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.

It is far more accurate to understand it as a failed coup attempt against the elected government by US-sponsored gangs in Gaza — “the Palestinian Contras” as Ali Abunimah puts it. Chief among their leaders was Gaza warlord Mohammed Dahlan, who earned the contempt of Hamas during the Oslo years with round-ups and torture of their activists.

Furthermore, it’s not only Hamas who sees things this way. Hani al-Hassan, one of the founders of the Fatah movement recently supported this view during an interview with al-Jazeera TV. In the current Al-Ahram weekly, veteran Palestinian journalist Khaled Amayreh reports from Ramallah that: “He argued that the recent showdown in Gaza was not a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas but one between Hamas and the Dahlan faction. Referring to Dahlan’s supporters as ‘the Dayton group’, a reference to the American General Keith Dayton who was in charge of arming and financing the former Gaza strongman, Al-Hassan said that Hamas had to do what it did in order to protect the overall national cause”. After he spoke out, al-Hassan’s house was shot at by unknown gunmen.

US backing of Dahlan via General Dayton is a matter of record as reported in the New York Times on the 18th of May:

Israel has made no secret of backing Fatah and attacking only Hamas targets. When a Fatah leader, Muhammad Dahlan, needed to bring in reinforcements on Tuesday — a brigade of guards undergoing training in Egypt — Israel made sure in a widely publicized move that the Rafah bordere crossing would be open to admit them.

The training of the guards is being supervised under an American program devised by the American security coordinator, Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, which is being financed by some $40 million from Congress and more from Western allies.

There is currently a theory popular those among Palestinian supporters of Fatah, who nevertheless recognise that Dahlan and his ilk are US stooges — those that Hamas refers to as “genuine Fatah” and that a Palestinian friend of mine calls “the Fatah of the first intifada”. The theory goes that Palestinian President, and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas actually conspired with Hamas to rid Gaza of Dahlan, since the violent chaos his armed gangs caused there was (presumably) becoming too much of an embarrassment. Once it succeeded, and Hamas by default ended up in control of the whole of Gaza, Abbas then turned on Hamas and used it as an excuse to dismiss the democratically elected government and install a government comprised of his and the US government’s favourites.

Whether or not this part is true (that Abbas wanted rid of Dahlan), the fact that Fatah-tending people in the West Bank believe it shows just how unrepresentative Dahlan and his gangs are. But a story published in Israel’s most popular paper Yedioth Ahronoth yesterday, that the PA emergency government has confiscated millions of dollars from Dahlan would seem to support the theory.

Also well worth reading is this op-ed on YA about Israel’s hypocrisy when it claims to want “Palestinian democracy” whilst saying it supports Abbas. It is worth remembering (as most media reports about the “new” government seem to forget or ignore) that this government is, according to Palestinian law, only supposed to be an “emergency government,” lasting one month.

Let’s see what anti-democratic steps are taken to extend it when this runs out…

——

“A Black Flag”

by Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 2nd July 2006

A black flag hangs over the “rolling” operation in Gaza. The more the operation “rolls,” the darker the flag becomes. The “summer rains” we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate Syria’s airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament.

A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization. The harsher the steps, the more monstrous and stupid they become, the more the moral underpinnings for them are removed and the stronger the impression that the Israeli government has lost its nerve. Now one must hope that the weekend lull, whether initiated by Egypt or the prime minister, and in any case to the dismay of Channel 2′s Roni Daniel and the IDF, will lead to a radical change.

Everything must be done to win Gilad Shalit’s release. What we are doing now in Gaza has nothing to do with freeing him. It is a widescale act of vengeance, the kind that the IDF and Shin Bet have wanted to conduct for some time, mostly motivated by the deep frustration that the army commanders feel about their impotence against the Qassams and the daring Palestinian guerilla raid. There’s a huge gap between the army unleashing its frustration and a clever and legitimate operation to free the kidnapped soldier.

To prevent the army from running as amok as it would like, a strong and judicious political echelon is required. But facing off against the frustrated army is Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz’s tyro regime, weak and happless. Until the weekend lull, it appeared that each step proposed by the army and Shin Bet had been immediately approved for backing. That does not bode well, not only for the chances of freeing Shalit, but also for the future management of the government, which is being revealed to be as weak as the Hamas government.

The only wise and restrained voice heard so far was that of the soldier’s father, Noam Shalit, of all people. That noble man called at what is clearly his most difficult hour, not for stridency and not for further damage done to the lives of soldiers and innocent Palestinians. Against the background of the IDF’s unrestrained actions and the arrogant bragging of the latest macho spokesmen, Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant of the Southern Command and Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, Shalit’s father’s voice stood out like a voice crying in the wilderness.

Sending tens of thousands of miserable inhabitants running from their homes, dozens of kilometers from where his son is supposedly hidden, and cutting off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of others, is certainly not what he meant in his understated emotional pleas. It’s a shame nobody is listening to him, of all people.

The legitimate basis for the IDF’s operation was stripped away the moment it began. It’s no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza. The difference between us and them? We kidnapped civilians and they captured a soldier, we are a state and they are a terror organization. How ridiculously pathetic Amos Gilad sounds when he says that the capture of Shalit was “illegitimate and illegal,” unlike when the IDF grabs civilians from their homes. How can a senior official in the defense ministry claim that “the head of the snake” is in Damascus, when the IDF uses the exact same methods?

True, when the IDF and Shin Bet grab civilians from their homes – and they do so often – it is not to murder them later. But sometimes they are killed on the doorsteps of their homes, although it is not necessary, and sometimes they are grabbed to serve as “bargaining chips,” like in Lebanon and now, with the Palestinian legislators. What an uproar there would be if the Palestinians had grabbed half the members of the Israeli government. How would we label them?

Collective punishment is illegitimate and it does not have a smidgeon of intelligence. Where will the inhabitants of Beit Hanun run? With typical hardheartedness the military reporters say they were not “expelled” but that it was “recommended” they leave, for the benefit, of course, of those running for their lives. And what will this inhumane step lead to? Support for the Israeli government? Their enlistment as informants and collaborators for the Shin Bet? Can the miserable farmers of Beit Hanun and Beit Lahia do anything about the Qassam rocket-launching cells? Will bombing an already destroyed airport do anything to free the soldier or was it just to decorate the headlines?

Did anyone think about what would have happened if Syrian planes had managed to down one of the Israeli planes that brazenly buzzed their president’s palace? Would we have declared war on Syria? Another “legitimate war”? Will the blackout of Gaza bring down the Hamas government or cause the population to rally around it? And even if the Hamas government falls, as Washington wants, what will happen on the day after? These are questions for which nobody has any real answers. As usual here: Quiet, we’re shooting. But this time we are not only shooting. We are bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege and kidnapping like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?

I came across this cartoon on the ISM Canada website. I’m posting it here, because it sums up so well what is incorrect with the image most people have of Israel’s Wall. It is NOT a “separation barrier” built between Israelis and Palestinians. It is an annexation barrier, the vast majority of which is built or is being built within Palestine. The primary aim of this project is to take more land away from Palestinians and add it to the state of Israel. For a long time, the Israeli government denied this, and claimed it was “only for security”, and that the route of the Wall could be moved in the event of a final status agreement. To anyone on the ground suffering from the effects, this was a transpartent lie. It is now conceded by high Israeli officials (including Tzipi Livni) that the Wall is going to be “the border”, within the framework of “convergence”.

Still, the cartoon is not the whole picture. It would be more acurate to show a series of fences being built within the Palestinian house, separating the mother from the father, from the children. Because this is what is being done – Palestinians are being divided into isolated, unliveable ghettos. Consulting some of the various maps available, demonstrates this plainly. Palestinian Reservations, modeled on the North American manifest destiny example are the ultimate aim.

So, what can we do to stop this? From outside, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign (similar to that of the boycott of apartheid era South Africa) is, in my judgement, one of few hopes left for any kind of future for Palestine. This article by a British academic who worked in Beirzeit University (near Ramallah, in the West Bank) during the early 80s, brilliantly argues for the academic boycott, and speaks from first hand experience about the denial of academic freedom that Israel routinely enforces on Palestinians. This article by a friend of mine is a good summary of the current state of the campaign.

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.

This op-ed piece from the International Herald Tribune by Fareed Taamallah, about checkpoints and the repressive nature of the Israeli occupation is simply beautiful. That radical anarchist, anti-semite Jimmy Carter seems have recently started telling something resembling the truth about the situation here, most recently about Israel’s “convergence” plan.

An Israeli involved in the ISM has been translating a lot of articles from the Hebrew press recently – although both Yedioth Ahronoth and Ha’aretz (two of the main Hebrew language Israeli papers) have English editions (both in print and online) not everyting is translated. The choice of what is and is not translated is often a political one. One of the most interesting pieces he has translated is about recent comments by Brigadier General (retired) Ilan Paz, who until recently was the head of the District Coordinating Office (DCO) in the West Bank. It’s called “Mr. Occupation Saw the Light” and is very reveiling. Also from the Israeli press is this op-ed about the recent high court decision that prevents Palestinian citizens of Israeli (the decendents of those who in 1948 choose not to flee and were not directly driven out) from living with their husbands, wives and children if they happen to come from the West Bank or Gaza strip. A law excluding people from the “only democracy in the middle east” based purely on race and nationality – all in the name of “security” (the magic answer). Finally from the Israeli press, Ha’aretz has been getting all hot and bothered recently about the boycott of Israeli academics and academic institutions that do not publicly condemn the occupation. Considering that Ha’aretz is so Zionist, this is a good sign!

As you probably know, I go to demonstrations in the village of Bil’in most weeks. If you want to know the background as to why the villagers are demonstrating, read “Wall of Shame” in a recent edition of the excellent SchNEWS. Also check these two photos, which show the truth about the “self defence” Israeli soldiers are “forced” to use in Bil’in every week. Recently, there has been an upsurge in violence used against the demonstrators. Two of my friends were shot at close range with rubber bullets (against even the regulations of the Israeli army) a few weeks ago. If they had used the rubber-coated steel bullets that they use against Palestinians, they would probably have been dead now. Thankfully they are now fine, and getting back to ISM work.

For people who tell you nonsense like “the Palestinians are uniquely violent – other anti-occupation movements have used non-violence”, it is worth noting that the almost instinctive reaction of the Israeli military to mass non-violent demonstrations by the Palestinians is violence. In Ar-Ram recently, just such a large, organised, peacefull protest against the Aparthied Wall that Israel has built right through the main street of their town was simply attacked. The Israeli military later told the press that they had to do this because the demonstrators threw stones as they approched. I was there and I know this was a total lie. We also have video footage that proves this, which we offered to the press. After they were attacked by the army, some of the youth did retaliate with stones, but this was mostly symbolic in that they were too far away to hit anything. This is the standard practice of the Israeli army – attack non-violent demonstrations and then afterwards claim they were “violent riots”, instead of demonstrations demanding basic human rights. They get away with this becase the Israeli and international press regularly reports these claims as fact. They attack tiny demonstrations even more freely. Palestinian demonstrations without media presence or Israeli and international support are met with lethal force. Finally, to illustrate the fundamentally racist nature of the Israeli military and their occupation, check out this account and pictures on how the military reacts to stone throwing by Jewish settlers.

——-

Linda Spence writing from Nablus, Occupied Palestine, Live from Palestine, 21 April 2006.

Tanks and soldiers roll into Balata refugee camp during the invasion of April 2006. (Dylan Bergeson)

17 April 2006 — This is just one personal account of a shocking situation I witnessed in in Nablus. In the week I have been here, Nablus and Balata refugee camp have been under regular daily and nightly attack from the IDF. All of the incursions have involved live ammunition, demonstrating little care for the hundreds of civilians in these highly populated areas.

We recieved a call at 10 AM to say that a house in the center of Nablus has been occupied by the army, with the family held prisoner inside. When the friends of this family’s children called for them to go to school, they discovered that the army were in the family’s home. The local shebab(“youth”) then began to pelt the house with stones. We were needed to approach the house and offer support to the family inside. I was told the army were more likely to resond to internationals and to allow food to be sent in or medical treatment arranged if an international approached them. In Palestine, people buy food on a daily basis; therefore, it can run out very quickly and there is no knowing how long the army will stay.

The stone throwing seemed relentless. I understand, however, that futile though it seems, it’s the only form of resistance avaiable to these disaffected, war-torn youth. Meanwhile, children were coming and going from several nearby schools. Medics and internationals escorted them to safety past the occupied house, as by now the army had begun shooting live ammunition. I have to admit that I was shocked that they were using live ammunition. Live ammo against stone-throwing children? I later heard the IDF claimed that pistols were fired by protestors, but I don’t believe this – we were on or near the front line most of the time.

Every time we crossed in front of the house, I thought of the British activist Tom Hurndall, who was killled by an IDF bullet. I think, God, I’m not brave enough for this and I don’t want to die, not even heroically. I was very aware of the fact that the TV crews are about 100 meters further back than us and had bulletproof vests. We moved back a little for safety and a bullet winged the wall next to the film cameraman.

My mouth was very dry and I became aware that I was shaking but then quickly realized I was cold. We’d rushed out without coats and the weather is very changeable here. I was unsure where fear ended and cold began.

We moved forward again to evaluate the situation and a bullet missed my friend by centimeters, which she didn’t actually notice. By now, I was feeling very shaken when suddenly I saw a boy standing very close, perhaps a half-meter away, get hit by a bullet. He clasped his neck, groaned and cried but didn’t really scream. He was also running, perhaps seeking safety, because when he reached a wall, his legs buckled. We knelt beside him and our coordinator put his hand over the wound to stem the gushing blood, but the ambulance – which had been on standby – was right there and took him away before we needed to help him.

Now I was really shocked, yet I wanted to stay with my group as a human rights observer. Much more live ammunition was fired – some very close – but we stayed at the scene in order to help the terrified family if and when the army evacuated the house. Tear gas was fired, shebab are everywhere and I was trying to ring the press. There was general chaos and I began to realize that I had lost my focus and was thinking only about injury and my family. I decided to leave and two people, including one of our coordinators, accompanied me.

After hours of dodging bullets, it was only when we were back in the camp that I felt safe again. When the rest of the group returned, I heard that another innocent child bystander had been shot beside them and was taken to the hospital in a taxi by our coordinator.

As I selfishly considered my own anxiety, It dawned on me that Nablus civilians have to deal with this constantly. There is no doubt that they must be sufferring stress and anxiety-related illnesses. Yet they continue to work, laugh, get married, and, most importantly, resist as best they can this appalling, legtimized violence from Israel.

Linda Spence is a 46 year old English woman who arrived to Palestine on April 4th to begin work with the International Solidarity Movement. This is her first visit to Palestine, during which she has spent most of her time in Nablus doing human rights observation work.

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.

IDF enters Gaza for first time since pullout

by Amos Harel

The Israel Defense Forces yesterday entered Palestinian Authority territory in the Gaza Strip openly for the first time since last summer’s disengagement. IDF soldiers crossed the Green Line fence and penetrated about 100 meters into the PA in order to examine the place in which two armed Palestinians were killed on Wednesday and to ensure that no bombs had been planted there.

The Palestinians had planned to attack either an Israeli community or a military patrol on Wednesday evening.

At around 5 P.M., two women soldiers on duty saw two armed Palestinians crawling toward the fence south of the Kissufim border crossing. The men were first fired on by a tank, then from the air and were killed. They were found to be carrying two Kalashnikov assault rifles, ammunition clips, grenades, a two-way radio and barbed-wire cutters. The bodies of the men, identified as Ibrahim Masoud, 20, and Muhammad Elamudi, 22, from the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, were removed by the International Red Cross.

“If Hamas leaders don’t act to stop the rockets, they must be hit hard and pay a heavy price,” Brigadier General Gadi Eisenkot, head of operations at General Staff Headquarters said. “What we saw up to now was just an introduction.”

“We have full legitimacy to impose great force when they continue to fire on our towns. The Israeli public also understands that, and so does the international arena. I don’t see anyone in the world getting upset about it,” Eisenkot continued.

Eisenkot claims that “we are not trying to purposely fan the flames,” but in the same breath he admits that “we realize that a wider confrontation could result. In my opinion that’s preferable to them getting us accustomed to 25 Qassams a week. True, no Israelis have been killed by Qassams since the disengagement but there is another test that must not be ignored: the sense of security of the people living in proximity to Gaza.”

See full interview with Brig. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, p. B1.

The Palestinian organizations often use explosive devices that can be deployed remotely against soldiers on the Israeli side of the border. Until a week ago, when Israel suspended contact with the Palestinian security forces in Gaza in response to the swearing-in of the Hamas government, the Palestinians used to search for such devices in coordination with the IDF. The IDF will now patrol the Palestinian side.

Two Qassams were fired in the area during the IDF operation. No one was injured.

IDF artillery continued to shell Gaza during the holiday.

IDF sources claim that the Qassams have grown less accurate as a result of the Israeli military pressure on the launching areas.

Yesterday morning, troops uncovered an explosives laboratory in the West Bank village of Burkin near Jenin. Thirty kilograms of explosives as well as four devices and related equipment were found at the site, which was run by Islamic Jihad. Border Police sappers blew up the lab under controlled conditions.

A young Palestinian man carrying a makeshift pistol and an ax was apprehended by soldiers of the IDF’s ultra-Orthodox Nahal unit at the Beqaot junction east of Nablus.

The army arrested 15 Palestinians on the West Bank over the weekend.

Arnon Regular contributed to this story.

———————

US Blocks Security Council Resolution Condeming Gaza Bombing

By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Agencies

The Arab states on Friday requested an open debate in the United Nations Security Council on Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, a day after the Council failed to agree on a statement on the recent surge in violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

The United States nixed the draft, proposed by Qatar, calling it unfairly critical of Israel.

The draft, put forward on behalf of the Palestinians, would have expressed concern about the “indiscriminate shelling against the Gaza Strip, resulting in extensive human casualties” and called on Israel to halt “military operations and excessive use of force that endangers the Palestinian civilian populations.”

The United States had argued for its long-standing belief that any such statement mention both sides’ obligations under the road map and cite Palestinian attacks against Israel as well.

Because the draft failed, the Security Council will hold an open meeting on Monday when any of the 191 member states of the United Nations can speak. The council will also hold a monthly meeting on the Middle East a week after that.

Palestinian UN observer Riyad Mansour strongly suggested that the United States was the lone holdout against the statement, though he did not mention the U.S. by name.

He referred to “one member who is shielding and protecting the Israeli actions and aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza and in other parts of the occupied territory.”

Diplomats said Britain and Denmark also had problems with the draft, and U.S. Ambassador John Bolton would not say if the United States was the only one opposed.

“If I were the only holdout I’d be proud of that fact,” Bolton said after the council could not agree on the text.

“The balance of the text as it ended up was still not adequate in our view and we weren’t prepared to support it,” Bolton said. “It was disproportionately critical of Israel, and unfairly so and needlessly so.”

The Palestinians had called on the UN Security Council Monday to take urgent action to stop what they called an escalating military campaign by Israeli forces.

Mansour had said in a letter to the council that at least 18 Palestinians have been killed since last Friday and scores more have been wounded in a barrage of military attacks.

——

Convergence to a border of convenience

Ha’aretz, 5th April 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/702535.html

By Amira Hass

For the “convergence” plan to be presented to the Western world as a giant concession worthy of praise, the dimensions of Jewish support for the “vision of the Greater Land of Israel” must be inflated. But if the Greater Land of Israel really were the top priority for the Jewish citizenry of Israel, then there wouldn’t be fewer than 10,000 settlers in the Jordan Valley. Tens of thousands would be rushing to expand Ma’aleh Ephraim and the farming settlements, so the lights of the eastern sector of the Greater Land would shine and twinkle like the lights of the western sector of the Jordanian kingdom.

Israel made sure during the years of the Oslo negotiations, as in the preceding years, to leave that enormous area blocked to any Palestinian development and wide open to any Israeli development. The somewhat difficult living conditions (heat, distance to the center of the country) would not have deterred the masses of Israelis. If every clod of the Greater Land of Israel indeed held an impassioned emotional attraction for the Jewish citizens of Israel, they would not have needed economic incentives to live in the areas conquered in 1967. They would have gone to settle the most distant hilltops and not made do with settlements “five minutes from Kfar Sava.” They would not have needed seductive advertising about one-family villas on their own plot of land. On the contrary, they would have encouraged the state and the contractors to build apartment blocs. There wouldn’t be 420,000 Jewish setters (including occupied East Jerusalem) but rather 2 million.

What drew the Jewish Israelis – and turned nearly half a million of them into outlaws under international law – were not the clods of holy land but comfortable lives promised to them by Israeli military supremacy, the spacious inexpensive housing and the improved infrastructure. Those were precisely the subsidies and incentives that they didn’t get inside the sovereign state. The convergence, therefore, is the borders drawn by the average Israeli Jew’s aspirations for comfort and convenience.

These would be natural ambitions if they did not come at the expense of the Palestinians as individuals and as a people. But average Israelis, including those who are not settlers, are not troubled by such trifle matters like international law, basic moral values and the welfare and convenience of the Palestinians. After all it is precisely the settlement blocs and the area between the separation fence and the Green Line that cut into the West Bank, take its water and fertile farming resources, separate Palestinian communities and obstruct all natural and logical geographic and demographic contiguity. These areas, and it doesn’t matter if the convergence is 28 percent of the West Bank or “only” 13.5 percent, have caused and will cause irreversible damage to Palestinian society and to individual Palestinians. But that’s not what bothers average Israelis and their representatives in Kadima, Labor and the Pensioners Party. These facts slip through the consciousness and are buried, like hundreds of Palestinian villages whose names do not appear on the road signs along the settlers’ highways.

Security is an important element in the good life. Lovers of prosperity at the expense of others must believe that the convergence will provide them with personal security. It is very reasonable to assume that the residents of the settlement blocs will continue feeling comfortable and safe behind the various kinds of barbed wire, cement walls and locked gates, ignoring their role in the robbery. But the invisible Palestinians see and feel. In Israel they are counting on Palestinians accepting the robbery and inherent discrimination out of habit, international helplessness or Israel’s military strength.

That is an illusion – like the illusion that reigned at the time of Oslo – that the Palestinians would accept the expansion of the settlements, being shoved off their lands and the draconian limits on their freedom of movement. The explosion that came at the end of September 2000 was caused by the violent clash between the international promise of peace and the reality of occupation and colonization. The convergence plan, which coagulates the violence of occupation in densely populated Palestinian areas, will bring forth and intensify three types of Palestinian rage: national rage due to the sabotage of the Palestinian project for a state, development and independence; economic rage of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their land, property and livelihood to the Jews who prosper on the other side of the barbed wire; and religious rage, of those who turn for solace to the Koran and Allah, where they can find explanations stating that’s the way Jews are.

The supporters of convergence and its architects are deceiving themselves by thinking that all these forms of rage won’t burst out, or that it will always be possible to suppress them. Indeed, it is difficult to predict when and how the rage will erupt, but sooner or later, they will be back disrupting the dreams of comfort and convenience at the expense of another nation.

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.

As calls for the release of the four CPT activists in Iraq (including Harmeet, my friend from ISM in January) continue to come from all quarters, it’s worth taking a moment to ask why there are not more people involved in groups like the CPT and ISM in Iraq and Palestine. His criticisms of how much of the US peace movement limits itself to “periodic protests in New York or Washington DC” can be equally well applied to the UK Stop the War Coalition.

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 09:06 -0600, *** *** wrote:

> little old ladies etc. coming out of the polling
> places and proudly holding their ink-stained
> fingers to the press to show how proud they
> were of finally getting to vote in a democratic
> election?


Have you stopped to consider what they are actually voting for?

If you check the actual record rather than just believe the TV news propaganda, it is clear that the US government has been resisting elections since the beginning of the occupation. It blocked a quick election for the interim government which could have been carried out back in June or July 2003 (using ration cards as the basis for ID). Instead they preferred to install their own former Ba’athist to run the country – Allawi. The situation in the country was inflamed by US and British murder and torture, predictably leading to armed resistance and terrorism, as well as an upsurge in Islamic fundamentalism to levels previously unheard of in Iraq (both of which were predicted long before the war by the Western intelligence agencies). Meanwhile, the Shia masses under Sistani have been non-violently and consistently demanding two things, almost since the very beginning: immediate elections and an end to the occupation. Every opinion poll that has come out of Iraq since the beginning of the occupation has shown that the vast majority of the population are demanding an end to the occupation (these are only two Iraqi commentators, but the polls tell us the same story).

In fact it is clear that an end to the occupation is what pretty much everyone who voted in the elections was primarily voting for. The United Iraqi Alliance (the Shiite coalition) would not have won the election without calling for an end to the occupation. UIA’s 22-point platform includes a demand for “a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.” Unfortunately, this is one election pledge they are going to find hard to fulfil because of the control the US maintains over Iraq, an essential component of which is a massive, permanent military presence in the heart of the region with the world’s largest oil reserves.

A prominent Iraqi politician in the Shia coalition told the New Yorker in January that the US had quietly told the parties before the election that there were three conditions for the new government: it should not be under the influence of Iran; it should not ask for the withdrawal of US troops; and it should not install an Islamic state.

> These people turned out in absolute record numbers
> to vote...


If (for some reason) you mean as compared to other countries, then that’s by no means clear. Saying that, the fact that any turned out to vote at all (against the occupation, don’t forget) in the face of terrorist attacks (which where unknown in Iraq before the invasion) is awe-inspiring. The victors have a clear mandate to start immediate negotiations with the Americans on the modalities of the withdrawal of American troops, as well as make a start on development of other planks of its electoral platform that the US may not find to its tastes.

Obviously, the US is not going to let such efforts succeed. So what will happen? Will Ibrahim Jafari be persuaded to sell-out his electorate somehow or will it come to a confrontation with the US? Eventual ousting of Jafari and installation of another Sunni Ba’athists thug in some sort of military coup or (more likely) eventual wrangling of a US preferred candidate within the UIA such as the reactionary Adel Abd al-Mahdi? I predict nothing.

> they [the GIs] can't wait to get back over
> there [Iraq]...


What planet are you living on? Do you actually read the news? A small sample: “For the Few and the Proud, Concern Over the ‘Few’ Part”, “Hundreds of U.S. Soldiers Emerge as Conscientious Objectors” (April 2003), “Meet the New COs”, “Three US soldiers killed in bomb attack in northern Baghdad”, “Extent of US abuse cases revealed”, “For Some, a Loss in Iraq Turns Into Antiwar Activism”, etc. etc. etc.

So to summarise; in your words Iraqis voted “in record numbers” for “a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq” (UIA/Sistani). Bush is seemingly intent on defying the expressed will of the Iraqi electorate: “We will not set an artificial time table for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out,” (State of the Union speech, February 2).

> What say you to that?

I say that the US and UK should live up to their rhetoric about freedom and democracy (i.e. leave the country).