Hello all,
Now that
I am returned and I've read through the hundreds of recent stories
and reports filed by other internationals as well as those of
Palestinians living under occupation, I feel compelled to pass
on a small taste of realities other than those which I myself
witnessed. (I am sending copies of other stories and accounts
to my own email list, but not including them in this posting to
ISM) Because the village in which I spent the bulk of my time
had only the drama of people who hadn't been allowed to work for
more than 4 months, nor bring in food nor any other sort of supplies
except for doing so on foot or with donkeys over a nearby small
mountain, or -- intermittently -- over hellish back roads. Nor
had they been able to receive medical care for the same period
except by making use of the same routes. For the record, the city
of Ramallah from which they were blocked from going to is only
a 30-minute or so, car ride away. But for the past 4+ months,
snipers were posted, ready to shoot anyone attempting to use said
road.
These
conditions were shared by approximately 32 other small villages
in the vicinity and for the first of these 4 months, the curfew
and restriction to their individual villages was nearly complete.
Those who risked travel due to medical necessity included a pregnant
woman who lost her child after going into labor while attempting
to get to Ramallah over the mountain as well as another village
woman, also pregnant and on the verge of labor, who attempted
the same route accompanied by her husband and father in law. Her
husband was shot and killed, her father in law shot and wounded.
My time
spent in Deir Ibzi'a was further made strange or atypical by the
fact that during the week we were there, we heard only minimal
shooting, saw only the occasional military vehicle, heard of only
one unprovoked arrest. In contrast, the villagers had had troops
and tanks and APC's (armored personnel carriers -- huge machines
that look like a tank but have only a machine gun nest atop them
instead of a full-on missile launcher) occupying their village
every single day for the past 130 days. The troops pulled out
on Wednesday, June 26 and we arrived on Friday, June 28.
Despite
the absence of in-their-face harassment, the villagers were freshly
marked by their recent experiences (which only vary by degree
from the many years of their lives preceding the past 4+ months).
They told us stories of villagers murdered, shot and beaten, stories
of soldiers occupying their homes without warning, stories of
soldiers storming the crowded local children's school and threatening
the small children with guns and then tear gassing them. They
told us more stories and more details than I could relate short
of writing an entire book.
Despite
all of this, we were received with an abundance of love and hospitality
and phenomenal beauty of spirit the likes of which I have never,
ever experienced in my entire life. As I read of the horrors and
daily unimaginable abuses witnessed and experienced by others
in the Occupied Territories during only the small snapshot of
time in which I myself was over there, I know that I need to pass
on some of these more graphic and immediate examples of life under
occupation to all of my friends and family who witnessed via my
email postings, a trip that turned into something I did not at
all expect.
I far
more imagined myself encountering the disturbing, violent situations
described in these hundreds of other accounts I've just read through
-- instead I was graced and blessed with a tidal wave of love
in the form of hundreds of children -- children who have been
harassed, tear gassed, lost family members, been prevented from
receiving their educations, seen their parents and elders humiliated
and abused, and are ever more enduring greater and greater privations
as their already endemic poverty is ratcheted up horrible notch
by notch. Children whose future looks to be only one of unimaginable
worsening of conditions.
I met
hundreds of beautiful spirits it would break my heart -- and would
break any feeling human's heart -- to see broken.
Mary
