Self-satisfied liberals ask this from time to time. From Michael Moore in “Stupid White Men” to occasional Haaretz editorials. It seems every liberal who asks this thinks they are the first to ever do so. Apparently, the Palestinians are supposed to thank them for bringing them the enlightenment of non-violence resistance.

The answer to the question is: “actually, they do all the time: idiot. But you’re too busy kissing Barack Obama’s behind to notice. Too busy to report on the Palestinian victims of Israeli soldiers’ frequent attacks against unarmed demonstrations.” Hell: an American was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers last month just after such a demonstration (he was not even protesting at the time). Did you even report on that Tomasky? That says a lot: you won’t even report on unarmed victims in Palestine when they are the privileged White Man.

Here is a list of 17 names (10 of whom minors). It is a list of unarmed Palestinians murdered by Israeli terrorist soldiers during popular demonstrations against Israel’s apartheid wall in the West Bank in the last 5 years.

Take note that this list does not even include the hundred of civilians (926 according to Palestinian hospital sources) murdered by Israel during their latest massacre in Gaza — they were mostly sitting at home, in hospitals or UN schools acting as makeshift shelters or trying to flee the Israeli onslaught. It does not include other unarmed Palestinian demonstrators murdered by Israeli terrorist soldiers during the second intifada, those who were demonstrating about things other than the wall. It does not include the victims of the ruthless Israeli repression of the first intifada: which on the Palestinian side was almost entirely a popular non-violent struggle. It does not include the 3000 victims of Sabra and Shatila, murdered by Israel’s sectarian rightist death squad allies in Lebanon, brought into the Palestinian refugee camps by Israeli soldiers in 1982. It does not include the many returning Palestinian farmers shot dead by Israeli soldiers for checking on their farms between 1948 and 1967. It does not include many many thousands of Palestinian and other Arab civilians murdered by Israel for far less than demonstrating non-violently over the last 100 years of Zionist colonialism in Palestine.

Nevertheless, here is the list. Remember these names before you start preaching to the Palestinians, Tomasky. They know far more about non-violent resistance than you ever will.

February 26th, 2004
Muhammad Fadel Hashem Rian, age 25 and Zakaria Mahmoud ‘Eid Salem, age 28
Shot dead during a demonstration against the wall in Biddu.

Abdal Rahman Abu ‘Eid, age 17
Died of a heart attack after teargas projectiles were shot into his home during a demonstration against the wall in Biddu.

Muhammad Da’ud Saleh Badwan, age 21
Shot during a demonstration against the wall in Biddu. Muhammad died of his wounds on March 3rd 2004.

April 16th, 2004
Hussein Mahmoud ‘Awad ‘Alian, age 17
Shot dead during a demonstration against the wall in Betunya.

April 18th, 2004
Diaa’ A-Din ‘Abd al-Karim Ibrahim Abu ‘Eid, age 23
Shot dead during a demonstration against the wall in Biddu.

Islam Hashem Rizik Zhahran, age 14
Shot during a demonstration against the wall in Deir Abu Mash’al. Islam died of his wounds April 28th.

February 15th, 2005
‘Alaa’ Muhammad ‘Abd a-Rahman Khalil, age 14
Shot dead while throwing stones at an Israeli vehicle driven by private security guards near the wall in Betunya.

May 4th, 2005
Jamal Jaber Ibrahim ‘Asi, age 15 and U’dai Mufid Mahmoud ‘Asi, age 14
Shot dead during a demonstration against the wall in Beit Liqya.

February 2nd, 2007
Taha Muhammad Subhi al-Quljawi, age 16
Shot dead when he and two friends tried to cut the razor wire portion of the wall in the Qalandiya Refugee Camp. He was wounded in the thigh and died from loss of blood after remaining a long time in the field without being treated.

March 28th, 2007
Muhammad Elias Mahmoud ‘Aweideh, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the wall in Um a-Sharayet – Samiramis.

March 2nd, 2008
Mahmoud Muhammad Ahmad Masalmeh, age 15
Shot when trying to cut the razor wire portion of the wall in Beit Awwa.

July 29th, 2008
Ahmed Husan Youssef Mousa, age 10
Killed while he and several friends tried to remove coils of razor wire from land belonging to the village.

July 30th, 2008
Youssef Ahmed Younes Amirah, age 17
Shot in the head with rubber coated bullets during a demonstration against the wall in Ni’lin. Youssef died of his wounds August 4th 2008.

December 28th, 2008
Arafat Khawaja, age 22
Shot in the back with live ammunition in Ni lin during a demonstration against Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Mohammad Khawaja, age 20
Shot in the head with live ammunition during a demonstration in Ni lin against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Mohammad died in the hospital on December 31st 2008.

This list, based on eyewitness accounts, is maintained in English by the ISM and the AATW. A slightly older version has been published on the ISM website, since when there have been two more murdered.

UPDATE: On 17th April 2009, this grily list became 18 when Basem Abu Rahme was murdered by a Israeli terrorist soldier in Bil’in.

A TV crew from CNN International recently visited our office. Most stuff about this country I’ve seen on seen on CNN international has been unbelievably pro-Israel. But this report is brilliant! Not least because I wrote the headline of the edition that that draw attention to in the paper: Tony Blair: ‘East Jerusalem is occupied territory.’

They visit West Jerusalem and ask Israelis what they think about the paper, newly available in Israel. Although one guy is nice, most of them hurl off-camera insults such as “who would pay to read what Arabs think” and “the Palestinians can take their papers and go to Jordan.”

Lovely.

One says on camera: “I’m not sure if I’m 100% comfortable with this idea of a Palestinian paper in Jerusalem.” Note that none of them express reservations, or even interest, over any of the actual content of the paper, merely the idea of a Palestinian paper.

Israeli newspapers such as Ha’aretz and the right-wing Jerusalem Post have been daily sold in Palestinian cities such as Ramallah for years.

To view the video, either click on this direct link, or go to www.cnn.com/video , click “search video” and search for “Palestine Times.”

Disconcertingly, an Israeli helicopter was hovering over Ramallah today. People I spoke to said it was interfering with their TV reception. And sure enough, when I got home the satellite reception was very dodgy indeed for a few hours. Honestly — they cant even leave us alone to watch TV in peace.

Saw Mustafa Barghouti on al-Arabya news channel up in Nablus helping the PRCS ambulance teams on the scene a couple days ago. Not sure how much actual medical work he was doing (am I’m sure it won’t hurt his poll ratings) but I couldn’t help but be impressed — you’d never see Mahmoud Abbas or any such politicians doing anything on the ground like that.

Working at Palestine Times is weird. It’s great in some ways but frustrating in others. We get some genuinely unique articles that I know for a fact you can see no where else in the world in English. It’s within the reach of the Israeli English-language media to have such articles, but their overwhelmingly Zionist bias precludes that possibility. Yes — we get some great stuff but it’s frustrating that almost no one is seeing it. Our circulation is still low and the website is paid-subscription only. I’m going to push for the website to be free (all the paper’s competitors have free websites) but we’ll see how far I get (probably not very).

This all happened here in the Old City of Ramallah or “Lower Ramallah”, the same neighbourhood that I live and work in. Only one block away from us in the ISM Media office, we heard loud gunfire close by and could tell that it was not from a celebration or protest. All the shops in the street below quickly closed up. Very soon after this, several Israeli army jeeps sped past our street towards the direction that the gunfire was coming from. We managed to capture this on video.

People came out onto the street in clusters, sharing news and wondering what to do. A group of us from the ISM office went onto the street to talk to people and see if we could be useful in any way. We got into a position from which we could film the jeeps from a distance. They had stopped near a posh local restaurant. We heard they had shot someone, but that he was still alive and no one was being allowed close to him. By the time we got there he was dead and the jeeps had left. We witnessed the dead and injured being taken away in ambulances, as well as the scene of destruction left behind. A falafel shop had been trashed so that the soldiers could use it as cover. It was on a street I regularly walk down. I had stood near that very spot only a few days previously as a friend bought falafel from one of the street vendors.

This comes on the same day that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would continue its policy of targeted assassinations of Palestinian fighters, because “the lives and the welfare of the residents of the Sderot [an Israeli town bordering Gaza] are more important than those of the residents of Gaza” . At exactly the same time, he was meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan and talking to the press about peace. Some peace, when Israel is regularly carrying out so many massacres of civillians in Gaza that it’s hard to keep up. They even try to deny that it was them behind it, when it’s obvious that they were. The idea that there is a “ceasefire” and “restraint” from Israel is a cruel joke.

Meanwhile, on the political front, there are no excuses left since it seems that Hamas has now recognised the state of Israel, using the Prisoner’s Document as a basis.

On the 24th of May the Israeli army invaded the West Bank city of Ramallah, my current home. In the middle of the day, undercover Israeli forces performed an “arrest operation” on a Palestinian militant in the centre of Ramallah. When their cover was blown, a large force of Israeli soldiers were sent in so that they could shoot their way out of the city past the angry crowds of Palestinians that had assembled. The Palestinian fighters were, for the most part, nowhere to be seen during the invasion. It was left to crowds of youths to defend the city from this act of aggression, using whatever came to hand. Stones, tins of paint, scrap metal – all of it was thrown at the soldier’s jeeps from the rooftops of Ramallah. In the course of events, the Israeli army martyred three civilians and one Policeman (who was apparently unarmed at the time) and injured about thirty others, shooting rubber-coated and live ammunition at the crowds of civilians. In this act of war, Israel violated the entirely one-way ceasefire that Hamas and all the other armed Palestinian factions (apart from Islamic Jihad) had been sticking to since February 2005, despite regular Israeli military operations and killings in the Palestinian territories.

Such “arrest operations” are not uncommon in Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem, but in Ramallah such a bold-faced incursion does not often happen. It has never happened during any of the times I have spent living in the city. In the last couple of months, though, there had started to be press reports of arrest operations in Ramallah. The Israeli military come into a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city, arrest a militant leader and get out quickly. Recently, they arrested Ibrahim Hamed the Ramallah head of the armed wing of Hamas. You hear or read about these things occasionally, but by the time you do so it’s over. This day-time incursion was on an entirely different scale. Working in the ISM Media Office, we first heard about it through the lightning-fast Palestinian grapevine and from hearing the sound of gunfire coming from the direction of al-Manara (the public square in the centre of Ramallah). We started to watch events unfold on al-Jazeera news. It was incredibly frustrating, watching this happen and not being able to do anything about it. Eventually, when we saw large crowds of civilians spontaneously demonstrating against the presence of the occupiers in the city, a few of us decided to leave the office with cameras. By the time we got there, the soldiers had left, leaving a trail of destruction and death behind them. We did, however, arrive in time to witness the immediate aftermath. Stones and other forms of improvised ammunition were strewn in the street everywhere; we saw bullet holes in someone’s car. A blood stain on the pavement went un-photographed, because we were so used to seeing such things after the Bil’in demonstrations, and some of us from the recent Nablus incursions. We managed to take pictures of the burnt-out shell of the white transit van the undercover forces had used to enter the city just before city cleaners took it away.

The whole episode left me with one overwhelming feeling: powerlessness. I had always assumed Ramallah to be something of a safe haven — the occupying power does not casually wander around the city as it does in Hebron. The event proved to me that this feeling was something of an illusion, and that the Israeli army can come in when it feels like doing so. Over the last year I have lived in Ramallah for over four months. Imagine, then, how people who live here all the time and have little or no alternative feel: “this is really their country – they go where they feel like. I don’t know what the hell we are doing here”. The bitterness and frustration in the voice of my Palestinian friend in the immediate aftermath of in invasion were palpable.

Palestinians, like any occupied and oppressed people do not like to project a weak image of themselves to the world. In common with all of humanity, they want to live dignified lives in peace with those around them. The crushing weight of the occupation finally leads some to snap and to strike back, sometimes using tactics that deliberately (and criminally) target Israeli civilians. Contrary to their image in the west, the Palestinians are mostly a very patient people – the first suicide bombing did not happen until 1994, forty-six years after “al-Nakba” (the disaster), know by Israelis as “The War of Independence”.

During the disaster of 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were either directly driven out their homes by the victorious new Jewish state, or fled for fear of the massacres carried out by the “only democracy in the middle east”. Unlike refugees in most other wars, they were not allowed to return to their homes after the ceasefire between the newly established Israel and the Arab states. The Jewish state was too worried about the “demographic problem” – too many of the wrong kind of human beings in the Jewish state. It continues to be worried about this “problem” to this day, with academic conferences and weighty tomes by the most highly regarded Israeli minds devoted to the subject.

According to the Zionist historian Benny Morris, there were twenty-four direct massacres carried out by the Israeli Haganah (the pre-state paramilitary force that was the precursor to the modern day Israeli army) and other Jewish terrorist groups of the time, killing hundreds of Palestinians. From his vast research into contemporary Israeli military archives, he recounts that there was “a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved”. In addition, his more recent archival research reveals that there was “about a dozen” cases of rape by Israeli soldiers during the Nakba.

Morris does not condemn all this. On the contrary, he approves: “you can’t make an omelet [sic] without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands… There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing”. He goes even further and actually criticises David Ben-Gurion (the first prime minister of Israel) for not going far enough: “maybe he should have done a complete job… if he had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations”. This is the stability of the grave – the lives of other peoples are mere “eggs” to be crushed underfoot.

When the origins of Zionism are so wrapped up in ethnic cleansing, and when even those Zionists like Morris who are considered to be radical leftists call such barbarities “justified”, then it’s really not surprising that the primary focus of the Israeli occupation today is still ethnic cleansing. It is a more slow-motion version of ethnic cleansing, going largely reported and unnoticed in the US – the constituency that matters most in all this since the funding for it comes mostly from the US government. Meanwhile, before the cleansing is complete, the “wild animal… has to be locked up” as Morris puts it in overtly racist terms. The cage he is referring to is presumably the annexation wall that is being built in the West Bank, dividing Palestinians from each other and killing all hope of a two-state solution.

These policies have a serious affect on Palestinian society. Although the gun-strewn martyr posters popular here and the bellicose language of some Palestinian politicians project an image of strength in the face of oppression, the everyday language of Palestinians tell a different story. By and large, oppression and terror works. Although it is often pointed out that military occupation of an unwilling population can not be sustained indefinitely, it is equally true that it will ultimately succeed if the Zionist slogan “a land without a people” is made into a reality and all the Palestinians are pushed out. Although the disastrous current projects of American empire make us forget, there have been cases in history when occupation and repression has succeeded. Palestine may yet turn out to be one of those cases. “I really feel like I hate myself. I want to leave Palestine”, a Palestinian friend of mine recently told me. And he is not the type of person to use defeatist language. Life is stifled here. Abnormality is normal.

Another Palestinian friend, after being harassed and shouted at by Israeli Border Police at checkpoints on the way to Jerusalem, unhappily confessed to me that “sometimes, when the soldiers treat me like this, I start to hate my Jewish friends”. The same woman had been chatting and laughing with Israeli friends at one of the Bil’in demonstrations only a week before. On traveling to Nablus and back, she related to me her experience of being detained at the numerous checkpoints between her home in Ramallah and Nablus, causing the trip to last hours longer than necessary: “I feel so humiliated. I start to hate myself”. The psychological effects are real and palpable. Mental illness is rampant here, yet there is little specialised medical infrastructure to treat it.

The main affect of the occupation is to make Palestinians feel like they have no dignity, or to make life unbearable enough that they want to leave. The human desire to have a happy and normal life is crushed. Those lucky enough to have somewhere else to go, and the financial means to do so, may be able to rebuild their lives elsewhere. If enough people leave, Palestine will eventually cease to exist, reduced to isolated ‘Arab reservations’ in the scraps of the West Bank that will eventually be left after Israel’s “convergence” plan has reached its logical conclusion. Israel seems to be following the North American colonial model. And, indeed, Benny Morris positively invokes it to support ethnic cleansing: “even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians”.

The apologists for war-crimes, genocide and empire will always find ways to justify their projects by shrouding them in intellectual language, while at the same time bitterly condemning the same crimes committed by official enemies. It’s up to us to make the effort to see through their lies, and act to support those living under occupation and oppression.

If there is a glimmer of hope in all this it is those Palestinians, Israelis and internationals who stand together in their popular resistance to the occupation. The main thing you can do to join those who stand united against Israeli apartheid (identified as such by veterans of the struggle against South African apartheid, including Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and the South African Trades Unions) is to support the call of Palestinian civil society for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights. Although the boycott Israel campaign is still in its early stages, it recently made important gains when a Canadian and a British trade union passed resolutions in support of the campaign. Read this action alert for examples of what you can do to help.

For more pictures from the invasion of Ramallah see my photo gallery.

I recenly spoke via an online voice call to my friends Harmeet and Donna in New Zealand. For those of you in the UK, you may not have heard of Harmeet because the British press tended to concentrate on Norman Kember, but he was one of the four peace activist hotages from the CPT kidnapped in Iraq back in December. Although sadly one of the four, Tom was killed. Harmeet, Norman and Jim were released only recently. It was really good to speak to both my friends from my first trip to Palestine who I had met at the ISM training.

I was moving around the West Bank quite a lot in the first couple of weeks here, so I’ve been able to see the most recent situation in each place. My plan at the moment is to commit to the Ramallah media office as my long term region and work here during the week while also doing some training sessions for new recruits to ISM too.

Wednesday the 5th: After a day’s rest in Jerusalem, I planned to go to Hebron the next day. Instead, in the morning we got a call from Mohammed, the ISM co-ordinator up in Nablus that there was an invasion and that they needed internationals up there as soon as possible to document the event and accompany Palestinian ambulances. We called as many people as we could reach to get as big a group as possible together. Being the nearest to Nablus, two ISMers who were in Jayyus were able to head there from the village. Myself and a group of two other ISMers and one activist from IWPS headed up there from Ramallah. As it turned out, the two coming from Jayyus managed to arrive in time to witness the last few shots from the Israeli military before they jeeps withdrew.

Turns out that the day did not actually warrant the tag “invasion” – just “military opperation”, according to Mohammed. A quick in-and-out that they apparently refered to as a “grave check” – that is checking which wanted men are dead and which are alive. Us in the group from Ramallah were not allowed past the Huwara checkpoint, which is the main way into the city coming from the south. So after about half an hour of failed negotiations, three of us decided to hike in over the hills (the fourth headed back to Ramallah). Even though the military had left, we decided to head in to try and ascertain what had happened. It took about an hour and a half through the mountains, but it was a really nice experience! We hiked up the mountain, surrounded by the beautiful scenery. We met several welcoming villagers along the way who gave us directions and told us about their various troubles: a shepherd who kept getting moved on by the military, a village whose hosues had been threatened by demolition because they were too close to an Israeli settlement (an rather recent looking series of portacabins).

Once there, we met in the ISM appartment in Balata camp, assessed the situation and decided what to do. There had been a call put out by Rabbis for Human Rights to support a family in the nearby village of Salim the next day – they were trying to plow their land but had been prevented by settler harrasment and military closure. Three ISMers decided they would go the next day – it was thought three would be enough since there was going to be a large group from Israel (in the event is was about 40). Meanwhile, we decided to try to visit the hospital and get the names of those injured. When we got there, we could not visit the injured boys (some were as young as 15) because they were in surgery. Ten people were admited with injuries that day, mostly from rubber-coated bullets (one of these was a serious head injury) and six were arrested. We saw one of them wheeled out on his way to surgery. Visiting the rather delapadated hospital was an extremely depressing experience. People sat around in the coridors, mostly in silence, with downcast looks on their faces, a teenage boy unsucessfully tried to hold back his tears sitting on the staircase with his friends. In all honesty I was glad to leave. That night I returned to the different world that was Ramallah, and even went out with some friends that night. It’s too easy to forget. Since that day, the Israeli military has been constantly in and out of Nablus occupying houses and shooting children with regularity. The suffering of Balata continues.

The next day was a Friday, so the weekly demonstrations were to be held. I went to Beit Sira, but that’s a story for another journal entry…

In actual fact, house occupations and shootings of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers in Nablus were underway well before the bombing. Furthermore, the military have been in and out of Nablus almost constantly over the last week. The Ha’aretz news timeline today directly contradicts the claim by the Jerusalem Post and even the strong implication that it was a “response” in the headline of their own story. At 12:34, the timeline refers to an AP wire report covering the military operations in Nablus: “Palestinian youth shot by Israeli troops during W. Bank protest” (note that there is no mention of the Tel-Aviv bombing in this story). The bombing does not appear in the Ha’aretz site’s timeline until over an hour after the Nablus story was filed: 13:43.

It is possible that the military operation intensified in Nablus after the Tel-Aviv bombing. But the Israeli media were ignoring the story about Israeli jeeps rolling into Nablus before it became possible for them to re-cast the incursion as a ‘response to terrorism’. A response to what is often characterised as ‘irrational, unprovoked, fanatical terrorism’. All this despite the fact that the Israeli army has been shelling civilian areas in Gaza for the past 12 days killing at least eighteen people, including at least two children with many more injured. We in the general public might be niave enough to think that terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians, regardless of their natonality, but it would seem that the major media defines Israeli bombing of Palestinians as “counter-terrorism” almost by definition.

Before the bombing in Tel-Aviv, the story about Nablus was all but ignored by the Israeli media. This currently remains the the policy of the western media, despite the fact that the army continues to occupy as many as five houses in Nablus using them as sniper posts, and have injured at least four Palestinian young people with live rounds and rubber-coated bullets.

We have been covering this story here in the ISM Media office since 10am this morning, and have watched the hypocrisy and subservience to establishment interests of the Israeli media explicitly illustrated before our own eyes. Apparently, Palestinian lives are only of use to the propaganda system. It could be argued, however, that this position is morally superior to the position of western media agencies such as the BBC on whose radar the attacks in Nablus do not even register.

This morning we went to a legal training session organised by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israeli (PCATI). It was a very useful and interesting session, and folk from ISM (including the new trainees), IWPS, the Tel Rumeida Project and CPT were there amongst others. Two Israeli lawyers gave us briefings on how Israeli military law applies to Palestinians in the occupied territories (the first session) and the rights of us as internationals in the occupied territories (the second session). The two lawyers are brillant, committed people and they do loads of work for Palestinians and international activists like us supporting them. The main point that came across was that although Israel claims to uphold a fair, equal rule of law that governs the Palestinians in the occupied territories, in reality the military is the law and what they say goes. The Palestinians are subject to a whole slew of military orders, which are only written in Hebrew and are hard for the public to access. It’s a really nightmarish system. And it is an apartheid system too, because the Jewish settlers who live in the occupied territories are not subject to these military orders, rather they are governed by regular Israeli law which is far more lenient and accountable. Just one example of this – Israelis (and internationals) arrested in the occupied territories have to be brought before a judge for the initial hearing within 24 hours, but Palestinians will not see a judge for eight days. Furthermore, since this judge is a uniformed military officer, this hearing is simply a formality in which one part of the military asks another part of the military to extend the arrest. There are lots of examples of things like this, but the whole thing amounts to a system of apartheid, whose main aim is to ultimately to make the Palestinians leave their homes.

On the first day of the ISM training, I could not really participate much because I was busy trying to make sure the press were covering a death that happened near Bil’in. Two brothers went missing in a flash flood that happened near Bil’in (the night before there was a huge storm here in the Ramallah area – the loudest thunder I have ever heard and the rain did not stop for ages). One was rescued, but the other’s body was found caught on the razor wire of the apartheid barrier. Local Palestinians who were in the search party claimed that the pool of water that the man drowned in was caused because the patrol road built as part of the apartheid barrier acted as a dam. Following the story as it was breaking and trying to get all the facts straight in our press releases was a stressful experience as it usually is trying to follow events as they happen and trying to get the media to cover them. Another ISMer, H. went out to where it happened and took the photos used on both our website and by al-Jazeera. Seeing the body in the photos was a traumatising experience because I had been following events as they unfolded, so I can only imagine what H. (to say nothing of the friends and relatives of the man) must have been feeling since he had seen the body with his own eyes. Once we finished all the media work we needed to get done on the story, me and H. went out to smoke nargile and drink coffee to forget our troubles. We had some interesting political discussion about the politics of self determination and national liberation movements and annoying, opportunistic fake “socialist” parties who exploit such struggles for their own interests while being completely blind to realities on the ground. I thoroughly recommend his blog and more specifically (relating to our discussion) his write up of the recent Cairo Conference.

I might go to Hebron at some point this week to help the Tel Rumeida Project, as the folk there are very tired by the sound of it. We have several ISMers going to support them tomorrow, and more after that so we’ll see how it goes. More media work tomorrow I think.

Must do laundry now.

That afternoon we went to a sort of conference near Biddu commemorating Land Day in which various PLO representatives waxed lyrical about the importance of Land Day, commemorating the martyrs, the importance of recognising that the PLO is still the “sole legitimate reprisentitive” of the Palestinian people since “some parties” (Hamas was rarely named) do not seem to recognise this, rebuilding the PLO after the recent elections, etc. etc. There were some interesting points, but the speakers seemed to be mostly repeating the same things. I guess this was because of the internal politics of the PLO – each party’s representative (Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, PPP and a representative of the Christian community) had to have their own speech, even if they said mostly the same thing. Three hours of speeches is a bit much.

Friday, of course, was the regular Bil’in demonstration. It was great to be back! Spirits were high and there was a good attendance. The Israeli anarchists were there in force as always. Also there were a lot of folk from Gush Shalom this week. The village committee’s plan was to use a large metal frame as a ramp to be able to get over the gate in the fence. A good attempt was made at this, but the soldiers were particularly nasty this week and lashed out almost immedately to stop this dangerous bridge building attempt. Can’t let the Palestinians into their own land now can we? The usual beatings and usage of “less lethal” weaponry on unarmed demonstrators ensued.

That night, myself along with two others from ISM stayed overnight in the Bil’in outpost, which was fun. It was a nice camping trip – it’s good to be outdoors in the fresh air! We sat around the fire with guys from the village, learned some Arabic and drank loads of sweet tea. About 7 in the morning we were woken up by the sound of an off-road vehicle pulling away. M. had seen them and said that it was soldiers who peeked in the door of the outpost to watch us sleeping. Furthermore they had apparently done the same thing three times that night! Weirdos!

Today was the joy that is the ISM core group meeting where the big decisions are made. Only seven hours this month – fun fun fun! Still at least we made some deicisons. Haha.

Raining outside, though weather was warm yesterday. Training for new ISM folk tomorrow. Must sleep. Bed soon.

Got here safely this morning about 4:45 am. No problems at airport, but they took their time searching my bags. Two hours later I was finally on my way to the hostel in Jerusalem. Such warm greetings from Hisham! Got the latest updates about the situation here and within ISM from him. Travelled into Ramallah with an aussie, J., who’d just returned from a conference in Egypt (and who, like me conincidentally, wants to visit Nazareth at some point). Brilliant to see all my friends in the media office in Ramallah, and they all seemed genuinely glad to see me – even though I’ve been crap about keeping in touch with them. I must do better with emails in future.

I have jetlag (first time ever for a Palestine trip). This was due to getting almost no sleep on the plane. Had a nap when I got here to Ramallah, but woke myself up so as not to get into a bad sleeping pattern.

Went to Bil’in with my good friend R. to visit some folk there. Met some other ISMers there and in Ramallah too. Spent some time enjoying the hospitality of one of the village’s families. Mmmm… nice Palestinian food. Walked over to the new outpost the Bil’in people have built on their land near the illegal Israeli settlements, to challenge their construction and that of the apartheid barrier. To get there we had to pass the fence, two sections of which had been cut down, presumably by kids from the village. Due to this and the fact that this was election day in Israel, there were several Israeli soldiers up by a large antenae (my guess is that it was a mobile phone mast). Upon seeing us pass nearby, they shouted to call us over. R. is a Palestinian and did not want to ignore them in case they started shooting. They detained him for about 30 minutes, checking his ID card over the radio. R. has nothing on his record so was not worried. Instead he chatted to the soldiers in his fluent Hebrew. They let us go after a while when a few other people came up from the village to join us. After that we headed over to the outpost, which is a cosy little place. Learned a little Arabic from A. A couple of other ISMers stayed there the night.

I’m really glad to be back – I think it’s going to be a good trip. I’m off to bed now to catch up with sleep.

p.s. I’ll send my phone number via email soon, but if you still have it from last time I was here: it’s the same as then.

In the village of Bil’in the barrier, if completed, will cut off or destroy a full 60% of the villager’s land. This is agricultural land used to grow olives and other produce. A similar situation can be seen in many places where the wall is built within Palestinian territory – not only cutting deep into the West Bank, but cutting Palestinians off from each other in many cases. In this area, the barrier (only put up in the last month, though the construction work has been going on for much longer) is in the physical form of a fence with a parallel military patrol road that the soldier’s jeeps cruise up and down on. Week in and week out since February the villagers assemble outside the village Mosque after midday prayers and the demonstrations sets off. They are joined every week by supporters from across the West Bank, from Israel and from many different countries. Amongst the Israelis present are the brilliant and dedicated activists from Anarchists Against the Wall and the principled and consistent Gush Shalom (“Peace Bloc”). Internationals come from many different places around the world and from different organisations. We in the ISM have benn joining in every week.

More recently the effect the demonstration has has been more clear. On the 11th of November, we managed to block construction happening for over an hour (videos are here and here, pictures are here and here. It was also covered on the Israeli Channel-One TV news, which actually gave us a fair hearing for once. This link to video of the news item is well worth following, even if you don’t understand Hebrew. An English subtitled version is expected to follow). This day was also the first anniversary of Yassar Arafat’s death, and the demonstration was well attended and in high spirits. As a group, we headed to the usual spot of the stand-off between demonstrators and soldiers, which is at the top of a hill near the site where the fence has been build recently. On this day however, the Popular Committee had planned a surprise – we unexpectedly headed off-road and towards the site of current construction. Our group of about 150 demonstrators blocked a construction road that diggers used to access the building site by standing in it while singing, chanting and clapping. A smaller group broke off from this main group and went around the line of soldiers that had quickly formed in order to stop us from moving towards the site. We managed to get around them while they were busy with the main group and calmly and non-violently block the path of a huge dumper truck that was being used to shift earth dug up from Bil’in’s agricultural land in order to build the apartheid barrier. We sat down and linked arms, refusing to move. The response of the Israeli military was very quickly to use violence against us, in the full knowledge that we would not respond in kind. They grabbed and dragged us, scratched our necks (this seemed to be some sort of deliberate crowd control technique because they did it to a few of us), beat us with clubs and threw sound grenades at us.

We were violently removed from the path of the dumper truck and digger, but the main blockade of the construction road was still in place, and continued for a good hour or so. At about 1:30pm one of the soldiers used a loudspeaker to announce something barely audible in Hebrew which was probably a warning to disperse. We continued to stand our ground as they loaded up with tear gas and sound bombs. Very suddenly, and with no provocation whatsoever, the military rushed us as one, using sound bombs, tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets (the later mainly against Palestinian children). Some of the boys reacted to this by throwing stones. One child was hospitalised after being shot in the head.

According to a report in Ha’aretz the next day, the propaganda department of the Israeli military described all this as “special means”. Stone-throwing youth are often used as a pretext for the violence the military unleashes on us, despite the fact that (even besides the fact of their very presence on the village’s land as an occupying military force) the stone throwers rarely start up until the non-violent demonstration leaves. Violence is what soldiers are trained to do. For example, on the 2nd of December, the demonstration was immediately attacked by the soldiers who shot tear gas at us before we had even reached the building site. Furthermore, the Israelis have even infiltrated the demonstration using undercover agent provocateurs dressed as Arabs to encourage children to throw stones first, and furnish this pretext to the soldiers. This had been suspected by Palestinian and Israeli activists for some time, but it was all-but explicitly confirmed by a spokesman from the Israeli military when Ha’aretz covered the story recently.

This is the problem with “non-violent activism”: the non-violence is all on one side. Non-violent activism paradoxically means that you should be prepared to expect violence. The Israeli military has no qualms about using violence because, after all, they are soldiers and that’s what they do. In their view, they are doing you a favour by “only” using beatings, tear gas, sound bombs and rubber-coated metal bullets. If it weren’t for the presence of international, and (especially) Israeli activists at Bil’in, they would be using live ammunition with regularity. In fact, during the similar non-violent campaign in the village of Biddu, five Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military. These facts are worth remembering the next time you read an opinion piece in the western media criticising the Palestinians for their violence, and supposedly “not using non-violent activism” (a statement like this from Ha’aretz, a paper whose editors and journalist know for a fact that this is a fallacy, is the high of racist fabrication).

The ISM tries to maintain a night-time presence in Bil’in along with Israelis and other internationals. This is due to night-time invasions during which the military has gone into selected houses in the dead of night and arrested young men and children, who they then accuse of “throwing stones” or “damaging security property” (i.e. the apartheid barrier). So far, they have made 18 arrests. I myself witnessed several such arrests at about 2am on the 1st of November while staying in the village over-night. These included a 14 year old boy who we saw bundled into a jeep as part of the military raid. During this night the soldiers faced such grave dangers as crying mothers and video cameras recording their actions. We also witnessed the Israeli military use a human shield to knock on the door of a house they then proceded to enter, in contravention of a recent High Court decision in Israel.

One of the 18 Palestinians was later released after his lawyer pointed out to the judge that it was illegal for the military to arrest him for being the brother of the person they were accusing. The soldiers had effectively taken him hostage until the family handed over the brother they were after. A second Palestinian, 21 year old Hamza Samara, spent 25 days in jail. The soldiers used torture to try to extract a confession from him, but they had no evidence against him so the judge eventually had to order his release on a 10,000 shekel bail. The other arrestees remain in prison. Some have been sentenced, while others await trial.

The “Friday Intifada” effect was temporary. A sustained, committed campaign of non-violent direct action takes time and dedication, and is not always the most exciting thing. Furthermore, the commitment of the villagers of Bil’in and their Israeli friends has acted as an inspiration to other villages suffering from the apartheid barrier. The village of Aboud recently received their land confiscation orders from the Israelis and, inspired by Budrus, Biddu, Bil’in and other places, has decided to commence the non-violent struggle there.

French supporters have created a website about the village with background and maps explaining the situation as well as many photos and videos. It’s well worth a visit even if you don’t read French.

Thanks to Jason Moore for the title of this article.

On Saturday the 22nd of October, an ISM affinity group went into the fields near Salim village to join locals in the olive harvest. A family had contacted us to help them to pick olives in a plot of 100 dunums of land that they had been unable to harvest for the past five years. A small settler outpost had been built very close to their land, which was already close to the larger Elon More settlement. As we drew near to the relevant plot we met the Palestinian family – they were being denied entrance by the Israeli military. At first the soldiers told us to leave or we would be arrested by the Border Police who were about to turn up, and that the family would not be allowed to pick today because they had supposedly not organised it with the DCO (district co-ordination office – the joint Israel-Palestinian Authority civil administration). Their story changed, however, because they also told some of us that it was a closed military zone – of course they could not produce a map of the alleged zone as they are required to do. The Commander referred to a Jewish ISM activist as “the lost Jew”, and told her he was ashamed of her. When challenged on his poor treatment of these people he responded that “Arabs aren’t people”. After about half an hour of waiting and some negotiations, a DCO representive and some Border Police arrived and we were allowed onto the land to pick after everyone was searched. They also watched us while we picked. Due to their enforced neglect over the last five years, the olive trees were not as fruitful as many trees in other plots that we had picked from in Salim the previous day.

During the previous two days, we did not get such problems. In Azmut on the 20th, the areas we helped pick in were only accessible by foot (or donkey) so the military just watched us from the nearby Elon More settlement (we could make out the jeep’s flashing yellow light in the distance). On the 21st we first went back to a different plot in Azmut – a farmer there was too afraid to pick from his land because of the rather menacing presence of two settlers who had parked their cars up on a nearby hill and were watching. We moved to Salim where we found the encouraging sight of hundreds of Palestinians out in the land picking olives. Military jeeps regularly rolled down the track in the valley, patrolling and occasionally asking Palestinians how much longer they were going to be. These were DCO sanctioned harvest days too and the military were there to “facilitate” this, supposedly. Rabbis For Human Rights had brought a bus load of people out that day to help, so the presence of Israeli activists in the land almost certainly helped persuade the military to be on relatively good behavior. The 22nd was a Saturday, so it was shabbat and the Rabbis did not turn up. Fortunately, it meant no settlers turned up while we were there either, although a single armed settler did arrive before we got there and reportedly shouted at the military a lot.

Our guess was that the military only turned up on the 22nd because the settlers had complained to them. The villagers had been able to pick with few problems the previous day, and the DCO permit lasted for the whole period up to the 25th, so it seemed that it was only because the settlers can’t stand the sight of Arabs that the military gave the Palestinians problems. If this is indeed the case, it shows once again the Israeli military (despite it’s PR claims) siding with settlers against the indigenous people of the land. If we can bring ourselves to see propaganda for what it is, this should come as no surprise to us. After all, colonial settlement in the West Bank is at the fundamental level a project initiated and encrouaged by the Israeli government, with big “financial benefits and incentives to citizens – both directly and through the Jewish local authorities”, according to B’Tselem the Israeli human rights organisation.

While he was being prevented from accessing his land, a Palestinian named Sala’din made the frustrated comment that “this is the Israeli peace! The whole world thinks there is peace here now”. I can imagine that in similar circumstances British farmers would certainly not stand for such treatment by a foreign occupational army. The fact that majority of Palestinians continue to resist in a non-violent manner, even by simply living in their land as normal is a testament to their courage and humanity.

Click here to see more photos from that day.

After my first stint in Hebron over election day, I went back to Jerusalem to gather my thoughts, do some laundry and decide on my next move. After a few days, I decided that I would go back to Hebron for the last week of my trip as the limits of spending a day here and a day there had become clear to me. As luck would have it, the Hebron ISM group came to Jerusalem to spend the night because they had been to a nearby meeting in the afternoon, so we had a mini reunion. Far too early the next morning (the 14th of January) we headed back down to Hebron. We met one of the ISM coordinator’s downtown and headed off to Idhna – yet another area soon to be devastated by the Wall. A demonstration had been planned there and our coordinator had arranged for us to meet with some local families too.

As it turned out, there had been a recent incursion in Idhna. We visited two families whose houses had been invaded by Israeli soldiers and occupied for three days after a sudden curfew had been announced. The families had only just been allowed back in their houses that morning, so the destruction we saw was fresh. And it really was destruction. I have read soldier’s testimonies of house occupations in Hebron in which they claim that sometimes occupied houses are well looked after, and the families compensated for any damage caused. Not in these cases. Both houses were absolutely trashed, as you can see from the photos I took. Money was stolen as well – 200 Jordanian dinars from the first family and 5000 from the second.

Visiting both these houses was quite surreal. The families were upset of course, but it seemed to me that they were not as upset as I would be if my house were occupied and vandalised. In a way, this was another sign of how used to the occupation Palestinians have become. A year and a half ago, soldiers had stolen a car and tools from the second family, as well as 20,000 shekels “to pay for the occupation”. For all that, they are no less angered by it. Familiarity breeds contempt – a truism no more appropriate than in the case of a military occupation.

In the case of the first family, the soldiers had locked them up in a room on the first floor of the house while they ransacked the place. It was cold there and they were not allowed to leave to get more clothes or even to get water to wash with. The second family had been treated even worse. On the first night a young mother and her children were kept in the garden overnight while they detained her husband and kept him pinned to the ground. They were shouting “Where is the gun? Where is the gun?” at them. A female soldier searched the women; they interrogated a 10 year old child. They did find a gun in the house, which his wife told us was from when he used to work for the Palestinian Authority. The husband was taken away and they were still trying to find out what had become of him when we visited them. The grandmother broke down towards the end of our visit, cradling a framed picture of her late husband while a male family member admonished her to keep her faith in God because tears are no solution.

All this took place during a time when there was no ongoing curfew in the area. More generally, this was a period of “relative calm” according to the western media (too often this is code for ‘only Palestinians are being killed’). Both of these houses were on quite high vantage points, so that may have been part of the reason they were targeted. Detention without trial was not invented in Guantanamo Bay – it has been a mainstay of the occupation here for decades. “Administrative detention”, as it is called in Israel, is for an initial period of six months and Commanders can extend this for another six months, then another, and another, ad. infinitum. Military Order Number 1229, of 1988 does not define a maximum period, so many Palestinians have been kept in Israeli jails (such as the notorious Ansar 3 Military Camp in the Negev desert) without charge for years. According to Amnesty International there are currently around 750 – 800 Palestinians in administrative detention. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem is one of the best sources of information on this topic, amongst others.

A few of the local activists (who our ISM coordinators – also Palestinians – had contacted) came with us when visiting the families. One of them pointed out a road we travelled on and said it was nick-named “Moscow street” because so many of the families on it were communists. This man was a PPP supporter (Palestinian People’s Party – the historical Communist Party) who mentioned to me that “our problem originally came from England”, echoing the statement made to me earlier by the PPP presidential campaign coordinator. He also had a pretty sophisticated understanding of the western media and how they typically portray the Palestinians. “Do you see that we are terrorists?” he asked me during our conversation the way out of the village. I replied that I had not seen one Palestinian terrorist during my trip.

Leaving the village (after the usual overwhelming hospitality from the local activists, the villagers in general and even the distraught families) we came across a new obstacle. A watch tower and nearby road block which had been empty when our taxi into the village passed them earlier were now flying the Israeli flag. A group of about 15 soldiers was blocking our exit of the village. They were also ID-checking and detaining Palestinian pedestrians and motorists entering and leaving the village. Initially they told us that we had to go back into the village, because they did not want us to get caught up with “trouble makers” at the demonstration. Eventually, they let us pass thanks to a combination of our negotiations and the public exposure a group of wire service photographers who turned up gave them (presumably they were in the area to cover the demo, but somehow they got wind of our presence). Just around the corner from the new checkpoint, we met up with one of the coach loads of Palestinians on their way to the demonstration. Palestinian hospitality applied even here as they insisted on seating us, even though the coach was already overcrowded, with many standing.

Two other bursting coaches and one mini-bus worth of Palestinians from around the locality made up the demonstration that we joined. At the front were the elders – they invited us to join them there and we were happy to accept. There were banners against the Wall, young and old men (no women apart from in our group I’m afraid to say), photographers and chanting of slogans such as “no to the wall that divides” and “with our soul and our blood we will defend you Palestine”. Israeli soldiers arrived in their jeeps and formed a blocking line before us, declaring it a “closed military zone” – a dirt road in the middle of farmer’s fields! The plan was to march to the land where the Wall is being built and pray there. When the military blocked the way, the decision was made to pray in the field there at the side of the road instead. After this, slow, calm and extremely non-violent attempts to advance down the road were made. We advanced slowly, slowly towards the line, sitting down in the road each time we stopped. The line of soldiers seemed weak, they had not formed their jeeps into a blockade and at one point it really seemed like we would make it through. Unfortunately there was division in the leadership over whether to go on or to go back. More through the loss of momentum, than because they particularly agreed with that side of the argument, the crowd eventually dissipated and started heading back to the coaches. It was a discouraging sight to see everyone heading off when we looked back. A small concession was won as four of the older men were allowed on to the site by themselves.

Despite my criticisms, the day was a high point of my experiences in Palestine. Extreme measures were taken by the organisers to make sure that there was no provocation of the soldiers. The whole thing was very Martin Luther King. An image of the Palestinians the corporate media in the UK never portrays (I challenge you to find an exception). For their part, the Israeli soldiers were surprisingly restrained. There was no tear gas, sound bombs or beatings. Rifles were brandished but that was about the extent of it. This stance is unusual for the Israeli military in the occupied territories, but it was not unusual for that particular period, so soon after the elections when so many Westerners were still around. During the Palestinian elections the Israeli government knew they were under extra international scrutiny. The US (and UK) funded killings continued to a lesser extent, but the whole period was an illustration of the concrete differences international observers and solidarity activists can make by their mere presence. In addition, it was generally an amazing experience to witness such political action, and a privilege to participate in it – and we were made to feel extremely welcome. It was a good way to build relationships between the ISM and people in the area – some of the kids in the coach on the way back had never seen Westerners before.

Click here to read another account of the house occupations by another member of the ISM affinity group that day.

Click here to see my photos of the Idhna demonstration.

These basic facts are important to bear in mind when the media talk about free and fair elections in Palestine. The same applies when George Bush and his ilk talk about the need for democracy in the Palestinian Authority, and an end to violence. Always with the implicit qualification that Israeli violence does not count as violence at all.

On Tuesday the 4th, a couple of meetings had been set up for us in the Jerusalem-based ISM affinity group, so that we could to try and understand better the concerns and problems for Palestinians in Jerusalem during the elections. The first was with a group called PASSIA, the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs. Its chairman and founder Dr. Mahdi Abdul Hadi met with us for about an hour and tried to clarify and explain some of these issues for us. The other meeting was with Sabeel which is an ecumenical liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians. They were very busy, but met with us for half an hour and outlined the group’s activities and shed more light on the elections in general and the Jerusalem situation in particular.

From these and other meetings beforehand, as well as observation of what happened on the ground, we managed to gather the following facts about the status of East Jerusalem based Palestinians. Firstly, as in the 1996 PA elections, Israel allowed only 5,376 registered voters from East Jerusalem to vote in East Jerusalem itself. The polling stations were Israeli post offices throughout the city. ‘Why post offices?’ you may well ask. Apparently this was because Israel – contrary to the international consensus – considers East Jerusalem to be part of Israel and therefore Palestinians living there are ‘absentee voters’ that Israel is generously allowing to take part in the PA elections via post! An even more vital concern was the rest of the 120,000 eligible voters in occupied East Jerusalem. Where could they vote? It turned out that they had to travel – often through checkpoints – to outlying regions near Jerusalem. Add to this the large amount of rumors going around that the Israelis would strip health benefits, social security or even the valuable blue Jerusalem ID from tax-paying Jerusalem Palestinians who dared to vote, and it is no surprise that only 26,365 out of the eligible 120,000 voted. In the event many Palestinians who went to their local Jerusalem post office to vote were turned away for various technical reasons. Most ended up being prevented from voting.

Presidential candidates other than Abu Mazen had a very hard time campaigning. Mustafa Bargouti asked for ISM accompaniment on the leg of his campaign from Gaza to Jerusalem, but was detained there for some time by the military. Previously he had also been arrested in Jerusalem and beaten outside of Jenin. Some of our group did manage to go around with him at one stage of this campaign. My initial impression was the candidates (other than Israel’s favourite for President Abu Mazen) were not so much being harassed for campaigning, as just being treated by the Israelis as normal Palestinians, while Abu Mazen got special treatment. On the other hand, the candidates Tayseer Khalid and Bassam El-Salhi were stopped and harassed by rather obvious Shin Beit agents while they were going to and coming from debates and meetings in East Jerusalem and other places in the West Bank, so make of that what you will.

For Palestinians in general, the Occupation makes everyday life hard – so elections are no exception to this. There was one report that young Palestinians had had campaign materials and flags confiscated by soldiers at Huwara checkpoint outside Nablus. A far more grave event happened the week before the election when a seventeen year-old boy, Riziq Musleh, was shot by an Israeli sniper in Rafah (in the Gaza strip) while attempting to hang a campaign poster.

During the run up to the elections, one of the most memorable statements made to me was by the campaign manager for Bassam El-Salhi (the Palestinian People’s Party candidate) when I introduced myself: “the British have a moral obligation to work here in Palestine”. Later on another PPP supporter pointed out to me that their problems started with the British occupation of Palestine. To both I replied that I happened to agree.

On the day of the Palestinian Presidential elections, ISM volunteers, including myself came to Hebron from Jerusalem to join the small ISM presence already there. Hearing reports of settler violence against Palestinians, we though it important that we boost the ISM presence there for election day, in case of any Israeli obstruction, either by settlers or the IOF. In any event, ISM is trying to build a more permanent presence in Hebron because of the huge problems there, especially in the old city, and general H-1 area (as designated by the 1997 Hebron accord). The general situation in Hebron really is something else, even within the context of the West Bank. The military occupation there is severe. Palestinians are afraid to walk their streets at night – mainly because of the extremist Zionist settlers in the area, but we also heard many horror stories of violence by the IOF Soldiers and Border Police. They were certainly an imposing presence in the Old City – their stated mission being to protect the settlers – who are not stopped at checkpoints, are allowed to roam freely and are often armed with M16s, submachine guns and the like. Houses are confiscated for use by the army. The settlers are in the process of ethnically cleansing the town, while the soldiers “only follow their orders” to protect them as citizens of Israel. The Old City is a ghost town during the day. Huge concrete blocks systematically placed around the main roads to the Old City mean that transport can not reach what was once the heart of the city. Most shops are closed and often deserted because of threats, harassment and violence from the settlers. Racist graffiti in Hebrew and the Star of David are found sprayed on Palestinian shops and houses all over the Old City. The only form of resistance left for some is simply to continue opening their shops – even if it means selling nothing for weeks or months.

It was in this context of military occupation and colonialism that Palestinian elections took place in Hebron. Along with what seems like the entire western media, we initially though the election turnout throughout the occupied territories was high at 70%, on closer analysis it seems like the figure was more like 46% of eligible voters. The figure for Hebron was even lower at 40%. We were not there to monitor the Palestinian’s election process as there was already many observers around to do that, but from what we saw we were very impressed with the professionalism and independence of the Central Election Commission.

We did not come across or hear of any systematic harassment specifically of voters in Hebron on election day. In fact, those of us who had been in Hebron for some time up until then noticed a more low-key military presence on the day – as well as a much larger presence of various international observers and journalists. In context, this still meant the usual ID checks for almost all Palestinian men who looked to be over 18 or so going through the check point that we observed most of the day and seemingly random hold ups of up to 2 hours for some. It also still meant that Zionist settlers and anyone who looked Western were allowed through the checkpoint with few or no questions, while Palestinians are stopped and harassed – often with a smile from the “enlightened” Israeli soldiers.

It was obvious that overall, Hebron was going to vote for Abu Mazen, especially in the Old City – even non-Arabic speakers could hear his name everywhere. People we spoke to tended to vary between the opinion that politicians are all crooks and collaborators, so they wouldn’t vote and voting for Mazen because they just wanted a peaceful life and for the Israelis to leave them alone. There was also a touch of the usual general cynicism with electoral politics that we are used to – “Abu Mazen is going to win anyway”. Perhaps because Hebron seemed pretty sure to vote for Israel’s preferred candidate and because of a boost in the presence of internationals during the election period, Israel decided to slightly ease off on the occupation for a short while.

Despite this, the occupation and ethnic cleansing continues in Hebron.

The obvious lesson is that free elections are not possible under military occupation. The occupying power can not possibly allow a full democratic process, as that would run the danger of a clash with its own interests. This much is a truism. This lesson would be worth reflecting on when thinking about the upcoming demonstration elections in Iraq.

The Hebron sections of this report were first used for an ISM report about election day in Hebron.