Hi Folks,
In the
past week since I left, it’s been hard to sit down and put
together some thoughts, since new experiences keep happening.
Here are a few.
The volunteers
for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who showed up
in Jerusalem last weekend were guided to Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem,
for a day of training on Monday. We spent the next day and a half
working intensively through Palestinian history, operations of
the ISM, principles of non-violence, role-plays, cultural sensitivity,
and much more. We met in Bethlehem with a member of the Applied
Research Institute of Jerusalem, who shared with us detailed demographic
and geographic information on the occupation, complete with satellite
photos. For a good web site with maps and other very useful documentation,
see www.arij.org.
We were
17: Americans, Swedes, Brits, an Italian, and a Dane. Around 5
Jews. Towards the end of the training we quickly formed into affinity
groups, trying in a short time to sort out commonality of temperament
and level of engagement. There were some who seemed, as one person
said, “ferociously courageous,” and others who wanted
to ease into the work.
Possible
ongoing activities of the movement (we were told it’s not
an organization) include checkpoint watching, house-sitting at
homes threatened with demolition, ambulance accompaniment, and
“breaking curfew.” The small affinity group that I
joined was sent to Deheishe camp, near Bethlehem. Here, we have
been sleeping in a house that has been threatened with demolition.
Sometimes houses are demolished in order to make way for Israeli
settlements or bypass roads; other times because they were built
without permit (as are many Palestinian homes, since permits are
almost impossible to get), and other times because someone in
the family, or related to the family, or living near it, committed
a suicide bombing or other kind of attack.
The latter
was the case with this house. A 17-year-old girl, daughter of
the family, set off a bomb in a Jerusalem market, killing around
15 people including herself. The fact that we were to protect
the family of a suicide bomber from collective punishment caused
enough conflict for
some of the people in my group that they withdrew and went elsewhere.
For me there was no conflict, however, because the family did
nothing to deserve punishment. They did not even know she was
planning the act, and learned about it from a television report.
And after it happened, the father and the girl’s fiancé
both made strong public statements
against attacks that hurt civilians.
We arrived
here Tuesday evening and were given a tour around the camp. It’s
on a hill off the main road out of Bethlehem. Deheishe was set
up by the U.N. in 1948 for Palestinian refugees from the newly
created state of Israel. The father of my family was born on the
road as his
family was fleeing from Ramle.
It happens
that I was in this camp in 1990, when I last visited Palestine
and Israel. Then, during the first Intifada, there were two high
fences around the camp, blocking off all but one entrance. On
the outer fence,
someone had spray-painted in Hebrew, “It’s Cheaper
to Kill Them.” The fences were removed after Oslo, when
Deheishe became part of the Palestinian-controlled area.
We walked
around the camp, through the narrow winding streets and alleys,
up the hills, passing cinder-block and mortar houses, some poor,
some wealthier. Most of the walls had graffiti in Arabic, and
many of them had posters with photos of people who had been killed
by the army. Some
were of people who had died while committing suicide attacks.
There was one older man who had been shot 36 times by soldiers
while he was coming back from the grocery store.
We were
met warmly by the family, and sat up until midnight introducing
ourselves and drinking tea. The house has been stripped of almost
all furniture, doors, and windows, in anticipation of the demolition.
We sat on plastic chairs, and slept on mats on the floors. The
house adjoins one other, and there are several others nearby,
across a ten-foot alley. If it is bombed, all the neighboring
houses will be damaged as well.
Before
going to bed we made a plan in case the army showed up. They come
in the middle of the night and give you a few minutes to get out,
then they set up dynamite. We are here because we are aware that
the army prefers that these things not be revealed to the outer
world, and if foreign observers are present, they are less likely
to come. I was
told that the army knows we are here, and won’t come as
long as we remain. We are at least the second group that has been
staying at the house.
As we
talked, we got an earful of information on how people are living.
The frustration expressed was intense, talking about people’s
inability to go to school or work, to make progress in their lives,
to plan anything at all. One man told us that of his 5 brothers,
two were in jail. He said, “I like to laugh. Maybe I will
laugh for a half hour, and cry the rest of the day.” Almost
all of his friends, he said, were either dead or in prison.
This
is just a minuscule portion of the woes we have heard about in
a short time. I will share in more detail when I get home.
We took
a look at a house that had been demolished. The family is now
living nearby, under a tent without sides. They had a few plastic
chairs, and served us coffee. They were also originally from the
Ramle area. The army came in the middle of the night, and they
had time to dress and grab their baby. The army outdid itself,
and when the house was blown up, the impact was felt at least
a half mile away. A fierce blast of wind reached all the way up
to the house I’m staying in, and rubble landed on the roof.
The house
was a sturdy new three-story building. The family had saved to
build it for twenty years. They only moved in three months ago.
Now it is a pile of rubble, like a thousand I have seen in Bosnia.
The blast was so strong that it blew a metal door 100 feet, to
a neighboring
house, and the door made a 1.5-foot hole all the way through the
concrete wall. This all happened less than a week ago. When we
arrived, the door frame was still hanging there, horizontal, stuck
into the concrete wall.
There
were dead chickens around the yard of the wrecked house. The floors
had mostly collapsed onto each other. Oddly, one bathroom door
survived, its mirror intact.
Today
as I was walking down to the Ibdaa community center (see www.dheisheh-ibdaa.net
-- it’s the only cultural center/hostel/internet lab of
its kind in a refugee camp), I noticed that the main street was
empty. At 8:30 a.m. there was already a curfew. I was told, “Forget
about today.” I had been planning to visit Bethlehem, but
no one was going anywhere.
We sat
around Ibdaa talking to visiting Italians and Palestinian-Canadians.
Suddenly there was the rumble of a very loud engine right outside
our window. It was an APC – an armored personnel carrier
full of Israeli soldiers. It looks like a small tank, only it
has wheels instead of tracks. The APC backed up and went into
the street. For the next hour it drove back and forth, going up
side streets and returning. At times several soldiers would get
out and march alongside. After a while, a tank showed up too.
One brave Palestinian man stood out on the street and filmed the
APC. After a while it left, but not without briefly detaining
and questioning an adventuresome Italian. The rest of us tried
to watch, while keeping out of the way.
When
we headed to Deheishe, we were told that “Bethlehem is Occupation
Lite.” That may be true, but what I’ve seen already
is bad enough to make me feel very angry and sad, and apparently
enough to make the people who have to live with it their whole
lives desperate.
Yours,
Peter
