the Hebron

Jamie is not a pacifist; his language is not polite. We offer, in this report, a unique viewpoint on events that deeply trouble us.
          –Daniel

Steve Zeltzer brings us this report from former a Palestinian Paper Tiger member. He writes:

"Hi folks, Jaime Yassin, a former paper tiger member, has been in Palestine for the last several weeks and just sent me this account of what is going on and how it's at odds with mainstream press coverage. It's long, but well worth reading."

          10/3/00 Ramallah

Hey, thought i'd let you know what i've seen, heard and experienced in the last few days since the violence started.

First of all its incredibly eroneous to refer to Sharon's visit as the spark that lit the fire, as the official press narative is being constructed. People were pissed on that day but it wasn't till they started to fire on the ground of haram al sharif and killed 7 people that things went really nuts, as you'd expect them to anywhere in the world. Strangely, this fact has been repeatedly neglected in us based on-line news reports that i've been reading, but it seems to be the most pertinent. I can tell you that there was a very different feeling on the day Sharon visited the Haram and the next day when people died.

I went out to the Israeli checkpoint to the settlement of Bet El here in Ramallah on the first day of conflict here in the territories (this settlement, by the way expropriated a portion of my family's land in 67). I first went to observe but me salio el Arabe when I saw Israeli's firing into crowds of teenagers throwing rocks and joined in. I just couldn't watch my people (hokey as it may sound) getting shot and just stand around like it didn't concern me. While I was there I saw snipers in the windows of a partially constructed addition to the city inn hotel which is right at the checkpoint--they were killing people,no joke, singling someone out every hour or so and just firing live rounds. Some 2 people were killed in this way on that day (Saturday)and ambulances were coming in about every 10 minutes to take someone away. Firing never abated for the Red Crescent medical staff. They were fired on the same as anyone else.

The next day I snuck over to the Israeli side of the conflict and saw the Israeli soldiers relaxed, joking and eating sandwiches in between shooting at these children across the way. It is obvious that they have no feeling that there lives are in danger. One soldier, dropped a grenade on the way out of his jeep and just left it there on the ground in front of a crowd that included not only press but a large gathering of Palestinians on-lookers. An objective view of what is going on illuminates the lack of concern on their part. The stones being thrown by these children were landing some twenty feet away from the nearest jeep. There was no reason to kill or even injure a Palestinian soul there.

I am reminded of the shock displayed by the left-leaning community in the US when protesters were pepper sprayed at the WTO and hope that they are able to muster a similar revulsion at the use of plastic-coated bullets against an unarmed civilian population. These pellets littered the area and I picked one up and examined it. If I picked up one of these things and threw it at your face you might have to go to the hospital!! These bullets fuck people up, no joke and are too often lethal (too often by American standards which would not accept even one death from such a "crowd-control device").

I went back to the area the next day but Palestinian soldiers were blocking the street entrance to the area. THere were only a few Palestinians throwing stones but Israeli positions were too far away. I walked around to the other side to the Israeli position (in front of the City Inn hotel)and journalists were conspicously absent. A soldier told me that the hotel was closed. I walked away thinking that the conflict was dying down.

As much as I feel that the occupation needs to be forcefully pushed out of the territories its breaking my heart to see these children dying for no other reason than to make television audiences vaguely aware that something incredibly psychotic is being perpetrated on the part of the Israeli government--as if, the CNN reports are completely decontextualized, failing to characterize the obvious reality in any terms but allegations from the Palestinian side.

For example, I saw the snipers in those windows that first day but when I tuned into CNN international that evening the fact emerged as an allegation by Palestinian authorities to back up their contention that the Israeli's were using disproportionate force. Later, however, Palestinian soldiers and Israeli soldiers were trading live ammunition fire in the area and helicopters were called in and patrolled the area all night. We could hear automatic weapon fire coming from that part of town late into the evening. Earlier on the main street in Ramallah they were broadcasting news programming on loud speakers (probably PA and suspect as such, I guess) a friend of mine told me they were saying that they had started bombing parts of Gaza with rockets--houses, cars and anything that moved.

I caught up with a couple of other half-breed Palestinians i know from the university later on and they convinced me to attend a Peace Now rally in West Jerusalem. They had a sign that said Israel Murder Army out of Palestine (i agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly, though i wasn't impressed with the grammatic construction). Warning: to all who think there is a viable peace movement in Israel please avoid reading the following or risk having your illusions shattered. People almost immediately complained that the sentiment was too strong for their rally. An elder women screamed at us that her 19 year old student had been killed in the army and how dare we insinuate they were murderers. The logic being that since someone she had cared for had been killed in such an army they could never be considered anything but noble despite the overwhelming ferocity of their response in the territories. Later an American Jewish student at the Hebrew University who I had met through an acquaintance reacted as if we had spit on his mother's grave. He accused us of polemicizing (can you believe this) the situation and called our statement ahistorical, releasing the government issued arsenal of Israeli propaganda-crap about purity of arms, the "where else were the jews supposed to go" apologia, and the "peace process is working" hat-trick. I'd had beers with this guy and he considered himself a leftist and to prove it compared the Palestine situation to that of East Timor and Chiapas-- "if you really want to see murdereous armies", he said.

The minute we showed up with our sign an army jeep full of soldiers was called in and a police photographer showed up and took our pictures (there were also photographers when I was throwing stones and I ended up being on regional tv for a few seconds, so I'm afraid that I may end up on some kind of list now). People here have a pathological inability to accept the reality of their occupation as their entire national self-esteem is predicated on the illusion of a snow-white military machine whose every missile makes the desert bloom. Or as a woman screamed at us, "don't you understand that all of us are the army". This seems the most insidious brainwashing tactic the Israeli army could've ever used against their own people-- to make them all physically and personally complicit in the dirty work. They have no choice but to ignore the atrocities of their government in order to continue to function as sane human beings.

An american friend of ours went to Nablus yesterday and said that automatic weapon fights had permeated the entire area around an Israeli army base and that it had been impossible to avoid getting shot in the conflict area. Things have gotten worse today, Tuesday. A two year old girl was seriously wounded in Gaza by Israeli gunfire this morning and 17 Palestinians were reported dead there so far and its only noon. Thankfully fighting seems to have ceased in Kalandia, the refugee camp on the road to Jerusalem, but seems to have escalated to running fire fights at the City Inn Hotel. Ramallah is apparently completely closed off by Israeli checkpoints on all sides, but the checkpoint to Jerusalem is usally porous (things are so upside down here that taxis use an alternate route only about 400 feet from the main road, to avoid checkpoints. These big yellow mini vans bounce around on this dirt road like hemorhoids and are plainly visible by the soldiers manning the checkpoint) so I don't know what this means in real terms. Adding to the horrible feeling of hearing about the daily dozen dead from our and other areas, all businesses are striking for the foreseeable future (at least until Saturday, someone told me) and I haven't worked for four days already and am already broke, I imagine my situation is not much different than that of other Palestinian workers around here. You can't even get a beer with which to drown your sorrows. For now, the future seems hopeless.

Jaime @ Paper Tiger

Jeff Halper is a Jewish person who has worked closely with CPT in fighting the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes. I respect his opinion highly.
--Esther

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Published on Monday, October 9, 2000

The Struggle For Control, The End Of A Paradigm

by Jeff Halper

It doesn't happen often that one stands in a truly historic moment, a pivotal time in which things as they were will never be the same again. I felt that watching in 2000 the last act of 1989 -- the Yugoslavian people storm the stronghold of Milosevic, the Parliament building -- and I feel that tonight, October 8th, as we wait for Barak's 48 hour ultimatum to expire. Its surrealistic sitting at home in quiet West Jerusalem; we hear on the news of street battles raging between the Palestinian neighborhood of Shuafat and the north Jerusalem settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev, with the army providing armed support for the Pisgat Ze'ev rioters. But its Yom Kippur night, so no TV; we have to rely on CNN or BBC to provide coverage of what is happening a mile or two away. We are also receiving reports of attacks of mobs of Israeli Jews from Upper Nazareth on the Palestinian neighborhoods of Nazareth proper -- with the police intervening in the side of the Jews (one dead so far), as well as attacks on Arab villages (like Kifl Harith, Dir Istiya, Salfit, Bidiya and other villages and near Ariel and al-Azariya near Ma'aleh Adumim) by settlers. What makes attacks by settlers especially deadly is that they occur in Area C of the West Bank, where the settlers have been heavily armed by the army (for their "protection"), where the Palestinians are completely unarmed and have no recourse to aid from the Palestinian Authority, and where the army wades in on the side of the settlers.

I have the feeling that whatever happens tomorrow night (Wednesday) or the next day -- whether Israel opens an all-out assault on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories or whether international pressure forestalls it -- all the old frameworks, ideologies and relationships have been demolished.

Both the Oslo peace process and the myth of a state that is both Jewish AND democratic are gone. I don't know what's going to replace them, and the struggle and bloodshed is far from over, but the old frameworks are shattered and can never be put together again.

Although I fear for the loss of life looming before us, I take hope in that the uprising on both sides of the "Green Line" will in the end give birth to new possibilities for a just and viable peace between Israel and the emerging Palestinian State, as well as a new overall post-Zionist framework -- perhaps the eventual emergence of a bi-national state in all of Palestine/Israel. Many forces played a role in the sparking the uprising: religious sentiments aroused by Sharon's provocation on the Temple Mount/Haram, the feeling that only a Lebanon-style armed resistance will lead to true independence, the Johnny-come-lately entry of the Palestinian Authority, the pressures exerted on Arafat to accept an imposed settlement before the end of Clinton's term of office, overwhelming feelings of frustration, anger, deprivation and humiliation directed at the suffocating Israeli Occupation. The great underlying force, however, was and is, in my opinion, the popular rejection by the Palestinian "Street" of the Oslo process, and in particular the Camp David "solution" that would have led to a bantustan-type state truncated with large Israeli settlements, disconnected from Jerusalem and without meaningful sovereignty.

Some of the same forces prompted the popular uprising of Palestinian citizens of Israel ("Israeli Arabs," as they are called, their very Palestinian identity denied them in the Israeli civil framework). While liberal commentators ascribe the protests that turned violent after lethal police intervention as due to "frustrations" generated by long-standing economic and social "deprivation," the fact is that despite their Israeli citizenship, Palestinians in Israel live under a kind of occupation. The vast majority of their lands have been taken for Jewish kibbutzim, towns, cities, "outposts" and even parks and forests. Because 92% of the land in Israel is reserved by law exclusively for Jewish use, Israeli-Palestinians live in crowded conditions without adequate infrastructures, some in dozens of "unrecognized villages" receiving no urban services whatsoever. They constitute the high majority of the unemployed, suffer from sub-standard education and, as "non-Jews," are excluded from virtually all work places that offer some kind of upward mobility. And they have been effectively locked out of Israeli society. The Israeli flag and national anthem contain only Jewish symbols; official Israel policy is to "Judaize" parts of the country with heavy Arab populations; and in a poll taken after the confrontations of the past week 74% of Jewish Israelis consider Israeli Arabs as "traitors" -- a figure reaching way beyond the usual "right-wing" sectors of society.

I fear much greater levels of violence in the coming weeks and months. Israeli Jews have never allowed themselves to even consider alternatives to an exclusively Jewish state, including large West Bank settlement and a Jerusalem under effective Israeli sovereignty. As Barak's ultimatum indicates, and the widening pogroms against Palestinians both within Israel and in the Occupied Territories portend, Israeli Jews are liable to react like the Serbs when their reality changes abruptly. I fear a resurgence of an Israeli Jewish tribalism that will lash out violently at any attempt to tamper with the status quo. This explains why Israel's response to the uprising been so ferocious. Why has it employed much greater firepower on a largely unarmed (or lightly armed) civilian population -- helicopter gunships, tanks, anti-tank missiles, high-velocity arms, laser projectiles, snipers, an especially damaging form of tear gas and more -- than it did during the Intifada?

The fact that the Palestinians had greater firepower themselves and had clear targets (Netzarim settlement in Gaza, Joseph's Tomb in Nablus and many others) explains this to a certain degree. But a deeper answer has to do more with asserting control than putting down an uprising. The Intifada demonstrated that outright occupation (or "administration" in Israeli terms) was untenable, but it did not actually threaten that control. The current uprising constitutes a much more serious threat. It rejects control completely and insists on genuine sovereignty and viability. As such it challenges Israeli domination (or, as Barak would say, Israeli "security"), and therefore has to be put down decisively. Already in June the Israeli Chief of Staff, Shaul Mofaz, was publicly threatening the use of tanks and assault helicopters against Palestinians if they dared an uprising, or unilaterally declared a state. Demands that Arafat end the fighting and "return to the negotiating table" thus have less to do with putting down the violence (which Israel can do handily) and more with reasserting the Oslo framework of control The events of the past ten days have irrevocably altered the status quo.

It falls to Israeli intellectuals to help formulate alternatives to traditional Zionism, occupation and domination so as to offer alternatives to the Israeli Jewish public. As an Israeli I do not fear alternatives such as a bi-national state, something that will permit everyone to live wherever he or she wants in the entire Land of Israel/Palestine. Israeli society, culture and economy are strong enough to survive and even thrive as an integral part of a larger political entity. One of Israel's visionaries, Aryeh Lova Eliav, even gave a name to this promising new entity: ISFALUR (Israel-Syria-Falastin-Arabia-Lebanon-URdan/Jordan). We have a long way to go in the process of paradigm-change, political negotiations, the construction of interim political frameworks and reconciliation. Violence will only delay this necessary process and make it all that more difficult. In these harrowing hours before Barak's ultimatum expires, as Oslo lays in rubble and new negotiating frameworks have still to emerge, I allow myself to be cautiously optimistic.

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Jeff Halper teaches anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and is the editor of the critical magazine NEWS FROM WITHIN.

I thought you might be interested in the AFSC view on the situation.
--Esther

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Published on Wednesday, October 4, 2000 in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Killing The Bud Of Mideast Peace

by Mary Ellen McNish

An Open Letter to the governments of Israel, Palestine and the United States:

Today marks the 131st anniversary of the birth of Mohandas K. Gandhi. While the world remains a place of violent conflict between nations and peoples, his example of nonviolence in the face of oppression is an enduring and powerful message. The American Friends Service Committee, founded on the Quaker principles of nonviolence and the transforming power of love, is particularly mindful of his legacy today, even as we witness the unfolding of another tragedy for the peoples of Palestine and Israel.

According to press reports, over the last five days, at least 40 Palestinians and two Israelis have been killed and hundreds injured in violent confrontations that erupted following a visit to the Haram al Sharif plaza/ Temple Mount in East Jerusalem by Israeli Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon and a phalanx of Israeli troops. At this critical moment in the interrupted negotiations between Israel and Palestine over the status of Jerusalem, no single act by an Israeli leader could have been more provocative or more effective as a means to torpedo those negotiations.

Even if Mr. Sharon didn't intend for there to be a sustained violent reaction, especially after more than a week of escalating tension, inflammatory rhetoric and sporadic violence between Palestinians and Israelis, he should have known that his presence within the confines of the Haram al Sharif would provoke a strong reaction among the Palestinian people - and not only Muslims who revere it as one of Islam's most holy sites.

This is not the first time that Mr. Sharon has shown indifference to the fatal consequences of his actions when those fatalities are Arabs. His culpability in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 has not been forgotten by Palestinians and may help explain the intensity of Palestinians' reactions.

Mr. Sharon's actions must be condemned in the strongest language. The government of Israel also bears significant responsibility by not stopping Mr. Sharon before the fact, by not rebuking his action after the fact, and then by reacting to the Palestinian outbursts with an unmeasured and disproportionate show of force.

At the same time, AFSC does not condone the violence shown by Palestinian civilians and police against Israelis. We urge the Palestinian government to call an immediate cease-fire and to take steps to avoid further armed confrontations with the Israeli forces. We call on the government of Israel to re-enter negotiations with the Palestinian Authority as soon as possible with the intent of reaching an agreement with regard to Jerusalem which respects the national rights and interests of Israelis and Palestinians. We urge both Palestinians and Israelis to show restraint and not abandon the course of peace.

We call on the United States government to take the lead in bringing the parties together and to deepen its commitment to promoting and facilitating just and lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis. It is not too late. On this, the anniversary of Gandhi's birth, we reaffirm our belief in the power of active nonviolence to end injustice and our commitment to the peoples of Israel and Palestine to accompany them in their journey to a just peace and reconciliation. Mary Ellen McNish is general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee.

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CPT Hebron has maintained a violence reduction presence in Hebron since June of 1995 at the invitation of the Hebron Municipality.

Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) is an initiative among Mennonite and Brethren congregations, and Friends meetings who support violence reduction Teams around the world. Contact CPT at P.O. Box 6508 Chicago, IL 60680 USA; Tel: 312-455-1199; Fax: 312-432-1213; e-mail: CPT@igc.org To join CPTNET send an e-mail to admin@MennoLink.org and the message: Group: menno.org.cpt.news Visit us on the WEB: http://www.prairienet.org/cpt

"The Sign of God is that we will be led where we did not plan to go." --Levely

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