MCC Palestine Update #32
Once more we send out an update against a backdrop of devastation and mind-numbing, body-scarring violence. "What we are all engaged in," writes Ghassan Andoni, director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples in Beit Sahour, "is: today's revenge for yesterday's shed blood. It seems to be endless. On the eve of his trip to the United States, Mr. Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, referred to the Israeli 'targeted killing operations" which resulted in the death of 13 Palestinians, among them 5 school children, by saying, 'I think we found the way to deal with it [it being Palestinian violence].' Sadly enough tonight he was proven wrong. Today, whoever carried out the Ben-Yehuda Street attack in Jerusalem will say, 'We found the way to deal with it [it being the Israeli occupation},' and he will be proven wrong in the coming few days. And the cycle continues. Shame on us all. Are we happy with being turned into human killing machines?"
Below are three pieces. The first is an advent reflection written by a group of international Christian workers in the occupied territories. The second is a sermon preached by Susan Thomas of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Old City on the first Sunday of advent. The third and final piece describes the travails of schoolchildren from Jenin trying to go home after school at the Catholic school in Zebabdeh village.
1. Advent 2001
“Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
We live in a tumultuous and restless time. The post-September 11th world has left many fearful for their security and uncertain about the future. The words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ have become routine in people’s conversations. Suspicion and doubt about others are becoming all too common.
For those of us living and working in the Holy Land (Israel/Palestine), such fears and uncertainties about the future are not new. We live in a land plagued by injustice and where terror exists in many different forms.
The acts of Palestinian suicide bombers, whether against Israeli civilians or soldiers, are publicly and swiftly identified and condemned as terror by the world community. But, unfortunately, Israeli actions inflicted upon a predominantly unarmed civilian Palestinian population; confiscating land, shelling residential areas and refugee camps, bulldozing agricultural lands, demolishing houses, assassinating political leaders and activists, expanding settlements, torturing political detainees, killing children – are too seldom acknowledged or condemned as the acts of terror they are. For Palestinians living in the Holy Land, this silence by the Israeli and international public compounds the experience of loss and destruction, creating feelings of abandonment, resentment and despair.
To begin to rid the world of violence and terror, we must be willing to name and condemn all their manifold forms. Whether Palestinian or Israeli, American or Afghani, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist, we all yearn to live in a world free of terror, suspicion, injustice, poverty, hunger, oppression and occupation. Only as we strive to lift-up the dignity of every human being and the well being of all creation can we hope to build a world of peace and security.
As we begin the season of Advent, there is no greater need than for us to create such a world. As people who are living in the midst of despair and hopelessness, we know this is no easy task. Yet, the words of Isaiah 40 quoted above provide us with courage to face the hard work ahead, reminding us that the world as we know it will one day be changed and aligned fully with God's will and purpose for all creation.
Advent is a time for Christians to reflect, prepare and anticipate, as we await the return of Christ and celebrate his birth. It is a time for us to get ‘our house in order,’ both personally and as a community. We are called to believe in and strive for God’s reign of justice, mercy and peace on earth as it is in heaven. In this first Advent of the new millennium, there may be no more important task before each of us than to wrestle with what we must do to help bring peace on earth.
In response to the uncertainty in the world following the attacks on 11 September, there appears to be an emphasis on ‘bombing’ our way to security and peace. Here in this land of Palestine/Israel, we have seen the folly of trying to obtain either through just such measures. For us, another prophet of this land calls us to a different way. Is it not through living as the Lord requires – doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with our God – that we bring hope and life to our broken world and obtain true peace and security for all God’s creation?
This Advent, many Palestinians, Internationals and Israelis will join together to end the occupation through acts of non-violent resistance. This Advent, many Christians in the US will join in Ecumenical Prayer Vigils for a just peace in this region. This Advent, many people the world over will ask their elected officials to move beyond empty rhetoric to real acts of solidarity with the outcast, the poor and the oppressed. It is these acts that will fulfill the call to do as the Lord requires. It is these acts that may begin to bring about Peace on Earth. We pray wherever you are in the world, you will find ways to join such movements of God’s spirit in order that ‘the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together….’
Rev. Alex & Brenda Awad
East Jerusalem Baptist Church (GBGM-UMC)
Douglas Dicks
Presbyterian Church (USA)
Partnership Liaison - Jerusalem
Nancy J. Dinsmor
Development Officer
Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem
Dean & Mrs. Ross Jones
St. George's College Jerusalem
Robert May
GBGM – United Methodist Church Worker
Kathi McDonald
Warden, St. George's College Jerusalem
Catherine Nichols,
Edward B. Nyce
Mennonite Central Committee
Rev. Sandra Olewine
United Methodist Liaison – Jerusalem
General Board of Global Ministries
Rev. Michael Thomas & Rev. Susan Thomas
Pastors, English-speaking congregation
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer
Alain and Sonia Epp Weaver
Country Representatives
Mennonite Central Committee
2. Advent 1 2001
Susan Thomas
Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem, 2 December 2001
Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 25:1-7
“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him. Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps...”
Rejoice, rejoice, believers, and let your lights appear;
The evening is advancing, and darker night is near.
The bridegroom is arising and soon is drawing nigh.
Up, pray and watch and wrestle; at midnight comes the cry.
The watchers on the mountain proclaim the bridegroom near.
Go forth as he approaches with alleluias clear.
The marriage feast is waiting; the gates wide open stand.
Arise, O heirs of glory; the bridegroom is at hand.
Matthew 15:8-13
“..The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
The saints, who here in patience their cross and suffrings bore,
Shall live and reign forever when sorrow is no more.
Around the throne of glory the Lamb they shall behold;
In triumph cast before him their diadems of gold.
Our hope and expectation, O Jesus, now appear;
Arise, O Sun so longed for, O¹er this benighted sphere.
With hearts and hands uplifted, we plead, O Lord, to see
The day of earth¹s redemption that sets your people free!
(Laurentius Laurentii 1660-1722)
Gracious and merciful Lord Jesus, you call us to be ready to greet you, not to slide into inattention so that we fail to notice that the oil in our lamps is running low:
Dear Lord, we want you to know that we never again want to be wakened near midnight by the sound of explosions in the midst of the people here. We never again want to join our prayers of lamentation with the wailing of sirens nor wonder whose beloved child is lying wounded or dead on the street once we have checked to see if our own are safely at home.
Dear Lord Jesus, we are tired. Not just sleepy. Tired. We are tired of trying to stay alert. Especially to danger. We are tired of thinking about what is safe, about suspicious backpacks and letters, about suspicious people, about suspicious plans for peace and security. We want to stay alert and pray with you, but we are tired of waiting for you to get here so that we can. We¹re sure that if you came now, back to the gardens of this city, we would welcome you with joy and stay awake and be your steady disciples. If you were here, maybe we could do that. As it is, we grow weary with this waiting and we aren¹t sure we¹ll have enough oil in our lamps to last the night.
Because the evening is advancing, and darker night is near. We just sang about that, in the midst of the exhortation to rejoice. It’s getting late. It’s getting darker and darker here--the evening is surely advancing--and pretty soon no one is going to be able to see a way through.
What is it we are supposed to do? Go into that night singing? How are we to rejoice? How are we to believe? Are you even talking to us when you say, ³Rejoice, rejoice believers?² Is it we who are being addressed? For we don¹t know if we can see well enough in this gathering darkness even to read the words of this song, much less sing them! And our eyes and voices are clogged with weary waiting for something to happen--a cry that you are coming, that dawn is breaking, that swords are being beaten into plowshares, even that Sharon and Arafat are talking to each other and not handing the power over to anyone with a tank, a rifle, or a homemade bomb.
Dear Lord Jesus, don¹t you know what this is like? Don’t you know what it is like to be foolish rather than wise? We surely do! Those ten bridesmaids weren’t so different from one another--the wise and foolish waited together, together they slept, together they were awakened. The parable doesn¹t say that the foolish wasted the oil that they had; they simply hadn’t expected to wait quite so long. And now, even with word that the bridegroom was definitely on his way, they weren’t sure they could trust the message. If they lit their lamps now, the lights might go out by the time he arrived. And they knew they had no store of oil in reserve to replenish their lamps.
They were foolish. Foolish not to trust the word, foolish not to have reserves, foolish even to follow the advice of the wise ones and to leave their watch to buy more oil at that moment.
Dear Lord Jesus, have mercy on us, the foolish. We come before you now wanting desperately to be lights in the darkness. We come before you now unprepared for the long wait, the longer night. We come before you now confessing our foolishness, our trusting in lesser things like last-minute shopping rather than casting ourselves upon your mercy and staying put to meet you--even with sputtering or extinguished lamps.
That was their real mistake, wasn’t it? That they left and missed the bridegroom’s arrival. That their lack of preparation and reserves--and the lack of faith in the bridegroom’s merciful
generosity on the night of his wedding--brought them to this most foolish decision with its disastrous consequences of their being shut out of the feast.
We want to be ready. We want to have plenty of reserves of faith with us. We want you to fill us up with the oil of your mercy, your forgiveness, your hope and expectation, your joy. We want you to give us companions who have extra reserves to share when our light is in danger of going out. We want to be wise as we wait, and most importantly, to be wise finally in trusting in your mercy rather than in our own “getting it right”.
Lord Jesus, your idea of “getting it right” is often different than ours, isn’t it? Your idea is like the prophet Isaiah’s that it is by the light of God that we are to walk, not our own light. Your idea is like the apostle Paul’s, that we are to live always as if in the day rather than the night, with our deeds exposed for all to see. Your idea is not that of saying the right words or performing the expected actions or claiming a non-existent prior close association with the Lord, but of being where God wants you to be.
I wonder, Jesus, if that was what was happening that night in Gethsemane, when you asked your closest disciples to wait and watch with you. In Matthew’s gospel, you told this story about the waiting bridesmaids shortly before your betrayal and arrest. Those bridesmaid disciples you chose for companions that night also slept. Not once, not twice, but three times, even with your urging for them to keep awake and to keep watch.
But unlike the foolish bridesmaids, they didn’t leave you. At least not then. Maybe in their drowsy dreaming, they remembered your warning parable. They stayed, frail human flesh that they were, and received your gentle, resigned words of merciful judgement upon their failing of the task: “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”
And even when they did flee, for fear, later on--you didn’t finally abandon them, but came to them, their risen Lord, and filled them once again with your oil of mercy, forgiveness, peace and expectation.
Dear Lord Jesus, we are tired.
Not just sleepy. Tired. We are tired of trying to stay alert. Especially to danger. We are tired of thinking about what is safe, about suspicious backpacks and letters, about suspicious people, about suspicious plans for peace and security. We want to stay alert and pray with you, but we are tired of waiting for you to get here so that we can. We’re sure that if you came now, back to the gardens of this city, we would welcome you with joy and stay awake and be your steady disciples. If you were here, maybe we could do that. Or maybe we couldn’t, but we would trust you more than our own lamps. As it is, we grow weary with this waiting and we aren’t sure we’ll have enough oil in our lamps to last the night.
So come, Lord Jesus! Come quickly!
Rejoice, then, you sad-hearted, who sit in deepest gloom,
Who mourn your joys departed and tremble at your doom.
Despair not; he is near you, there, standing at the door,
Who best can help and cheer you and bids you weep no more.
He comes to judge the nations, a terror to his foes,
A light of consolation and blessed hope to those
Who love the Lord¹s appearing, O glorious Sun, now come,
Send forth your beams so cheering and guide us safely home.
(Paul Gerhardt 1606-1676)
3. Letter from Fr. Raed Abu Sahliah of the Latin Patriarchate, Jerusalem
Let me begin, by telling you what happened today with my colleague Fr. Aktham Hijazin, the parish priest of my village Zababdeh, which is 100 kms far from Jerusalem and 10 kms far from the nearest town of Jenin: Fr. Aktham is the director of our Latin Patriarchate school in the village in which study around 800 students who come mainly from the village but also there are 200 who come from the nearby villages even from Jenin. This morning two buses brought the boys and girls from Jenin, at the end of the school day, Jenin was invaded for the 4th time by the Israeli army and tanks and almost completely closed, people from the surrounding villages who work normally in Jenin couldn’t return back home and even the 80 of our school boys and girls were not allowed to return back home to Jenin. After coordination with the Red Cross, Fr. Aktham and some teachers accompanied the two buses full of students (who are between 6 years old to 18) and when they reached nearby by Jenin the Israeli tanks stopped them and didn’t allow them to go in and even when the priest tried to go down and negotiate with the soldiers, they began to shoot on the air for three times and didn’t want even to speak with him and ordered them to go back.
If you were at his place, what would you have done with 80 scared students who would like to go home and join their families who are under military siege? Fr. Aktham decided to return back to Zababdeh with all the kids, when they arrived, they were received by a crowd of people from the village who offered them to eat because it was almost dark and was the time to take the Ramadan breakfast because some of them were Moslems and were fasting the whole day. Then the priest distributed the students to stay over night in the houses of our parishioners instead of leaving them alone at school. Every family was happy and proud to take one kid home and let him call this family in Jenin to tell them that he is safe and sane.
Tomorrow, Fr. Aktham will have another busy day after his Sunday mass, and maybe another adventure, because he has to send the students to Jenin which is still under heavy siege, otherwise they will have to stay in Zababdeh. Of course, they are most welcome among our kids and families, but do you think that their families will not be worried until they will be back home?!
This is a very simple story from many others our people are living each day that our kids should experience at this very young age, they are lucky that they are now safe in our village, because almost 110 of their colleagues lost their lives during the last 14 months, five boys were killed last week by a bomb explosion while they were going to their school, one was killed today in Jenin while he was returning home from school, he was 10 years old.
Sunday, December 2
Tuesday, November 13
MCC Palestine Update #31
MCC Palestine Update #31
Much has happened here since we last sent out an update and yet the developments have a depressing familiarity to them. Israeli troops withdrew from some parts of Area A while remaining in others. More Palestinian homes were demolished. More Palestinians and Israelis were killed. More settlements were built.
Amidst this backdrop of routine horror, some take hope in the fact that U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon now talk openly about a Palestinian state. And yet many fear that this talk of a "state" does not mean talk of a Viable political solution which would provide a modicum of justice and equality, but will mean letting Palestinians calling the disconnected cantons on which they are now confined a "state."
New MCC projects over the past week include a grant to a kindergarten in Khan Younis refugee camp to develop itself into an afternoon children's club (ages 8-14). Adjacent to the Gush Katif bloc of settlements, the club will provide much-needed free psychological space for children whose reality is dominated by violence.
Below are two pieces. The first, by MCC worker Ed Nyce, was written during Israel's incursion into the Bethlehem area. While Israeli troops have withdrawn from Bethlehem, they remain in some other West Bank towns. The second, by Israeli peace activist Ran HaCohen, challenges the deceptiveness of current talk about a Palestinian state.
1. Covered by Fog
Ed Nyce
It is early, early, early morning (yes, it is that early; after all, who can sleep?).
Fog covers much of what is usually visible under the East Jerusalem street lights. Maybe it is a good sign; is moisture on the way?
Fog is covering other things, too. When this fog lifts, what will be seen? The things we hear about; are they true? Some things, which we have seen through the fog, we know are true. Will we be believed?
This morning, Thursday, October 25, 2001, is Morning #7 that Israeli tanks, et al, have helped themselves to Palestinian-controlled areas of Bethlehem. Other cities were invaded a day earlier, some a day later. Life is blanketed by utter horror, worse even than the horror of the unspeakable, mustspeakable events of the past year.
“They’re shooting from between the houses,” the Israelis say of Palestinian gunmen when defending Israeli attacks on civilian targets. Well, yes, and experiencing the exchange of fire in Bethlehem the first three nights while in my home and a fourth in a nearby cave, I find no reason to romanticize or even apologize for such “between the houses” shooting. May it stop.
Non-pacifists point out that there is no other place for the runners to “defend” themselves. And that is true. Israeli land confiscation in the territory they are occupying pushes people more and more into cities, and takes away building-free land for farming, for fields of battle. As a pacifist, I don’t want nobody shootin’ nuttin’. Fog blocks our view of our own demand that USians and Israelis cannot be pacifists (wouldn’t THAT be crazy) but that Palestinians must be.
Is it so foggy that no one can see that those Palestinians who are "shooting from between the houses" are doing so not in Israel, but in these occupied lands?
Few can also see the day-to-day, normal life challenges which grow in their immensity. “We’re expecting our baby any moment,” my friend Nisreen told me Sunday. I was calling from my Bethlehem apartment; she and husband Tony were at his mother’s small Bethlehem home because it is usually “safer” than their Beit Jala apartment. “What do you think you will do?” I asked. “We’re supposed to go down to the French hospital, but that’s near here the tanks are [and very close to the hospital which was attacked by the Israelis]. I hope we can get there safely.” I hope so too, my friend; I hope so too.
“I’m afraid that when I can get back to the university, the tests will be no good.” I traveled to Ramallah yesterday, paying condolences to the Rantisi family, following the death from natural causes a few days ago of Rev. Audeh Rantisi. Later, the friend who’d met me there and I had lunch in the currently not-so-bustling town. He researches and experiments in the fields of biology and chemistry. The university is near Ramallah, but these days, there may as well be an ocean separating them. “The samples I took can last a day or two, but it’s getting close to a week, and I’m afraid I’ll have to contact the people and get new ones. The samples won’t be the same.”
I went to West Jerusalem yesterday afternoon. It’s on the Israeli side of the green line. It could have waited. I know lots of people who can’t do that, who can’t get there. But I wanted to see. Yes, there’s fear that a bomb could go off who knows when; we hope and pray not. There’s lots of guards. But stores, restaurants are open. The streets are intact. People’s homes aren’t being shelled or bulldozed. It must be a fog which covers the view of what’s happening so close by, in Bethlehem, Ramallah, even East Jerusalem. It must be a fog: could the terrible destruction happen if people really knew? Or is the fog in my mind, clouding my judgment, allowing me to hope that people wouldn’t just sit by? Maybe my mind is hopelessly foggy, and I can’t penetrate the curtain to see that people actually believe that what’s happening in the Palestinian areas, in Afghanistan, in other places, is necessary, even okay. Would people really think that?
What do you do about rumors? Fog surrounds the “proof.” Is it humane to want verification before reporting? Whose eyes count? What if a source’s fog vision turns out to be hazy? Will people believe you the next time? Yet if not reporting it, “Why didn’t you tell us?” might be a fair question.
Early, early, early morning gives way to early morning. The birds are audible; I hear the faint sound of a turtle dove. The morning fog has lifted, and the feathered friends are probably visible. I want to find that other dove, that dove with the olive branch in its mouth. But the
mourning fog has not lifted. I can’t see the dove. There’s some fog inside, too, in the heart, in the ears. The dove is hard to hear. After or, dare we hope, before the fog lifts, and we find the olive branch dove: Quick, check! Is it breathing?
2. Say No to a Palestinian 'State'
Ran HaCohen
Antiwar.com, 13 November 2001
Imagine the following scenario: after ages of discrimination, the United States decides to compensate African-Americans generously and to solve their problems once and for all. All African-Americans are locked up in prison, and the prisons are declared to be an independent African-American state. Sound crazy? That is just what the US and Israel are now planning – for the Palestinians.
Things in Israel may have never been worse. Economically, the country is in the worst recession since 1953. Two major economic sectors – hi-tech and tourism – have suffered fatal blows, the one from the global collapse of the "new economy," the other from the Intifada boosted by the September attacks.
Politically, living here calls to mind the first years of the Third Reich.Day after day you witness a society rapidly losing its human face. The safe haven for persecuted Jews has turned into a safe haven for sadistic war criminals, where nobody’s life, be he Arab or Jew, is secure. As part
of an overall campaign to de-legitimize the Arab- Israeli population, this week the Israeli Parliament lifted the immunity of its (Arab) member Azmi Bishara: not for corruption or criminal deeds (a commonplace in Israeli politics), but, for the first time, for things he had said. And even this decision, a dangerous blow to Israeli democracy, threatening the freedom of speech of an elected Parliament member, has been editorially applauded by Israel’s "liberal" newspaper Haaretz, which cynically blamed the victim: "If anyone is responsible for the situation having reached this point, it is MK Bishara himself."
At the same time, Israeli state terrorism in the Occupied Territories is reaching unprecedented peaks. Israeli death-squads now kill a Palestinian freedom fighter almost every day. On the other hand, police claim to have "no clue" as to the identity of a Jewish terrorist group that has murdered at least six Palestinians during the past months. Prime Minister Sharon has not yet reached the death toll of his murderous predecessor Ehud Barak during whose term, in October and November 2000, more than 110 Palestinians were killed every month – but he is making a good progress: October 2001 was the bloodiest month this year, with more than 90 Palestinian casualties. Sharon, however, is more innovative in abusing the Palestinian population: to annihilate Palestinian freedom of movement altogether, the Israeli army now not only destroys (by ditches) the miserable roads still open to Palestinians, but, to disable Palestinian traffic completely (be it to work, to get water and food, or to hospital), it even confiscates the keys to Palestinian private cars.
But all of a sudden, in the middle of all these atrocities, there seems to be a ray of light. The term "Palestinian state" is being de-tabooed. Sharon now wants to give the Palestinians a state, President Bush even claims that a Palestinian state has "always been part of the American
vision" (why didn’ t they tell us before?), King Abdallah of Jordan says the Arab world should integrate Israel in return for a Palestinian state, and even Chairman Arafat himself airs his threats to declare a state. What a harmony, what a consensus! One almost wonders what the Middle East
conflict was all about, if it can be solved by such a simple declaration.
What Do They Mean by 'State'?
Whoever follows the Israeli press would have no difficulty imagining the Palestinian state offered by Israel. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a hard-line hawk with a misleading dovish image, one of the founders of Israel ’s illegal settlements project, says it openly: the Palestinian
state will comprise just the areas currently controlled by the Palestinian Authority. His initial hesitant words about dismantling some settlements in the Gaza Strip were immediately withdrawn: no settlements will be evacuated.
The Palestinian Authority is holding – or was holding, up to the recent Israeli incursions – something like 10% of the West Bank and about two-thirds of the Gaza Strip: separate "autonomous" enclaves in half a dozen Palestinian cities, cut off and hermetically besieged by Israeli forces. This will be the "Palestinian state."
Former Prime Minister Netanyahu was much more honest. I recall a speech he held in the Knesset a few years ago. In his notorious eloquence he asked rhetorically: Is there a state without contiguity? Is there a state without an army? Is there a state that does not control its own borders? Is there a state that does not control its own water resources and airspace? I am telling you, said Netanyahu: there is no such state.
Netanyahu was right. There is no such state as what Israel means by a "Palestinian state." Sharon stresses it over and over again: the "state" will have no borders with Jordan or Egypt, it will be surrounded by Israel from all sides, it will be demilitarized, Israel will control its water and its air space; and the Israeli settlements, consuming about 50% of the West Bank and a third of Gaza and still growing, will all remain intact, and with them the entire network of checkpoints, military bases and roads open for Israelis only, that turn the Occupied Territories into a block of Swiss cheese (as Arafat once put it), with the holes left to the Palestinians. This Palestinian state will be no more a state than the South African Bantustans in the darkest days of Apartheid. It will be the ultimate camouflage for the ongoing occupation.
Who Needs a Palestinian Bantustan?
The Palestinian people do not need such a state. They need land, which was and is being dragged away by Israeli settlements. It needs its own water, 80% of which is being stolen by Israel. It needs freedom of movement, not just to walk to the nearest checkpoint and face an Israeli gunman. It needs an open border to pick up at least some of the refugees spread all over the Arab world.
The envisioned Palestinian "state" will not give any of that. On the contrary: it will serve as a surrogate and as a new justification for the ongoing occupation, which will not be called occupation anymore. It will take the question of Palestine off the international agenda by turning it from a juicy and photogenic resistance to occupation into a simple border-dispute, one of so many around the world. If this was the case, fair enough; but it is not: a Palestinian state alongside Israel’s occupation is an outright abuse of the term "state."
The Palestinians are fed up with empty tokens and symbols of sovereignty. This was the logic of Oslo: give Arafat a title ("Chairman," "President"), give him a license to issue postage stamps, police uniforms and pseudo-official travel documents, and the Palestinian problem will be solved by his well-trained gunmen. Most of the Palestinians were ready to live with that temporarily for seven years, expecting it to be the swallow that makes summer; it did not.ven Arafat himself, who for years cooperated with this fabrication of illusions, understood a year ago that the game was over: faced with the choice between joining the furious tiger of the Intifada and being its prey, he chose to jump on its back and ride it. If he changes sides now, he is finished.
Some Advice for the United States
So it will take much more than the well-meant words of Scott McConnell – "there is a great deal more conversation among Americans than used to be about foreign affairs in general and about wrongs committed against the Arabs in particular. You have seen some evidence of this in President Bush's own words about Palestine" – to convince Palestinians of America’s intentions. It will take much more than nice and harmless promises of a Palestinian state from President Bush. Having sold the Palestinians empty illusions for years, if the US now wants to regain its credibility among Palestinians – and Arabs, and Moslems – it will have to put the horse before the cart, not behind it. First get Israel out of the occupied territories. A Palestinian state may follow, but not precede the end of Israel’s occupation.
Much has happened here since we last sent out an update and yet the developments have a depressing familiarity to them. Israeli troops withdrew from some parts of Area A while remaining in others. More Palestinian homes were demolished. More Palestinians and Israelis were killed. More settlements were built.
Amidst this backdrop of routine horror, some take hope in the fact that U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon now talk openly about a Palestinian state. And yet many fear that this talk of a "state" does not mean talk of a Viable political solution which would provide a modicum of justice and equality, but will mean letting Palestinians calling the disconnected cantons on which they are now confined a "state."
New MCC projects over the past week include a grant to a kindergarten in Khan Younis refugee camp to develop itself into an afternoon children's club (ages 8-14). Adjacent to the Gush Katif bloc of settlements, the club will provide much-needed free psychological space for children whose reality is dominated by violence.
Below are two pieces. The first, by MCC worker Ed Nyce, was written during Israel's incursion into the Bethlehem area. While Israeli troops have withdrawn from Bethlehem, they remain in some other West Bank towns. The second, by Israeli peace activist Ran HaCohen, challenges the deceptiveness of current talk about a Palestinian state.
1. Covered by Fog
Ed Nyce
It is early, early, early morning (yes, it is that early; after all, who can sleep?).
Fog covers much of what is usually visible under the East Jerusalem street lights. Maybe it is a good sign; is moisture on the way?
Fog is covering other things, too. When this fog lifts, what will be seen? The things we hear about; are they true? Some things, which we have seen through the fog, we know are true. Will we be believed?
This morning, Thursday, October 25, 2001, is Morning #7 that Israeli tanks, et al, have helped themselves to Palestinian-controlled areas of Bethlehem. Other cities were invaded a day earlier, some a day later. Life is blanketed by utter horror, worse even than the horror of the unspeakable, mustspeakable events of the past year.
“They’re shooting from between the houses,” the Israelis say of Palestinian gunmen when defending Israeli attacks on civilian targets. Well, yes, and experiencing the exchange of fire in Bethlehem the first three nights while in my home and a fourth in a nearby cave, I find no reason to romanticize or even apologize for such “between the houses” shooting. May it stop.
Non-pacifists point out that there is no other place for the runners to “defend” themselves. And that is true. Israeli land confiscation in the territory they are occupying pushes people more and more into cities, and takes away building-free land for farming, for fields of battle. As a pacifist, I don’t want nobody shootin’ nuttin’. Fog blocks our view of our own demand that USians and Israelis cannot be pacifists (wouldn’t THAT be crazy) but that Palestinians must be.
Is it so foggy that no one can see that those Palestinians who are "shooting from between the houses" are doing so not in Israel, but in these occupied lands?
Few can also see the day-to-day, normal life challenges which grow in their immensity. “We’re expecting our baby any moment,” my friend Nisreen told me Sunday. I was calling from my Bethlehem apartment; she and husband Tony were at his mother’s small Bethlehem home because it is usually “safer” than their Beit Jala apartment. “What do you think you will do?” I asked. “We’re supposed to go down to the French hospital, but that’s near here the tanks are [and very close to the hospital which was attacked by the Israelis]. I hope we can get there safely.” I hope so too, my friend; I hope so too.
“I’m afraid that when I can get back to the university, the tests will be no good.” I traveled to Ramallah yesterday, paying condolences to the Rantisi family, following the death from natural causes a few days ago of Rev. Audeh Rantisi. Later, the friend who’d met me there and I had lunch in the currently not-so-bustling town. He researches and experiments in the fields of biology and chemistry. The university is near Ramallah, but these days, there may as well be an ocean separating them. “The samples I took can last a day or two, but it’s getting close to a week, and I’m afraid I’ll have to contact the people and get new ones. The samples won’t be the same.”
I went to West Jerusalem yesterday afternoon. It’s on the Israeli side of the green line. It could have waited. I know lots of people who can’t do that, who can’t get there. But I wanted to see. Yes, there’s fear that a bomb could go off who knows when; we hope and pray not. There’s lots of guards. But stores, restaurants are open. The streets are intact. People’s homes aren’t being shelled or bulldozed. It must be a fog which covers the view of what’s happening so close by, in Bethlehem, Ramallah, even East Jerusalem. It must be a fog: could the terrible destruction happen if people really knew? Or is the fog in my mind, clouding my judgment, allowing me to hope that people wouldn’t just sit by? Maybe my mind is hopelessly foggy, and I can’t penetrate the curtain to see that people actually believe that what’s happening in the Palestinian areas, in Afghanistan, in other places, is necessary, even okay. Would people really think that?
What do you do about rumors? Fog surrounds the “proof.” Is it humane to want verification before reporting? Whose eyes count? What if a source’s fog vision turns out to be hazy? Will people believe you the next time? Yet if not reporting it, “Why didn’t you tell us?” might be a fair question.
Early, early, early morning gives way to early morning. The birds are audible; I hear the faint sound of a turtle dove. The morning fog has lifted, and the feathered friends are probably visible. I want to find that other dove, that dove with the olive branch in its mouth. But the
mourning fog has not lifted. I can’t see the dove. There’s some fog inside, too, in the heart, in the ears. The dove is hard to hear. After or, dare we hope, before the fog lifts, and we find the olive branch dove: Quick, check! Is it breathing?
2. Say No to a Palestinian 'State'
Ran HaCohen
Antiwar.com, 13 November 2001
Imagine the following scenario: after ages of discrimination, the United States decides to compensate African-Americans generously and to solve their problems once and for all. All African-Americans are locked up in prison, and the prisons are declared to be an independent African-American state. Sound crazy? That is just what the US and Israel are now planning – for the Palestinians.
Things in Israel may have never been worse. Economically, the country is in the worst recession since 1953. Two major economic sectors – hi-tech and tourism – have suffered fatal blows, the one from the global collapse of the "new economy," the other from the Intifada boosted by the September attacks.
Politically, living here calls to mind the first years of the Third Reich.Day after day you witness a society rapidly losing its human face. The safe haven for persecuted Jews has turned into a safe haven for sadistic war criminals, where nobody’s life, be he Arab or Jew, is secure. As part
of an overall campaign to de-legitimize the Arab- Israeli population, this week the Israeli Parliament lifted the immunity of its (Arab) member Azmi Bishara: not for corruption or criminal deeds (a commonplace in Israeli politics), but, for the first time, for things he had said. And even this decision, a dangerous blow to Israeli democracy, threatening the freedom of speech of an elected Parliament member, has been editorially applauded by Israel’s "liberal" newspaper Haaretz, which cynically blamed the victim: "If anyone is responsible for the situation having reached this point, it is MK Bishara himself."
At the same time, Israeli state terrorism in the Occupied Territories is reaching unprecedented peaks. Israeli death-squads now kill a Palestinian freedom fighter almost every day. On the other hand, police claim to have "no clue" as to the identity of a Jewish terrorist group that has murdered at least six Palestinians during the past months. Prime Minister Sharon has not yet reached the death toll of his murderous predecessor Ehud Barak during whose term, in October and November 2000, more than 110 Palestinians were killed every month – but he is making a good progress: October 2001 was the bloodiest month this year, with more than 90 Palestinian casualties. Sharon, however, is more innovative in abusing the Palestinian population: to annihilate Palestinian freedom of movement altogether, the Israeli army now not only destroys (by ditches) the miserable roads still open to Palestinians, but, to disable Palestinian traffic completely (be it to work, to get water and food, or to hospital), it even confiscates the keys to Palestinian private cars.
But all of a sudden, in the middle of all these atrocities, there seems to be a ray of light. The term "Palestinian state" is being de-tabooed. Sharon now wants to give the Palestinians a state, President Bush even claims that a Palestinian state has "always been part of the American
vision" (why didn’ t they tell us before?), King Abdallah of Jordan says the Arab world should integrate Israel in return for a Palestinian state, and even Chairman Arafat himself airs his threats to declare a state. What a harmony, what a consensus! One almost wonders what the Middle East
conflict was all about, if it can be solved by such a simple declaration.
What Do They Mean by 'State'?
Whoever follows the Israeli press would have no difficulty imagining the Palestinian state offered by Israel. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a hard-line hawk with a misleading dovish image, one of the founders of Israel ’s illegal settlements project, says it openly: the Palestinian
state will comprise just the areas currently controlled by the Palestinian Authority. His initial hesitant words about dismantling some settlements in the Gaza Strip were immediately withdrawn: no settlements will be evacuated.
The Palestinian Authority is holding – or was holding, up to the recent Israeli incursions – something like 10% of the West Bank and about two-thirds of the Gaza Strip: separate "autonomous" enclaves in half a dozen Palestinian cities, cut off and hermetically besieged by Israeli forces. This will be the "Palestinian state."
Former Prime Minister Netanyahu was much more honest. I recall a speech he held in the Knesset a few years ago. In his notorious eloquence he asked rhetorically: Is there a state without contiguity? Is there a state without an army? Is there a state that does not control its own borders? Is there a state that does not control its own water resources and airspace? I am telling you, said Netanyahu: there is no such state.
Netanyahu was right. There is no such state as what Israel means by a "Palestinian state." Sharon stresses it over and over again: the "state" will have no borders with Jordan or Egypt, it will be surrounded by Israel from all sides, it will be demilitarized, Israel will control its water and its air space; and the Israeli settlements, consuming about 50% of the West Bank and a third of Gaza and still growing, will all remain intact, and with them the entire network of checkpoints, military bases and roads open for Israelis only, that turn the Occupied Territories into a block of Swiss cheese (as Arafat once put it), with the holes left to the Palestinians. This Palestinian state will be no more a state than the South African Bantustans in the darkest days of Apartheid. It will be the ultimate camouflage for the ongoing occupation.
Who Needs a Palestinian Bantustan?
The Palestinian people do not need such a state. They need land, which was and is being dragged away by Israeli settlements. It needs its own water, 80% of which is being stolen by Israel. It needs freedom of movement, not just to walk to the nearest checkpoint and face an Israeli gunman. It needs an open border to pick up at least some of the refugees spread all over the Arab world.
The envisioned Palestinian "state" will not give any of that. On the contrary: it will serve as a surrogate and as a new justification for the ongoing occupation, which will not be called occupation anymore. It will take the question of Palestine off the international agenda by turning it from a juicy and photogenic resistance to occupation into a simple border-dispute, one of so many around the world. If this was the case, fair enough; but it is not: a Palestinian state alongside Israel’s occupation is an outright abuse of the term "state."
The Palestinians are fed up with empty tokens and symbols of sovereignty. This was the logic of Oslo: give Arafat a title ("Chairman," "President"), give him a license to issue postage stamps, police uniforms and pseudo-official travel documents, and the Palestinian problem will be solved by his well-trained gunmen. Most of the Palestinians were ready to live with that temporarily for seven years, expecting it to be the swallow that makes summer; it did not.ven Arafat himself, who for years cooperated with this fabrication of illusions, understood a year ago that the game was over: faced with the choice between joining the furious tiger of the Intifada and being its prey, he chose to jump on its back and ride it. If he changes sides now, he is finished.
Some Advice for the United States
So it will take much more than the well-meant words of Scott McConnell – "there is a great deal more conversation among Americans than used to be about foreign affairs in general and about wrongs committed against the Arabs in particular. You have seen some evidence of this in President Bush's own words about Palestine" – to convince Palestinians of America’s intentions. It will take much more than nice and harmless promises of a Palestinian state from President Bush. Having sold the Palestinians empty illusions for years, if the US now wants to regain its credibility among Palestinians – and Arabs, and Moslems – it will have to put the horse before the cart, not behind it. First get Israel out of the occupied territories. A Palestinian state may follow, but not precede the end of Israel’s occupation.
Thursday, November 1
MCC Palestine Update #30
MCC Palestine Update #30
MCC Palestine urges everyone to write their elected officials in order to urge their governments to pressure Israel to withdraw from Palestinian population centers. Israeli troops have reinvaded all major Palestinian towns in the West Bank with the exceptions of Jericho and the Palestinian-controlled section of Hebron. This move, the Israeli government declared, was in response to the assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi; Zeevi's assassination, meanwhile, occurred against the backdrop of 36 Israeli assassinations of Palestinians (during which at least 19 bystanders were killed).
Israel demands that the Palestinian Authority arrest and extradite those responsible for Zeevi's murder, promising, in the words of Ariel Sharon, that if it does not do so, then the "era of Arafat is over"; the Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, promises to arrest those responsible but try them in Palestinian courts. MCC's Palestinian partners and colleagues are extremely tense about what the future holds: does Israel intend to topple the Palestinian Authority? Deport or assassinate Yasser Arafat? Unleash massive bombardment on Palestinian cities? Carry out Rehavam Zeevi's dream of transfer? [Surely not, we tell ourselves: the whole world is watching. Yet while the whole world is watching scores, hundreds die because of the occupation and is silent.] Or "simply" tighten the screws on an already oppressive siege which has sent unemployment skyrocketing well past 50% (much higher in some areas)?
Johnny Yusef Thaljieh, a cousin of two workers at the Wi'am Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem, was killed by a stray bullet while standing outside of the Church of the Nativitiy in Bethlehem on Saturday; he was buried in the Greek Orthodox cemetery on Sunday. He was one of 20 killed since Israel started its reinvasion of Palestinian cities on Thursday.
MCC peace development worker, Ed Nyce, remains in Bethlehem. He now sleeps in his living room, as his bedroom faces a hill on which an Israeli tank is now poised. The family of Zoughbi Zoughbi (director of Wi';am Conflict Resolution Center) has cleaned out the cave on which the family home is built: during times of war during the past century, the Zoughbi family has moved to the cave for protection.
Below are four pieces. The first two, by the Lutheran International Center in Bethlehem and the Roman Catholic (Latin) Patriarch of Jerusalem, call on Christians the world over to protest these latest Israeli moves and to call for an end to the occupation. The third, by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, examines the politics of assassination. The final piece, also by Levy, narrates what happened to farmers in the village of Bardalah in the West Bank when Israeli settlers came to burn their fields and destroy their crops. Bardalah received substantial assistance from MCC during the 1970s through MCC's rural development unit.
1. From the Lutheran International Center in Bethlehem:
Palestinians in the Bethlehem area have become almost used to being trapped in our town, particularly in the last 13 months of the Intifada.
But, now, not only are we trapped, we also face the turret of a tank no matter which direction we look. (Israelis report they have deployed 30 tanks in the area now.)
Life has come to a stop. On Friday, no one could get to the Center, as most staff lived in areas in which heavy firing was occurring. For the safety of the students, all schools are closed (a 10-year old school girl was killed by Israeli fire on Thursday morning in Jenin), shops are closed today in memorial of the three Palestinians who were killed yesterday in their homes by Israeli fire.
Even now as we write this, tanks shells are exploding around the Bethlehem area and a young girl and a young women in Beit Jala have just been killed. Some of our staff have just called, Faten and Carol, and are in the middle of extremely heavy firing.
What do we feel?
There is no time to feel, to weep, death comes upon death, destruction follows destruction.
As the shelling becomes louder and nearer, as we listen to the wailing of the ambulance sirens going nearby, we urge you not to leave us 'orphans.' Do not forget us in our time of trial.
Pray for us,but in these days, more importantly, contact your government officials urging them to intercede before more people are killed.
"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies." (2 Corinthians 4:8-10)
+ The Staff of the International Center of Bethlehem www.annadwa.org
2. Letter of H.B. Mons. Michel Sabbah to the Faithful
To our beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord!
The prophet Hosea says: Yahweh indicts the inhabitants of the country: there is no fidelity, no tenderness, no knowledge of God in the country, only perjury and lies, slaughter, theft, adultery and violence, murder after murder. This is why the country is in mourning, and all who live in it pine away (Hosea 4, 1-3). These words may be applied, at least partially, to our days. And we all carry the responsibility to purify our time and return to rectitude, justice and goodness.
Brothers and sisters: We are close to you. Together with you we experience the storm happen during these days. With Gods help this crisis will pass. We are with you in these difficult times. We would like to encourage you: Love each other with patience and faith. With the psalmist we say: Princes persecute me without a cause. But my heart stands in awe of Your word (Ps 118, 161), and further: Consider my affliction and deliver me, for I do not forget Your law. Plead my cause and redeem me; revive me according to Your word (118, 153-154).
Our destination is to be born under occupation and be exposed constantly to death. Every human person has the right and the duty to do all possible to him in order to obtain his own liberty. The international community finally has to come to understand that the Palestinian is a human being like all the others and has the right, as every human being, to reconquer his proper dignity and liberty in his own country.
Killing is evil. All violence is evil. All war disfigure the countenance of God, and is therefore evil. Only the murderer strives for murder. He opens the gates of death and makes the person enter. In our Holy Land the element that opens the gates to death is the military occupation. Therefore we say: the suffering of the Palestinian people until today is enough. Its time to end its tragedy.
To the Israeli people we say: you merit also security and peace. We wish you security and peace. In everybody and in everyone of you we see the dignity which derives from that of God and which is a gift to every human person being Palestinian or Hebrew. The key of death or peace is in your hands and in that of the government you have elected. It is the government that can open or close the gates of death. It is the government that can give you peace or take it away from you. Those who today fight each other and are thrown into the abyss of death have the right to live and enjoy security. Therfore, it depends on your government to put an end to all occupation that has been pressing upon the Palestinians during decades from this part, depriving them from their dignity and liberty. The United Nations have formulated regulations as base of peace. It would be sufficient to implement them.
With our Brothers, the Patriarchs of the Holy City and all the Heads of the Churches of Jerusalem we declare: It is enough with the bloodshed; it is enough with the fight! Shut the gates of death, of hatred and terror. Stop the shedding of blood that call for other bloodshed. The blood of all victims cries before God and before every human conscience. Restitute the occupied land to the real owners, thus allowing the hearts to regain serenity and for every human being to regain the proper humanity, and for Palestinians and Israelis to regain in equality the proper dignity given by God!
+ Michel Sabbah
Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
3. The price of liquidation
Gideon Levy
Haaretz
What is the difference between the assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? It's important to understand that in the Palestinian perception, at least, there is no difference. Both of them headed extremist political movements, which advocate uncompromising solutions, yet were nevertheless considered legitimate in the eyes of their people.
The answer to the contention that Mustafa's Popular Front engaged mainly in terrorism, whereas Ze'evi's Moledet (Homeland) party did not is somewhat more complex. Beyond that most Palestinians consider the struggle against the Israeli occupation to be legitimate, Mustafa was above all a political leader, and no sufficient proof was adduced for Israel's accusations that he
was personally involved in planning acts of terrorism.
Moreover, in the Palestinian view, and in the view of part of the international community as well, the Israeli security cabinet, of which Ze'evi was a member, and which authorized operations involving liquidations, house demolitions, shellings and curfews, also bears a significant moral responsibility.
The outburst of nationalist emotion in the wake of the two acts of murder is also remarkably similar. Mustafa was the leader of the movement that is second in importance in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Palestinians saw his assassination as a blow to their national honor and their sovereignty, no less than the Israeli public's reaction to the Ze'evi assassination.
Ze'evi's provocative approach - his advocacy of the transfer of the Arabs, his likening of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Hitler, his assertion that the Palestinians have no right to live in their land -fanned the fire even more, perhaps like the political position of the Popular Front, which, at least in the past, called for a solution in the form of one secular, democratic state.
This is not the place to discuss the relative merits or demerits of a binational state; in any event, neither the advocates of one solution or the other deserve to die. And things look different depending on where you stand. The image in the mirror was reflected from both sides of the divide in the wake of these two unnecessary and vicious acts of murder.
But the discussion of the similarity between the two assassinations is ultimately a matter for the historians. At this moment, after the murder of Rehavam Ze'evi, what requires discussion is the continued policy of liquidations. Whoever is responsible for the fact that Ze'evi had no protection, responsibility rests also with those who conceived and executed the policy of liquidation, pushing the bar ever upward and not taking into account the consequences.
Did those who gave the order to assassinate the leader of the Popular Front take into consideration that the inevitable result would be a parallel upgrading of targets by Palestinian terrorists? That they would henceforth try to eliminate Israeli political leaders - a mode of action they had avoided in the past? Either those who sent the Israeli assassins didn't take that into account, in which case they stand accused of arrogance ("it won't happen to us, we have the Shin Bet security service") or blindness; or they did take it into account, in which case they must bear at least part of the responsibility for what happened.
What did they think: that the Popular Front would forgive and forget the assassination of its leader? That it would move on to the next order of business on the agenda? That it would make do with random shooting of settlers on the roads?
If the fomenters of the liquidations took into account a Palestinian response in the form of political assassinations of Israeli leaders, they carry a heavy burden of moral responsibility. No one can claim that the writing was not on the wall. On the very day of Mustafa's assassination, the Popular Front declared his blood would be avenged. Those in charge of the Israeli liquidations must now say whether they considered that possibility when they made their decision to assassinate Mustafa. Was his liquidation, whether justified or not, worth the life of an Israeli cabinet minister?
The argument that Palestinian terrorism exists in any case, as though it were a force of nature, doesn't always stand up to scrutiny. Not a little Palestinian violence is perpetrated in reaction
to Israeli violence, and the most direct and clearcut connection is the reaction to liquidations. Two Israeli restaurateurs, Etgar Zeitouni and Motti Dayan, were murdered last January in Tul Karm in the West Bank by a cousin of Dr. Tabath Tabath, who had been liquidated; the murder of Lior Kaufman last Thursday night near Ma'aleh Adumim in the West Bank, took place close to the village of Ataf Abayat, who was liquidated a few hours earlier.
No Israeli leader was assassinated by Palestinians until the liquidation of Abu Ali Mustafa. Since the liquidation of Hussein Abayat - the brother of Ataf Abayat - last November, Israel has liquidated at least 35 Palestinians, six of them in the past week alone. Beyond the moral and legal questions that must be asked about a state: that sends its sons on hit missions, that publishes hit lists and kills even when it would be possible to arrest and try the targets. We must now ask in all seriousness whether the advocates of this horrific policy also took its price into account.
The assassination of a cabinet minister in response to the liquidation of a leader from the other side is an opportunity to pause for a moment and consider whether there is any point to continuing this policy. Is the terrible price that is paid worth what's achieved? Have the liquidations reduced Palestinian terrorism or only aggravated it?
That hardly any time passed between Ze'evi's internment and the liquidation of three Palestinians, for which an Israeli hiker paid with his life, shows that the government and the defense establishment have not drawn any sort of lesson from the events. Past is prologue: we will liquidate, they will murder.
4. Bitter harvest
Gideon Levy
Haaretz
They arrived in the night, two busloads of men and youths, accompanied by soldiers. Bent on revenge for the murder of Salit Sheetrit of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, they destroyed the crops and the
hothouses of the farmers of Bardala. The police, called to the scene, arrived nine hours later
The ruined hothouses of Bardala: "This is the only source of support for us and our children." (Photo: Miki Kratsman)
Izat Maslamini was distraught. He walked about in his field, limping, his shirt dripping with sweat, his face unshaven and his throat hoarse. Here was another torn-up tube and more irrigation pipes pulled out of their places, another wrecked hothouse and another eggplant bush that will never bear fruit. Maslamini picks up from the ground each remnant of the destruction, as if believing that everything he beheld - cucumber after cucumber, irrigation pipeline after irrigation pipeline - would somehow be set right again.
Maslamini raised the ruined tubes and waved them about; he threw the lost vegetables to the ground in despair. Walking has been difficult for him ever since he was beaten by Jews on that terrible night; he still carries the scars, and wants everyone to see. He says that those who were armed forced him to stay by the door of his hut, where he sat for two hours, watching the settlers destroying the fruits of his labor. All the hard farming work of the past year went down the drain that night.
Maybe only a farmer can truly understand. The harvest was due to begin exactly five days after this pogrom by the settlers, who are farmers themselves. "By God, I didn't harvest anything this year," the disconsolate farmer repeated over and over again. The damage is estimated at NIS 150,000.
The rampagers came to his fields four days after the murder of Salit Sheetrit of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. Now the road to the farmer's ruined fields are blocked as well: On Sunday, an IDF bulldozer came and dug a trench to separate the fields of Maslamini and his neighbors from the main road. This week, Maslamini composed a declaration to the world, the cry of a tiller of the soil whose fields were sabotaged and whose world has been destroyed, written in awkward script on wrinkled cigarette paper. He keeps it in his shirt pocket, which is already stuffed with notes.
"In the name of God the merciful. We farmers of the northern region, the land of Bardala, tell you that the settlers have destroyed our fields and wrecked our hothouses. This is the only source of support for us and our children. And now we must go on living. The settlers also beat Izat Maslamini on the back and legs. We call upon all the organizations to provide assistance to these farmers who have lost all they had. We ask Saudi Arabia and Prince Walid bin Talil to support us, like he donated $10 million to New York to build the Twin Towers ... "
When Maslamini finished reading his proclamation, there was a deathly silence in the shady spot at the edge of his fields, where we sat, interrupted only by the quiet humming of the bees up in the fruit trees. Then farmer Jihad Darajma said, "We all agree," and all the other farmers sitting there nodded their heads.
Maslamini angrily passes through his ruined fields, bewailing his tragedy. "From what am I going to eat now? You tell me. How will my children and I eat? It's all over. Tell me, what are we to do? It's all gone. They've killed us. They beat me on the back and legs with their weapons. What are we going to do? I have 12 big and small children [eight children and four grandchildren] and what will we do for them? Where am I going to get food for them? I need NIS 1,000 for fertilizer and for plastic. Where am I going to get it from? I haven't harvested one thing. They came in the night and then fled. What shall we do to them? Tell me.
"Here, look. Two dunams of hothouses - all gone. Over there, three dunams of eggplant - all gone. And now the road here, you can't get in anymore. If there were soldiers here now, they'd take your ID and you'd sit here and wait. When is the soldier coming back? In an hour, two hours, five hours, seven hours, maybe not all night. What does he care? He's happy. You can't come in here. Here's the cucumber area. They destroyed everything, dug it all up. What are we going to do? I saw it happen at night, at 2:30 in the morning. They grabbed me and beat me.
"Am I causing problems? Look at this boy here, you see? No shoes. We thought the crops would grow and we'd all eat, this boy, too, and now it's all gone. Isn't that a shame? I told the policeman, `If I did this mess, then come and take me.' Look at the irrigation pipe. It's all torn up. What can we do with it. Look - it can't even be fixed. They cut it all up. By God, I haven't harvested anything. By God - if you believe in God. Here, this is the first eggplant I've picked this year. Look at it. I've been sick at home until now. There's no money for us to try it again. Look how they tore the plastic sheeting of the hothouses. They have these things like pruning shears that slice the tubing. Look, they left one here. Everything is ruined, all 60 dunams, and there's another 100 dunams that belong to the neighbors. They destroyed everything there, too. All in one night.
"We wait a year for the crops to grow - all through the winter and the summer. And then they come and wreck the whole area, everything, even inside the hothouses. They wouldn't let us speak. `Sit, sit and keep quiet,' they told us. They hit us in the leg with their M-16s. How is it possible to live like this? How can we make peace? Did I cause them trouble? I didn't even have a knife to slice tomatoes. They tore everything up with box-cutters."
Salt of the earth
Like an abdomen sewn up after an operation, the torn plastic sheeting of the hothouses are closed with crude black stitches. But the vegetables inside are a total loss - yellow, rotten cucumbers and green tomatoes that will never ripen. The torn-up irrigation tubing lies scattered on the ground, beyond repair. Yazid, a bespectacled young boy, shows a piece of evidence from the place of destruction: a cutting tool left behind by the vandals. A neighbor, Jihad Darajma, who was in charge of irrigation on thenight of the rampage, hoists his little nephew on his shoulders. "What does it have to do with this child?" he asks.
All the fields close to the main road, the Jordan Valley Highway, were totally destroyed, plowed up by the avenging bulldozers. The land was completely ruined; whatever crops remained have withered and yellowed. They came to avenge the murder of 28-year-old Salit Sheetrit of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, killed four days before. Not radical settlers from Yizhar or violent settlers from Tapuah, but "colonizers" of the Jordan Valley - apparently together with religious kibbutzniks from Sde Eliyahu inside Israel, who had never been considered "settlers."
The salt of the earth, who went to settle in a part of Israel that someone, for some reason, once promised them would forever remain in Israel's hands (according to the Allon Plan) and whose world is now crashing down around them. Ehud Barak put the future of "their" Jordan Valley on the table at Camp David, farming isn't the big hit it used to be, and Palestinian terrorists are shooting at them on the road that just yesterday was also thought to be a part of Israel.
Maslamini, 49, has four daughters, four sons and four grandchildren. For 10 months of the year, from August through June, they live in a hut at the edge of the fields, without electricity. On Sunday of this week, the laundry was hanging on the line after having been boiled over coals. The children go to school in the nearby village of Bardala, a kilometer and a half away. For two months of the year, the hottest part of the summer, they stay in the village of Tubas. Maslamini has been working this land for three years. Before that, he worked the nearby fields. A tenant farmer, he splits the income with the owner of the land. Last year, he reaped a crop worth NIS 155,000 from the 30 dunams that he works, half of which went to the owner. It's all written in his notebook - the income and expenses, each crate of cucumbers sold and each sack of fertilizer purchased. Gas - NIS 6,100. Plastic sheeting
-
NIS 2,223. According to his notebook, he sold 16 crates of squash at NIS 30 per crate. He gets up at four in the morning to go to work and goes to bed at eight in the evening. They rest between noon and 2 P.M., because of the heat, and finish work at six.
He planted here in July. Eggplant, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, hot peppers, sweet peppers, fava beans. The prime crops he sells right there to merchants who come from Jenin, Nazareth and Tiberias. The rest, they send to the market in Nablus - whenever it's possible to get there. A crate of prime produce sells for NIS 40, the rest is sent to the market for NIS 10, not including high transportation expenses, due to the situation. These days, it sometimes takes nine hours to travel the 40 kilometers to Nablus, traveling on makeshift roads. Now that the dirt blockade of Maslamini's fields is piling up before our eyes, as the IDF officer gives the signal and the bulldozer gouges the earth, getting there will take longer and be even more difficult.
Maslamini awoke in a panic in his hut when he heard the mob closing in. It was after two in the morning. He pulls out his notebook, where he has it all written down. On the night between September 27 and 28, it says. "Your holiday, your Kippur, had just ended," he says. The vandals arrived just hours after the conclusion of the fast and Yom Kippur prayers. They came in two buses, for a well-organized rampage, escorted by two IDF jeeps as quiet and unseeing backup. Before going to sleep that night, Maslamini had watched the news from New York again and again on Jordanian Television. "Only in New York, only in New York," he'd said to his wife.
Maslamini was stunned by what he found when he went out of his hut. He saw dozens of people running wild in his field, which was illuminated by the headlights of an IDF jeep. "They were kids - 16, 17, 19 years old. Each one armed with a box-cutter and wire cutters. They spread out all over. For every three kids, there was an armed adult. Then the tractors came. There were three of them ...
"Four armed men stood next to my house. `Sit, don't say anything,' one of them said, and then he hit me. They were settlers, not soldiers. My neighbor, Salah Darajma, came with a tractor and wanted to go to his children. They told him to beat it. Tell me, what were we to do? It went on for an hour and a half or two hours. They kept on destroying everything, with the IDF jeep showing them the way. I was afraid that if I started yelling, they'd do something to my children. That's all I was thinking. You can talk to the soldiers, but it's not possible to talk to these people, to the settlers. They were from Sde Eliyahu, from Mehola and Sdemot Mehola. You think anyone was there from Tel Aviv? What do they care? They knew that neither we or our children had done this."
As Izat is telling his story, his neighbor Jihad arrives. "They came off of two buses," he says. "And they had knives and pliers and shears. Each group of three was accompanied by someone armed with a gun. I told my uncle, who was with me, to take his children and wife and escape with them to the area above. We took all the children and fled, my wife and I and our 6-month-old baby. I went and sat with them in silence. Where could I go?"
Jihad Darajma called the police around 2:30 A.M. "This guy answered and I spoke to him in Hebrew. I told him that people had come and were plowing up our crops and wrecking our hothouses and that we had little children that were seeing all this. He asked where I was. I told him that I live in Bardala. So he said, `Where's Bardala?' I told him it's in the Jordan Valley. I explained to him exactly. He said, `Wait, I'll ask where Bardala is.' I heard him talking with a young woman. I heard him ask her where Bardala is. She said, `Here, next to Sdemot Mehola.'
"I could tell that he thought he understood now. He asked me where I was calling from. I told him that I was calling from the house in the tent, from my uncle's cellular phone. He asked me for
the number and asked my name. I gave him my name and he said: `I'm sending a patrol car now.' I said: `There's a blockade here and a blockade there and you could stop them in a minute.' Then I hung up the phone.
"I waited. I said to myself that if the police wanted to come, it should take 15 minutes or a half-hour at most. They didn't come. And meanwhile the vandals are plowing up our fields. I tried again. I dialed 100 and spoke to a woman there. I told her I'd spoken to a man there before, that there were people who were destroying our crops. She asked where it was and said she'd send another patrol car. I hung up and waited another hour or more. And all this time, they're still at it. I waited and they didn't come. So I said, What can we do? From now on, I'm just watching. And I turned off the cell phone. I sat there smoking a cigarette and looking at the field. I played with my baby and told him that tomorrow, we're going back to Tubas. That we're done with farming. And now he's in Tubas and I'm here trying to pick whatever they didn't have time to pull up. If
we had the money, we'd try to grow things here again."
`You can replant'
The police arrived at 11 the next morning, almost nine hours after they were called. Maslamini: "They looked around, they took some pictures. One of them asked why I killed that girl on the road and I said, `You think we killed anyone? If one of my children did something, I would have called the police. What are we doing here? Are we here to cause trouble? We're here to be able to eat. The policeman said that if there's one rotten tomato in the bunch, then the whole bunch is rotten. But if it hadn't been on the news that a girl had been killed around here, I wouldn't have known. He told me, `You can replant.' I told him I didn't have any money, so he said, `Go to the Palestinian police and let them give you money.' Now we're waiting. Maybe someone will come by and give us money. We don't have enough money to buy food."
Superintendent Rafi Yafeh, spokesman for the Judea and Samaria police district: "On September 28, at 2:10 A.M., a phone call was received by the Samaria police from a Palestinian resident of
Bardala who said that Jewish settlers were causing damage to Palestinian agricultural areas. A message regarding the incident was relayed to a patrol car at 2:23. The police car arrived at the
scene at about 3:40 A.M. after the suspects had already fled. It should be noted that the Samaria sector is quite large and response times are therefore sometimes longer due to the distances that must be covered. The investigation of the matter was entrusted to an investigative team in Samaria, which preserved the crime scene, collected evidence and took statements from the
Palestinians and the security forces. The district intends to continue collecting evidence against the suspects and to bring them to justice."
An American attorney, the legal advisor to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, is seeking to file a complaint with the police on behalf of the Bardala residents. She says both of the inquiries she made this week have been ignored.
Sdemot Mehola secretary Moshe Dermer: "I don't know who did these things, this vandalism, but I would guess that the ones who did it are good Jews who couldn't bear to see a person murdered on the road while the Arabs keep on working their tomato fields as if nothing happened. Jews and Arabs have lived together peacefully here. But as soon as someone struck at our side, a response was quick in coming. They knew that as soon as someone did something to us, the other side would get hurt."
Mehola secretary Amram Dayan: "As a community, as an organization, we had nothing to do with it, either in planning or execution. It was the action of some individuals and I don't know who they are. That's all I can say at this point."
Sde Eliyahu secretary Shaul Ginsburg: "I don't know anything, just that the police reported that our tractor was there. We condemn any kind of violence. But, above all, we condemn and are grieving over the murder of our member, Salit."
No response from the IDF spokesman had been received as of press time.
Goats now graze over the remnants of Maslamini's crops. Across the road, the ruins of the neighbors' hothouses also stand silent. They belonged to the Ahmed family. Of their seven hothouses, four were completely destroyed. On Sunday of this week, the brothers tried to repair what was left. But the vegetables had all withered among the wreckage. Not far away, between Maslamini's ruined field and the Ahmeds' ruined hothouses, the IDF's mighty bulldozer, guarded by an armed sergeant, was making progress in its work, leaving a cloud of dust behind it. "It's so the residents of these villages won't be able to go out to the road," said the officer, explaining the operational objective as the machine under his command continued its destructive work.
MCC Palestine urges everyone to write their elected officials in order to urge their governments to pressure Israel to withdraw from Palestinian population centers. Israeli troops have reinvaded all major Palestinian towns in the West Bank with the exceptions of Jericho and the Palestinian-controlled section of Hebron. This move, the Israeli government declared, was in response to the assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi; Zeevi's assassination, meanwhile, occurred against the backdrop of 36 Israeli assassinations of Palestinians (during which at least 19 bystanders were killed).
Israel demands that the Palestinian Authority arrest and extradite those responsible for Zeevi's murder, promising, in the words of Ariel Sharon, that if it does not do so, then the "era of Arafat is over"; the Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, promises to arrest those responsible but try them in Palestinian courts. MCC's Palestinian partners and colleagues are extremely tense about what the future holds: does Israel intend to topple the Palestinian Authority? Deport or assassinate Yasser Arafat? Unleash massive bombardment on Palestinian cities? Carry out Rehavam Zeevi's dream of transfer? [Surely not, we tell ourselves: the whole world is watching. Yet while the whole world is watching scores, hundreds die because of the occupation and is silent.] Or "simply" tighten the screws on an already oppressive siege which has sent unemployment skyrocketing well past 50% (much higher in some areas)?
Johnny Yusef Thaljieh, a cousin of two workers at the Wi'am Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem, was killed by a stray bullet while standing outside of the Church of the Nativitiy in Bethlehem on Saturday; he was buried in the Greek Orthodox cemetery on Sunday. He was one of 20 killed since Israel started its reinvasion of Palestinian cities on Thursday.
MCC peace development worker, Ed Nyce, remains in Bethlehem. He now sleeps in his living room, as his bedroom faces a hill on which an Israeli tank is now poised. The family of Zoughbi Zoughbi (director of Wi';am Conflict Resolution Center) has cleaned out the cave on which the family home is built: during times of war during the past century, the Zoughbi family has moved to the cave for protection.
Below are four pieces. The first two, by the Lutheran International Center in Bethlehem and the Roman Catholic (Latin) Patriarch of Jerusalem, call on Christians the world over to protest these latest Israeli moves and to call for an end to the occupation. The third, by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, examines the politics of assassination. The final piece, also by Levy, narrates what happened to farmers in the village of Bardalah in the West Bank when Israeli settlers came to burn their fields and destroy their crops. Bardalah received substantial assistance from MCC during the 1970s through MCC's rural development unit.
1. From the Lutheran International Center in Bethlehem:
Palestinians in the Bethlehem area have become almost used to being trapped in our town, particularly in the last 13 months of the Intifada.
But, now, not only are we trapped, we also face the turret of a tank no matter which direction we look. (Israelis report they have deployed 30 tanks in the area now.)
Life has come to a stop. On Friday, no one could get to the Center, as most staff lived in areas in which heavy firing was occurring. For the safety of the students, all schools are closed (a 10-year old school girl was killed by Israeli fire on Thursday morning in Jenin), shops are closed today in memorial of the three Palestinians who were killed yesterday in their homes by Israeli fire.
Even now as we write this, tanks shells are exploding around the Bethlehem area and a young girl and a young women in Beit Jala have just been killed. Some of our staff have just called, Faten and Carol, and are in the middle of extremely heavy firing.
What do we feel?
There is no time to feel, to weep, death comes upon death, destruction follows destruction.
As the shelling becomes louder and nearer, as we listen to the wailing of the ambulance sirens going nearby, we urge you not to leave us 'orphans.' Do not forget us in our time of trial.
Pray for us,but in these days, more importantly, contact your government officials urging them to intercede before more people are killed.
"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies." (2 Corinthians 4:8-10)
+ The Staff of the International Center of Bethlehem www.annadwa.org
2. Letter of H.B. Mons. Michel Sabbah to the Faithful
To our beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord!
The prophet Hosea says: Yahweh indicts the inhabitants of the country: there is no fidelity, no tenderness, no knowledge of God in the country, only perjury and lies, slaughter, theft, adultery and violence, murder after murder. This is why the country is in mourning, and all who live in it pine away (Hosea 4, 1-3). These words may be applied, at least partially, to our days. And we all carry the responsibility to purify our time and return to rectitude, justice and goodness.
Brothers and sisters: We are close to you. Together with you we experience the storm happen during these days. With Gods help this crisis will pass. We are with you in these difficult times. We would like to encourage you: Love each other with patience and faith. With the psalmist we say: Princes persecute me without a cause. But my heart stands in awe of Your word (Ps 118, 161), and further: Consider my affliction and deliver me, for I do not forget Your law. Plead my cause and redeem me; revive me according to Your word (118, 153-154).
Our destination is to be born under occupation and be exposed constantly to death. Every human person has the right and the duty to do all possible to him in order to obtain his own liberty. The international community finally has to come to understand that the Palestinian is a human being like all the others and has the right, as every human being, to reconquer his proper dignity and liberty in his own country.
Killing is evil. All violence is evil. All war disfigure the countenance of God, and is therefore evil. Only the murderer strives for murder. He opens the gates of death and makes the person enter. In our Holy Land the element that opens the gates to death is the military occupation. Therefore we say: the suffering of the Palestinian people until today is enough. Its time to end its tragedy.
To the Israeli people we say: you merit also security and peace. We wish you security and peace. In everybody and in everyone of you we see the dignity which derives from that of God and which is a gift to every human person being Palestinian or Hebrew. The key of death or peace is in your hands and in that of the government you have elected. It is the government that can open or close the gates of death. It is the government that can give you peace or take it away from you. Those who today fight each other and are thrown into the abyss of death have the right to live and enjoy security. Therfore, it depends on your government to put an end to all occupation that has been pressing upon the Palestinians during decades from this part, depriving them from their dignity and liberty. The United Nations have formulated regulations as base of peace. It would be sufficient to implement them.
With our Brothers, the Patriarchs of the Holy City and all the Heads of the Churches of Jerusalem we declare: It is enough with the bloodshed; it is enough with the fight! Shut the gates of death, of hatred and terror. Stop the shedding of blood that call for other bloodshed. The blood of all victims cries before God and before every human conscience. Restitute the occupied land to the real owners, thus allowing the hearts to regain serenity and for every human being to regain the proper humanity, and for Palestinians and Israelis to regain in equality the proper dignity given by God!
+ Michel Sabbah
Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem
3. The price of liquidation
Gideon Levy
Haaretz
What is the difference between the assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? It's important to understand that in the Palestinian perception, at least, there is no difference. Both of them headed extremist political movements, which advocate uncompromising solutions, yet were nevertheless considered legitimate in the eyes of their people.
The answer to the contention that Mustafa's Popular Front engaged mainly in terrorism, whereas Ze'evi's Moledet (Homeland) party did not is somewhat more complex. Beyond that most Palestinians consider the struggle against the Israeli occupation to be legitimate, Mustafa was above all a political leader, and no sufficient proof was adduced for Israel's accusations that he
was personally involved in planning acts of terrorism.
Moreover, in the Palestinian view, and in the view of part of the international community as well, the Israeli security cabinet, of which Ze'evi was a member, and which authorized operations involving liquidations, house demolitions, shellings and curfews, also bears a significant moral responsibility.
The outburst of nationalist emotion in the wake of the two acts of murder is also remarkably similar. Mustafa was the leader of the movement that is second in importance in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Palestinians saw his assassination as a blow to their national honor and their sovereignty, no less than the Israeli public's reaction to the Ze'evi assassination.
Ze'evi's provocative approach - his advocacy of the transfer of the Arabs, his likening of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Hitler, his assertion that the Palestinians have no right to live in their land -fanned the fire even more, perhaps like the political position of the Popular Front, which, at least in the past, called for a solution in the form of one secular, democratic state.
This is not the place to discuss the relative merits or demerits of a binational state; in any event, neither the advocates of one solution or the other deserve to die. And things look different depending on where you stand. The image in the mirror was reflected from both sides of the divide in the wake of these two unnecessary and vicious acts of murder.
But the discussion of the similarity between the two assassinations is ultimately a matter for the historians. At this moment, after the murder of Rehavam Ze'evi, what requires discussion is the continued policy of liquidations. Whoever is responsible for the fact that Ze'evi had no protection, responsibility rests also with those who conceived and executed the policy of liquidation, pushing the bar ever upward and not taking into account the consequences.
Did those who gave the order to assassinate the leader of the Popular Front take into consideration that the inevitable result would be a parallel upgrading of targets by Palestinian terrorists? That they would henceforth try to eliminate Israeli political leaders - a mode of action they had avoided in the past? Either those who sent the Israeli assassins didn't take that into account, in which case they stand accused of arrogance ("it won't happen to us, we have the Shin Bet security service") or blindness; or they did take it into account, in which case they must bear at least part of the responsibility for what happened.
What did they think: that the Popular Front would forgive and forget the assassination of its leader? That it would move on to the next order of business on the agenda? That it would make do with random shooting of settlers on the roads?
If the fomenters of the liquidations took into account a Palestinian response in the form of political assassinations of Israeli leaders, they carry a heavy burden of moral responsibility. No one can claim that the writing was not on the wall. On the very day of Mustafa's assassination, the Popular Front declared his blood would be avenged. Those in charge of the Israeli liquidations must now say whether they considered that possibility when they made their decision to assassinate Mustafa. Was his liquidation, whether justified or not, worth the life of an Israeli cabinet minister?
The argument that Palestinian terrorism exists in any case, as though it were a force of nature, doesn't always stand up to scrutiny. Not a little Palestinian violence is perpetrated in reaction
to Israeli violence, and the most direct and clearcut connection is the reaction to liquidations. Two Israeli restaurateurs, Etgar Zeitouni and Motti Dayan, were murdered last January in Tul Karm in the West Bank by a cousin of Dr. Tabath Tabath, who had been liquidated; the murder of Lior Kaufman last Thursday night near Ma'aleh Adumim in the West Bank, took place close to the village of Ataf Abayat, who was liquidated a few hours earlier.
No Israeli leader was assassinated by Palestinians until the liquidation of Abu Ali Mustafa. Since the liquidation of Hussein Abayat - the brother of Ataf Abayat - last November, Israel has liquidated at least 35 Palestinians, six of them in the past week alone. Beyond the moral and legal questions that must be asked about a state: that sends its sons on hit missions, that publishes hit lists and kills even when it would be possible to arrest and try the targets. We must now ask in all seriousness whether the advocates of this horrific policy also took its price into account.
The assassination of a cabinet minister in response to the liquidation of a leader from the other side is an opportunity to pause for a moment and consider whether there is any point to continuing this policy. Is the terrible price that is paid worth what's achieved? Have the liquidations reduced Palestinian terrorism or only aggravated it?
That hardly any time passed between Ze'evi's internment and the liquidation of three Palestinians, for which an Israeli hiker paid with his life, shows that the government and the defense establishment have not drawn any sort of lesson from the events. Past is prologue: we will liquidate, they will murder.
4. Bitter harvest
Gideon Levy
Haaretz
They arrived in the night, two busloads of men and youths, accompanied by soldiers. Bent on revenge for the murder of Salit Sheetrit of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, they destroyed the crops and the
hothouses of the farmers of Bardala. The police, called to the scene, arrived nine hours later
The ruined hothouses of Bardala: "This is the only source of support for us and our children." (Photo: Miki Kratsman)
Izat Maslamini was distraught. He walked about in his field, limping, his shirt dripping with sweat, his face unshaven and his throat hoarse. Here was another torn-up tube and more irrigation pipes pulled out of their places, another wrecked hothouse and another eggplant bush that will never bear fruit. Maslamini picks up from the ground each remnant of the destruction, as if believing that everything he beheld - cucumber after cucumber, irrigation pipeline after irrigation pipeline - would somehow be set right again.
Maslamini raised the ruined tubes and waved them about; he threw the lost vegetables to the ground in despair. Walking has been difficult for him ever since he was beaten by Jews on that terrible night; he still carries the scars, and wants everyone to see. He says that those who were armed forced him to stay by the door of his hut, where he sat for two hours, watching the settlers destroying the fruits of his labor. All the hard farming work of the past year went down the drain that night.
Maybe only a farmer can truly understand. The harvest was due to begin exactly five days after this pogrom by the settlers, who are farmers themselves. "By God, I didn't harvest anything this year," the disconsolate farmer repeated over and over again. The damage is estimated at NIS 150,000.
The rampagers came to his fields four days after the murder of Salit Sheetrit of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. Now the road to the farmer's ruined fields are blocked as well: On Sunday, an IDF bulldozer came and dug a trench to separate the fields of Maslamini and his neighbors from the main road. This week, Maslamini composed a declaration to the world, the cry of a tiller of the soil whose fields were sabotaged and whose world has been destroyed, written in awkward script on wrinkled cigarette paper. He keeps it in his shirt pocket, which is already stuffed with notes.
"In the name of God the merciful. We farmers of the northern region, the land of Bardala, tell you that the settlers have destroyed our fields and wrecked our hothouses. This is the only source of support for us and our children. And now we must go on living. The settlers also beat Izat Maslamini on the back and legs. We call upon all the organizations to provide assistance to these farmers who have lost all they had. We ask Saudi Arabia and Prince Walid bin Talil to support us, like he donated $10 million to New York to build the Twin Towers ... "
When Maslamini finished reading his proclamation, there was a deathly silence in the shady spot at the edge of his fields, where we sat, interrupted only by the quiet humming of the bees up in the fruit trees. Then farmer Jihad Darajma said, "We all agree," and all the other farmers sitting there nodded their heads.
Maslamini angrily passes through his ruined fields, bewailing his tragedy. "From what am I going to eat now? You tell me. How will my children and I eat? It's all over. Tell me, what are we to do? It's all gone. They've killed us. They beat me on the back and legs with their weapons. What are we going to do? I have 12 big and small children [eight children and four grandchildren] and what will we do for them? Where am I going to get food for them? I need NIS 1,000 for fertilizer and for plastic. Where am I going to get it from? I haven't harvested one thing. They came in the night and then fled. What shall we do to them? Tell me.
"Here, look. Two dunams of hothouses - all gone. Over there, three dunams of eggplant - all gone. And now the road here, you can't get in anymore. If there were soldiers here now, they'd take your ID and you'd sit here and wait. When is the soldier coming back? In an hour, two hours, five hours, seven hours, maybe not all night. What does he care? He's happy. You can't come in here. Here's the cucumber area. They destroyed everything, dug it all up. What are we going to do? I saw it happen at night, at 2:30 in the morning. They grabbed me and beat me.
"Am I causing problems? Look at this boy here, you see? No shoes. We thought the crops would grow and we'd all eat, this boy, too, and now it's all gone. Isn't that a shame? I told the policeman, `If I did this mess, then come and take me.' Look at the irrigation pipe. It's all torn up. What can we do with it. Look - it can't even be fixed. They cut it all up. By God, I haven't harvested anything. By God - if you believe in God. Here, this is the first eggplant I've picked this year. Look at it. I've been sick at home until now. There's no money for us to try it again. Look how they tore the plastic sheeting of the hothouses. They have these things like pruning shears that slice the tubing. Look, they left one here. Everything is ruined, all 60 dunams, and there's another 100 dunams that belong to the neighbors. They destroyed everything there, too. All in one night.
"We wait a year for the crops to grow - all through the winter and the summer. And then they come and wreck the whole area, everything, even inside the hothouses. They wouldn't let us speak. `Sit, sit and keep quiet,' they told us. They hit us in the leg with their M-16s. How is it possible to live like this? How can we make peace? Did I cause them trouble? I didn't even have a knife to slice tomatoes. They tore everything up with box-cutters."
Salt of the earth
Like an abdomen sewn up after an operation, the torn plastic sheeting of the hothouses are closed with crude black stitches. But the vegetables inside are a total loss - yellow, rotten cucumbers and green tomatoes that will never ripen. The torn-up irrigation tubing lies scattered on the ground, beyond repair. Yazid, a bespectacled young boy, shows a piece of evidence from the place of destruction: a cutting tool left behind by the vandals. A neighbor, Jihad Darajma, who was in charge of irrigation on thenight of the rampage, hoists his little nephew on his shoulders. "What does it have to do with this child?" he asks.
All the fields close to the main road, the Jordan Valley Highway, were totally destroyed, plowed up by the avenging bulldozers. The land was completely ruined; whatever crops remained have withered and yellowed. They came to avenge the murder of 28-year-old Salit Sheetrit of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, killed four days before. Not radical settlers from Yizhar or violent settlers from Tapuah, but "colonizers" of the Jordan Valley - apparently together with religious kibbutzniks from Sde Eliyahu inside Israel, who had never been considered "settlers."
The salt of the earth, who went to settle in a part of Israel that someone, for some reason, once promised them would forever remain in Israel's hands (according to the Allon Plan) and whose world is now crashing down around them. Ehud Barak put the future of "their" Jordan Valley on the table at Camp David, farming isn't the big hit it used to be, and Palestinian terrorists are shooting at them on the road that just yesterday was also thought to be a part of Israel.
Maslamini, 49, has four daughters, four sons and four grandchildren. For 10 months of the year, from August through June, they live in a hut at the edge of the fields, without electricity. On Sunday of this week, the laundry was hanging on the line after having been boiled over coals. The children go to school in the nearby village of Bardala, a kilometer and a half away. For two months of the year, the hottest part of the summer, they stay in the village of Tubas. Maslamini has been working this land for three years. Before that, he worked the nearby fields. A tenant farmer, he splits the income with the owner of the land. Last year, he reaped a crop worth NIS 155,000 from the 30 dunams that he works, half of which went to the owner. It's all written in his notebook - the income and expenses, each crate of cucumbers sold and each sack of fertilizer purchased. Gas - NIS 6,100. Plastic sheeting
-
NIS 2,223. According to his notebook, he sold 16 crates of squash at NIS 30 per crate. He gets up at four in the morning to go to work and goes to bed at eight in the evening. They rest between noon and 2 P.M., because of the heat, and finish work at six.
He planted here in July. Eggplant, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, hot peppers, sweet peppers, fava beans. The prime crops he sells right there to merchants who come from Jenin, Nazareth and Tiberias. The rest, they send to the market in Nablus - whenever it's possible to get there. A crate of prime produce sells for NIS 40, the rest is sent to the market for NIS 10, not including high transportation expenses, due to the situation. These days, it sometimes takes nine hours to travel the 40 kilometers to Nablus, traveling on makeshift roads. Now that the dirt blockade of Maslamini's fields is piling up before our eyes, as the IDF officer gives the signal and the bulldozer gouges the earth, getting there will take longer and be even more difficult.
Maslamini awoke in a panic in his hut when he heard the mob closing in. It was after two in the morning. He pulls out his notebook, where he has it all written down. On the night between September 27 and 28, it says. "Your holiday, your Kippur, had just ended," he says. The vandals arrived just hours after the conclusion of the fast and Yom Kippur prayers. They came in two buses, for a well-organized rampage, escorted by two IDF jeeps as quiet and unseeing backup. Before going to sleep that night, Maslamini had watched the news from New York again and again on Jordanian Television. "Only in New York, only in New York," he'd said to his wife.
Maslamini was stunned by what he found when he went out of his hut. He saw dozens of people running wild in his field, which was illuminated by the headlights of an IDF jeep. "They were kids - 16, 17, 19 years old. Each one armed with a box-cutter and wire cutters. They spread out all over. For every three kids, there was an armed adult. Then the tractors came. There were three of them ...
"Four armed men stood next to my house. `Sit, don't say anything,' one of them said, and then he hit me. They were settlers, not soldiers. My neighbor, Salah Darajma, came with a tractor and wanted to go to his children. They told him to beat it. Tell me, what were we to do? It went on for an hour and a half or two hours. They kept on destroying everything, with the IDF jeep showing them the way. I was afraid that if I started yelling, they'd do something to my children. That's all I was thinking. You can talk to the soldiers, but it's not possible to talk to these people, to the settlers. They were from Sde Eliyahu, from Mehola and Sdemot Mehola. You think anyone was there from Tel Aviv? What do they care? They knew that neither we or our children had done this."
As Izat is telling his story, his neighbor Jihad arrives. "They came off of two buses," he says. "And they had knives and pliers and shears. Each group of three was accompanied by someone armed with a gun. I told my uncle, who was with me, to take his children and wife and escape with them to the area above. We took all the children and fled, my wife and I and our 6-month-old baby. I went and sat with them in silence. Where could I go?"
Jihad Darajma called the police around 2:30 A.M. "This guy answered and I spoke to him in Hebrew. I told him that people had come and were plowing up our crops and wrecking our hothouses and that we had little children that were seeing all this. He asked where I was. I told him that I live in Bardala. So he said, `Where's Bardala?' I told him it's in the Jordan Valley. I explained to him exactly. He said, `Wait, I'll ask where Bardala is.' I heard him talking with a young woman. I heard him ask her where Bardala is. She said, `Here, next to Sdemot Mehola.'
"I could tell that he thought he understood now. He asked me where I was calling from. I told him that I was calling from the house in the tent, from my uncle's cellular phone. He asked me for
the number and asked my name. I gave him my name and he said: `I'm sending a patrol car now.' I said: `There's a blockade here and a blockade there and you could stop them in a minute.' Then I hung up the phone.
"I waited. I said to myself that if the police wanted to come, it should take 15 minutes or a half-hour at most. They didn't come. And meanwhile the vandals are plowing up our fields. I tried again. I dialed 100 and spoke to a woman there. I told her I'd spoken to a man there before, that there were people who were destroying our crops. She asked where it was and said she'd send another patrol car. I hung up and waited another hour or more. And all this time, they're still at it. I waited and they didn't come. So I said, What can we do? From now on, I'm just watching. And I turned off the cell phone. I sat there smoking a cigarette and looking at the field. I played with my baby and told him that tomorrow, we're going back to Tubas. That we're done with farming. And now he's in Tubas and I'm here trying to pick whatever they didn't have time to pull up. If
we had the money, we'd try to grow things here again."
`You can replant'
The police arrived at 11 the next morning, almost nine hours after they were called. Maslamini: "They looked around, they took some pictures. One of them asked why I killed that girl on the road and I said, `You think we killed anyone? If one of my children did something, I would have called the police. What are we doing here? Are we here to cause trouble? We're here to be able to eat. The policeman said that if there's one rotten tomato in the bunch, then the whole bunch is rotten. But if it hadn't been on the news that a girl had been killed around here, I wouldn't have known. He told me, `You can replant.' I told him I didn't have any money, so he said, `Go to the Palestinian police and let them give you money.' Now we're waiting. Maybe someone will come by and give us money. We don't have enough money to buy food."
Superintendent Rafi Yafeh, spokesman for the Judea and Samaria police district: "On September 28, at 2:10 A.M., a phone call was received by the Samaria police from a Palestinian resident of
Bardala who said that Jewish settlers were causing damage to Palestinian agricultural areas. A message regarding the incident was relayed to a patrol car at 2:23. The police car arrived at the
scene at about 3:40 A.M. after the suspects had already fled. It should be noted that the Samaria sector is quite large and response times are therefore sometimes longer due to the distances that must be covered. The investigation of the matter was entrusted to an investigative team in Samaria, which preserved the crime scene, collected evidence and took statements from the
Palestinians and the security forces. The district intends to continue collecting evidence against the suspects and to bring them to justice."
An American attorney, the legal advisor to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, is seeking to file a complaint with the police on behalf of the Bardala residents. She says both of the inquiries she made this week have been ignored.
Sdemot Mehola secretary Moshe Dermer: "I don't know who did these things, this vandalism, but I would guess that the ones who did it are good Jews who couldn't bear to see a person murdered on the road while the Arabs keep on working their tomato fields as if nothing happened. Jews and Arabs have lived together peacefully here. But as soon as someone struck at our side, a response was quick in coming. They knew that as soon as someone did something to us, the other side would get hurt."
Mehola secretary Amram Dayan: "As a community, as an organization, we had nothing to do with it, either in planning or execution. It was the action of some individuals and I don't know who they are. That's all I can say at this point."
Sde Eliyahu secretary Shaul Ginsburg: "I don't know anything, just that the police reported that our tractor was there. We condemn any kind of violence. But, above all, we condemn and are grieving over the murder of our member, Salit."
No response from the IDF spokesman had been received as of press time.
Goats now graze over the remnants of Maslamini's crops. Across the road, the ruins of the neighbors' hothouses also stand silent. They belonged to the Ahmed family. Of their seven hothouses, four were completely destroyed. On Sunday of this week, the brothers tried to repair what was left. But the vegetables had all withered among the wreckage. Not far away, between Maslamini's ruined field and the Ahmeds' ruined hothouses, the IDF's mighty bulldozer, guarded by an armed sergeant, was making progress in its work, leaving a cloud of dust behind it. "It's so the residents of these villages won't be able to go out to the road," said the officer, explaining the operational objective as the machine under his command continued its destructive work.
Wednesday, October 17
MCC Palestine Update #29
MCC Palestine Update #29
17 October 2001
This morning the Israeli minister of tourism, Rehavam Ze'evi, was shot dead in his room at the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem, within half a kilometer from MCC's office. Ze'evi was the leader of the Moledet party and an outspoken advocate of "transfer" of Palestinians from the occupied territories (i.e., ethnic cleansing). The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility, citing the attack as revenge for the assassination of the PFLP's leader Abu Ali Mustafa in August. 59 Palestinians have been killed as part of Israel's assassination campaign during the past year, among them 19 bystanders.
On Monday of this week we started getting calls in our office with news that several of the checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had been removed. We also received word that two of our West Bank staff members, after over one year of not having permits to enter Jerusalem, had finally been issued three-month permits. The assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi has meant a reversal of these small changes: all roadblocks are back in place.
Even if the roadblocks would again be removed, it is our worry that the changes would prove to be cosmetic and short-lived. Settlement expansion in the occupied territories continues, with the Israeli group Peace Now reporting that at least ten new settlements have been built since July.
Average Palestinians are deeply suspicious that this cease-fire will not be the desperately-needed first step in a series of steps towards a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, but willinstead prove to be but a momentary break in the long history of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories. At MCC, our fervent prayer is for the shattering of destructive myths--the myth of security through violence; the myth of peace without truth and justice; and the myth of liberation through violence--and for the inbreaking of justice, peace, and truth in Palestine/Israel leading to reconciliation. These are lofty, perhaps naive, prayers, prayers which it feels quixotic to utter after thirty-four years of occupation and after the uprising of the past year: but they are prayers we must offer up.
Below are two pieces. The first, by journalist Amira Hass, raises a prophetic warning against the possibility of "transfer" (i.e., ethnic cleansing) of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Neither we nor Amira Hass wish to be alarmist on this score; however, over the past few months the once highly-improbably scenario of transfer has started to seem slightly more possible. The second piece narrates the story of Issa Zuf of Hares village in the West Bank, one of the thousands permanently disabled during the past year.
1. Keeping a Lid on the Transfer Genie
Amira Hass
Haaretz
War brings out the darkest thoughts and the deepest fears. It's impossible to guess now how the war on Afghanistan will develop and how it will affect our region and our country. Still,
because of the war, this is the time to clearly ask the following question: is Israeli society immune to an idea such as the transfer of the Palestinian population as a "solution" to the protracted conflict?
Are there enough restraints in the Israeli society to prevent such a twisted idea - which, after all, has a proponent within the Israeli cabinet - from evolving into an "emergency plan" that will take advantage of a propitious moment in a war without limits? Wars,
by their nature, release bottled-up genies.
Skepticism that Israel may try to expel the country's Arabs at the beginning of the twenty-first century is natural and encouraging. It shows that the majority of Jewish Israelis accept as an unequivocal fact that the Palestinians are natives of this land. The question is how much strength the majority of the Jewish Israelis have in the face of those Jews who want to change that fact. The experience of the past year in general and of the past month in particular suggests that deep cracks have appeared in the immunity of most Jewish Israelis to the attraction of military "solutions."
After a year of confrontation, the more vociferous sectors of the Jewish- Israeli public view the Palestinians as an integral part of the Islamic terror map.
During the Oslo years in general and in the past year in particular, the majority of the Jewish-Israeli public has disregarded the fact that it is an occupying power in every part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It interprets the bloody clash as a war between two equal entities in terms of their political and international status, and, like its government, ignores the responsibility the State of Israel bears for the welfare and safety of the occupied population.
The transfer idea has a living progeny: the shunting of the Palestinian and the Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship into separate "pales of settlement," whose demarcation lines are continuously shrinking under expropriation orders issued "for the good of the public" - the Jewish public, that is. Discriminatory land laws and more than 50 years of deprivation have pushed the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens into enclaves of overcrowding, poverty, unemployment and want. On the other side of the 1967 Green Line, Area C (under Israeli administrative and security control) occupies 60 percent of the West Bank. It is depicted by the Israelis who control the area (settlers, the Civil Administration, soldiers) as "Israeli territory" which must be protected against a possible Palestinian "takeover." This is the clear-cut conclusion from the impotence of the authorities in the face of the piratical and official expansion of the settlements in Area C, and from what soldiers posted at roadblocks between Palestinian locales (and not between the West Bank and Israel) say. The soldiers explain that they are "protecting our territory, Israel's territory."
Bureaucratic pressure on a ruled population, combined with a process of separating it from the numerically and militarily dominant nation, reflects undercurrents that desire the disappearance of that population. In wartime, such bureaucratic pressure could evolve into military pressure.
The American response of a massive attack on an entire nation, in whose sovereign territory Osama bin Laden encamped, is automatically compared to what is perceived as an "insufficient" Israeli reaction to Palestinian terrorism. This is a constant pressure on the Israeli right-wing government by its natural electorate. Indeed, under the pressure of the expectation of a fierce
American reaction, the Israeli army, immediately after the September 11 attacks, escalated its activity in Jenin and Rafah, causing a large number of deaths among Palestinian civilians, without any discernible Israeli protest.
There is good reason to suppose that the American counterattack is in fact liable to create a convenient atmosphere for stepping up the military pressure on the Palestinians. If the war continues and expands, and if the Palestinians continue their terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, the "solutions" inherent in military pressure, including the expulsion "solution," could acquire even more advocates at both the military and civilian levels.
The information that the Jewish public receives about what is going on in the occupied territories is meager, limited and seeps into its consciousness slowly (that is, information not related to attacks on Jews). Even what is reported is serious enough (for example, dozens of Palestinian civilians who were killed by Israeli army gunfire in the first weeks of the intifada, even though they did not endanger soldiers); but the information does not generate a sufficiently powerful and swift Israeli mobilization to restrain the political and military levels. What has restrained Israeli operations is mainly external, not domestic, pressure. Yet even this external pressure is fading, and in a world that is preoccupied with a general war, the fear mounts that it will disappear altogether.
In the course of the Oslo years, the large major peace camp in Israel abandoned the concept of the importance of nonviolent resistance to the occupation. It lost touch with the Palestinian public (to instead form ties with the Palestinian leadership). In the year of the intifada, it broke off ties with the Palestinian leadership, with which it is angry. Will the dormant sensors of the Israeli peace camp awaken in time if the bottled- up Israeli genies are released?
2. ‘I still see the two faces of Israel’
Joseph Algazy
Haaretz, 15 October 2001
When soldiers entered his village, Issa Suf went out to warn the children to go into their houses, and was severely injured by an IDF bullet. Now he is paralyzed, but still retains some hope for the future.
SCENE OF THE SHOOTING: "I told the soldier who had kicked me that I couldn't get up," says Issa Suf. (Photo: Nir Kafri )
"Enough of the suffering and the blood that has been shed. I can measure this pain according to what has happened and is happening to me. I'm only a young man, and in one moment, because of one bullet, I became paralyzed in half my body, apparently for the rest of my life," says Issa Suf, a resident of the Palestinian village of Hares. Suf was shot next to his house five months ago, and now lies helpless in his bed.
Hares is a small Palestinian village that lies northwest of Ramallah, and southwest of Nablus, in a region that, fortunately or unfortunately for the 3,000 residents, is a very important strategic point. From Tel Hares ("the watchman's tel," in Arabic), one can get a good view of the Trans- Samaria highway, and below are large reservoirs of water, the feeder area of the Yarkon-Taninim aquifer. The area is rich in riverbeds, springs and wells. In recent years, the settlements have mainly used these water sources, which not by chance were established around them. These settlements include Ariel, Kiryat Netafim, Revava, Barkan, Yakir, Nofim, Kfar Tapuah, Yitzhar and others.
In Hares there are also vestiges dating back to the time of Byzantine rule in the area.
During the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967, thousands of the residents of Hares and other villages in the area moved to the east bank of the Jordan, and became refugees there. Before the present intifada, many of them used to come back to visit relatives during the summer months.
"Israel, mainly the settlers, has not relinquished the dream of uprooting us from here, but this time they won't succeed. We won't let any of the families leave the place, not even for Paradise," say the residents of Hares, after every incident and clash between themselves and the IDF and settlers in the area.
During this intifada, there have been three "shahids" (Islamic martyrs, as those who carry out suicide missions are called) in Hares. The bald spots in the lands around the village testify to the hundreds of trees, mainly olive trees, uprooted by IDF bulldozers as a result of stone-throwing, and of clashes with settlers and soldiers who enter the village and, in certain cases, shoot and throw grenades. The forced unemployment the roadblocks cause and the closures damage the residents' quality of life, and their daily routine has become completely disrupted.
Last Sunday, in the afternoon, soldiers piled large quantities of rocks and earth on the road at the entrance to the village; the next morning, they removed them.
"In the face of our stubbornness, I wouldn't be surprised if one day, when Israel discovers that they can't remove us from here by force, they will offer every family in Hares perhaps $100,000 if only they leave," estimated one of the residents.
PR for Israel
Issa Suf returned to his home in the village about a month ago. He was hospitalized in Amman after his injury from an IDF bullet four-and-a-half months ago. He lies in bed, his lower body paralyzed. In order to move, he uses a device hanging from the ceiling. He has to move his limbs often in bed, in order to prevent bedsores; occasionally, one of his relatives massages his entire body. Sometimes family members or friends sit him in a wheelchair and take him out to the back yard to take in some air. Because he is incontinent, at fixed intervals, he is transferred to the wheelchair and brought to the bathroom. He complains of strong pains in his lower limbs.
Issa Suf's house is near the homes of his parents and his brothers, in the western part of Hares. His father, Naif Suf, invested most of his life and strength in removing rocks and boulders from his land, on which he grows olives, dates, pomegranates and sabra cactuses, as well as other fruit. From his two wives, he has six daughters and nine sons. Some of his sons work outside the village.
Their neighbors describe them as a cohesive family, whose children are always willing to help others. The eldest son, Nawaf Suf (Abu Rabia), is the Palestinian representative on the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Liaison Committee in the Salfit region.
Issa, who completed a course in journalism, worked for a while at an advertising company in Nablus. After taking a sports course, he served for several years as a physical education teacher. He learned his fluent Hebrew during the days when he worked at the Shamir Salads warehouse at the settlement of Barkan.
Suf has no past record of arrests for security reasons. During the Gulf War, he said, he was caught during the curfew walking to buy milk for the children, was detained for 11 days in Tul Karm, and was fined NIS 500. During the present intifada, his main job was public relations and providing information for Israeli and foreign journalists. He also helped his brother, Nawaf, in coordinating visits of solidarity missions from Israel, which transferred deliveries of food and medicine to the Palestinian villages that are suffering from shortages because of the closures.
On the day before he was injured, Issa Suf had been the one who coordinated the transfer of a delivery of food from Israel to the villages of Marda and Kiri. The Israelis involved in bringing in food knew him well, and therefore, the day after he was injured, 400 people held a protest vigil in front of the Defense Ministry in the Kirya in Tel Aviv, and declared, "We are all Issa Suf!"
Grim recollections
Last week, Suf told of the circumstances of his injury.
"In Hares, there are many little children," he began. "During these dangerous days of shooting and tear gas, their parents have a hard time keeping them shut up inside the house. At the beginning of any incident with soldiers and settlers, the adults rush to bring the children home so they won't be hurt.
"That day, May 15, at about 10 a.m., when I was at the home of my brother, Raad, who works at a carpentry shop at the entrance to the village, he called me on his cell phone and told me that he had seen soldiers entering the village. He asked me to hurry and bring in all the little children who were outside their homes. I went out in order to bring home Raad's little son, Ahmed, who is
three years old, and also called aloud to the women to go outside and bring their children into the houses.
"From the place where I was standing, a few meters from the house, I heard volleys of shots, but I still didn't see who was shooting. Because of the shots, I shouted loudly at the children who were still outdoors, and told them to go home quickly, when suddenly I felt a bullet hit me from the side, in the right shoulder.
"I barely managed to walk two or three steps toward the door, and I collapsed on the path. Only then did I see that, from the direction of the path that goes down toward the house, two soldiers were approaching me, spraying volleys from their weapons in all directions. One of them was a redhead and the other was dark. The redhead approached me, and while I was still lying wounded on the floor, kicked me in the foot and said, `Get up! Get up!'
"I tried to get up, but I couldn't. I tried to move one of my feet with my hands, but I didn't succeed. I told the soldier who had kicked me that I couldn't get up. I also began to feel that I was having trouble breathing. The next day in the hospital, the doctors explained that the bullet which hit me penetrated a lung, and caused an internal hemorrhage that put pressure on the lungs.
"My younger brother, Abed, called me on the cell phone I was holding, and told me that he had received information that in our neighborhood someone had been injured, and he asked me to go and help the wounded man. I told my brother that the injured man he was telling me about was me, and asked him to find some vehicle to bring me to the hospital, since I couldn't move and was having trouble breathing.
"The redhead grabbed the cell phone, took out the battery, and threw the two parts on the floor. When the dark soldier noticed that people. including my father, Naif, and my mother, Tamam, were running to the place where I was lying, he threw stun grenades at them in order to prevent them from approaching me. Then I turned to the redheaded soldier and said to him in Hebrew, `Be humane, and leave, so that my family can approach me and help me.' Slowly my vision became blurred, too.
"My cousin, who is also called Abed Suf, came with a car, and despite the threats of the soldiers, came up to the place where I was lying, and with the help of others, put me into the car and took me to the neighboring village. From there, unconscious, I was taken by ambulance to the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus. The doctors told my family that the delay in bringing me to the hospital had greatly aggravated my condition. When I returned to consciousness, the doctors put a tube into my chest and drew out the blood that had collected there."
On the fifth day of his hospitalization in Nablus, his doctors discovered that the bullet that had penetrated Suf's body had disintegrated in the area between the eighth and the ninth vertebrae, and that they didn't have the equipment to treat him. They transferred him to the Al Ordon hospital in Amman. There, in a complicated operation, they removed parts of the bullet from his body, but not all of them in order to prevent damage to additional vital organs. From there he was transferred to the King Hussein Medical Center for physiotherapy. Now they are considering the possibility of sending him to a hospital abroad for further treatment.
Issa Suf, now 30 years old, is married and the father of an infant named Vard ("Flower"), who was a month-a-half old on the day his father was injured. Despite the harsh events and his injury, he has not lost hope that the bloodshed will end.
"From where I am," he said, pointing to his bed, "in the miserable situation in which I am living, I haven't stopped distinguishing between good and evil, between an occupier and a guest. I have not stopped seeing the two faces of Israel. Unfortunately, the good people in Israel - those who know how to distinguish between good and evil and between justice and injustice - are few, very few. The others, those who want everything for themselves and don't care if the other suffers and dies, are the great majority.
"Every time I think, like now, for example, that something good is about to come about, your [Prime Minister] Sharon comes and destroys it. I am convinced that the key to peace is in the
hands of the Israeli people. They are the only ones who can solve the problem."
17 October 2001
This morning the Israeli minister of tourism, Rehavam Ze'evi, was shot dead in his room at the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem, within half a kilometer from MCC's office. Ze'evi was the leader of the Moledet party and an outspoken advocate of "transfer" of Palestinians from the occupied territories (i.e., ethnic cleansing). The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility, citing the attack as revenge for the assassination of the PFLP's leader Abu Ali Mustafa in August. 59 Palestinians have been killed as part of Israel's assassination campaign during the past year, among them 19 bystanders.
On Monday of this week we started getting calls in our office with news that several of the checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had been removed. We also received word that two of our West Bank staff members, after over one year of not having permits to enter Jerusalem, had finally been issued three-month permits. The assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi has meant a reversal of these small changes: all roadblocks are back in place.
Even if the roadblocks would again be removed, it is our worry that the changes would prove to be cosmetic and short-lived. Settlement expansion in the occupied territories continues, with the Israeli group Peace Now reporting that at least ten new settlements have been built since July.
Average Palestinians are deeply suspicious that this cease-fire will not be the desperately-needed first step in a series of steps towards a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, but willinstead prove to be but a momentary break in the long history of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories. At MCC, our fervent prayer is for the shattering of destructive myths--the myth of security through violence; the myth of peace without truth and justice; and the myth of liberation through violence--and for the inbreaking of justice, peace, and truth in Palestine/Israel leading to reconciliation. These are lofty, perhaps naive, prayers, prayers which it feels quixotic to utter after thirty-four years of occupation and after the uprising of the past year: but they are prayers we must offer up.
Below are two pieces. The first, by journalist Amira Hass, raises a prophetic warning against the possibility of "transfer" (i.e., ethnic cleansing) of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Neither we nor Amira Hass wish to be alarmist on this score; however, over the past few months the once highly-improbably scenario of transfer has started to seem slightly more possible. The second piece narrates the story of Issa Zuf of Hares village in the West Bank, one of the thousands permanently disabled during the past year.
1. Keeping a Lid on the Transfer Genie
Amira Hass
Haaretz
War brings out the darkest thoughts and the deepest fears. It's impossible to guess now how the war on Afghanistan will develop and how it will affect our region and our country. Still,
because of the war, this is the time to clearly ask the following question: is Israeli society immune to an idea such as the transfer of the Palestinian population as a "solution" to the protracted conflict?
Are there enough restraints in the Israeli society to prevent such a twisted idea - which, after all, has a proponent within the Israeli cabinet - from evolving into an "emergency plan" that will take advantage of a propitious moment in a war without limits? Wars,
by their nature, release bottled-up genies.
Skepticism that Israel may try to expel the country's Arabs at the beginning of the twenty-first century is natural and encouraging. It shows that the majority of Jewish Israelis accept as an unequivocal fact that the Palestinians are natives of this land. The question is how much strength the majority of the Jewish Israelis have in the face of those Jews who want to change that fact. The experience of the past year in general and of the past month in particular suggests that deep cracks have appeared in the immunity of most Jewish Israelis to the attraction of military "solutions."
After a year of confrontation, the more vociferous sectors of the Jewish- Israeli public view the Palestinians as an integral part of the Islamic terror map.
During the Oslo years in general and in the past year in particular, the majority of the Jewish-Israeli public has disregarded the fact that it is an occupying power in every part of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It interprets the bloody clash as a war between two equal entities in terms of their political and international status, and, like its government, ignores the responsibility the State of Israel bears for the welfare and safety of the occupied population.
The transfer idea has a living progeny: the shunting of the Palestinian and the Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship into separate "pales of settlement," whose demarcation lines are continuously shrinking under expropriation orders issued "for the good of the public" - the Jewish public, that is. Discriminatory land laws and more than 50 years of deprivation have pushed the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens into enclaves of overcrowding, poverty, unemployment and want. On the other side of the 1967 Green Line, Area C (under Israeli administrative and security control) occupies 60 percent of the West Bank. It is depicted by the Israelis who control the area (settlers, the Civil Administration, soldiers) as "Israeli territory" which must be protected against a possible Palestinian "takeover." This is the clear-cut conclusion from the impotence of the authorities in the face of the piratical and official expansion of the settlements in Area C, and from what soldiers posted at roadblocks between Palestinian locales (and not between the West Bank and Israel) say. The soldiers explain that they are "protecting our territory, Israel's territory."
Bureaucratic pressure on a ruled population, combined with a process of separating it from the numerically and militarily dominant nation, reflects undercurrents that desire the disappearance of that population. In wartime, such bureaucratic pressure could evolve into military pressure.
The American response of a massive attack on an entire nation, in whose sovereign territory Osama bin Laden encamped, is automatically compared to what is perceived as an "insufficient" Israeli reaction to Palestinian terrorism. This is a constant pressure on the Israeli right-wing government by its natural electorate. Indeed, under the pressure of the expectation of a fierce
American reaction, the Israeli army, immediately after the September 11 attacks, escalated its activity in Jenin and Rafah, causing a large number of deaths among Palestinian civilians, without any discernible Israeli protest.
There is good reason to suppose that the American counterattack is in fact liable to create a convenient atmosphere for stepping up the military pressure on the Palestinians. If the war continues and expands, and if the Palestinians continue their terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, the "solutions" inherent in military pressure, including the expulsion "solution," could acquire even more advocates at both the military and civilian levels.
The information that the Jewish public receives about what is going on in the occupied territories is meager, limited and seeps into its consciousness slowly (that is, information not related to attacks on Jews). Even what is reported is serious enough (for example, dozens of Palestinian civilians who were killed by Israeli army gunfire in the first weeks of the intifada, even though they did not endanger soldiers); but the information does not generate a sufficiently powerful and swift Israeli mobilization to restrain the political and military levels. What has restrained Israeli operations is mainly external, not domestic, pressure. Yet even this external pressure is fading, and in a world that is preoccupied with a general war, the fear mounts that it will disappear altogether.
In the course of the Oslo years, the large major peace camp in Israel abandoned the concept of the importance of nonviolent resistance to the occupation. It lost touch with the Palestinian public (to instead form ties with the Palestinian leadership). In the year of the intifada, it broke off ties with the Palestinian leadership, with which it is angry. Will the dormant sensors of the Israeli peace camp awaken in time if the bottled- up Israeli genies are released?
2. ‘I still see the two faces of Israel’
Joseph Algazy
Haaretz, 15 October 2001
When soldiers entered his village, Issa Suf went out to warn the children to go into their houses, and was severely injured by an IDF bullet. Now he is paralyzed, but still retains some hope for the future.
SCENE OF THE SHOOTING: "I told the soldier who had kicked me that I couldn't get up," says Issa Suf. (Photo: Nir Kafri )
"Enough of the suffering and the blood that has been shed. I can measure this pain according to what has happened and is happening to me. I'm only a young man, and in one moment, because of one bullet, I became paralyzed in half my body, apparently for the rest of my life," says Issa Suf, a resident of the Palestinian village of Hares. Suf was shot next to his house five months ago, and now lies helpless in his bed.
Hares is a small Palestinian village that lies northwest of Ramallah, and southwest of Nablus, in a region that, fortunately or unfortunately for the 3,000 residents, is a very important strategic point. From Tel Hares ("the watchman's tel," in Arabic), one can get a good view of the Trans- Samaria highway, and below are large reservoirs of water, the feeder area of the Yarkon-Taninim aquifer. The area is rich in riverbeds, springs and wells. In recent years, the settlements have mainly used these water sources, which not by chance were established around them. These settlements include Ariel, Kiryat Netafim, Revava, Barkan, Yakir, Nofim, Kfar Tapuah, Yitzhar and others.
In Hares there are also vestiges dating back to the time of Byzantine rule in the area.
During the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967, thousands of the residents of Hares and other villages in the area moved to the east bank of the Jordan, and became refugees there. Before the present intifada, many of them used to come back to visit relatives during the summer months.
"Israel, mainly the settlers, has not relinquished the dream of uprooting us from here, but this time they won't succeed. We won't let any of the families leave the place, not even for Paradise," say the residents of Hares, after every incident and clash between themselves and the IDF and settlers in the area.
During this intifada, there have been three "shahids" (Islamic martyrs, as those who carry out suicide missions are called) in Hares. The bald spots in the lands around the village testify to the hundreds of trees, mainly olive trees, uprooted by IDF bulldozers as a result of stone-throwing, and of clashes with settlers and soldiers who enter the village and, in certain cases, shoot and throw grenades. The forced unemployment the roadblocks cause and the closures damage the residents' quality of life, and their daily routine has become completely disrupted.
Last Sunday, in the afternoon, soldiers piled large quantities of rocks and earth on the road at the entrance to the village; the next morning, they removed them.
"In the face of our stubbornness, I wouldn't be surprised if one day, when Israel discovers that they can't remove us from here by force, they will offer every family in Hares perhaps $100,000 if only they leave," estimated one of the residents.
PR for Israel
Issa Suf returned to his home in the village about a month ago. He was hospitalized in Amman after his injury from an IDF bullet four-and-a-half months ago. He lies in bed, his lower body paralyzed. In order to move, he uses a device hanging from the ceiling. He has to move his limbs often in bed, in order to prevent bedsores; occasionally, one of his relatives massages his entire body. Sometimes family members or friends sit him in a wheelchair and take him out to the back yard to take in some air. Because he is incontinent, at fixed intervals, he is transferred to the wheelchair and brought to the bathroom. He complains of strong pains in his lower limbs.
Issa Suf's house is near the homes of his parents and his brothers, in the western part of Hares. His father, Naif Suf, invested most of his life and strength in removing rocks and boulders from his land, on which he grows olives, dates, pomegranates and sabra cactuses, as well as other fruit. From his two wives, he has six daughters and nine sons. Some of his sons work outside the village.
Their neighbors describe them as a cohesive family, whose children are always willing to help others. The eldest son, Nawaf Suf (Abu Rabia), is the Palestinian representative on the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Liaison Committee in the Salfit region.
Issa, who completed a course in journalism, worked for a while at an advertising company in Nablus. After taking a sports course, he served for several years as a physical education teacher. He learned his fluent Hebrew during the days when he worked at the Shamir Salads warehouse at the settlement of Barkan.
Suf has no past record of arrests for security reasons. During the Gulf War, he said, he was caught during the curfew walking to buy milk for the children, was detained for 11 days in Tul Karm, and was fined NIS 500. During the present intifada, his main job was public relations and providing information for Israeli and foreign journalists. He also helped his brother, Nawaf, in coordinating visits of solidarity missions from Israel, which transferred deliveries of food and medicine to the Palestinian villages that are suffering from shortages because of the closures.
On the day before he was injured, Issa Suf had been the one who coordinated the transfer of a delivery of food from Israel to the villages of Marda and Kiri. The Israelis involved in bringing in food knew him well, and therefore, the day after he was injured, 400 people held a protest vigil in front of the Defense Ministry in the Kirya in Tel Aviv, and declared, "We are all Issa Suf!"
Grim recollections
Last week, Suf told of the circumstances of his injury.
"In Hares, there are many little children," he began. "During these dangerous days of shooting and tear gas, their parents have a hard time keeping them shut up inside the house. At the beginning of any incident with soldiers and settlers, the adults rush to bring the children home so they won't be hurt.
"That day, May 15, at about 10 a.m., when I was at the home of my brother, Raad, who works at a carpentry shop at the entrance to the village, he called me on his cell phone and told me that he had seen soldiers entering the village. He asked me to hurry and bring in all the little children who were outside their homes. I went out in order to bring home Raad's little son, Ahmed, who is
three years old, and also called aloud to the women to go outside and bring their children into the houses.
"From the place where I was standing, a few meters from the house, I heard volleys of shots, but I still didn't see who was shooting. Because of the shots, I shouted loudly at the children who were still outdoors, and told them to go home quickly, when suddenly I felt a bullet hit me from the side, in the right shoulder.
"I barely managed to walk two or three steps toward the door, and I collapsed on the path. Only then did I see that, from the direction of the path that goes down toward the house, two soldiers were approaching me, spraying volleys from their weapons in all directions. One of them was a redhead and the other was dark. The redhead approached me, and while I was still lying wounded on the floor, kicked me in the foot and said, `Get up! Get up!'
"I tried to get up, but I couldn't. I tried to move one of my feet with my hands, but I didn't succeed. I told the soldier who had kicked me that I couldn't get up. I also began to feel that I was having trouble breathing. The next day in the hospital, the doctors explained that the bullet which hit me penetrated a lung, and caused an internal hemorrhage that put pressure on the lungs.
"My younger brother, Abed, called me on the cell phone I was holding, and told me that he had received information that in our neighborhood someone had been injured, and he asked me to go and help the wounded man. I told my brother that the injured man he was telling me about was me, and asked him to find some vehicle to bring me to the hospital, since I couldn't move and was having trouble breathing.
"The redhead grabbed the cell phone, took out the battery, and threw the two parts on the floor. When the dark soldier noticed that people. including my father, Naif, and my mother, Tamam, were running to the place where I was lying, he threw stun grenades at them in order to prevent them from approaching me. Then I turned to the redheaded soldier and said to him in Hebrew, `Be humane, and leave, so that my family can approach me and help me.' Slowly my vision became blurred, too.
"My cousin, who is also called Abed Suf, came with a car, and despite the threats of the soldiers, came up to the place where I was lying, and with the help of others, put me into the car and took me to the neighboring village. From there, unconscious, I was taken by ambulance to the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus. The doctors told my family that the delay in bringing me to the hospital had greatly aggravated my condition. When I returned to consciousness, the doctors put a tube into my chest and drew out the blood that had collected there."
On the fifth day of his hospitalization in Nablus, his doctors discovered that the bullet that had penetrated Suf's body had disintegrated in the area between the eighth and the ninth vertebrae, and that they didn't have the equipment to treat him. They transferred him to the Al Ordon hospital in Amman. There, in a complicated operation, they removed parts of the bullet from his body, but not all of them in order to prevent damage to additional vital organs. From there he was transferred to the King Hussein Medical Center for physiotherapy. Now they are considering the possibility of sending him to a hospital abroad for further treatment.
Issa Suf, now 30 years old, is married and the father of an infant named Vard ("Flower"), who was a month-a-half old on the day his father was injured. Despite the harsh events and his injury, he has not lost hope that the bloodshed will end.
"From where I am," he said, pointing to his bed, "in the miserable situation in which I am living, I haven't stopped distinguishing between good and evil, between an occupier and a guest. I have not stopped seeing the two faces of Israel. Unfortunately, the good people in Israel - those who know how to distinguish between good and evil and between justice and injustice - are few, very few. The others, those who want everything for themselves and don't care if the other suffers and dies, are the great majority.
"Every time I think, like now, for example, that something good is about to come about, your [Prime Minister] Sharon comes and destroys it. I am convinced that the key to peace is in the
hands of the Israeli people. They are the only ones who can solve the problem."
Monday, October 1
MCC Palestine Update #28
MCC Palestine Update #28
Amidst talk of a potential cease-fire declaration, the road closures for Yom Kippur, and the one-year anniversary of the al-Aqsa Intifada, the work of MCC's Palestinian partners continues. The Center for Agricultural Services in Hebron this week initiated a program to support the production of "dibs" (a honey-like spread made out of grapes) in Hebron's Old City--the project will provide a badly needed additional source of income for nearly 50 families in an area often under curfew. The Badil Refugee Resource Center in Bethlehem, meanwhile, has begun to assemble a Hebrew-language packet with information on the legal basis of the right of Palestinian refugees to return and on practical modalities for return.
Below are three pieces. The first, by Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh, tries to lay out a way ahead for Palestinians and Israelis; his piece was published simultaneously in Palestinian and Israeli papers. The second is a worship reflection which MCC country representative Alain Epp Weaver will be offering at MCC's student conference in New York on forgiveness and politics. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, considers what the press would look like if it reported everything that happened in the occupied territories.
1. What next?
Sari Nusseibeh
Haaretz, 24 September 2001
What can a levelheaded person among us (be he/she Jewish or Arab) see as a future prospect to the escalating bloody events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? This is a question all of us (whether we be levelheaded or aspire to be so) must consider patiently and detachedly.
Surely no rational person on the Israeli side expects that this conflict can be resolved by removing the Palestinian people from historic Palestine. Similarly, no sane person on the Palestinian side expects to achieve the desired peace by means of removing the Jewish people from this land. Both peoples exist and, in all likelihood, will continue to do so. Therefore, the struggle between them will continue unless they put a stop to it.
Surely also, on the other hand, no sane person on the Israeli side expects Israel to be able to bring about security and stability by forcefully imposing a settlement on the Palestinian people. But equally and conversely, Israelis are unlikely to cave in and accept solutions forced upon them. Force, therefore, will not produce stability or relatively permanent security, if for no other
reason than because force is not a trait that is the permanent property of any one party over the other.
All of this means that when any levelheaded person looks ahead, all he or she can see is either a future full of confrontations and bloodshed, or the logical need for a peaceful, agreed-upon
solution.
Some might say: But we have tried the peace process and it has failed (with each side presenting reasons for this failure from its own point of view). They might continue by accusing the other
side of deliberately prolonging the confrontations, alleging that it never wanted peace in the first place and concluding that the theory that a peaceful solution to the conflict works is, therefore, not a valid theory, and that peace is not a realistic option.
It is true that the peace process has failed, but it must be asked: Did the theory or merely its implementation fail? Are we the only party that believes in peace? In my opinion, the fault does not lie in the theory: It lies in the form it took and the way in which it was implemented.
Why do I say that the fault does not lie in the theory? From an Israeli point of view, failing to reach a solution gradually places Israel in danger. Sooner or later, Israel will find itself
turning either into a racist state - like the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa -that is unable to bring security or peace to its citizens, or a binational that has lost its Jewishness. Both outcomes represent a strategic problem for Israel and require a preemptive measure to prevent them. Thus, strategically, Israel is in need of a solution.
On the Palestinian side, the dream of a national identity within a political entity can only be realized through the creation of a separate (or independent) national state. Allowing such a goal to slip away, or setting a goal beyond this, will simply push the Palestinians toward a demographic and strategic confrontation with Israelis, the best outcome of which, from their viewpoint, will produce a political framework in which Palestinian national identity will not be the predominant political identity of the state. Thus, a solution is a strategic requirement for the the Palestinians too.
Commonsense, therefore, says that a joint solution for both the Palestinian and Israeli problems - and not for one side alone - involves concluding a definitive peace between the two peoples. The theory that such a solution must be based on the establishment of two neighboring - but separate - states also remains sound for as long as such a solution is practicable, both geographically and demographically. In this context, it is important to point out that time does not stand still, waiting for the people to return to their senses.
But if, in theory, peace is a valid way out, why did we fail in its implementation? Is it because the other side does not believe in peace? Or is it because the other party to the conflict does not
behave sanely?
There are certainly a number of different reasons for its failure. But in my opinion, one can identify three fundamental obstacles to a solution. These obstacles, whether directly or indirectly, will also continue to prevent one. Therefore, if peace is to be attained, both peoples must confront these obstacles and take them into account. These obstacles can be described as fixed political positions or deeply-rooted psychological states of mind. The first is Palestinian; the second is Israeli; and the third is common to both.
The first obstacle, from the Palestinian perspective, is the emotionally- fixed delineation by the Palestinian people of the areas occupied in 1967 as the geographic/political space for the
establishment of a Palestinian state. As a result, attempts by Israel to reduce this space in one way or another (through procrastination, the confiscation of land, settlement activities, and the like) will surely lead the negotiations to failure.
The second obstacle, from the Israeli perspective, is the adamant rejection by Israel of the "principle of the right of return", or its refusal to accept waves of refugees to its land. Once again the clear conclusion is that the Palestinians' insistence that Israel allow these refugees to return to their original homes and lands will also lead to failure.
The third obstacle, which is common to both peoples, is Jerusalem. Neither side is ready to give up the city. This means that a solution, if one exists at all, must be designed in a manner in which both parties come to share the city through joint sovereignty. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's suggestions in this regard, during the final days of his presidency, can serve as a basis for such a design.
If the first step in a peace process does not involve a concerted effort by both sides to face these issues head on, there will not be a final step in the process. Transitional political solutions (the
policy of stages, plans such as the Mitchell Report, the Tenet recommendations, and so on) will not lead to the sought-after peace.
In my view, the issues I have just pointed out are matters that all rational people among us realize deep down in themselves. They are neither strange nor new, but rather things that everyone already knows.
Can, therefore, the voice of reason, on both sides, be raised to deliver us from this tragic situation? Or will we leave our shared destiny to opportunists - those bent on wanton destruction - and others?
Professor Nusseibeh is the president of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. This piece is appearing simultaneously in Israeli and Palestinian newspapers.
2. Worship Reflection
Alain Epp Weaver
MCC UN Conference, New York, October 2001
Our reading this morning comes from Jeremiah, chapter 8:
You shall say to them, Thus says the Lord:
When people fall, do they not get up again?
If they go astray, do they not turn back?
Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding?
They have held fast to deceit, they have refused to return.
I have given heed and listened, but they do not speak honestly.
No one repents of wickedness, saying
“What have I done!”
All of them turn to their own course, like a horse plunging headlong into battle.
Why do we sit still?
Gather together,
let us go into the fortified cities and perish there;
for the LORD our God has doomed us to perish,and has given us poisoned water to drink,
because we have sinned against the LORD.
We look for peace, but find no good,
for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
(Jer. 8:4-6, 14-15, 22)
“We look for peace, but find no good, for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.” It has indeed been a time of terror during the past month. Horror, terror, shock, revulsion, despair, anguish: we search the thesaurus for words to help us name our reaction to the attacks in the United States on September 11, but find words wanting.
Our stunned silence does not last long. Into this wordless vacuum quickly rushes anger, a visceral desire for revenge. We become like horses plunging headlong into battle. Coarser voices on talk shows urge bombing “them” back to the Stone Age, turning Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, whomever, into rubble. A minister of God’s Word, Franklin Graham, suggests on CNN that the use of weapons of mass destruction should not be ruled out. Subtler voices at the Pentagon, the State Department and in the punditocracy speak chillingly about the “necessary collateral damage” of any US military action, meaning the death of who knows how many civilians. Perhaps most disturbingly, we barely notice that the closing of the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan means a cutting off food supplies to millions inside Afghanistan dependent on World Food Program supplies.
“We aren’t like the terrorists, we don’t kill innocent children,” said one New Yorker shortly after the World Trade Center crumbled. If only that were true. American wars, like all wars, have not been clean. Thousands of Iraqi children die each month as a result of U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq. Our attempts to distance ourselves from the evil perpetrated by those who planned and implemented the deadly terror of September 11; our President’s promise to “eradicate evil,” blind us to our involvement as a nation in institutions of injustice and violence which directly and indirectly spread death and destruction on a larger scale than in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, even if not always as dramatically.
We like to think of ourselves as progressive and civilized. But, warns Gregory Jones, it is “one of the ironies of ideologies of progress” that “the conviction that ‘we’ who are ‘progressive’ or ‘civilized’ have learned how to live without diminishing or destroying other people. Hence ‘we’ conclude that the solution to all problems is for others to become like ‘us,’ all the while masking the ways in which our own ‘progress’ is built on the backs of others as they are destroyed.”
“The prophets understood the events of their day with some subtlety,” Eastern Mennonite professor Ted Grimsrud preached the Sunday following the attacks of September 11. “They saw God’s finger in the very human (and very evil) acts of the Babylonians in attacking ancient Israel. They portrayed these events as having two levels of meaning-they were acts of
bloodthirsty aggression by human beings sold out to evil, but they were also expressions of God’s judgment against God’s people and their institutions for the injustice and violence of those people.” The words of the prophet Jeremiah are potentially offensive. Could God possibly the will the death of thousands of innocent people going about there daily chores? No-God did not desire their deaths. But God has given us, a sinful humanity, up to the consequences of our sinful, violent ways. If we sow violence, we not surprisingly reap it, too.
In reflections before the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, Jewish theologian, Marc Ellis warned that “the dichotomy of innocence and guilt, civilized and uncivilized, do not serve us well . . . they do not fulfill the demands of the Days of Awe and Repentance-to reflect anew, to turn away from injustice, to confess our sins as individuals, as a community and as a nation. We too are part of the cycle of violence that we condemn so easily when the burden is so dramatically placed on another people or nation.”
Is there no balm in Gilead? God asks rhetorically in Jeremiah’s prophecy. There is a balm for our burned flesh and souls, God is telling us, but sadly we do not avail ourselves of it. We would rather rub in the soothing ointment of revenge into our wounds. But we are not physicians who can heal ourselves, and our prescription of revenge does not ameliorate our condition, but worsens it. We delude ourselves-in fact, we commit idolatry-if we think that we can dispense “infinite justice.” God cries instead for us to accept the only balm that will heal us, the stinging ointment of forgiveness which demands that we recognize our own complicity with cycles of
violence and domination.
The coming days will undoubtedly be difficult. Demands for revenge will not grow silent. America will most likely not use this time for critical self-reflection. We must, therefore, recommit ourselves as Christians to the difficult, painful discipline of forgiveness, of allowing ourselves to be molded into communities which testify that there is indeed an alternative to the politics of violence and revenge, that there is indeed a balm in Gilead. May God give us grace, courage, and strength for the days ahead. Amen.
3. Just For One Week
Amira Hass
Haaretz, 26 September 2001
DAILY DIFFICULTIES: A soldier stopping Palestinian students and teachers on their way to school on Monday in the old city of Hebron, which was under curfew. (Photo: Reuters )
Suppose that for one week the entire Israeli media - radio, television and daily newspapers - would decide to report everything happening to the majority of the population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In other words, to the Palestinians.
Let us suppose that space is not an issue; in other words, that the newspapers would publish a special daily supplement - every day for one week - covering all the events of the previous day in the territories, not omitting of course reports about attacks on settlers and soldiers. On television and radio, several long talk shows would be replaced - for a week, just for a week - with items about the neighbor/occupied people/enemy living just five minutes away.
During that week, the Israeli media would report not only every mortar shell falling near a Jewish settlement, but also every Israeli shell hitting a Palestinian home as its eight children are preparing to go to school. IIt would tell the stories of the Jewish casualties, but also those of the Palestinian ones: Who was killed holding a gun after firing at the Ofer military camp from a post in Bitounia's cemetery, and who was killed by a tank shell while sitting in her home in Jenin. The Palestinian dead would also be given names, ages and biographies, and the television would broadcast pictures of their family and friends crying on each other's shoulders.
The media would show Palestinian schools with walls riddled by Israeli bullet holes and sandbags blocking the windows to protect the children studying in their classrooms. It would not content itself with dry reports about "exchanges of fire," but rather detail the topography and technology of these exchanges: A barricaded military post on a mountain top armed with a tank and machine guns, facing AK47 fire from the foot of the hill. The media would devote ample space, from a journalistic point of view, to Palestinian claims that no shots had been fired that day from a specific site shot at "in retaliation" by IDF soldiers, and then request a comment from the IDF spokesman's office.
The media would report the story of every peasant whose olive trees were uprooted and shredded by IDF bulldozers, or chopped down by unknown perpetrators in the middle of the night. It would describe the occurrences at every roadblock separating one village from the other, or separating a village from the nearby city: Patients laid out on stretchers moved from one ambulance to the other over dirt mounds, and children passing three roadblocks on their way
to school.
It would carry reports about tear gas and stun grenades fired by soldiers at pedestrians passing through the roadblocks, give details of those wounded and try to find out from the IDF spokesman why the grenades were used. It would also interview children questioning their parents why they did not go to the beach this year, or why they are not visiting their grandmother in Nablus this year, or why she cannot visit them.
This imaginary project is not designed to bring about a change of heart among Israelis, nor to convince them that they are not the attacked, the victims, the betrayed. These are feelings that are
difficult to root out. The aim of the project is first of all a basic journalistic aim: to try and report everything happening, and not only from the Israeli angle.
But the project also has a by-product with intelligence value, because without the full picture it is impossible to draw up a sensible policy. This project would force the Israeli public to pose
clearer questions to its leaders about the path for the future.
Information of this type is usually given to the Israeli public in doses that do not enable it to judge the situation clearly. Were the information presented almost in full, the public would be
exposed to the totality of the Israeli occupation of 3 million people, and realize the endurance and staying power of the Palestinian public, its determination and ability to live under inconceivable hardship.
Understanding the Palestinians' staying power should worry Israelis, far beyond the question of where the next terrorist will blow up. It might increase the number of those concluding that the
government is not doing enough to defeat the Palestinians and that it must switch to new tactics or intensify existing ones - perhaps by deporting thousands across the border? Perhaps bombing
inhabited buildings and open-air markets? Perhaps a really hermetic sealing of every Palestinian village and town? Perhaps barbed wire fences and armed guards around each such town?
Alternatively, some Israelis might be convinced by the Palestinians' stamina to listen more attentively to the basic Palestinian demands. To understand how deeply these are linked to their very existence, a fair, respectable existence. Not to fantasies, privileges, or luxuries.
Amidst talk of a potential cease-fire declaration, the road closures for Yom Kippur, and the one-year anniversary of the al-Aqsa Intifada, the work of MCC's Palestinian partners continues. The Center for Agricultural Services in Hebron this week initiated a program to support the production of "dibs" (a honey-like spread made out of grapes) in Hebron's Old City--the project will provide a badly needed additional source of income for nearly 50 families in an area often under curfew. The Badil Refugee Resource Center in Bethlehem, meanwhile, has begun to assemble a Hebrew-language packet with information on the legal basis of the right of Palestinian refugees to return and on practical modalities for return.
Below are three pieces. The first, by Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh, tries to lay out a way ahead for Palestinians and Israelis; his piece was published simultaneously in Palestinian and Israeli papers. The second is a worship reflection which MCC country representative Alain Epp Weaver will be offering at MCC's student conference in New York on forgiveness and politics. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, considers what the press would look like if it reported everything that happened in the occupied territories.
1. What next?
Sari Nusseibeh
Haaretz, 24 September 2001
What can a levelheaded person among us (be he/she Jewish or Arab) see as a future prospect to the escalating bloody events in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? This is a question all of us (whether we be levelheaded or aspire to be so) must consider patiently and detachedly.
Surely no rational person on the Israeli side expects that this conflict can be resolved by removing the Palestinian people from historic Palestine. Similarly, no sane person on the Palestinian side expects to achieve the desired peace by means of removing the Jewish people from this land. Both peoples exist and, in all likelihood, will continue to do so. Therefore, the struggle between them will continue unless they put a stop to it.
Surely also, on the other hand, no sane person on the Israeli side expects Israel to be able to bring about security and stability by forcefully imposing a settlement on the Palestinian people. But equally and conversely, Israelis are unlikely to cave in and accept solutions forced upon them. Force, therefore, will not produce stability or relatively permanent security, if for no other
reason than because force is not a trait that is the permanent property of any one party over the other.
All of this means that when any levelheaded person looks ahead, all he or she can see is either a future full of confrontations and bloodshed, or the logical need for a peaceful, agreed-upon
solution.
Some might say: But we have tried the peace process and it has failed (with each side presenting reasons for this failure from its own point of view). They might continue by accusing the other
side of deliberately prolonging the confrontations, alleging that it never wanted peace in the first place and concluding that the theory that a peaceful solution to the conflict works is, therefore, not a valid theory, and that peace is not a realistic option.
It is true that the peace process has failed, but it must be asked: Did the theory or merely its implementation fail? Are we the only party that believes in peace? In my opinion, the fault does not lie in the theory: It lies in the form it took and the way in which it was implemented.
Why do I say that the fault does not lie in the theory? From an Israeli point of view, failing to reach a solution gradually places Israel in danger. Sooner or later, Israel will find itself
turning either into a racist state - like the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa -that is unable to bring security or peace to its citizens, or a binational that has lost its Jewishness. Both outcomes represent a strategic problem for Israel and require a preemptive measure to prevent them. Thus, strategically, Israel is in need of a solution.
On the Palestinian side, the dream of a national identity within a political entity can only be realized through the creation of a separate (or independent) national state. Allowing such a goal to slip away, or setting a goal beyond this, will simply push the Palestinians toward a demographic and strategic confrontation with Israelis, the best outcome of which, from their viewpoint, will produce a political framework in which Palestinian national identity will not be the predominant political identity of the state. Thus, a solution is a strategic requirement for the the Palestinians too.
Commonsense, therefore, says that a joint solution for both the Palestinian and Israeli problems - and not for one side alone - involves concluding a definitive peace between the two peoples. The theory that such a solution must be based on the establishment of two neighboring - but separate - states also remains sound for as long as such a solution is practicable, both geographically and demographically. In this context, it is important to point out that time does not stand still, waiting for the people to return to their senses.
But if, in theory, peace is a valid way out, why did we fail in its implementation? Is it because the other side does not believe in peace? Or is it because the other party to the conflict does not
behave sanely?
There are certainly a number of different reasons for its failure. But in my opinion, one can identify three fundamental obstacles to a solution. These obstacles, whether directly or indirectly, will also continue to prevent one. Therefore, if peace is to be attained, both peoples must confront these obstacles and take them into account. These obstacles can be described as fixed political positions or deeply-rooted psychological states of mind. The first is Palestinian; the second is Israeli; and the third is common to both.
The first obstacle, from the Palestinian perspective, is the emotionally- fixed delineation by the Palestinian people of the areas occupied in 1967 as the geographic/political space for the
establishment of a Palestinian state. As a result, attempts by Israel to reduce this space in one way or another (through procrastination, the confiscation of land, settlement activities, and the like) will surely lead the negotiations to failure.
The second obstacle, from the Israeli perspective, is the adamant rejection by Israel of the "principle of the right of return", or its refusal to accept waves of refugees to its land. Once again the clear conclusion is that the Palestinians' insistence that Israel allow these refugees to return to their original homes and lands will also lead to failure.
The third obstacle, which is common to both peoples, is Jerusalem. Neither side is ready to give up the city. This means that a solution, if one exists at all, must be designed in a manner in which both parties come to share the city through joint sovereignty. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's suggestions in this regard, during the final days of his presidency, can serve as a basis for such a design.
If the first step in a peace process does not involve a concerted effort by both sides to face these issues head on, there will not be a final step in the process. Transitional political solutions (the
policy of stages, plans such as the Mitchell Report, the Tenet recommendations, and so on) will not lead to the sought-after peace.
In my view, the issues I have just pointed out are matters that all rational people among us realize deep down in themselves. They are neither strange nor new, but rather things that everyone already knows.
Can, therefore, the voice of reason, on both sides, be raised to deliver us from this tragic situation? Or will we leave our shared destiny to opportunists - those bent on wanton destruction - and others?
Professor Nusseibeh is the president of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. This piece is appearing simultaneously in Israeli and Palestinian newspapers.
2. Worship Reflection
Alain Epp Weaver
MCC UN Conference, New York, October 2001
Our reading this morning comes from Jeremiah, chapter 8:
You shall say to them, Thus says the Lord:
When people fall, do they not get up again?
If they go astray, do they not turn back?
Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding?
They have held fast to deceit, they have refused to return.
I have given heed and listened, but they do not speak honestly.
No one repents of wickedness, saying
“What have I done!”
All of them turn to their own course, like a horse plunging headlong into battle.
Why do we sit still?
Gather together,
let us go into the fortified cities and perish there;
for the LORD our God has doomed us to perish,and has given us poisoned water to drink,
because we have sinned against the LORD.
We look for peace, but find no good,
for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
(Jer. 8:4-6, 14-15, 22)
“We look for peace, but find no good, for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.” It has indeed been a time of terror during the past month. Horror, terror, shock, revulsion, despair, anguish: we search the thesaurus for words to help us name our reaction to the attacks in the United States on September 11, but find words wanting.
Our stunned silence does not last long. Into this wordless vacuum quickly rushes anger, a visceral desire for revenge. We become like horses plunging headlong into battle. Coarser voices on talk shows urge bombing “them” back to the Stone Age, turning Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, whomever, into rubble. A minister of God’s Word, Franklin Graham, suggests on CNN that the use of weapons of mass destruction should not be ruled out. Subtler voices at the Pentagon, the State Department and in the punditocracy speak chillingly about the “necessary collateral damage” of any US military action, meaning the death of who knows how many civilians. Perhaps most disturbingly, we barely notice that the closing of the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan means a cutting off food supplies to millions inside Afghanistan dependent on World Food Program supplies.
“We aren’t like the terrorists, we don’t kill innocent children,” said one New Yorker shortly after the World Trade Center crumbled. If only that were true. American wars, like all wars, have not been clean. Thousands of Iraqi children die each month as a result of U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq. Our attempts to distance ourselves from the evil perpetrated by those who planned and implemented the deadly terror of September 11; our President’s promise to “eradicate evil,” blind us to our involvement as a nation in institutions of injustice and violence which directly and indirectly spread death and destruction on a larger scale than in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, even if not always as dramatically.
We like to think of ourselves as progressive and civilized. But, warns Gregory Jones, it is “one of the ironies of ideologies of progress” that “the conviction that ‘we’ who are ‘progressive’ or ‘civilized’ have learned how to live without diminishing or destroying other people. Hence ‘we’ conclude that the solution to all problems is for others to become like ‘us,’ all the while masking the ways in which our own ‘progress’ is built on the backs of others as they are destroyed.”
“The prophets understood the events of their day with some subtlety,” Eastern Mennonite professor Ted Grimsrud preached the Sunday following the attacks of September 11. “They saw God’s finger in the very human (and very evil) acts of the Babylonians in attacking ancient Israel. They portrayed these events as having two levels of meaning-they were acts of
bloodthirsty aggression by human beings sold out to evil, but they were also expressions of God’s judgment against God’s people and their institutions for the injustice and violence of those people.” The words of the prophet Jeremiah are potentially offensive. Could God possibly the will the death of thousands of innocent people going about there daily chores? No-God did not desire their deaths. But God has given us, a sinful humanity, up to the consequences of our sinful, violent ways. If we sow violence, we not surprisingly reap it, too.
In reflections before the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, Jewish theologian, Marc Ellis warned that “the dichotomy of innocence and guilt, civilized and uncivilized, do not serve us well . . . they do not fulfill the demands of the Days of Awe and Repentance-to reflect anew, to turn away from injustice, to confess our sins as individuals, as a community and as a nation. We too are part of the cycle of violence that we condemn so easily when the burden is so dramatically placed on another people or nation.”
Is there no balm in Gilead? God asks rhetorically in Jeremiah’s prophecy. There is a balm for our burned flesh and souls, God is telling us, but sadly we do not avail ourselves of it. We would rather rub in the soothing ointment of revenge into our wounds. But we are not physicians who can heal ourselves, and our prescription of revenge does not ameliorate our condition, but worsens it. We delude ourselves-in fact, we commit idolatry-if we think that we can dispense “infinite justice.” God cries instead for us to accept the only balm that will heal us, the stinging ointment of forgiveness which demands that we recognize our own complicity with cycles of
violence and domination.
The coming days will undoubtedly be difficult. Demands for revenge will not grow silent. America will most likely not use this time for critical self-reflection. We must, therefore, recommit ourselves as Christians to the difficult, painful discipline of forgiveness, of allowing ourselves to be molded into communities which testify that there is indeed an alternative to the politics of violence and revenge, that there is indeed a balm in Gilead. May God give us grace, courage, and strength for the days ahead. Amen.
3. Just For One Week
Amira Hass
Haaretz, 26 September 2001
DAILY DIFFICULTIES: A soldier stopping Palestinian students and teachers on their way to school on Monday in the old city of Hebron, which was under curfew. (Photo: Reuters )
Suppose that for one week the entire Israeli media - radio, television and daily newspapers - would decide to report everything happening to the majority of the population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In other words, to the Palestinians.
Let us suppose that space is not an issue; in other words, that the newspapers would publish a special daily supplement - every day for one week - covering all the events of the previous day in the territories, not omitting of course reports about attacks on settlers and soldiers. On television and radio, several long talk shows would be replaced - for a week, just for a week - with items about the neighbor/occupied people/enemy living just five minutes away.
During that week, the Israeli media would report not only every mortar shell falling near a Jewish settlement, but also every Israeli shell hitting a Palestinian home as its eight children are preparing to go to school. IIt would tell the stories of the Jewish casualties, but also those of the Palestinian ones: Who was killed holding a gun after firing at the Ofer military camp from a post in Bitounia's cemetery, and who was killed by a tank shell while sitting in her home in Jenin. The Palestinian dead would also be given names, ages and biographies, and the television would broadcast pictures of their family and friends crying on each other's shoulders.
The media would show Palestinian schools with walls riddled by Israeli bullet holes and sandbags blocking the windows to protect the children studying in their classrooms. It would not content itself with dry reports about "exchanges of fire," but rather detail the topography and technology of these exchanges: A barricaded military post on a mountain top armed with a tank and machine guns, facing AK47 fire from the foot of the hill. The media would devote ample space, from a journalistic point of view, to Palestinian claims that no shots had been fired that day from a specific site shot at "in retaliation" by IDF soldiers, and then request a comment from the IDF spokesman's office.
The media would report the story of every peasant whose olive trees were uprooted and shredded by IDF bulldozers, or chopped down by unknown perpetrators in the middle of the night. It would describe the occurrences at every roadblock separating one village from the other, or separating a village from the nearby city: Patients laid out on stretchers moved from one ambulance to the other over dirt mounds, and children passing three roadblocks on their way
to school.
It would carry reports about tear gas and stun grenades fired by soldiers at pedestrians passing through the roadblocks, give details of those wounded and try to find out from the IDF spokesman why the grenades were used. It would also interview children questioning their parents why they did not go to the beach this year, or why they are not visiting their grandmother in Nablus this year, or why she cannot visit them.
This imaginary project is not designed to bring about a change of heart among Israelis, nor to convince them that they are not the attacked, the victims, the betrayed. These are feelings that are
difficult to root out. The aim of the project is first of all a basic journalistic aim: to try and report everything happening, and not only from the Israeli angle.
But the project also has a by-product with intelligence value, because without the full picture it is impossible to draw up a sensible policy. This project would force the Israeli public to pose
clearer questions to its leaders about the path for the future.
Information of this type is usually given to the Israeli public in doses that do not enable it to judge the situation clearly. Were the information presented almost in full, the public would be
exposed to the totality of the Israeli occupation of 3 million people, and realize the endurance and staying power of the Palestinian public, its determination and ability to live under inconceivable hardship.
Understanding the Palestinians' staying power should worry Israelis, far beyond the question of where the next terrorist will blow up. It might increase the number of those concluding that the
government is not doing enough to defeat the Palestinians and that it must switch to new tactics or intensify existing ones - perhaps by deporting thousands across the border? Perhaps bombing
inhabited buildings and open-air markets? Perhaps a really hermetic sealing of every Palestinian village and town? Perhaps barbed wire fences and armed guards around each such town?
Alternatively, some Israelis might be convinced by the Palestinians' stamina to listen more attentively to the basic Palestinian demands. To understand how deeply these are linked to their very existence, a fair, respectable existence. Not to fantasies, privileges, or luxuries.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
