully satisfy me; but I implore the reader to seek beyond the implied equation that suffering necessitates inhumanity.
My second objection to Mrs. C's article is that it is does not encompass the full reality of a conflict. A conflict has two sides. Her article is written in a vacuum. Her article is insightful and probably fairly accurate, but unfortunately, it does not recognize the existence of a legitimate debate. I sincerely applaud her attempt to combat apathy, but there must be a balance. The portrayal of suffering, while deeply humbling, adds nothing to a highly emotional conflict. There has been great suffering on both sides, but only if we escape the race to victimhood will we be able to actually speak in the lexicon of solutions. We must reject the simplistic assumption that greater suffering inherently means greater justice. I would welcome Mrs. C's article if it would be written amid a reality of discussion; but until there is recognition of an actual conflict, articles such as hers will add nothing but more oil to the flames.

I responded to his article with my own. Here it is:

Mr. Nulman, Why are you afraid of the truth?

by Kate C

In the last issue of The Free Press, Bard student and self-declared ‘left-wing Israeli’ Rafi Nulman writes that my 28 February article on the Israeli invasion of the Balata refugee camp adds ‘more oil to the flames.’ He criticizes the news piece ‘for two reasons’: he first asserts that my ‘implication that the Israeli army is arbitrarily and intentionally cruel’ is ‘offensive’, and then that ‘the article, like many others of its kind, is not reflective of the full scale of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’ Nulman also, in a typical move, states seemingly without a hint of self-reflection or irony that, because he is a left-wing Israeli, the article ‘would have pleased [him] greatly’ had he ‘read it in Israel.’

Before systematically deconstructing his specific arguments, it must be said that the premise of his rebuttal to my news piece---and not, as he suggests, the journalism itself---is precisely the problem that continues to fuel the fires of violence in the Middle East. ‘There is no doubt that Palestinians are suffering,’ he writes. But according to Nulman, reporting on any of the particulars of this suffering is just ‘pil[ing] more rhetoric onto an already charged situation.’ Nulman here reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld, who ceaselessly demands that al-Jazeera cease publishing photos of US bombing victims on the grounds that they constitute incitement. (I wonder if Nulman would take his theory to the logical conclusion the Bush administration arrived at when they bombed an al-Jazeera camera crew in Iraq, killing a journalist who had covered the American bombing campaign from the ground.)

Though Nulman and Rumsfeld may rather that the dirty work of their militaries be concealed from the public, the problems in Palestine and Iraq have nothing to do with the existence of honest journalism reporting from the ground, up. In fact, they have more to do with its absence. The problem in Palestine can more accurately be identified as an Israeli-manufactured ideological and institutional shield from seeing the effects of their supposed ‘anti-terror’ policies on human beings---a problem Nulman manifests perfectly in his critique of my article.

The article I wrote on the Balata invasion was printed in the “News” section of the paper for a reason. It was not an opinion piece, though I will not deny that I have opinions or that my opinions influenced my decision to cover the invasion. No journalist reporting a specific story can ever describe the totality of socio-economic, political or historical narratives surrounding a given problem. This is not a journalist’s job.

The so-called ‘balance’ Nulman seeks is not demanded of articles written about specific military operations in other conflicts. My piece is, in a very fundamental sense, a simple article: Israel invaded, people were killed. I covered the invasion, just as many journalists covered the American invasion of Fallujah. In their descriptions of the latter event they were not expected to describe the field of historical and political circumstance that surrounded or produced it. Why the double standard that expects me to produce an Israeli narrative to cover for or explain away Israeli actions in Balata? The article was about the one invasion, not the history of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.

The premise of Nulman’s article is problematic at best. What he is really saying is that he does not want people outside of Israel to read the details of what his state’s army does to Palestinians. The international and US media do not pay attention to the dignity or human rights of refugees in Balata, and so it must be shocking for him to read about their humanity in the pages of a Bard newspaper. Shocking and, clearly, disconcerting. But there is a way for him to address what he sees as biased journalism.

If Nulman seeks what he imagines is journalistic ‘balance,’ he should cease writing ill-informed and interested attack op-eds and instead write a news piece about how Israelis suffer from Palestinian repression. (I would, frankly, love to find out how he thinks that works. Is it all the American aid for building and expanding settlements? Is it the unwavering support for Israel in the UN that results in US vetoes of each and every resolution condemning Israeli atrocities in the territories? Or is it ‘shoot and cry’ syndrome, which sends young Israeli boys to India for a few months or years of opium and hashish smoking after they have ‘suffered’ so dreadfully killing Palestinian children and controlling Palestinian life at checkpoints and in watchtowers? Suicide bombings are indeed terrible and terroristic, but to compare or attempt to equate the stifling terror of life under colonization and occupation to Israeli experience goes far beyond chutzpah.)

Nulman’s specific criticisms of the article are equally difficult to digest. To support his first claim, that the Israeli army is not arbitrarily and intentionally cruel, he argues that Palestinian fighters ‘intentionally attack from within densely populated areas, so as to cynically use their own people as a human shield.’ I would ask Mr. Nulman, who obviously has no idea of what he speaks, where he would prefer the Palestinian fighter to attack from.

Would he prefer that the fighter attempt to leave his community while it is under full-scale attack by Israeli soldiers armed with jeeps, tanks and helicopters? He certainly does not support bringing the battle to his home turf, as he would most assuredly undergo shock and horror if Palestinian fighters were to begin shooting at soldiers in the streets of Yaffa---the now-Israeli town Balata refugees fled during the 1947-48 nakbe (catastrophe), never to return. Checkpoints, Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, and surveillance make travel near impossible for Palestinians---and particularly so for fighters.

So where, Mr. Nulman, would you prefer the Palestinians fight their occupiers? Balata is an open-air prison, contained and surveilled by Israel. There is no other place for them to fight when Israel attacks their homes. The very fact of Balata’s forced isolation demolishes Nulman’s second objection to my article: that it is ‘written in a vacuum.’ The vacuum he perceptively identifies but misguidedly theorizes would not exist were it not for the occupation. It is a biting paradox that he find himself displeased with a report from within the Israeli-produced vacuum.

Nulman further defends the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) by citing the odious claim that Palestinians use ambulances for smuggling weapons and fighters. The Israeli army has said this numerous times, and numerous times has been found to have fabricated images and lied about it. (One example is the infamous ‘stretcher-as-rocket’ photograph.) Nulman also bemoans suicide bombers who disguise themselves as women. He writes that ‘these cynical exploitations of human decency beg for the use of extreme measures.’ ‘How,’ he writes, do I ‘expect the IDF to react?’ How Nulman can even approach writing about Palestinians exploiting the human decency of their relentless occupiers it is hard for me to imagine---or take seriously.

As the foreign, occupying power Israel is expected, under international law, to respect the rights of Palestinians as an occupied people. The state does not. The Palestinians have the legal right, enshrined in numerous international laws to which Israel is a signatory, to resist Israeli military occupation. The Israelis have deliberately and with great vigor crushed any Palestinian attempts to do so, even non-violently.

Do you remember, Mr. Nulman, the first Palesitnian intifada, back when you were a small boy? During this first mass uprising against Israeli occupation, Palestinians organized tax revolts and demonstrated non-violently, using stones and community gardens to fight against the American-bankrolled, Israeli war machine. In response to the largely non-violent resistance, then Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered his troops to use an ‘iron fist’ and to ‘break their bones.’

The command was not intended or interpreted as figurative language: Israeli soldiers systematically used rocks and the butts of their guns to break the bones of Palestinians who were caught throwing stones or participating in demonstrations. There is a generation of Palestinians who have deformed hands, arms and legs as a result of Rabin’s order and individual soldiers’ compliance. The Israeli army, as well as the larger Israeli society, have a highly developed culture that demands a dehumanization of the Palestinians in order to justify expelling, brutalizing and colonizing them. Nulman is practicing wishful thinking to suggest that such racist and dehumanizing treatment, this very culture of violence and humiliation, has faded in the Israeli military or society.

If he or anyone else needs further proof of this culture of arbitrary and indiscriminate violence against Palestinian civilians, he should read about how Palestinian political prisoners are treated in Israeli torture dens. Cathertine Cook’s book Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children makes for particularly disconcerting reading. There is, woefully, plenty more like it.

Finally, Nulman asserts that my article implied that Israel’s violence against Palestinians is arbitrary and indiscriminate. I did nothing but report what happened and what happens frequently in Balata. If such reportage suggests to Nulman that Israel’s policies in the territories are arbitrarily and indiscriminately violent, he should do more as a citizen of the offending state to stop them. He certainly needs to stop wasting his time chastising those on the outside who bother to pay attention to what Israel does with American money. The article I wrote on Balata was not meant to solve the conflict. I wrote it to inform Bard students about a particularly grotesque articulation of Israeli policy in the territories. I am sorry, Mr. Nulman, for you and for your nation, if you do not appreciate my airing the details.

Balata camp invaded

The Israeli army, backed with Apache attack helicopters, tanks and jeeps, invaded the Balata refugee camp at 1:00 am on February 19, 2006. The invasion was the largest and most serious the dense refugee camp has endured in the past two years. The attack began with Israeli soldiers announcing a curfew. In the occupied West Bank, ‘curfew’ means that no one can leave their home at all, not simply that they must stay inside after a given hour. Curfew is constant, and makes emergency medical work and other vital services, as well as simply living, difficult to impossible.

All entrances to Balata were immediately blocked by the army, on some streets by tanks or jeeps and on others by hastily constructed roadblocks, or mounds of earth and trash. One ambulance was trapped inside the camp, and it was able to bring wounded only to the edge of the camp, where people on stretchers were moved to another ambulance. The medical workers did not drive the ambulance out of the camp for fear that the army would prevent them from returning. According to an international volunteer press release, “normal ambulance traffic came to a complete halt.”

International volunteers worked with Palestinian medical personnel to get wounded civilians to an emergency field clinic set up inside the camp and to hospitals in Nablus and nearby cities. The following incidents were witnessed and reported by international volunteers working with the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) and confirmed by the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). These incidents took place during the first day of the invasion; that first day, over 80 people were injured and four killed, most of them civilians and many of them youths.

Two young men were shot dead and over thirty injured in the first hours of the invasion. A group of young men and boys was gathered at the entrance to the camp, attempting to fight off the Israeli attack with rocks. Their rocks were opposing guns, tanks and helicopters. Medical volunteers were called to the site where Mohammed Ahmad Natur and Ibrahim Ahmad Sheikh Khalil had been shot. One had been shot in the neck and the other in the chest. They were later declared dead. The Israeli occupation forces later declared that the two had been planting bombs on Market street. The volunteers who witnessed the murders witnessed no explosions or bomb squads in the area, and the army continued to use the road in question throughout the day. It is thus highly unlikely that there was an actual bomb threat.

The morning of the nineteenth also brought tragedy to a Palestinian family-to-be when an ambulance carrying a woman in complicated labor was attacked by two Israeli army jeeps. The jeeps drove into both sides of the ambulance, preventing it from moving, and then shot at it. The soldiers forced the ambulance to stand still for half an hour, using it as a shield against youth throwing stones. Using ambulances as human shields contravenes numerous international laws.

At 11:15 am, the military attempted to close the UN medical clinic by shooting
warning shots and percussion grenades at it. They also prevented patients
from entering the clinic. The army also closed the UN girls school in the camp, turning it into a temporary military base and bringing in generators and large quantities of water and food.

According to the IWPS press release, at 1:00 pm, “two ambulances were held up by several jeeps. According to the ambulance team they were detained for 30 minutes and someone with a bullet wound in the shoulder was beaten inside one of the ambulance.
The soldiers forced the ambulance personnel to undress his wound, which had just stopped bleeding. The ambulance was held until the family, with the help of the ambulance team and the IWPS volunteers, brought his ID card. After his ID was checked, the ambulance continued its way, only to be stopped by the next jeep on the road.”

The Israeli army’s official spokespeople did not publicly explain the terror inflicted on the people of Balata camp. The army website does not contain any information or even a press release about the invasion, and it has been completely absent from the international media. The invasion would be bad press for Israel were anyone to pay attention. Though one high level al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade activist was arrested during the operation, and three low-level fighters were killed, the most serious impact it had was to remind Balata residents of who has the upper hand in the conflict when it comes to brute violence.

Intimidation and humiliation constitute a large part of Israeli strategy in this regard. The IWPS report further states that “in several instances, soldiers drove through the camps cursing the residents' mothers and sisters in Arabic in what seemed to be an attempt to provoke the youth to throw stones. The volunteers have witnessed no armed resistance, only youth throwing stones and building barricades.”

It seems, too, as if Israel has gotten over its fear of wounding or murdering international peace volunteers. The murders of American activist Rachel Corrie and British photographer Tom Hurndall in 2003 braced the Israeli state and garnered the army significant negative media attention throughout Europe and other parts of the world outside of the United States. Israel’s renewed arrogance and fearlessness may be a result of the media spotlight on the recent Hamas electoral victory, and the resulting obfuscation of Israel’s acts on the ground in occupied territory.

What emerges in the shadows of this media spotlight is horrifying. A Dutch medical volunteer was one of four injured volunters, two Palestinian and two international, who were attacked by Israeli soldiers as they stood trapped between a building and a military jeep at the height of the reinvasion’s intensity on February 23rd during one of many inexplicable attacks. The building they were standing in front of had been set afire by the Israeli army, and the army prevented fire rescue teams from approaching it because they said they intended to set off more bombs inside it.

The press release describes the scene: “ At 2:00 without any warning shots [the medical volunteers] were fired at and a grenade was thrown at them from around the corner. According to the volunteers the shooting came from the direction of the alleyway where the Israeli soldiers were. A twenty two year old American student was wounded by shrapnel in the hand a twenty nine year old Dutch volunteer was wounded by shrapnel in the thigh and shoulder, Jirar Candola an ambulance driver with the UPMRC was shot in the arm and leg and Ihab Mansour, a medical volunteer working with the Palestinian scientific society, was shot in the head and taken away by the Israeli soldiers.”

"We were standing in the alley way, everything was quite when suddenly without warning we heard a big explosion and heard gun shots. I then saw Jarar and Ihab liying on the floor. Ihab wasn't moving,” said the wounded Dutch volunteer.

The rest of the day witnessed the deaths of more innocents. “19 year-old Ibrahim Saadi was shot dead while throwing a stone at the Israeli armored jeeps. 20 year-old Naim Abu Sarif was shot dead by a sniper while standing on the roof of his house.” Five camp residents were wounded on the 23rd, including a 36 year-old taxi driver who nearly died due to bullet wounds to his head and shoulder.

After blowing up the house that they had lit aflame, Israeli soldiers withdrew from the camp in the early evening, leaving behind them a trail of destruction, trash, damaged water and electricity infrastructure and indescribable human suffering.

An International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer wrote of the funeral of two of the young men who were shot dead by Israeli forces, “That morning we watched the funeral procession of Ibrahim and Naim from a roof and when I saw those kid’s faces it was time for a long overdue cry. They were so young, so beautiful and I can’t get their faces out of my head.”

In the hours following the invasion, a local Palestinian ISM coordinator was kidnapped by the Israeli secret service. He was tortured in his three hour interrogation, during which he was accused of having connections to ‘terrorists’. The ISM is committed to non-violence in word and deed.

For more information on the Balata invasion, see www.balatacamp.net.

balata invaded

The Israeli army, backed with Apache attack helicopters, tanks and jeeps, invaded the Balata refugee camp at 1:00 am on February 19, 2006. The invasion was the largest and most serious the dense refugee camp has endured in the past two years. The attack began with Israeli soldiers announcing a curfew. In the occupied West Bank, ‘curfew’ means that no one can leave their home at all, not simply that they must stay inside after a given hour. Curfew is constant, and makes emergency medical work and other vital services, as well as simply living, difficult to impossible.

All entrances to Balata were immediately blocked by the army, on some streets by tanks or jeeps and on others by hastily constructed roadblocks, or mounds of earth and trash. One ambulance was trapped inside the camp, and it was able to bring wounded only to the edge of the camp, where people on stretchers were moved to another ambulance. The medical workers did not drive the ambulance out of the camp for fear that the army would prevent them from returning. According to an international volunteer press release, “normal ambulance traffic came to a complete halt.”

International volunteers worked with Palestinian medical personnel to get wounded civilians to an emergency field clinic set up inside the camp and to hospitals in Nablus and nearby cities. The following incidents were witnessed and reported by international volunteers working with the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) and confirmed by the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). These incidents took place during the first day of the invasion; that first day, over 80 people were injured and four killed, most of them civilians and many of them youths.

Two young men were shot dead and over thirty injured in the first hours of the invasion. A group of young men and boys was gathered at the entrance to the camp, attempting to fight off the Israeli attack with rocks. Their rocks were opposing guns, tanks and helicopters. Medical volunteers were called to the site where Mohammed Ahmad Natur and Ibrahim Ahmad Sheikh Khalil had been shot. One had been shot in the neck and the other in the chest. They were later declared dead. The Israeli occupation forces later declared that the two had been planting bombs on Market street. The volunteers who witnessed the murders witnessed no explosions or bomb squads in the area, and the army continued to use the road in question throughout the day. It is thus highly unlikely that there was an actual bomb threat.

The morning of the nineteenth also brought tragedy to a Palestinian family-to-be when an ambulance carrying a woman in complicated labor was attacked by two Israeli army jeeps. The jeeps drove into both sides of the ambulance, preventing it from moving, and then shot at it. The soldiers forced the ambulance to stand still for half an hour, using it as a shield against youth throwing stones. Using ambulances as human shields contravenes numerous international laws.

At 11:15 am, the military attempted to close the UN medical clinic by shooting
warning shots and percussion grenades at it. They also prevented patients
from entering the clinic. The army also closed the UN girls school in the camp, turning it into a temporary military base and bringing in generators and large quantities of water and food.

According to the IWPS press release, at 1:00 pm, “two ambulances were held up by several jeeps. According to the ambulance team they were detained for 30 minutes and someone with a bullet wound in the shoulder was beaten inside one of the ambulance.
The soldiers forced the ambulance personnel to undress his wound, which had just stopped bleeding. The ambulance was held until the family, with the help of the ambulance team and the IWPS volunteers, brought his ID card. After his ID was checked, the ambulance continued its way, only to be stopped by the next jeep on the road.”

The Israeli army’s official spokespeople did not publicly explain the terror inflicted on the people of Balata camp. The army website does not contain any information or even a press release about the invasion, and it has been completely absent from the international media. The invasion would be bad press for Israel were anyone to pay attention. Though one high level al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade activist was arrested during the operation, and three low-level fighters were killed, the most serious impact it had was to remind Balata residents of who has the upper hand in the conflict when it comes to brute violence.

Intimidation and humiliation constitute a large part of Israeli strategy in this regard. The IWPS report further states that “in several instances, soldiers drove through the camps cursing the residents' mothers and sisters in Arabic in what seemed to be an attempt to provoke the youth to throw stones. The volunteers have witnessed no armed resistance, only youth throwing stones and building barricades.”

It seems, too, as if Israel has gotten over its fear of wounding or murdering international peace volunteers. The murders of American activist Rachel Corrie and British photographer Tom Hurndall in 2003 braced the Israeli state and garnered the army significant negative media attention throughout Europe and other parts of the world outside of the United States. Israel’s renewed arrogance and fearlessness may be a result of the media spotlight on the recent Hamas electoral victory, and the resulting obfuscation of Israel’s acts on the ground in occupied territory.

What emerges in the shadows of this media spotlight is horrifying. A Dutch medical volunteer was one of four injured volunters, two Palestinian and two international, who were attacked by Israeli soldiers as they stood trapped between a building and a military jeep at the height of the reinvasion’s intensity on February 23rd during one of many inexplicable attacks. The building they were standing in front of had been set afire by the Israeli army, and the army prevented fire rescue teams from approaching it because they said they intended to set off more bombs inside it.

The press release describes the scene: “ At 2:00 without any warning shots [the medical volunteers] were fired at and a grenade was thrown at them from around the corner. According to the volunteers the shooting came from the direction of the alleyway where the Israeli soldiers were. A twenty two year old American student was wounded by shrapnel in the hand a twenty nine year old Dutch volunteer was wounded by shrapnel in the thigh and shoulder, Jirar Candola an ambulance driver with the UPMRC was shot in the arm and leg and Ihab Mansour, a medical volunteer working with the Palestinian scientific society, was shot in the head and taken away by the Israeli soldiers.”

"We were standing in the alley way, everything was quite when suddenly without warning we heard a big explosion and heard gun shots. I then saw Jarar and Ihab liying on the floor. Ihab wasn't moving,” said the wounded Dutch volunteer.

The rest of the day witnessed the deaths of more innocents. “19 year-old Ibrahim Saadi was shot dead while throwing a stone at the Israeli armored jeeps. 20 year-old Naim Abu Sarif was shot dead by a sniper while standing on the roof of his house.” Five camp residents were wounded on the 23rd, including a 36 year-old taxi driver who nearly died due to bullet wounds to his head and shoulder.

After blowing up the house that they had lit aflame, Israeli soldiers withdrew from the camp in the early evening, leaving behind them a trail of destruction, trash, damaged water and electricity infrastructure and indescribable human suffering.

An International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer wrote of the funeral of two of the young men who were shot dead by Israeli forces, “That morning we watched the funeral procession of Ibrahim and Naim from a roof and when I saw those kid’s faces it was time for a long overdue cry. They were so young, so beautiful and I can’t get their faces out of my head.”

In the hours following the invasion, a local Palestinian ISM coordinator was kidnapped by the Israeli secret service. He was tortured in his three hour interrogation, during which he was accused of having connections to ‘terrorists’. The ISM is committed to non-violence in word and deed.

For more information on the Balata invasion, see www.balatacamp.net.

always welcome

Security and Honor

Last night I couldn't sleep. After spending a good part of the week brewing in illness in my Jerusalem bed, a sudden glimpse of normal health encouraged me to stay up late. Tossing and turning in the uncomfortable bunk bed, unable to turn on the light to read, and in a reflective mood having recently regained my ability to think clearly, I became obsessed with the idea that Palestinians and Israelis speak a similar language of bullshit. These languages are, of course, at a certain level intrinsically opposed to the other, but they nonetheless almost mirror one another in other ways.

The two words that came to mind were 'security' and 'honor'. Many men, it seems, both Palestinian and Israeli, have succeeded in creating a situation wherein they can do anything they want and be justified in their respective societies if the missions are declared as defenses of the security of Israel or the honor of Palestinians. Unfortunately, in both cases, women are entirely forgotten, and, like most women in in the world, suffer most due to the difficult political, economic and even cultural situations.

Of course Israel and Palestine are microcosms of many of the world's problems. Both of these rhetorics are employed at the expense of most people in other countries, as well---indeed in most. Everything here seems crystallized, though. The density of these problems---both theoretically and geographically---is part of what interests me so much about Palestine.

Anyway I think it's a good way to understand the deadlock here. Palestinians, women and men, have very legitimate moral claims to an end to the occupation, the removal of settlements, and the right of their refugees to return (or to more than reasonable financial compensation for their losses). But this judgement should in no way make impossible criticism of the movements in the region. One of the biggest problems in Palestinian society, as I see things, is the particular form of male domination that has become deeply entrenched since the first intifada, only growing stronger in the second. I think the deepening conservativism has helped Palestinians stay a closely knit community---no doubt an important task under a typical divide and conquer military dictatorship. But it is also in certain respects what is holding Palestinians back from breaking the chains of the occupation. In no way am I making claims that Palestinian society must mirror that of 'the West'; there are huge cultural differences in terms of naming and identification that in no way allow for (even ignorant) criticisms made of the mythical 'backward' Arab society.

I'll provide an example, to illustrate the importance of considering real cultural difference---importantly, a notion that does not necessarily connote cultural relativism. It comes from an interesting conversation I recently had with Islah Jad, Professor of Women's Studies at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah.

Many of those reading this blog have probably seen the film I just finished about the queer Palestinian group 'Aswat'. Islah Jad's daughter and I go to school together, and I visited them for a few days last week. Anyway I was about to show my friend the film when her mother came into the room. Having never showed the film to any Palestinians, I was a bit nervous. Luckily, any fear was overwhelmed by my curiosity. What would this extremely intelligent, in touch, lefty, feminist woman have to say? Her critique was like a wet dream for a filmmaker: informed, intelligent and honest. Though I think she misinterpreted parts of my role in the construction of the film, her argument was precisely what I had been seeking.

Her response was well crafted. First she suggested that I read Joseph Massad's article 'Re-orienting Desire', on what he calls the 'Gay Internationale' and their misguided interference with sexual politics in the Arab and Muslim worlds. (You should read it if you get a chance...look it up on google.) The argument is basically Foucauldian in the sense that Massad suggests the insistence on naming sexuality, on calling same sex activity 'homosexuality', is not only culturally explicit and non-existant in the cultures under the microscope, but also detrimental to the 'cause' of helping people live decent lives. The message is essentially that gay rights activists, their language and culture of activism, has no place in Arab and Muslim culture and actually make life worse for the people these groups claim to work to 'liberate'.

My friend's mother in Ramallah gave me the following example: two women she has known for many years in Ramallah are lesbians and live together. According to Professor Jad, everyone in the town knows that they live together and no one bothers them. Indeed, they are pediatricians, people upon whom residents shower admiration and respect.

If, she continued, these women were to suddenly go public with their sexuality they would be banished. Why? The many Palestinian women in the room during the discussion were adament that the reason has little to do with Palestinian opinions on homosexuality. They suggested such resistance to naming simply because people, all people, do not talk about their sexuality in public. It's not something that happens.

Anyway I've a bit mixed up Islah Jad and her daughter's arguments with those of Joseph Massad but you get the idea. The point of telling the story is to demonstrate that no society, and particularly Palestinian society from an American Christian perspective, can be judged from the outside in a way that makes sense upon first---or even second, third, or fourth---thought.

However, and back to the original point, the relations between men and women in Palestine are decidedly unfair, with men taking almost total control of the task of setting parameters for resistance against the occupation. I don't think I have to explain more about how Israel uses 'security' as a pretext for just about everything.

An interesting example is that both Palestinian and Israeli men have problems with young Palestinian women travelling to Europe to go on speaking tours. Many Palestinian men in Balata won't allow their daughters or neices or sisters to travel due to the damage to the family's honor a trip to liberal Europe may cause. The Israelis justify the denial of these women's legitimate political and personal desires due to 'security' concerns. 'Honor' is the word of the day, just as in Israel, and more so lately in America, the word 'security' squashes legitimate debate in much of the public sphere.

One of my friends, who spent a year in Israeli prison at the age of 19, may not be able to travel with the rest of the dance and drama group because her cousin saw her speaking to a boy at her university, caused a family scandal, and got her in trouble with her father. Unfortunately these futile grabs at what power men can muster often deaden the liberation movement.

---

Tomorrow I'm back to Balata to see some friends before heading home. Finally feeling better, but quite pissed off about wasting four days of this too short trip.

Week in Review

The past week has been an interesting one. Since I last wrote my two friends have been deported; one of them was kept only overnight in prison and then sent home, the other couldn't get a plane ticket for almost a week. I've come down with a mysterious illness that has kept me in bed for the past few days. I hope very much that it will go away soon.

Last Friday I travelled to Ramallah to visit with a friend and stay with her family for the weekend. It was a crazy experience. Most of my time in Palestine over the years has been spent in Nablus, in the Balata camp. Life there is hard but in many ways beautiful. The closeness of the community is something I have never witnessed before, as is the strict adherence to conservative social mores. These regulations are wide ranging and must be taken seriously. In all my time in Palestine I've hardly ever worn a short sleeved shirt. That is, until I experienced the 'other' side of Palestine, wealthy Ramallah.

I arrived in the cultural capital of Palestine sometime mid-afternoon on Friday and called Yasmine's house in order to get directions. Instead of giving me exact directions her mother directed me to the Friend's Boys School. She said she'd pick me up there. Just a short walk from the center of the city, I waited a while until she arrived. In a brand new Audi, without a head covering, wearing short sleeves. A new world, I thought. I am about to enter a new world.

Their house is incredibly beautiful. Built in 1928 and recently remodeled, there are enough rooms for all three children to have their own space---something I have never encountered in Palestine. Of course the country is like every other--there are wealthy and destitute, the comfortable and the cramped. I was and continue to be so shocked by the disparity; travelling to Ramallah and experiencing this 'other side' of Palestine reinforces my belief in the refugee's rights to return to their lands or to be granted compensation. A refugee camp, though a symbol of resistance and survival, is no place to make one's home.

Yasmine wasn't around when I got there. According to her sister, who could have been dressed for a night out in Paris, she was at the pool. The pool? 'By the way', her sister said, 'why are you wearing long sleeves? It's fucking hot outside.' My weekend was only to become more strange.

We arrived at the Grand Park Hotel in the wealthiest neighborhood of Ramallah and I found a scene that looked more like Florida than the Palestine I thought I knew. Men and women half naked, in bikinis, drinking beer and lounging on the deck of a beautiful pool. People swimming together. I was experiencing such culture shock that it took me a full hour to get used to the idea of taking my shirt off in front of so many people.

Anyway the rest of the weekend was spent doing entirely bourgeosie things like eating in fancy restaurants, drinking coffee in expensive cafes, and seeing films at various cultural societies who were participating in the Arab Film Festival.

More on that later.

But first, check out this story about the fighters from Balata:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/45A17A5A-34D8-4488-9226-21FB59C93237.htm

Always holding it down. The PA has done and will do little for the people there, and they know it. You can always count on Balata to demonstrate to the world what's really going on...