Author: Helena

Check out the great short movie made by ‘Waltz with Bashir’ animator Yoni Goodman about the situation of civilians in Gaza during the recent war. One thing that people working with the many international relief organizations here in Israel/Palestine note is that it is almost unprecedented for the civilian population of a war zone to be prevented from leaving it, as just about all of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians were during the recent war.
AP’s been doing some good coverage from Palestine this week. This story has a bit of background about the movie.
At a broader level, I’ve been reading Jonathan Cook’s remarkable latest book Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair which pulls together the whole history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, showing the continuity of the Zionists’ efforts– right until the present day– to try to empty Palestine of its indigenous residents. One important point he makes is that the deliberate inculcation of despair amongst Palestinians is a big part of this plan, with the goal being that the despairing Palestinians will eventually abandon their long commitment to their native land and just up and leave it.
The short text on the book’s back cover that summarizes the book’s argument includes this:

[Israel] has industrialized Palestinian despair through the ever more sophisticated systems of checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative ‘defence’ industry by pioneering the technologies needed for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare.

I don’t know if Jonathan wrote that text himself. I suspect he did. But I find it an extremely astute description of the situation.
I’m about three chapters into the book, which seems really well done. Jonathan is a pioneering and steadfast British writer who’s lived in and reported from Nazareth in northern Israel for several years now. On his website he writes,

I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ – a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism’s appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Update 3:10 a.m. EST Christiane also recommends this excellent French-language graphic-art report on Gaza. (I think one of the Swiss socialist MPs mentioned there is the son of Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the ICRC… Anyway, many Swiss people understand a lot about international humanitarian law.)

Saturday morning I went to Bethlehem. Took the mini-bus from just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. It trundles you south along a route which slowly gives you broad vistas of hilltop after hilltop covered with some of the newer Israeli settlements like Gilo, which is vast, and Har Homa. Then the bus deposits you unceremoniously outside a very forbidding section of the Wall, which really is 30 feet tall, forbidding, and brutal. brutal, even if the Israelis, in an excess of irony, have decided to paint a vast feel-good mural on the Wall right there near the entrance to Bethlehem emblazoned with the words “Peace and Love.”
No kidding.
I think I’ll have to write a special essay sometime about the sick esthetics of the entire people-control system the Israelis run in the OPTs.
So the bus drops you, and you have to wind your way through the cattle-shed “terminus” they have here for foot traffic. No vehicles are allowed through anywhere near here, I think. The three Palestinian guys in front of me, who had the special “magnetic cards” that graciously allow them to visit Jerusalem from Bethlehem, all took quite some time to go through as they had to fit their whole hands into a new– to me– kind of scanner machine, which didn’t seem to work very well. The bored-looking Israeli teenage border-guard girls gave peremptory instructions to the men from inside their booth. Me, with my US passport, they waved right through. (Remember that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of this country. I am a visitor; and the Israeli girls may well be recent immigrants.)
Once on the other side I called my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran nonviolence activist, son of Bethlehem, and current member of the elected city council, and then started walking along to where he said he’d pick me up. The wall loops in and out in a complicated way here, as everywhere. It comes very close to many houses, and in one portion it goes right down the middle of a street. It is always 30 feet high; dark grey in color; and punctuated very frequently by looming, cylindrical watch-towers.
Hullo? Israelis? Do these towers not remind you of something in the Jewish people’s recent past??
Zoughbi drove me up to Manger Square and we then spent a fascinating 90 minutes or so sitting in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Three or four other city council members came by and participated for longer or shorter periods of time in the general political discussion. Two were from Hamas. There was a lot of good-natured political discussion and joshing amongst all those present. Neither Zoghbi nor Victor are members of Hamas. But least among these city council members, everyone seemed to get along fine. They also expressed the deep wish that the ongoing national reconciliation effort in Cairo should succeed as fast and durably as possible.
Zoughbi then took me to the neighboring town of Beit Jala. That’s the one that’s lost most of its arable and grazing lands to Gilo. Up on a hilltop near there there’s a small settlement called Har Gilo, and just beneath it is a resort-style hotel called the Everest Hotel, where by chance we found another fascinating set of people meeting. Probably shouldn’t tell you more about it without getting permission. Anyway, Zoughbi knows about half the population of the West Bank, it seems, so the organizers of this peace-oriented gathering invited us to join them for lunch. The lunch was good and warm, and the discussion very interesting. However, with bitter winds whipping around outside the hotel was, um, certainly living up to its name.
After that, Zoughbi dropped me back at the center of Beit Jala, where there’s a mini-bus service that takes you directly from there back to downtown Jerusalem. But the catch is the bus has to pass through a big vehicle terminus somewhere south of town that controls access to the “settler road” that snakes almost directly to Jerusalem from the Hebron/Kiryat Arba area in the south of the West Bank.
So going through this terminus, all the passengers have to disbark and wait until the border guards have given the vehicle and all the bags in it a very thorough check. It was now colder than ever, with a horrendous, biting wind. Old people, kids, and everyone were left to stand at the side of the road for a good 15 minutes while the border guards took their time getting around to doing what turned out to be about three minutes’ worth of checking on the bus. Then they checked all our IDs and our hand baggage as we got back on the bus. Most of my fellow-passengers seemed to be East Jerusalem residents– that is, they carried the little blue-jacketed ID cards given only to EJ people, as opposed to the “magnetic cards” that are given to a very small proportion of West Bank residents, that allow them to enter East Jerusalem.
(Yesterday I spent the day in Hebron, the nearby village of Doura, and the Israeli town of Sderot… Last Friday I had an intriguing visit to a portion of northern Jerusalem called Dahiyet al-Barid. Today I did an interview with Um Kamel, my neighbor here in Sheikh Jarrah who’s been living in a tent all winter after the Israeli police threw her and her husband out of her house last November, so a group of settlers could take it over… Her husband died of heart failure soon after. Um Kamel is not, it turns out, from the same family I briefly visited when I was here in 2002. But the problem of settler and takeovers, the demolition of Palestinian houses, and the eviction of Palestinians from their homes is one that is certainly gathering some speed right here in East Jerusalem these days, and needs to be written about a lot more…. Anyway, more of my travelogue accounts will come when I have time… tomorrow, I leave Jerusalem and continue my travels… Better get to bed…)

The best one-stop shop for regularly updated information about the continual, multi-layered assaults that the Israeli government has been sustaining against the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Gaza, is undoubtedly the website of the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in the OPTs.
From there today, you can access not only the very comprehensive “Protection of Civilians Weekly Report– the PDF of the latest edition is here— but also numerous other materials, including the more detailed (and also weekly) “Field updates on Gaza” and other resources like this very helpful map (PDF) of the area of Silwan, right near Jerusalem’s Old City where the authorities have issued demolition orders for 88 homes… or OCHA’s very handy map center.
I was in Bethlehem today. It was a horror story to get through the brutal concrete Wall as I went there from Jerusalem and back, but excellent to connect with a good friend there, nonviolence organizer Zoughbi Zoughbi, who took me to a number of really interesting and informative encounters in both Beit Laham and Beit Jala. (More, later.)
In both towns, just about all the shops were closed– except, by prior agreement, pharmacies– as the owners participated in the West Bank-wide commercial strike declared in solidarity with the threatened people of Jerusalem’s Silwan. I think the strike was observed throughout pretty much all of the West Bank. The front page of PNN right now has an interesting piece about it, which includes some very moving quotes from residents of the West Bank outside Jerusalem about the intensity of their feelings for the city and the depth of their sadness at being excluded from it.
The Fateh-dominated PLO and Hamas had both agreed to participate in calling for this strike, which perhaps can be seen as one first fruit of the reconciliation talks in Cairo.
OCHA’s latest “Protection of Civilians Weekly Report” (PDF) has a wealth of information about attacks on the rights of Palestinians in all the OPTs. On p.4 you can learn that during the whole week February 18-24 the Israelis allowed only 635 truckloads of goods in to supply the entire needs of the Strips’ 1.45 million people. The number of truckloads of goods that entered Gaza each day before Hamas won its victory in the parliamentary election of January 2006 was 750, which is the baseline defined for “normal” life since then. But the needs of Gaza’s people in the wake of the devastation caused by Israel’s military assault of December-January are certainly greater than “normal.” They desperately need cement, glass, rebar, and other basic materials required to reconstruct destroyed and damaged homes and infrastructure. They need more than 750 truckloads of goods to be entering each day… and they are in the lucky position of having friends and backers in the international community who are eager to help provide their needs. If only Israel, which is the military occupation power that controls all access points nto the Strip, would let the shipments in.
I have made a few attempts to ask humanitarian-aid people what the dreaded Israeli blacklist of foodstuffs that cannot be sent into Gaza contains. But they have stayed largely closed-lipped. The OCHA report says this:

The Israeli criteria used for processing import requests into Gaza remain unclear. During the reporting period the Israeli authorities rejected entry to 30 metric tonnes of chickpeas, 43 pallets of macaroni, 137 pallets of wheat flour, 131 recreational kits, 68 pallets of stationary items for students, 150 school-in-a-box kits, 33 boxes of medicine, 22 freezer appliances, 3 generators, and 4 water pumps.

I think the lack of clarity referred to there is important, and most likely deliberate. The Israelis don’t want to be shamed by having their full list published; and the absence of a published list meanwhile means that any decisions made on any particular day can be capriciously taken, and will therefore keep the aid-providers and recipients in a constant state of uncertainty. This increases everyone’s frustration level! But what a couple of the aid coordinators told me was that the Israeli authorities described the bans on certain foodstuffs as being applied because these were deemed to be luxury” items. Chickpeas, macaroni, and wheat flour– luxuries?
And what twisted minds would ban recreational kits and school supplies? (Oh, I guess the same twisted minds that bombed a number of schools in the Strip and a good portion of Gaza Islamic University.)
John Kerry and Hillary Clinton have both reportedly expressed their “concern” about some of the items on the banned list.
God help the people of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the rest of the West Bank. And God help all of us whose governments are complicit in these savage and illegal acts.

… Or, 25 interesting things about Ramallah and its environs.
1.
Whole areas of the Greater Ramallah area now loom like “Dubai on a hilltop”, with clusters of large high-rises either recently built, or still being built. Many are glossy, glass-fronted “trade centers” or “office complexes.” Who’s been financing this massive wave of development? Some of it, clearly, has been financed by western donor governments eager to prop up the Ramallah-based “Palestinian Authority’. Many area residents say, however, that much of it has been financed by the very extensive, and relatively well-off, networks of Ramallah expatriates. Some people say that as much as 90% of the Palestinians whose family origins are here now live elsewhere– primarily in the US. When they’ve sent money ‘home’, over the years, they have generally loved to plow it into real-estate development. Back in the days of full-bore Israeli occupation, the military authorities kept a tight lid on Palestinian building. Now, they are ‘free’ to indulge their wildest real-estate fantasies (and some truly are pretty wild and tasteless.) The results do not make it easy to persuade the many international NGOs who flock to Palestine that there is any real socioeconomic need here. Yes, there is need in Palestine, including a lot of it in other parts of the West Bank, as well as in Gaza. But for the most part you don’t find it if you stay inside Ramallah.
2.
Many of the city’s high-rises are now occupied by PA ‘ministries.’ By some counts there are 37 of them, each with its own grandiose marble-clad building. (Often, little goes on inside, but that’s another question.) But the PA is not a sovereign government. In fact it has a jurisdiction and mandate that is far more circumscribed than that of my home-state, Virginia. In Virginia, the state– or Commonwealth, as it is somewhat grandiosely known– has a ‘Department of Education’, a ‘Department of Transport’, etc etc. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for the PA to call these bodies “Departments”, and to keep them to a reasonable and effective scale? Calling them ‘ministries’, it seems to me, is just another instance of PA grandiosity and legerdemain.
3.
Ramallah has numerous lively and engaging cafes and eateries– and apparently some bars and night-clubs, though I didn’t check those out. But I don’t think it has a single decent bookstore. H’mmm…. I moved from there to East Jerusalem recently; one of the first things I did was wander along Jerusalem’s Salahuddin Street to the Educational Bookstore. Although it’s tiny it always has the most stunning and well-organized selection of books on current political and cultural topics, in Arabic and English. Maybe they should open a branch in Ramallah?

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 1”