[Peace-discuss] Our occupation

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In regard to the installation at Channing-Murray next Tuesday, which
Peter has arranged, here's an account of the occupation (which we as
members of a democratic polity are responsible for) by a writer from St.
Louis who provides legal representation to immigrants and refugees. It
appears in the current (May 3) issue of the magazine America
<americamagazine.org> 190:15.  --CGE]

	An Occupational Hazard
	By Angie O'Gorman

On my desk is a photograph of a large poster that had been crudely taped
to the wall of a bakery in an Arab souk just inside the Damascus Gate to
the Old City of Jerusalem. The poster shows a Palestinian man crouching on
the ground, his back against a cinderblock wall, his mouth contorted in a
silent scream, his eyes wild with fear. He is trying, in vain, to tuck a
small boy under his arm, away from some immediate threat that they are
both watching in horror. The boy is crying, his hands grasping the shirt
sleeve of his would-be protector. Just to the left of these two are three
bullet holes in the cinderblock wall at different distances from the man
and boy, as if the marksman had been zeroing in on his targets. The poster
chronicles a real event. Both father and son were shot dead. In English
and Arabic the poster reads, "Stop Killing Palestinian Children."

I am neither Israeli nor Palestinian, which gives me either more or less
objectivity in reflecting on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. My only
personal involvement in the issue is that my tax dollars are paying for
large swaths of the current bloodshed and horror. Last fall I went to the
West Bank to see my tax dollars at work, to see how my investment was
paying off.

I have not lived in Israel, so I do not know what it is like to enter a
bus or restaurant wondering if I will be alive when it is time to leave. I
have only the slightest experience of this kind of fear from my El Al
flight between New York and Tel Aviv. For 11 hours I watched the computer
screen display our flight path, wondering where the most likely place was
for us to be blown to bits. I had no intention of riding a bus or eating
out in Israel.

Enlarge this gnawing anxiety beyond buses and restaurants and planes to
anywhere at any time; add tanks, bulldozers, armored personnel carriers,
checkpoints between you and everywhere you need to go, trigger-happy
18-year-old soldiers, tear gas, concussion-sound bombs and bullets
exploding into shrapnel. This is the fear with which Palestinians live in
the Israeli-occupied territories.

A Day in the Olive Harvest

A few days after arriving, I attach myself to a group of internationals
attempting to help Palestinian farmers harvest their olives in villages
around Nablus, in the Occupied Territory. Israeli settlers come down from
their mountaintop homes to bite and club us. They fracture the leg of one
60-year-old American. It could be worse. Palestinian farmers have been
shot at and killed, their hands and arms amputated. Oddly, a fractured leg
doesn't seem so serious anymore. My sense of the normal is changing.

As we try to enter the next village, we are stopped at the Israeli
checkpoint. I have to keep reminding myself that this checkpoint does not
divide Palestine from Israel, but two Palestinian villages from each
other. One of us is detained and the rest remain with him to learn the
outcome. I sit and watch the occupation at work. A group of Palestinian
female college students is stopped, because the soldier questioning them
says they'd kill him if they had a gun. There is no accusation that they
have a gun. But there will be no university class for them today. They
turn away frustrated, some crying.

An ambulance is denied passage. Workers and teachers try to pass. Some are
allowed through, others blocked, others simply made to wait, and wait, and
wait. I feel rage growing in me and wonder how much of this I would put up
with before opting to become a human bomb.

We who live in the United States take much for granted about the conflict
between Israelis and Palestinians: Israel's right to exist in safety and
Palestinian terrorism, for example. Concentrating our attention on these
two poles, around which most Americans, including myself, construct their
understanding of what is going on here, also helps us avoid certain other
issues.

If Yasir Arafat is to protect Israel from Palestinian violence, who is
protecting Palestinians from Israeli violence? Why is a Palestinian
suicide bomber a terrorist but the Israeli commander who orders missiles
fired into a car in a residential Palestinian neighborhood not a
terrorist? Why is Palestinian terrorism labeled terrorism and Israeli
terrorism labeled "security measures?" Why is the United Nations not
preventing Israeli incursions into U.N. refugee camps in the West Bank and
Gaza? Why are we even discussing the pros and cons of Israel's Great Wall,
built miles beyond the 1948 armistice line, annexing in the process
Palestinian land, life and water? There should be nothing to discuss. What
is really going on in the West Bank and Gaza: security measures or ethnic
cleansing?

A Right to Exist

Next to the photo on my desk is another picture, also of the bakery wall
in the Arab souk, a collage of 16 Palestinian men and boys, all dead,
killed by Israeli soldiersâ-- someone's sons, perhaps relatives of the man
from whom I just bought freshly baked baklava. I am afraid to ask him if
the dead are his relatives, afraid to ignite a simmering rage. Does this
people not have a right to defend itself against extinction? Where is its
army? Its military hardware? Who has barred this people from their
legitimate self-defense against an occupying force, the fourth largest
military power in the world, and then demanded adherence to the
international rules of war?

We trek around another checkpoint, having been refused entry by Israeli
soldiers into the Palestinian town of Beit Furik. We pass through Nablus
on the way. It is not a pleasant walk. We cross rock and rubble and seem
always to be going up or down hills. We play hide-and-seek with Israeli
patrols, because we are not permitted to cross the Israeli security roads
that crisscross the area. Palestinians are shot for doing so. A woman I am
with falls and breaks a rib.

I see absolutely nothing of beauty. While heading into a narrow valley
between two sizable hills, the smell of sewage grows steadily stronger. I
think, "How careless people are here."  When we get to the bottom, what I
thought was a creek turns out to be a four-foot-wide stream of gray, raw
human sewage. I learn later that Israeli soldiers redirected the Nablus
sewer system to discharge its contents into this previously freshwater
creek. We cross the "creek" over a narrow plank of metal together with
Palestinians who are making their daily commute between work, school and
home, a daily journey that is not only dangerous to their health but hours
longer than necessary, because the Israeli checkpoint blocks the most
direct route from here to everywhere else.

In October the Israeli Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case
challenging the intentional creation of this running, raw-sewage creek,
which the plaintiffs claimed was an act of bioterrorism. The court found
that this open flow of sewage does not present a significant health
hazard. It said the diversion was necessary for Israeli security.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, in the town of Jayyous, Israeli occupation
forces order the Abu Amar family out of their home. The family was told
they must have a permit to live there because their home "is now located
in Israel." When Israel's Great Wall was built around Jayyous, the Abu
Amar home was walled into Israel and out of the Palestinian village. Their
children must now pass through a gate in the wall, controlled by Israeli
soldiers, on their way to school and back. Sometimes they are allowed
through, sometimes not. Villagers in Jayyous send packages of food,
clothes and other necessities to their now annexed neighbors. But the Abu
family is not the only victim of the Great Wall here. The Jayyous farmers
have been walled out of their farmland. They are not allowed to use the
gate.

View From the States

In December I return home, but an American friend remains in Nablus, under
curfew, under siege. The international press has gone, ordered out by
Israeli Defense Forces. How easily the media obey these days, whether
"embedded" or not. My friend stays on with a group of internationals to
accompany a Swedish medical team. They do this to heighten the cost to the
Israeli forces of hurting the medical volunteers. There is reason for
this. Israeli soldiers have used medical-relief volunteers and others as
human shields in house-to-house searches in Nablus. They also routinely
prevent ambulances from bringing injured and ill Palestinians to the
hospital.

A suicide bomber has struck again in Israel, and the siege of Nablus is a
consequence. My friend sends reports by e-mail. She is the now famous
"American also slightly injured" at the December anti-wall demonstration
in Ma'sha, where Gil Na'amati, an Israeli soldier-turned-protestor, was
shot in both legs by other Israeli soldiers.

I read that while the bodies of four teenage rock throwers, shot by
Israeli solders, were being carried through Nablus, one of the pallbearers
himself was shot in the head. Three other marchers were shot in the back.
Perhaps the teenagers were suspected of terrorist activity or were even
known terrorists. Perhaps they were innocent.

But there is no chance for anyone to know, because there was no trial to
test the suspicions against these youth. Due process before death would be
in order. But everything is out of order here in Israeli-occupied
Palestine. There is no order. Everything is arbitrary, including life and
death. Including the truth. Later, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz will
report that these four youths were killed in a battle with occupation
forces. Ha'aretz received its information from Israeli forces.

What if these youth were simply fighters against the Israeli occupation?
Isn't that allowed? To fight the foreign forces occupying their land?
Didn't Americans once do that?

I must admit to having a different view of stone-throwing Palestinian
youth now, as well as of the occupation itself, and what its real goals
are. What else are these youth supposed to do as Israeli armored vehicles
ride through their refugee camp streets, taunting, shooting, demolishing
Palestinian homes and worse? I can no longer pass easy judgment. I am no
longer sure how I would react after years of this, generations of this.
What are rocks compared to tanks and bullets? I left Palestine with fewer
certainties than I had when I arrived.

I do not have a stake in any of this, really, except that I am paying for
the Israeli occupation, and so I find that I, along with the entire world
community, am rather heavily invested in an unacceptable occupational
hazard. This occupation has inexorably pushed Israel and the United States
to accept atrocities as a road map to Israeli national security. Dare I
say it? The Israeli occupation is giving ethnic cleansing an acceptable
rationale. To observe life in the West Bank leaves me with no other
description. The handwriting, as they say, is on the wall.

	Copyright © 2004 by America Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
	For information about America, go to www.americamagazine.org.