Photo of the week

I've thought about setting up a flickr account or similar to show readers some of my photos - and I still may - but meantime I'll just put one or two up here now and then . . . 
This first one has appeared before - with this story - so have a read for more context if you like, but it's one of my favourites, not as a brilliant photo in itself, but because it captures some of what my last two posts have been about; people from different cultures coming together for peace.

(click on the photo to enlarge)

A Jewish grandfather, a Muslim grandmother and her grandson rest at the site of a protest, watched by various onlookers including a young soldier on the other side of the barbed wire.

A victory against the Wall! (and a note re my last post)

For avid readers you'll already know the good news but for those who haven't been following the other blogs I recommend (down the right side on my page) here's a really great story from The Palestine Monitor website... 


I hope you click on the link for the full story, but in short, after years of non-violent protest the village of Bil'in has had at least a partial victory against the illegal 'separation wall' going through their village. The Israelis have begun to take some of it down, restoring hundreds of acres of land back to Bil-in and it's citizens. It's only a start, but an excellent result for the determination and persistence of these villagers.


Do check it out for more, including photos - and don't forget the other sites I've highlighted for more on Palestine, including the already mentioned Palestine Monitor, The Electronic Intifada, and the Jewish Voice for Peace.


And speaking of the last one, a quick note regarding my last post.

Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims of all ages,
working side by side for justice and peace

As I described, I have been moved from despair to hope a number of times by the many awesome people and organisations I've come across in Palestine and Israel working against the occupation and for peace. Encouragingly, many of these individuals and groups are Israelis and/or Jewish (or groups founded by Israelis), and I chose to highlight three such groups in my last post (as well as a joint Jewish/Palestinian group). 





I did this because of my genuine delight to find Israelis so willing to hold their country to account for their terrible occupation of Palestine and so determined to work for peace. I also wanted to highlight them because so often the portrayal of Israel in Australia (and no doubt in much of the rest of the world) leaves out these dissenting voices. Perhaps this is not surprising given the official and political positions presented by Israel, but it's important to know that there is a very strong opposition within Israeli society to the occupation, despite them rarely appearing in the mainstream media. (With at least one result being that to support Palestine is to 'obviously' be opposed to Israel, and then to perhaps even be portrayed as anti-Semetic.) 


I also found it useful to highlight these groups to demonstrate - at least indirectly - that I am not blindly supporting Palestine, nor anti-Israeli (despite some criticisms of me by people who will remain nameless).


I totally condemn violence by all parties, and strongly support any and all those wanting and working for peace - especially those in Palestine who are feeling the effects of over forty years of occupation. I condemn the violence of Palestinians who take up arms against Israel, and I condemn the settlers, soldiers and other Israelis who daily use violence to brutally suppress the Palestinian people.


I have met inspirational Palestinians, but also Israelis, and stand with them in solidarity against the state of Israel's occupation and inhumanity towards the Palestinian people.


As all of the Israeli peace activists and groups demonstrate, anti-occupation is not anti-Israel and is not synonymous with some apparent goal of the destruction of Israel. To make that clear; I do not desire the loss of the state of Israel. 


What I do desire is a peaceful and just settlement between Israel and Palestine which results in two peoples living side by side with justice and equality. Many people I met on both sides of this conflict inspire me to believe this could actually happen.






Update: Here's a link to the BBC report re the Bil'in story.

Inspiring stories and awesome people

While much of what I’ve experienced during my time in Palestine and Israel has made me angry, sad, frustrated or a jumble of those and other troubling emotions, I’ve also come across many amazing people and brilliant organizations who give me great hope.

Nakba Day 2011 in Ramallah

(pic by the groovy Goeran S.)

Many of these people are remarkable, resilient Palestinians who I’ve met who despite all that they have lived through – and are currently still experiencing – remain committed to a peaceful future. But I’ve also met awesome individuals from Israel (and other places) doing what they can to expose and change the injustice of Israel towards Palestine and it's people.

This is just a sample of people who have inspired me, surprised me or who I just wanted to include for their work for Palestine.

Combatants for Peace:

This incredible group is comprised of former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters, who are now committed to non-violence and more amazingly to working with people who used to literally try to kill them. Their motto is: ‘only by joining forces, will we be able to end the cycle of violence’.

I first wrote about them in March after a group of us had the privilege of meeting Wael and Tamar and hearing first-hand from them about the group and their stories (see also my photo here). More of the incredible personal stories can be found here. Check out this story from an Israeli perspective, and this for a Palestinian just as two beautiful examples of changed lives.

Israeli Committee on Housing Demolitions:

I mentioned ICHAD in my last post, after having met with one of their staff on a really insightful tour of parts of Jerusalem a couple of months ago - check out their staff page for a brief bio on Jeff Halper and a couple of his great colleagues. These folk are another great example of Israelis and Palestinians working together, and especially of Israelis standing against their own government’s policies, and working in solidarity with Palestinians.

Rabbis for Human Rights:

While this group works across a broad range of issues they are particularly concerned with the occupation and have a specific department working on this - check out the stories at this link.

It's been really inspiring to find a group of Jewish religious leaders so willing to confront their own people with injustice - here’s a quote from their website:

‘. . . the injustice to Palestinians in the area under Israeli rule is blatant and as rabbis we feel it our religious duty to counter the powerful lobbies of fundamentalists, both Jewish and Christian, in our work with the Israeli authorities. Our understanding of Torah is that it legislates justice and equality before the law, and that the land was promised to the Jewish people on condition that those are the values by which it would be ruled.’

Breaking the Silence:

This is a courageous group of former soldiers speaking out about their experiences in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and the truth about what happens to the Palestinians under occupation. Often decried as traitors, they have an amazing amount of testimonials from the very people tasked with Israel's occupation activities.

From their website:

Founded in March 2004 by a group of soldiers who served in Hebron, Breaking the Silence has since acquired a special standing in the eyes of the Israeli public and in the media, as it is unique in giving voice to the experience of soldiers. To date, the organization has collected more than 700 testimonies from soldiers who represent all strata of Israeli society and cover nearly all units that operate in the Territories. All the testimonies we publish are meticulously researched, and all facts are cross-checked with additional eye-witnesses and/or the archives of other human rights organizations also active in the field. Every soldier who gives a testimony to Breaking the Silence knows the aims of the organization and the interview. Most soldiers choose to remain anonymous, due to various pressures from official military persons and society at large. Our first priority is to the soldiers who choose to testify to the public about their service.

Check out their publications which can be downloaded directly from here on their site.

The face of the future - a young Israeli activist standing in solidarity

with an even younger Palestinian

Often this conflict is described as intractable; hopeless; never-ending, and so on. And I can admit to sometimes feeling this despair myself. But I was also incredibly surprised at how hopeful many of these people and groups made me as I was meeting them or witnessing them in action; if people literally surrounded daily by the conflict can be so committed to peace, how can I doubt?

I hope this gives you hope too – and perhaps inspires you to take some small action to help end the occupation.

(Feel free to post a comment or email me if you need any hints for action. Of course, you could start by writing a letter).

The Palestinian Authority’s Historic Mistake - and Opportunity (Guest post by Jeff Halper of ICAHD)

While I have occasionally posted links on my blog, usually the writing is mine. Today though I got an email from an amazing guy in Jerusalem with an article he’s written that I really wanted to pass on. Jeff Halper is the Co-founder and Director of the brilliant organisation ‘Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ which has worked tirelessly for the rights of Palestinians – more info about him and ICAHD below. For now, Jeff’s article.

The Palestinian Authority’s Historic Mistake - and Opportunity.

By Jeff Halper           

No one knows the precise plans of the Palestinian Authority vis-a-vis September: will Mahmoud Abbas declare a Palestinian state within recognized borders and ask that it be admitted as a full member of the UN – or not? Perhaps Abbas himself does not know. Now political leaders often make decisions alone or in consultation with a small group of advisors. As in so many matters political, however, the Palestinian leadership finds itself in a unique situation. Its main allies are not governments, and certainly not the American government, whose support for some inexplicable reason has constituted the Palestinians’ default position for the past forty years. Rather, the Palestinians’ most loyal and powerful ally is civil society. And yet, this most solid base of support remains unappreciated, unutilized and ignored.

 

Three circles of popular support radiate out into the wider world, able to mobilize millions of people to the Palestinian cause. First, of course, is the Palestinian people itself. Displaced, scattered, oppressed, occupied, struggling for its national rights and very cultural identity, this “little grain of sand,” as it has been called, continues generation after generation to jam not only the vaunted Israeli military machine but that of its main supporter, the United States, who for decades has used Israel as its forward position in the Middle East.

To oppressed people everywhere, the Palestinians have become an inspiration, almost their surrogate. Their ability to remain steadfast (sumud) is proof that injustice, even when supported by the most advanced weaponry of the most powerful super-powers, can be resisted. But Israel, helped by time and geography, has succeeded in fragmenting the Palestinians. The refugees in the camps are almost completely excluded from political processes, but it is the exclusion of the Diaspora that is especially problematic. Highly educated for the most part, fluent in all the European languages, they could play a major role in promoting the Palestinian cause abroad. Indeed, a few individuals have carved out influential positions despite being excluded, even resisted, by the West Bank leadership. Instead, the Palestinian Authority has fielded, with a couple notable exceptions, a most inept and inarticulate corps of diplomats. Rather than using their greatest asset, their own people abroad as well as the legions of articulate spokespeople at home, including younger people, the Palestinian Authority has tied its own hands diplomatically just when Israel is mounting a major international offensive against it. Just recall one astounding fact: during the entire year that saw the Obama Administration taking office and the invasion of Gaza, there was no official Palestinian representative in Washington!

The second circle of civil society support for the Palestinian cause is, of course, the Arab and wider Muslim worlds. While each uprising of the “Arab Spring” has its own reasons and dynamics, the Palestinian struggle provided the inspiration. The Arab peoples came to realize that the same forces oppressing the Palestinians – militarism designed to thwart democracy and ensure neo-colonial control over their lands and resources – are at the source of their own oppression as well.

Indeed, the Palestinians possess one source of tremendous clout: they are the bone in the throat of the global powers that prevent them from completing their imperialist plans. The Palestinian struggle is not simply a local one between Palestinians and Israelis; it has become global on the order of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It cannot be by-passed. Even though there are larger and bloodier conflicts in the Middle East, until the Palestinians signal the rest of the Muslim world that they have arrived at a political settlement with Israel and the time has come to normalize relations, the conflict is not over. A solution cannot be imposed, and the Palestinians are the gatekeepers. Nothing can happen without them, and until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed resolved, the US and Europe will be unable to pursue their interests unencumbered in an empowered Middle East.

The third circle of civil society just waiting to be mobilized are the millions of ordinary people the world over whose have devoted enormous energy and resources towards the realization of Palestinian national rights. The Palestinian struggle has indeed assumed the proportions of that against apartheid. It is one of the two or three leading issues in the world. Churches, trade unions, university students, political and human rights organizations, prominent intellectuals, performers and even key politicians have all mobilized in support of the BDS movement (boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel). They are evident in the repeated attempts to break the siege of Gaza by sending international flotillas.

But they, like Palestinian civil society and that of the Arab and Muslim worlds, wait to be mobilized by the Palestinian leadership. According to newspaper accounts – unfortunately, the Authority leadership has never conducted an open discussion of the crucial September initiative and has never shared its deliberations – the two main objections to seeking membership in the UN are fear of upsetting the American administration and failure to obtain the required number of votes. The first is ridiculous. Does anyone still believe the Palestinians will gain anything by pursuing American-led “negotiations”?

The second objection, that not receiving the required votes for admission to the UN constitutes a “failure,” exposes a key flaw in the strategic thinking of the Palestinian leadership. If Abbas approaches the UN in a docile and half-hearted way, appearing more to be pushed by an Israeli refusal to negotiate than by his people’s own just cause and urgent need for independence, the Palestinian struggle will certainly suffer. Many other countries that would otherwise support the Palestinian initiative will indeed waiver, giving in to US and Israeli pressure because it seems the Palestinian themselves are not serious about it. But if he goes into the UN as the head of a national unity government with the support of the world’s peoples, Mandela-like, he could decisively change the course of events forever.

To pull off his September initiative, Abbas must reject the go-it-alone approach that the Palestinian leadership has followed fruitlessly for so long. He must recognize that civil society the world over – and in the Muslim world and Europe in particular – is the Palestinians’ most important ally. The issue is not whether the initiative “succeeds;” it is clear that the US will cast a veto. The true struggle is to pull out all the stops to show the world just how strong the Palestinian movement is. If mobilized, the collective power of the grassroots who have for years labored on the Palestinian issue will generate a momentum that will be hard to stop.

Time is of the essence. Mobilization must begin immediately. The elected representatives of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territory, joined for the first time by Palestinians of the refugee camps, inside Israel and the Diaspora, should issue a joint “Call for Support.” Immediately following the Palestinian Call, grassroots activists would issue a Civil Society Call to support the Palestinian initiative, which would be signed by tens of thousands of people from all over the world and delivered to the UN in September. If a campaign for public support begins now, if the political leadership works intensively and closely with its own civil society to garner wide-spread support, more than 100,000 people can be gathered at the UN in New York in September in a mass rally for Palestinian independence. (And believe me, Israel will mobilize its own supporters!)

Inside the UN, Abbas would present Palestine’s compelling case for independence and UN membership, as he did in his New York Times piece of May 16th. He would also reframe the conflict. It is not specious security issues that lay at the roots of the conflict, but Israel’s refusal to respect Palestinian national rights and to end the Occupation. As he also did in the New York Timesarticle, Abbas must also make it clear that recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in no way compromises the right of refugees to return to their homes, a key point of future negotiations with Israel. He should also state up-front that the establishment of a Palestinian state does not end the Palestinian quest, through peaceful means, of an inclusive single-state solution.

If international mobilization is pursued vigorously and Abbas exudes a genuine determination to see a Palestinian state established and recognized, more than 130 countries, including many of the leading European ones, will vote to accept Palestine into the UN. Even if this does not overrule the US veto in the Security Council, it is far more than a merely symbolic achievement and certainly cannot be considered a failure. Such a massive expression of support would demonstrate the inevitability of Palestinian statehood. It would signal the beginning rather than the end of an international campaign for Palestinian rights, one now joined by governments as well as civil society.

We, the people who have pursued Palestinian rights over the decades, Palestinians and non-Palestinian alike, are an integral part of the struggle. We have earned the right, all of us, to have our voices heard in September. Indeed, I would argue that if September comes and goes without any breakthrough due to the acquiescence and weakness of the Authority leadership, civil society support might well dissipate. The people can bring the struggle to a certain point; we cannot negotiate or pursue initiatives at the UN. If the leadership fails us then we truly have nowhere to go. All those Palestinians who have suffered, resisted and died over the past decades cannot be let down at this historic moment by a vacillating political leadership. We call on you to mobilize us. Together we shall succeed, and sooner rather than later.

by Jeff Halper

Co-founder and Director of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Jeff Halper is the co-founder and director of ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.  He was born in 1946 in Minnesota and emigrated to Israel in 1973.  Since then he has been a tireless advocate for justice and civil rights for all Israelis and Palestinians.  He spent ten years as a community worker in Jerusalem aiding low-income Mizrahi families. He co-founded ICAHD with Meir Marglit in 1997 to help resist Israel’s strategy of house demolitions in the occupied territories.  He is the author of three books, Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century, An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Possession, Redeeming Israel, and Obstacles to Peace: A reframing of the Palestinian – Israeli Conflict.

 - From the ICAHD staff page

ICAHD Home page: http://www.icahd.org/

About ICAHD

ICAHD is a non-violent, direct-action organization established in 1997 to resist Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories — 24,000 as of this writing and counting. As we gained knowledge of the brutalities of the Occupation, we expanded our resistance activities to other areas – land expropriation, settlement expansion, by-pass road construction, policies of “closure” and “separation,” the wholesale uprooting of fruit and olive trees, the Separation Barrier/Wall, the siege of Gaza and more…

 - More at this link

Occupation 101 - revisited

An average sight on a street corner in Al Khalil (Hebron)
[original photo by my buddy JW - March 2011]

This is actually a post about the Occupation itself but a quick reminder about an earlier post as well. Some time ago I mentioned a film called 'Occupation 101' which I highly recommend.


It's on youtube and in my earlier post I gave the link to the first eight minutes in the hope that this taster would have you keen to see more. The downside to that is that you need to keep loading each segment of the whole feature film. For those that would like to see the first segment only here's that link again, but since my first post I've discovered a link to the whole film viewable in one go. As I've indicated, I can't recommend this highly enough as an overview of the situation in Palestine - I'd really love you to watch it.

And now a little about the occupation itself.
I can't even begin to convey in words what it's like to be in an occupied country, and as a visitor I can't actually do justice to the sense of occupation for Palestinians. But I'd ask you to at least try and imagine what it would be like if your country had been at war, and not only lost, but was then occupied.


Imagine that you were constantly surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, jeeps, armoured cars, military equipment and more. Road blocks and curfews. Closure of farms, business areas and your ability to get to work hindered or completely stopped. Add to this the constant threat of violence, shootings or even bombings, or the arbitrary demolition of your home.


Please stop and try and imagine this just for a minute.


Then understand that this has been going on in Palestine for forty-four years.
How would that be for me or you in our countries?


(I know some of my readers are actually in Palestine or other countries affected by conflict and war, but most are in comfortable western countries like mine in Australia).


On top of this, bear in mind that Israel refuses to acknowledge the occupation.
In feats of verbal gymnastics and avoidance of responsibility, they talk of an 'administered territory', 'disputed territories' and various other euphemisms to avoid the reality. Yet not even their key ally, the U.S. accepts this; in fact no other country accepts the Israeli position. The 'road map initiative' of the Quartet (USA, Russia, Europe and the UN) talks very specifically about occupation, and Israel must be willing to acknowledge this as part of moving towards peace. 


More importantly, Israel needs to realise that peace will only prevail when Palestine is no longer occupied; when Palestinians experience real freedom; when two people can live side by side as equals instead of the oppressors and the oppressed.

An ID check in your own street having already been checked 200 metres earlier. A normal day for this part of town...

Visit Palestine!

The official Israeli Tourism body is currently marketing these postcards - apparently without irony.

Comments:

Pheebs wrote:

OK- quick pic summary.... (too much writings of yours to get thru)..... can I please have the verdant green pastures (bottom pic), while I don pink balaclava with musos (earlier) and eat from barrels of pickles (pic in middle of further further down page. This looks better and more civil/ rest like than tear gas last month! Enjoy the icecream!

13/06/11

I'm sure this makes NO sense, not only cos I can't type, but also you are reading this with only three palestinean postcards, rather than the WHOLE run of pics running down your blog... Grrrmph. Pheebs.

Nonviolence - the un(der)-reported story

As I have touched on previously, while the world’s media portrays much of Palestine as a violent struggle, the reality is that much of the Palestinian resistance to the occupation is non-violent. While I in no way want to give the impression that there is no violence from the Palestinian side, the portrayal of this is dramatically overstated in comparison to efforts for peace and the non-violent resistance to the occupation.

This is both typical of the mainstream media’s preference to show violence and conflict, and the largely western media’s bias towards giving a positive image of Israel, and a negative one of Palestinians (and Muslims).

While there is violence on occasion from the Palestinian side, the reality is that this is sporadic, while violence from the Israeli side is virtually a daily occurrence, whether from the army, police or settlers. And the violence from the Israeli forces is totally out of proportion; a comparison of almost any figures shows that injuries or deaths on the Palestinian side are at least ten times greater than on the Israeli side. Compare the civilian toll and it is more like one hundred times…

I recently posted a link to an article in the Economist (in this post) which posed very important questions for us in the international community; How long will we ignore the non-violent quest for peace? 


Why won’t we accept that Palestinians are being treated ruthlessly every week while they try to maintain a peaceful approach to resisting their ongoing occupation and oppression? 


And what do we expect them to do if this doesn’t work?

One village peacefully protested the loss of their village lands (and livelihoods) forty-three times over about nine months – each time suffering beatings, arrest and tear gas) before finally some young men in the village threw stones.

Wouldn’t you feel like throwing a stone?

Here’s a couple more excellent links expanding on these thoughts.

In an article for Foreign Policy entitled ‘Palestine's Hidden History of Nonviolence’ Yousef Munayyer says:

‘You wouldn't know it from the media coverage, but peaceful protests are nothing new for Palestinians. But if they are to succeed this time, the West needs to start paying attention.’

This is supported by Joseph Dana who suggests that ‘The Arab Uprising Hasn’t Suddenly Arrived In Palestine — It’s Always Been Here’, while another Foreign Policy article picks up on Barrack Obama linking the Palestinian struggle to the US civil rights movement in the sixties in ‘When Montgomery comes to Nabi Saleh’.


The theme of all of these touches on the hypocrisy of the West who apparently want peaceful revolution against oppressive regimes, but ignore the Palestinian cause, despite their long-suffering non-violent resistance against an overtly oppressive and brutal regime. And when will enough of us withdraw support for Israel, and realise that many Palestinians are only going to be tempted towards violence if they perceive that non-violence is futile and they continue to suffer year after year.

Ramallah demonstration (photo by Goeran S.)

Back Room meetings with Hamas; Jihad in my head

Assuming that got your attention, it’s actually much more innocent than it might sound to most Westerners’ ears. More like a postscript to my earlier post re the warmth and friendliness of Palestinians. As I mentioned, two of the guys I met on recent trip to Ramallah and Nablus were called Jihad, and one was Hamas. To many people these names have such loaded negative connotations, yet here they are common names.

I met Hamas in a felafel restaurant; he was one of the cooks, and Jihad wasn’t exactly in my head, but his hands were in my mouth as he fed me (and another traveler, Emily) from his fruit and vegetable stall. (Thanks to Emily for taking one photo, and appearing in the other :)

Photo by Emily B.

Heartbroken...

Last night I heard one more story of Palestine, and while it was one I heard before, this time for me it was especially powerful. My favourite bookshop here was showing a documentary - the story of Budrus, which like so many other Palestinian villages has lost land to the building of the highly controversial wall.

As the people of Budrus acknowledge, if the Israelis want to build a wall for security, then that’s fine – assuming it’s on the line between Israeli and Palestinian territory.

Instead, thousands of acres of West Bank Palestinian land are being confiscated by the occupying power – against all international law, and against obvious common sense and most of all morality – and the wall is being built on and through Palestinian homes, farms and villages with no redress for the people losing homes, land, incomes and more.

In this case, the Israeli plan was to build their massive ugly concrete wall literally through the village. The villagers stood to lose not just their land but three hundred acres of farm land, and three thousand olive trees – their lifeblood, and income, and as both sides here know, a symbol of life. To rub salt into the wound, the wall was to be within 40 metres of the school and be built through the cemetery…on top of the graves of the villagers' ancestors.

As I watched, a range of emotions flowed through me. At some points I felt inspired by the strength and courage of the villagers who chose to fight all this non-violently, at other times horror and disbelief that anyone could think that it was OK to devastate a village, to desecrate the dead, and to brutalise the living to make it happen.

My heart bled most seeing women weeping for their trees – some a thousand years old, and nurtured ‘as if family’, and I was at my most angry when I saw these middle aged and elderly women being clubbed by soldiers simply for standing on their farms – despite knowing in my head that this is going on every week throughout Palestine.

I was also inspired and heartened by the involvement of Israelis and internationals who joined the Budrus movement, and that this unity and solidarity – with a commitment to non-violence – ultimately resulted in the proposed wall being shifted. A victory for the village, and an example to other villages who are still fighting this same battle every week – many choosing the same non-violence as Budrus.

The fifteen year old young woman Iltezam Morrar, who along with her father Ayed, led the non-violent resistance - and won

Nonetheless, I still came away heartbroken, knowing that these small victories are little in comparison to the war which Israel is waging every day through their occupation. The daily humiliations, the hours lost at checkpoints, the massive loss of land and property, the harassment of ordinary people, and the brutal violence of arrests, beatings and deaths at the hands of settlers and soldiers make this a very one-sided battle. I weep for Palestine tonight and pray for something to change . . .

A young Palestinian man arrested for being on his village land simply because the military can declare it a 'closed military area' any time they like - this time at At-Tuwani - but just like Budrus, a pattern repeated weekly across the West Bank.