NABLUS,
West Bank, July 5 –
At the entrance to the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, the sight
of rubble, the smell of rotting meat, and piles of burnt trash
are apparent. Emptied shops – resulting either from bombing
or from severe economic strangulation – are in abundance.
And there are posters of suicide bombers on nearly every surface
of this war-weary city.
Nablus
has been under almost constant curfew for the past 16 days. The
violence has lately been limited to a recent assassination of
a local Hamas leader, but more is almost certainly coming. The
mood is one of torturous suspension, as Palestinians wait out
the military occupation in anticipation of further assaults. Sporadic
tank fire throughout the night has kept residents in a state of
terror and sleeplessness.
The economy
here is at a standstill; businesses are both blockaded from the
outside and kept shuttered by the threat of Israeli military violence.
Schools are closed; children play in the street within a safe
distance from their homes.
Today,
approximately 50 Palestinians, joined by a nearly equal number
of international solidarity activists, defied the curfew in a
public march through the Old City to demand that the UN intervene
to enforce international resolutions calling for an end to the
occupation. The illegal, nonviolent march was headed by local
women, and accompanied by internationals whose presence was intended
to keep Israeli soldiers from firing into the crowd. Women from
Working Women's Committee, Fatah, and the Union of Palestinian
Medical Relief Workers (UPMRC) initiated the march with the support
of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
The women
marched through the densely-packed casbah – the site of
a thriving, illegal (under this occupation) commerce of produce
– chanting an emotional declaration in Arabic: "This
is our land and we are here. These people will not surrender.
With our blood and with our spirit, we will build Palestine."
Palestinian
men in their middle years watched with weary interest. The organizers
had debated whether to make the full march to UN headquarters
outside of the relative safety of the Old City. In the end, locals
and internationals marched the full route without confrontation
from the Israeli military.
Palestinians
in Nablus are elated by the presence of the internationals –
as attested by friendly horn blasts from passing ambulances, and
by children who ran up to the smashed entrances of their homes
to wave excitedly and practice English greetings. It is not the
official international force that Palestinians have been demanding
for the past 35 years, but this patchwork of volunteer medical
workers, independent human rights observers, and nonviolent intervention
teams is at least a validation from the outside world of the ongoing
suffering experienced here.
Outside
of the UPMRC headquarters, two adolescent boys presented ISM activists
with shrapnel from bombs dropped from F-16 fighter jets that destroyed
Palestinian Authority (PA) administrative buildings in April.
"Look," one of the boys pleaded to anyone who stopped.
"Look." The Ministry of Agriculture, which had formerly
been used to jail Hamas militants, is in shambles, a giant gaping
hole blown through one corner and pierced by machinegun fire over
nearly every foot of its outer wall. Now, it is abandoned, along
with every other Palestinian Authority facility. This destruction
is courtesy of Lockheed Martin, which rolls F-16s off its assembly
lines at its sprawling plant outside of Fort Worth, Tex., drawing
profits of over $2 billion per year.
The desperate
intensity of outreach to Western Europe and the United States
is embodied by a young Palestinian woman, Ansam, whose entreaty
to several internationals at the march was simply: "Go back
to your country and tell them." When asked what she thought
about the United States' complicated role in the conflict, she
replied, "You should be with us." To an American ISM
activist, she confessed, "I have no hope for the future.
I don't want to live anymore. There must be a better place than
this."
The phenomenon
of "martyrdom" is in stark evidence here, and in fact
ISM activists are staying with the families of suicide bombers
to ward off retaliation by the Israeli military. But the march
today was part of a nonviolent strategy of resistance –
a long tradition in the Palestinian movement. The right to resist
occupation through armed struggle is enshrined by the 1949 4th
Geneva Convention, but the question haunts organizers: what is
a credible resistance that will convince Israel to desist, and
what actions of resistance will allow reconciliation between Jews
and Palestinians after the occupation ends?
"You
see that we are not terrorists," says a field coordinator
for the UPMRC. "We want to live in peace. These men,"
she says, gesturing towards a wall of martyr posters, "don't
carry out suicide bombings because they are naturally violent;
it is because they have lost hope."
With
the internationals labeled "supporters" of terror by
the Israeli Interior Ministry, the issue of use of force is a
sensitive one. Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American who is a
local coordinator of ISM based in Ramallah, confronts the charge
head on: "As a movement we do not agree with the suicide
bombing operations or any violence against civilians or non-combatants,
but we stand behind the Palestinian right to armed struggle. We
don't criticize it, but ours is a nonviolent movement."
The suicide
bombings, in fact, have crept in to fill the vacuum of real power
in Palestinian society. "Sadly," says Arraf, "the
resistance among Palestinians is less than what we conceived last
December."
"Since
Jenin," Arraf continues, "Palestinians believe that
in a massive march against the checkpoints they will just be gunned
down” -- with no accountability whatsoever from the Israeli
government. The local Palestinian leaders make the decisions,
she stresses, but "with internationals there, we've seen
a reduction of Israeli military violence – and we've seen
increased international media coverage."
