More reports from July

August 23, 2002
Report from Erica

I can't express how surreal it is to be sitting in a clean, stylish apartment in suburban East Jerusalem, a full brunch in my stomach and clean clothes on me for the first time in weeks: safe, paralyzed, in exile. Last night is comical now, or a strange dream. But it's not about me.

The army is getting more and more annoyed by international presence in the West Bank: I heard only a few minutes ago that another international had been arrested from Nablus, and when the soldiers were talking to us yesterday, they effectively said that they would arrest any international in the Nablus area. The entire city and its environs has been designated—in the army's capriciously executed policy—a closed military zone. If the IDF applies this with any consistency, that would mean that all the Occupied Territories will be closed to all outside witnesses. Right now, Israeli accountability is minimal at best: if no one is left but the army and the Palestinians they keep under siege, that accountability will drop to nil.

Yesterday I went with Jeremy, Seif, Suha and Fiona to another occupied house in Nablus.  Jeremy is from NY and and a member of JATO.  Seif is a Palestinian man living in Askar; he teaches poetry, drama and music as a volunteer at the children's summer camp there.  Suha is a Palestinian Israeli journalist and Fiona a Canadian journalist. 

The Palestinian house occupied by the Israeli military is on a hill from which you can see straight across the valley to another of the occupied houses.  The army rings the city with these ad hoc bases. The army refused us entry to the house right away.

"Didn't you know it's curfew?" they said. "No one is allowed to be in Nablus."

They wouldn't let us in to talk to the family living in the house, nor would they let the family out to talk to us; they insisted that the family had all the supplies they wanted and that the army paid rent to the family for the occupation of their home.  This contradicts everything we have heard directly from other families whose homes the army has commandeered. 

We then offered to leave of our own free will and the soldiers informed us that they would take us out of the city themselves.

I had my passport on me still and thought I should at least get Seif, our Palestinian companion, out of the situation, especially after we saw three Palestinian men exit the house, one of them blindfolded and handcuffed.  So we walked away from the house. We weren't 50 meters away when two tanks pulled up and ordered us to get in the vehicles. After 2 minutes Seif and I were brought back in front of the same occupied house again.

Suha, the Palestinian Israeli journalist, speaks Hebrew and could overhear everything the soldiers were saying about us. After they found out my last name, the commander constantly referred to me amongst the soldiers as "the Jewish bitch." The soldiers made obscene jokes to each other in Hebrew about how I was sleeping with Palestinians. At one point, I didn't want to let my passport out of my hands.

"If she doesn't give us the passport," Suha reported the commander as saying, "beat her."

Eventually the soldiers took me, Suha and Fiona in an APC to a military camp 20 km west of Nablus, right outside one of the many illegal settlements here. The soldiers had detained Seif and led him into the occupied house. Today I found out that he spent five hours in blindfolds and handcuffs.  He was beaten and interrogated and eventually let go. 

Suha, Fiona and I sat at the military camp until 10 o' clock at night. Suha told me she overheard the soldiers saying to each other to treat us nice, because it wouldn't look good if they maltreated us; instead, they should let us "dry out." Which is what we did. While we were waiting we talked to some of the soldiers.

The 20-year old who was assigned to guard us told us, "I hate the Knesset, it's totally dominated by the religious fanatics, who decide everything. I hate the settlements. But I'm just a soldier: what can I do? I wanted to become a soldier so I could change things, be the one giving the orders not to just make people's lives difficult."

"But it didn't work out that way," I said.

"It didn't work out that way," he said.

We were brought to the police station in the illegal Ariel settlement, held there, questioned, and released with charges dropped after three hours. It took us two more hours to get to Jerusalem due to extended negotiations with a police officer who at first took us for prostitutes, then the police car dropped us at a checkpoint, from where the soldiers called us a taxi. 

I can't go back to the West Bank now, at least not now, not without risking real arrest and definite deportation. I hope my fears that the army will start rounding up all internationals prove false. Even if they do prove false, it won't change the fact that the IDF still exercises almost unchecked power in the Occupied Territories.

I can see, even from the brief time I was there, that the situation is getting worse: as the days of curfew stretch on, as the gunfire goes on all night, as new roadblocks crop up every morning, as the money and food run out, as more houses are demolished, as more Palestinians are detained, arrested, tortured, shot.  I am outside, away from all that now. And no Palestinian can get outside.

August 17, 2002
Report from Erica

Curfew is lifted today in Nablus for the first time in over a week: all of a sudden the city is no longer a ghost town, but a real city, the market bursting with life, everyone out in the streets. I can't write long, at 6:00 the curfew will be imposed again, and everyone will be under the effective house arrest that "curfew" implies. And even this is only half the story: outside the city, tanks wait to turn back anyone trying to enter or leave.

Gabe and I had gone to a house in an outlying town where soldiers have occupied the top two floors for the past week with no indication of leaving. The man who spoke to me said that it was the second time the soldiers have occupied the house. The first time, it was for 27 days, and they locked the 4 families of the house in the bottom floor for the first 15 of those days, only allowing the family to enter the yard after a group of internationals came to check out the situation.

We had gone today to bring some food and diapers; a family was trying to get back to their village after having taken their son to the hospital. They had been stuck here while the curfew was lifted. Even now they were afraid of problems if they tried to go into the valley without international presence. For good reason. We walked down with them part way; they crossed over a massive road block the army had made and we watched them walk down the hill. After 2 minutes a tank came. We approached with our hands up. As one soldier was taking our documents, the tank fired into the valley, in the air over the family.

They had to turn back and walk up the hill with all their bags, their little son limping all the way. The army searched their bags, and after arguing with the husband, eventually let them go. Another group of men, farmers who lived in Nablus but worked in the village, were made to turn back.

"But what about their work?” I asked the soldier.

"Yes, well, it's collective punishment, but what can we do?" I wasn't quick enough to point out to him that collective punishment is illegal under international law.

The lifting of curfew is cold consolation anyway after the army went through old Nablus last night with tanks and foot soldiers. At 6:00 in the evening the operation began. Parts of the old town have been completely destroyed by last night's shooting and fires. The army did not allow fire trucks to enter and put the fires out.

There's so much I could say, more than I could write if I had 45 hours instead of 45 minutes, the joy and the warmth and the intelligence of the Palestinians as well as the humiliation and the violence and the poverty of the occupation. I have heard stories about the actions of the Israeli army that have chilled my blood. No one should have to live like the people here live. It's well and good to shake one's head over the humanitarian crisis here, but it's empty pity without understanding that it doesn't have to be this way.

The media portrays Palestine as a land of either terrorist fundamentalists or some kind of pre-biblical nomadic tribe. As I sit in this internet cafe, I can fairly well vouch that the Palestinians are as educated, kind, intelligent, fun as any other people. The vibrancy of the city today compared to the locked doors and empty streets of yesterday is a testament to how much the occupation, and nothing else, is responsible for the misery here.

August 13, 2002
Report from Erica

Fear in the Night

Last night around 1 am, Z. came and knocked on the door of the house where I'm staying. He motioned for me to come up to the roof: the buildings blocked the view, but from his own roof he had seen soldiers on foot, coming towards Old Askar refugee camp. When we went back inside, the man whose house it is bolted the door. That day his wife had gone to the hospital with their two-day-old daughter: the baby had a high fever and trouble breathing, and he didn't even know if she would survive. He went to bed and I stayed up with Z., smoking cigarettes and talking to fill the eerie silence, punctuated only by the yowls of stray cats and the sound of the trucks speeding up and down the road, occasional machinegun fire.

At one point Z. began talking about his land back in Jaffa--from where his family, like almost every family here--was exiled in the years after 1945. He had tears in his eyes. Like most people here in Nablus, he hasn't been able to even leave the town's borders for years--never mind leaving the West Bank. The camps themselves are small ghettos, getting more and more crowded as the population grows and the camp is not allowed to expand it's borders.

Nablus itself is a ghost town; the people wave to us from out their windows, the children shout "howryoo!" and "watchernem!" at us, but often don’t dare to go outside in case the tanks come through, which they do almost every night, shooting at anything that moves.

At a children's peace demonstration in Balata camp yesterday, one little boy with sad, patient eyes ran up to me and showed me the scar on his leg where the bullet had been. Every night we hear that at least one more person has been killed in the city by the army, one more man arrested, one more house destroyed. I don't think there's any way I can communicate fully how constant is the state of fear and powerlessness in which the Palestinians live.

"Are you afraid?" Z. asked me last night.

"Me? Afraid? No. Are you?"

"No," he said smiling, but the way he smoked cigarette after cigarette, the anxious peering out the window every 2 minutes, proved otherwise.

As I write this report I am sitting in the school of Deir Hatab village, where the Nablus medical center is doing a "mobile clinic." In fact its nothing more than medical distribution, and the simplest of medicines at that: decongestant, antiseptic, children's fever reducer, multivitamins.

The ambulance pulled up as we were walking down the road and asked for accompaniment. On the road to the village--only a 10 minute drive--two soldiers stopped us; they took the IDs of the doctors, and my and Angelo's passports. I watched them radio their base, looking at the passports as if they had never seen one before in their lives. They made the ambulance driver open up the first aid kits, the bags of medicine. Finally they let us pass.

After two more minutes the ambulance stopped and dropped us off so it could go to another clinic in Ramallah. We got out, taking the boxes of medicine, climbed over a small hill to where a van was waiting for us to pick us up and take us to the school. There are dozens of women lined up now, many carrying their small children. Without this delivery, they wouldn't have access to even the most basic over-the-counter medicine that any American or Israeli can pick up at the corner store. Just one more daily inconvenience, humiliation or prohibition here for all the things that should be taken for granted.

I can't help myself from thinking constantly and since the moment I arrived in Nablus, "this is what Kosovo must have been like a year before I was there." (The feeling is so strong, so visceral, I've been constantly fighting the urge to speak Albanian to people: last night I actually accidentally said, "qysh?" to a little boy who was trying to talk to me.) Not only does it look similar, not only are the customs--endless cups of coffee and oversweet tea, endless offers of cigarettes--similar, but, and more importantly, the stories I hear are the same as well. There's hardly a man here who hasn't done time in an Israeli prison; there's hardly a family who hasn't lost a loved one to military fire. Everyone here, also, jumps when they hear a hard knock on the door.

August 7, 2002
(Report from Louisa's support person)

That's all for now. also I'm supposed to encourage people to call Louisa, so pass that on too.

August 4, 2002
(Report from Louisa's support person)

August 2, 2002
Report from Louisa

Our concerns were that the Israeli Occupation Forces might see us going forward with an action as celebratory and be harsher, that Palestinians were generally too afraid to come out because of that, and that if those things were true it would end up being just internationals plus the Palestinian heads of NGOs, which is highly problematic. As Adam Shapiro pointed out, us walking through the streets after curfew proves absolutely nothing except that we can do it and Palestinians can't, which is obviously in fundamental contradiction with our purpose here. What was pleasing to me is how obvious these things were to all the internationals.

A large Spanish delegation showed up here yesterday and it's just such a difference for me here as compared to activism in the states when there are ALWAYS self-interested activists to contend with. Everyone here was basically on the same page. We are here as an enabling force at the request of Palestinian organizers. We are not here to fight their fight or to tell them how or to be heroes. We are here because the danger is SO great when Palestinians break curfew or do direct actions, when we are around the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) PR is at stake and they know it. For the most part they are too afraid to kill and beat Palestinians when we are around. Our hope is that a continued international presence will help make it possible for Palestinians to continue their resistance to the occupation and eventually end it.

As we were wrapping up this discussion a sound bomb went off outside and some of us went to see what was up. Adam went to the corner with his video camera and soldiers fired a rubber bullet at him. When we came in we decided to go out in two groups to walk around various Ramallah neighborhoods, because clearly the Jerusalem attack had gotten the IOF all riled up and they were being much stricter about enforcing curfew and punishing violators.

Huwaida and my affinity group walked all over Ramallah for several hours. Let me tell you, as a Jew who had Holocaust nightmares as a child all the time, walking around the city is like those nightmares. Everyone is in their homes and its not even dark yet. (If I were a psychoanalyst I would have a lot to say about what these soldiers are reenacting and why. But I'm SO not a psychoanalyst. So oh well.) As we got to the center of town, we came upon an APC. Fortunately they did not shoot at us. They yelled in Arabic for us to go home but we didn't respond. In the old city of Ramallah there was some chaos. A reporter told us he got a report of tear gas, so we talked to people in the area and found that the IOF had thrown tear gas INSIDE a home because kids were gathered outside playing or whatever.

At the same time the soldiers held up the red crescent ambulance that was trying to get to the scene to take the children and older people who had been inside and needed medical attention. Everyone was coughing and sneezing, eyes watering and all that. The families in the area were fairly confident that the soldiers wouldn't return that night. And they didn't.

Walking around as a group, about 35 Palestinian boys joined us, they said they were waiting for the soldiers to return. They used 1st Intifadah tactics like starting contained fires in the middle of the road to keep the IOF out. No more major stuff happened after this, thank god.

Today my affinity group is off to Nablus, though there may be an Afternoon demo here first. In Nablus the infrastructure is very good. They consider it a model for international/Palestinian organizing, so we're excited to join up there. There have been several successful roadblock removals, and lots of defying curfew. Ramallah is a middle class city (its also where the PA offices are) and generally the people here are less active than in Nablus and other smaller cities.

Afternoon Report:  Internationals attempt to block tank with their Bodies

The afternoon demonstration today was cancelled by Palestinian political organizations and it is unlikely the NGOs will want to proceed alone. So a couple international groups visited children's summer camps on refugee camps where international presence was requested. My group went back to the checkpoint we were at yesterday between Ramallah and Bir Zeit, where the university many Palestinians attend is located.

The soldiers frequently question: 'Why are you going to Bir Zeit?' and the students reply 'To go to school' and the soldiers say 'Why?'

We were concerned about backlash given the attack in Jerusalem yesterday and brought an eight person crew, three Spanish, one French and the three Americans and one Irish guy from our group. (Although of the three Americans, only I am white, one is Palestinian-American and one is Mexican-American, obviously both in more vulnerable positions with soldiers reading them, especially before they show their passports).

We were doing our routine--four on each side of the checkpoint, the two directions, and asking the soldiers to allow people to sit or get water, etc. All things considered, everything was fairly uneventful until one man was singled out, blindfolded and forced into their APC, as all the soldiers headed over we got extensive footage of the man being handcuffed and put in the APC. I demanded they allow us to ride in the APC if they had nothing to hide, told hem they were breaking international law, blah blah blah. Again they physically forced us out of the way and all got in the APC, so five of us linked arms and blocked the APC as it tried to pull away. After only a minute they threw a sound bomb which hit one of the Spanish men who was on my right, linked up with me. (His back hurts, some wounds, some blood, but not terribly serious, just painful). The air filled with smoke and they began shooting (live fire, not rubber bullets) in the air around us, though not at us. Many more sound bombs and we were forced away as they drove forward. We ran after the tank and blocked it again, pushing against it as it drove into us. Though we were unsuccessful at preventing it from getting away (given our small numbers and that it was a spontaneous action), we were able to speak to some of the man's friends and get details--his name, his home phone number and report it to an Israeli human rights organization who is working on getting him released. Apparently his brothers are Palestinian police and his father is wanted, so he was picked up though he has no affiliation of any kind to any particular organization. Of course here being Palestinian is criminal.

The troops left and Palestinians passed freely, though cars and trucks have a hard time getting through with all the road blocks. We were going to go to Arura check point which is a smaller one between villages where we feared revenge might be taken since so few internationals and media go through. But it had been removed.

So we headed over to Kalandia, which is a very large checkpoint everyone going to and from Ramallah must go through. It is much more systematized, so we didn't expect to be able to take action much, just check it out. It is known to be the "humanitarian" checkpoint, a real PR thing for Israel since so much media comes through they have shade and sometimes water. Because of yesterday's attack though they were arbitrarily only letting in Palestinians from three towns. No one from Ramallah was being let in to Ramallah. We were able to call an Israeli human rights organization to help get some women with babies into the hospital, though they waited for a very long time, repeatedly being told they could not enter.

That's about it, reportedly it was all quiet in the other direction (leaving Ramallah, where the Spanish delegation was stationed).

On the personal note, i.e. Jewish stuff, ha, one soldier told me "I hate the Israeli government, I have to serve, I hate this gun,. I hate this uniform, etc." He said he supports the refusniks but is afraid to refuse to serve because he will be punished. He also argued about Palestinian violence against Israelis, but was able to have a decent conversation about it until he was sent to ID people somewhere else. The real issue for someone like that is about not understanding power relations. I mean, that's the issue for so many people that equate Pal. and Israeli violence. I said to him, look, do you remember Warsaw? and he said yes, so I said, we made Molotov cocktails, we threw bombs, because we were in ghettos, being killed, what choice did we have? And so he listened. I find that rather than calling soldiers Nazis (listen up activists who think that's a good tactic), it is effective to address power issues from the other side, trying to get them to remember their (our) history of resistance. Trying to get them to realize what it is to be forced to use violence because the other side is OCCUPYING with tanks, and military/financial support from our very own USA. It is still possible to condemn targeting the Hebrew University, for example, or discos, but not have those incidents obfuscate the entire history of (imperialist, colonial) domination.

We are meeting up with Huwaida shortly, probably lunch then some Palestinian/international graffiti and then heading out to Nablus. Because of  yesterday's attack, the IOF (which had been stationed on the outskirts of Nablus, controlling comings and goings) has now moved back in and instated curfew all day. So everyone's hiding in their homes. There should be computers there, so I'll let you know what happens when we arrive. 

August 1, 2002
Report from Louisa

Checkpoints and Arbitrary Detention

Four of us arrived late this morning at Surda and found the standard APC with 5 soldiers doing arbitrary ID checks (mostly, though not exclusively, of men). At some times they make everyone show ID then forget or get distracted and check none for awhile. For totally unclear reasons, they detain large groups of men, who are forced to stand in the REALLY hot sun without water and wait indefinitely while the soldiers take their IDs behind large cement blocks and make phone calls to "check" on the individuals.

In hassling the troops, we were able to speed up the release of the detained Palestinian men and getting their IDs back to them.

On the Jewish side of things (ha), I have been repeatedly telling all the soldiers I come into contact with that the international Jewish community does not support Israeli state violence, that they are making many of us ashamed. I had a pretty decent conversation with a couple of soldiers, asking them if their family had been survivors and talking about it for awhile, and then getting to all the parallels between their treatment of the Palestinians and Nazi treatment of Jews. From that place, they were actually really hearing this, looking like they wanted to cry and so I told them "this isn't about protecting Jews and you know that, you know this is wrong, you’ve got barbed wire everywhere, curfew like in the ghettos, etc..." We're going to begin bringing info from the refusniks to share with soldiers who we can get through to at all.

One Palestinian man was being handcuffed (remember soldiers are not allowed to make arrests) and we surrounded the soldier with cameras and demanded he explain to the man of what crime he was being accused.  As they led the man handcuffed to the APC, I blocked the door to it and told them if they were doing nothing wrong they must let two of us come with them with cameras. At this point the soldiers claimed they could no longer speak English and would only yell at us in Hebrew. (They kept trying to get me to speak Hebrew with them, which I refused to do, but conveniently it meant they were afraid I understood them when they talked to one another about us). After another minute the commander on site threw me off the tank, fortunately all on tape. They drove away and two of the detained men told us the soldiers at taken their ID cards and car keys with them. So we waited for about an hour and a half with the detainees, meanwhile contacting an Israeli human rights organization who reprimanded the Israeli Occupation Forces. The APC then returned and the soldiers (out the top hatch) yelled and swore in Hebrew, and threw the IDs and keys down on the ground, and drove away.

Though theoretically the checkpoint is open until curfew at 6, Palestinians were passing "freely" for the time being. After lunch we plan to return for few hours, to see if the soldiers come back.

On another note, it seems there was just another suicide bombing in Jerusalem. If you know any news about it, especially where the Israeli govt. is claiming the bomber came from, let me know.

July 31, 2002
Report from Louisa

Palestinian Boys Blind-folded and Hand-cuffed

RAMALLAH.  My affinity group and Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf went through Kalandia checkpoint in the afternoon and took a taxi from there to Ramallah, which was supposed to be under curfew at 6. ON the way to

Adam and Huwaida's house, we saw 3 young (age 9-13) Palestinian boys handcuffed, blindfolded, being taken by 5 Israeli soldiers at gunpoint to a military base the Israeli Occupation Forces created 6 weeks ago, when they broke into and took over an apartment building. The residents in the building are often forced to stay in or out and must climb a wall with barbed wire to get into their building which now has an Israeli and Israeli Occupation Forces brigade flag flying from it.

We got video footage and photos of the boys being detained. The kids' friends immediately came to tell us what had happened, saying they had been playing when the soldiers took the boys. We then confronted the soldiers, telling them they were violating international law, etc. Huwaida and Adam called a number of human rights organizations and media. Within a few minutes, more than 50 children from the community came to look for their friends. The troops were unwilling to speak to us, except to say that these children were dangerous to them and we didn't understand. They claimed the kids were throwing Molotov cocktails at their tanks. Soon family members of the detained boys showed up, mothers and sisters argued with the troops, who would only say that they would provide the boys with water if they asked for it. Needless to say there were endless arguments between the troops and the ISM people/Palestinians.

The soldiers were fascinated with me being Jewish. When they told me I should be ashamed, I scared them away by saying that coming out of our history, they should know better and that Jews across the world were ashamed because of the Israeli state's actions claiming to be on our behalf. (This interchange is on DV, by the way, which rocks). Eventually negotiation got the boys released just before curfew. Complete details are available on the ISM website, www.palsolidarity.org.

July 30, 2002
Report from Louisa

This has to be quick because we are leaving for Ramallah very soon. Hope all is well with everyone. I am fine. My affinity group is great, thank god, no anarchist white boys trying to control everything. Many criticisms of the internationals though (forthcoming). The anti-Semitism is worse among the internationals. The Palestinian people I've talked to so far have all been happy about Jewish people working against Israeli state terror. Overall, the Arab media has been much more responsible than U.S. media when it comes to distinguishing Israeli state violence from Jewish people.

An old white man from NYC told me he's upset he looks Jewish because, he said, "Sorry but I don't WANT to be one of the 'chosen people' as you call yourselves." He wants me to read a book about Jewish control by a Jewish man so I won't think he's anti-Semitic for telling me about it.

There was just a suicide bombing here and the entire old city was evacuated. We were right there; it was crazy. The Israeli Occupation Forces looks like Nazis, so bizarre. They just arrested eight Palestinian men outside. We don't yet know the details though. There are four newborn kittens at the hostel. I'll miss them the most. This is pretty crazy, but everything's fine. 

The wackiest visual on earth yesterday when the Israeli Occupation Forces had a ceremony taking over the entire church of the holy Sepulchre with their AK47s and all.