Dear
fellow conspirators, troublemakers, and lovers of justice,
I want to offer a glimpse of the reality
on the ground of the West Bank that is so rarely conveyed by the
U.S. media. I stayed for a week in Beit Ummar, a small farming
community outside of Hebron. What I saw confirms the UN reports
that this is a low-intensity war against a largely defenseless,
unarmed population. There are “martyr” posters in
abundance in Beit Ummar, but they are not of young men who strapped
bombs to their chests and blew themselves up in Israeli marketplaces;
in fact, they are men and
boys who were shot at point blank range by Israeli soldiers for
walking home from work on settler bypass roads or for violating
curfews.
In the space of a week, we experienced two Israeli military operations,
in which the
military came through town just before dark in jeeps and armored
personnel carriers, shooting into the air. These operations have
no point except in intimidating (I won’t use the word “terrorizing,”
though it comes to mind) the local residents. The response from
the children is to fling rocks at the jeeps. Then the soldiers
respond by shooting teargas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition.
We never witnessed Palestinian militias firing back at the soldiers.
There is no Palestinian armed presence capable of engaging the
Israeli military here or in most other West Bank towns. We watched
a Palestinian shopkeeper get beaten mercilessly by soldiers. When
they were through for the night, people showed us where their
windows had been shot out, when water tanks had been punctured
and electrical lines shot down. This is a regular occurrence for
the people in Beit Ummar, and identical scenarios have been observed
by other internationals throughout the West Bank.
To add to this absurdity, there is no sign
of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. While our
president is so arrogantly insisting that the PA institute “democratic
reforms” and depose its leader, the PA headquarters in every
major West Bank town have been leveled by American-made F-16 fighter
jets. Fatah in Gaza, we’re told by internationals there,
carries around rusty rifles with no bullets.
The Palestinian suicide bombers do inflict
horrific casualties on Israeli civilians, who should not be the
target of military attacks, and unfortunately there are many,
many more Palestinians who are willing to sacrifice their lives
in these attacks. We talked to a young woman, Ansam, in Nablus,
who told us, “Once I wanted to be a doctor, but now I cannot
leave my home to go study. I have nothing to live for. I do not
want to live this life anymore.” Her consideration of martyrdom
was implicit.
We saw that there was good reason for this
hopelessness, not only in places like Nablus which are under nearly
constant curfew and have been heavily bombed, but in places where
like Beit Ummar, where young men we befriended were shot at by
Israeli soldiers trying to cross the bridge into Hebron to take
final exams, and where young men told us of being abducted by
the military, tortured, and pressured to take payments to inform
against other Palestinians.
We’ll continue to hear about suicide
bombing operations, but we don’t hear about the weekly non-violent
marches against the occupation in Nablus and Ramallah, and we
aren’t told that 95 percent of the Palestinian population
is unarmed, and engaged in non-violent resistance to the occupation.
Why don’t we heed their voices, and pressure Israel to end
the 35-year old occupation? Never through the Oslo process did
Israel consider just pulling out of the territories and giving
Palestinians the right to their land and sovereignty. It’s
simple: justice clears a path for peace.
We saw Israel’s territorial expansion
in effect. We accompanied Palestinian farmers from Beit Ummar
whose land near the Jewish settlement of Karmetzur has been declared
a military security zone. They are faced with their property being
fenced in, their plum trees and grape fields being burned, and
their land being handed over to the Jewish settlers. Their recourse
is to apply for a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration
at Kiryat Arba (home of Baruch Goldstein, the settler from Brooklyn
who massacred 29
Muslims at the Ibrahimi Mosque). This is insulting, and a good
way to get killed. The Beit Ummar farmers don’t have the
option of armed defense of their land. Instead, they are discussing
how to use civil disobedience, international presence, and media
coverage to challenge the confiscation. This is painstaking, slow,
community organizing work.
You draw your own conclusions; mine is
that this is a gradual, slow process of ethnic cleansing -- an
attempt to finish the job started in 1948. The Sharon government
cannot wink at the United States and say it sees a future for
a Palestinian state, and continue to expand its settlements.
From what we’ve heard, the process
is very similar across the occupied territories. For instance,
in Gaza, internationals are accompanying Palestinians in trying
to repair a well that is constantly destroyed by the Israeli occupying
army. They need consistent efforts and presence to maintain access
to their water, and ultimately they need to change the
balance of power that allows the Israeli military to ruthlessly
and willfully destroy their community infrastructure.
From my description, the situation may
appear hopeless – and its true that there is a glaring lack
of clear, uncompromising leadership in Palestine that is tied
to a popular base. It’s not though. Palestinians have a
stronger civil society than in most places I’ve been. They
have more professionalism in running their hospitals, schools,
community centers, and local municipalities than you can imagine.
They are actively building their society. And they are determined
in their insistence that they cannot live under military occupation
any longer.
We need
to stay with this struggle in the United States. There is a desperate
need for more Americans to join the International Solidarity Movement
to help organize the civil disobedience campaign for defense of
the land and water, and to keep a grassroots media focus on the
intransigence of the Israeli military. I can’t emphasize
how important this is to the Palestinian people. It is also important
for us to keep educating Americans about the occupation to shift
public opinion away from blind support for Israel; and to keep
pressuring our universities and city councils to divest from Israel,
which is in a position to feel the economic pain.
All
of these actions, taken together, can build a platform for national
liberation.
I've seen all I want to of the theater of the absurd
The
beasts, the judges, the emperor’s hat,
The masks of the Age, the color of the ancient sky,
The palace dancer, the unruly armies
I want to forget them all!
I just want to remember
the dead piled high behind the curtain
-
“Ruba’iyat” by Mahmoud Darwish, national poet
of Palestine
.
