Whose Security?

"Security" is an all-encompassing word for Israel that can justify virtually anything. Security is the reason for the Wall, the checkpoints, the home demolitions. It's the pretext for denying entire families from getting permits to access their own land that's been isolated by the Wall. Entire fields of olive trees have been razed to the ground for security purposes. No other explanation needs to be given, all of this is just done to ensure security. But whose security are we talking about? Who is being protected by all these measures, and who is really under threat?

Well, a little over a week ago, the Israeli army evicted about 250 settlers from a Palestinian house that they had been occupying in Hebron. The settler who said he bought the house (an American businessman from New York) said that this was his ancestral home, that the land belonged to him, and that he would not leave it. Some of the settlers who helped him occupy the house even threatened to start fighting with the army if they evicted them. And when the soldiers eventually got around to evicting the settlers, they did get really angry. But they didn't take it out on the soldiers, as they had threatened to do.

Instead, they took out all of their anger on the Palestinians. All over the West Bank, there were settler attacks on roads and in any villages that are unfortunate enough to have a settlement nearby. Palestinian houses were burned, cars were destroyed, buildings were vandalised, stones were thrown at people. There's even a video of a settler shooting two Palestinians point-blank.

You would think that these attacks would prompt a response from the army or the police. You would think that the authorities, who are supposed to provide security, would crack down on the settlers who were perpetrating these attacks. But the day after all this happened, I was in a car driving to a village up north, and along the road, we saw that at least one army jeep was stationed at the entrance to every Palestinian village. They were stopping people from entering villages, searching cars, etc. The fact that they were stationed at the villages doesn't seem to make sense. Shouldn't they be stationed at the settlements? Since it was the settlers who were attacking the Palestinians?

But instead, it's the Palestinians who got imprisoned in their own villages, who were subject to the humiliating roadside searches, who were treated like suspicious criminals just for entering or exiting their homes. So it's the Palestinians who were attacked, and the Palestinians who then paid the price and were punished for being attacked. It's all backwards.

And this is part of the security-mania that's everywhere in Israel. Israel's security is threatened, Israel is the vulnerable state, Israel needs to protect itself by any means necessary. But why does the occupier get to define what "security" is? Why does the settler who's sitting on stolen land and who's armed to the teeth get to say that the Palestinians threaten his security? Why does the soldier with his gun to a Palestinian's head get to say that he's enforcing security? And does Israel really think that it can achieve security by repressing an entire people?

The oppressor shouldn't be the one to make the security claim. And it definitely shouldn't be able to gain uncritical and unlimited international support for this claim. The entire dominant conception of security in relation to Israel-Palestine needs to be reversed. We have to look at the reality of the situation, and think about whose security we actually need to look out for. And we need to realize that security can never come from repression.

Resistance

On a slightly different note from my other posts, there are some really amazing, exciting things going on in the West Bank right now. Acts of resistance are springing up in lots of different villages, and the people are able to sustain the momentum from these initial acts, and turn them into regular, sustained resistance movements. These kinds of things are important to talk about because they're coming in the face of all the repression and harship that the people face on a daily basis.

The village that I'm most familiar with that's been rising up lately is called Jayyous, it's north of where I'm living. Right now, the Wall goes through village land, isolating most of the farmland that belongs to it, and cutting off 7 of the 8 artisan wells that serve the village. There's a gate through which villagers can pass to access their farmland, but nobody can pass unless they get a permit from Israel, and for most people, getting a permit is almost impossible. So for a village where 85% of the people are (were) farmers, most of whom can no longer access their farmland, this is absolutely devastating. Also, the gate is controlled by Israeli soldiers, who only open it once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. If you miss the opening, then too bad, you have to wait around. And keep in mind that this is all on Palestininan land, and all Jayyous land. In essence, the Israeli soldiers are in charge of who crosses from one half of the village to the other. It's absurd that the soldiers should have any jursidiction at all here.

But recently, there's been so much resistance in Jayyous because Israel has just implemented a court decision to move the Wall back a little bit. Might sound like a good thing, but it really isn't. With this decision, about 200 olive trees will be uprooted, in addition to the hundreds that have already been uprooted - some of them dating back to the Roman era - and almost 6,000 square kms of village land will be permanently confiscated. The villagers will have no access to their farmland, not even through the gate that's currently opened three times a day. In fact, there will be no gate at all. So what's going to happen to the village? What will the people who rely on that farmland do? It's not like they can all just move to the nearest city and find jobs.

So the people resist. They've been having these strong weekly demonstrations, and they aren't letting up. Normally the soldiers come and shoot tear gas and rubber bullets and sound bombs to quell the protests. Two weeks ago, though, the villagers somehow caught the army off guard, and they were able to march right to the Wall, where they proceeded to take rocks, sticks, anything they could find, and destroy the gate. People started tearing pieces of the gate off and taking them home. Really amazing, they actually tore down the gate, part of the Wall, this ultimate symbol of their oppression.

Obviously the soldiers didn't appreciate this, so they arrived on the scene firing rubber bullets and whatnot into the crowd. Over the next week, the soldiers continually threatened the villagers, coming into the village at 2 or 3 in the morning to harrass and intimidate people, carrying out door to door investigations, threatening to use massive violence if another protest took place.

So, in the face of these threats, what do the villagers do? Do they back down and allow their livelihoods be stolen from them? Well, no. Actually, they do the opposite. The next demonstration was even bigger than the earlier one, with everyone in the village, women, men, old people, youth, everyone coming out to demonstrate. They simply will not back down, will not let up, and will not stand for the perpetuation of occupation and increased colonization. Allowing this to happen isn't even an option for them. This is their home, and they're not giving it up, and no amount of threat or repression is going to change that.

The spirit of resistance that these people have is really incredible, and really inspiring. And this spirit is spreading around the West Bank, so now there are many villages doing similar things. I don't think the army knows what to do with them, because they've tried about everything short of mass arrests, and nothing is stopping the villagers. And at this point, the villagers are so strong and have so much momentum that if they try mass arrests, the people will become even more militant. In the end, the demonstrations probably won't directly result in the Wall being torn down. But it's the spirit that's important. By keeping this spirit alive, and by spreading it around the country, the resistance to occupation is certainly not going away, no matter what the people are up against.

Home Demolitions

To start off with today, I’ll just give a few facts about the Wall that Israel is building around and through Palestine. When completed, it’ll be about 790 km, which is about twice the length of the Green Line, which is supposed to be the “border” between Israel and Palestine. It’ll de facto annex about 50% of the West Bank, confiscating the land for exclusive Israeli use, and most of what will be confiscated is the most fertile agricultural land, and the invaluable underground water resources located in Palestinian territory. It goes straight through some communities, dividing families from one another, and it snakes right next to others, leaving no room for the villages to expand, and cutting off their farmlands. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements are left with huge tracts of land where they can expand. Ultimately, the Wall will work with the settlements to divide the West Bank into three separate cantons with little or no contiguity, making it almost impossible to sustain a Palestinian state.

One of the other effects of the Wall is that it has become a “legitimate” reason to demolish homes. The other day, I visited a spot where about six homes had been demolished because they were deemed to be too close to the Wall. In this area, Israel declared that houses had to be at least 1 km away from the Wall. It didn’t matter that these houses had been built before the Wall was constructed; the point was that the path of the Wall was less than 1 km away from the houses, so they had to be destroyed.

So the families who lived in these houses were given a piece of paper written in Hebrew saying that in 24 hours, their homes would be demolished due to their proximity to the Wall. Of course, most Palestinians don’t read Hebrew because their language is Arabic. So maybe they knew what the demolition order said, maybe they didn’t. But keep in mind that they were living inside the Green Line, which means according to internationally accepted borders, they were in Palestine, not Israel. So, knowing that the families were Palestinians living in Palestine, why wouldn’t the Israeli government make an Arabic translation of their demolition order? Also, even if they did read Hebrew, why would Israel only give them 24 hours notice before demolishing their homes? This lack of notice is another violation of international law.

So anyways, at 2 or 3 in the morning on the next day, an Israeli army unit with a fleet of bulldozers showed up at the houses, ready to start the demolition. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to a bunch of soldiers and bulldozers ready to raze your house to the ground. The families weren’t allowed to take any of their furniture or belongings out of their houses before the bulldozers started their work. They were given no compensation, and were offered no alternative place to live. In one night, five homes were demolished, and five families lost everything they had.

The Wall isn’t the only reason for house demolitions, but it certainly doesn’t help the issue. Since 1967, about 19,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, and more demolition orders are issued every day. How is this justifiable? Where’s the humanity here? I’m not sure questions like these have any answers. The only thing we can do is try and resist the occupation, and to show our solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Checkpoint Racism

I've never seen racism as clearly and as concretely as in Palestine. Here, it's like racism is a tangible thing that you can reach out and touch, because you see so many examples of it every day. It's not just an abstract concept, it's an actual physical thing that can take on many different forms. You look out your window in Ramallah and see the Wall. Racism. You walk down the street in Hebron and pass a group of Israeli soldiers with M-16s. Racism. You drive down the highway and around the bend you see what used to be the main entrance to a village, which has now been sealed shut with boulders, isolating the village (see the picture above - the sign says "Jaba Welcomes You"). Racism.

In addition to all these examples, one of the most blatant forms of racism here are the hundreds of checkpoints that are scattered all around the West Bank. Palestinians can be denied crossing these checkpoints for a myriad of reasons, or they can just be forced to wait at them for hours. I've heard stories from people telling me that a trip from Bethlehem to Ramallah, which used to take about half an hour, can sometimes take two and a half hours because they're forced to wait at checkpoints. If Palestians are on a bus crossing through the bigger ones, they all have to get off the bus and walk through the checkpoint on foot, then go catch the bus again on the other side of the checkpoint. Only Palestinians have to do that though, not internationals. I've seen a few things myself at different checkpoints that I think really illustrate the discriminatination that happens here every day.

A few weeks ago I went to Bethlehem with a few other people, and when we were coming back to Ramallah, we crossed through one of the big checkpoints (see the picture below). In front of us was a woman with her newborn baby. This checkpoint was like airport security, where you put your bags through an x-ray machine, and then walk through a metal detector. So this woman put all her stuff through the x-ray and walked through the metal detector carrying her baby. The metal detector went off, and the soldier yelled something at her. So she went back and took off what might have set off the metal detector, and tried to walk through again. And the alarm went off again. So the soldier yelled at her, and the woman went back and tried a third time. Same result. And this continued for a good 10-15 minutes, with the soldier screaming louder and louder at the woman in Hebrew, and the woman all the while carrying her baby, frantically trying to figure out what was setting of the machine. Finally, it turned out that the baby's diaper had been done up with safety pins. So the woman had to take every single safety pin out of the diaper, put them through the x-ray, and then walk through the metal detector. Then of course she had to find a place on the other side to put her baby down so she could do the diaper back up again. This is the kind of humiliation that the Palestinians have to go through daily.

Another checkpoint story came when I went olive picking with a big group of internationals and some Palestinian students. We had rented a bus and were on our way back to Ramallah when we came to a checkpoint. The Palestinians were sitting in the back of the bus because if they sat in the front, the soldiers would see them first and would immediately give us a hard time. So anyhow, the bus stopped, a soldier got on, looked around, and saw that there were Palestinians sitting at the back of the bus. So he walked straight to the back, without saying a word or looking at anyone else, and made all the Palestinians give him their ID cards. He took them, checked them in his computer, didn't find that they had a record or anything. After 10 minutes or so, he gave them back to the Palestinians and sent us on our way, without so much as a glance at the mostly white skinned, blond haired Europeans who made up the majority of the bus passengers. He was only interested in Palestinians, since of course, they're all "security threats" and you can never be too careful with them.

Maybe 20 minutes later, we came to another checkpoint. A soldier got on, but rather than looking around for himself, he just asked the person sitting in front if there were any Palestinians on the bus. The person said no, the soldier didn't bother to check, and just sent us on our way, saying "have a nice day!" And that was it. No Palestinians, no problem.

My last checkpoint story involves myself. I was with a couple of people going from Ramallah to Jerusalem, and we had to cross through a big checkpoint called Qalandiya. So I went through the metal detector and show the soldier my passport. She was still a little suspicious of me I guess, so she said something to me in Hebrew. I told her I only spoke English, and she turned and said something to a second soldier who was next to her. The second soldier hadn't been paying attention to me, so she didn't know I was Canadian. She looked at me, assumed I was Palestinian, and started yelling at me in Arabic. The first soldier quickly told her to stop yelling because I wasn't Palestinian. When the second soldier understood the situation, she calmed down and asked me in English how old I was. I answered her, and she waved me through.

Again, this is the type of thing that Palestinians go through day in and day out, but for them it's 1000 times worse. At least I have the privilege of having a Canadian passport. They live through the constant humiliation and frustration of having soldiers stop them and question them when you're traveling through their own land. They have to endure the soldiers looking at them with such an air of superiority, like they're dealing with animals and can do anything they want. It almost makes you sick to your stomach to see it. To live under occupation like this, there are no words to describe the injustice. Yes, racism is alive and well in the holy land.

Life in the Jordan Valley

Last week I went to the Jordan Valley, which is the eastern part of the West Bank, running north to south along the Jordanian border. It's about the only part of the West Bank that has a natural abundance of water, rich fertile soil, and natural minerals from the Dead Sea. All this makes it perfect agricultural territory, and it also makes the Valley a major target for Israeli expansion and land confiscation. It was occupied by Israel following the 1967 war, and now, after 40 years of occupation, Palestinians control about 5.6% of the territory, while Israel controls 94.4%. Before 1967, there were some 200,000 Palestinians living in the Valley, and now there are only about 52,000 left, with most of them concentrated in the city of Jericho. I want to tell a story to show that the consistently diminishing Palestinian presence in the Jordan Valley isn't an accident.

We stopped at a few villages on our tour, but there was one that struck me the most. Actually, I shouldn't even really call it a village, because it's only one house. There used to be about 100 families living in this village, but slowly, they were forced to leave, with many of them even having their homes demolished by Israeli troops with bulldozers. Now, all that's left of the village is one house with one farmer living there with his family. This farmer absolutely refuses to leave his land, no matter what he's subjected to.

He's got a greenhouse and a small patch of land that he farms, and he's surrounded by illegal settlements. He has no electricity, even though he has two electrical towers on his property, maybe 10 metres from his front door (see the last picture below). But these towers, one running north-south, and the other running east-west, only carry power to the Israeli settlements that are on all sides of him. Even though there's all this electricity running right on top of his head, he doesn't get any of it.

This farmer is also unconnected to any running water network. This is despite the fact that, just like the electricity situation, he has a water pump on his property that pumps water to the settlements around him. A nice, steady flow of water runs right underneath him, but he can't have any. He actually used to pump water himself from a spring a few kilometres away, but a few months ago, Israeli troops came and cut the pipes and dug them up, so he can't do that any more (see the picture of his cut up pipe on the right). Why did they cut his pipes? They said he was "stealing water from nature." Completely absurd.

But even in the face of all this, and seeing his fellow villagers lose their homes one by one, this farmer refuses to leave. This is his land, and he won't give it up to a colonialist power. But now, Israel has issued him a demolition order saying that his house will be destroyed if he doesn't leave voluntarily by a certain date. The funny - or not so funny - thing about this demolition order is that it states that his house will be destroyed, but his greenhouse won't. Why will his greenhouse be spared? Is this some form of compassion that Israel is showing, a way of "going easy" on the farmer? Well, no. It's actually so that when the farmer leaves and the settlers come and occupy his land, they'll already have a working greenhouse. They won't have to go through all the trouble of building the greenhouse, planting the seeds, setting up an irrigation system. The nice Palestinan farmer will have left all that behind for them.

So what choice does the farmer have? He can move off of his land, but where is he supposed to go, since his family has lived in this small village for generations? Or he can stay there and watch his home get demolished by Israeli soldiers. Thousands of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley have had to make this choice since 1967. It's really surreal, we were driving along the main road through the Valley, and the guide would point to the side of the road and tell us that a village used to be there. All that's left now is a few piles of rocks that used to be houses. If someone hadn't told me, I would never have known that people lived there. And now the land "belongs" to Israel, and the people have forcibly been expelled.

This is why the diminishing Palestinian presence isn't an accident. All of this is part of a deliberate policy that's going on all over the Jordan Valley and the West Bank in general. Doing things like cutting off water and electricity, restricting freedom of movement, preventing expansion of towns and villages, is a way of constricting Palestinian communities, making life virtually unsustainable for them. In essence, the Israeli state wants the land without the people. It's amazing that there are farmers like this one who will go through anything to prevent that from happening.

Olive Picking in Asira al-Qibliya

Yesterday I went olive picking with a big delegation of internationals and some Palestinian students in a village called Asira al-Qibliya, which is in the north of the West Bank. October is olive harvest season for the Palestinians, which is a really important time for them socially, culturally, and economically. The olive harvest has been going on for generations, and the olive trees have deep, deep meaning for the Palestinian people. A huge percentage of Palestinians also depends on the harvest for their economic survival.

Every year, though, the olive harvest comes under attack in the West Bank. Soldiers and state policies prevent huge numbers of Palestinians from even going to their farmland. Trees are burned and uprooted, trees that have existed since long before the occupation of Palestine began. Palestinian villagers are attacked with rocks and bullets by fanatical settlers. This year, 105 villages in the West Bank have been identified as being under threat from attacks and land confiscations. It's all part of the colonial project that aims to isolate Palestinians, and to ultimately eliminate their presence from Palestine.

Anyhow, there's an Israeli settlement near Asira called Yizhar, and there's been a lot of settler violence in the area since the harvest started. Settlers have been burning down olive trees, destroying farmland, and throwing rocks at villagers. One Palestinian teenager was actually killed a few weeks ago after a clash between settlers and villagers. When the clash was over, the kid was sitting under a tree, and soldiers opened fire on him. He was shot 20 times, I suppose to make sure he was dead.

We also saw a Palestinian house near the settlement that had the Star of David spray painted all over it. The Star of David, therefore, has become a symbol of colonialism, intimidation, and oppression. And the Palestinians are supposed to be the bad guys, the aggressors, the terrorists? It's really sickening how the truth is so twisted. You'll hear settlers saying things like "God promised us all of this land, we have deeper ties to the land than the Palestinians do, etc." What right do they have to say this, especially when so many of them are from the US, Russia, Germany, France...? How do they have more claim to this land than a family who has been living here for generations upon generations? And what makes them think that they're justified in dehumanizing the Palestinians to the point that they'll take any means necessary to try and expel them - essentially ethnically cleanse them - from the land? I'd love to be able to understand the psychology of these people, to figure out how they work.

Especially when you meet the Paletsinian villagers, and they're such incredible people. They were really amazing to us when we came to support their harvest. The women in the village cooked traditional food for all of us - the villagers plus around 30 volunteers, and as we ate in the olive fields, they asked us about our lives, about why we were there, what we thought about the situation, etc. Every Palestinan who I've met has been unbelievably friendly and hospitable. They'll invite you into their homes, share whatever they have with you, and just make you feel so welcome to be here.

When you see stuff like this, you develop a clear understanding of the expression "to exist is to resist." Because really, simply by being here, by living on the land that's rightfully theirs, by taking care of the land, by passing the connection to the land down to future generations, the Palestinians show their strength, their resiliance, their defiance. Continuing to live here in the face of constant abuse and attacks is perhaps the strongest form of resistance. To exist is to resist.

This is why, despite the reality that they face, Palestinians shouldn't be seen as victims. "Victims" suggests that they need people to come and help them. This isn't the case. They welcome solidarity for their cause, for people to come and show their support and stand with them in their struggle, but not paternalistic "help." "Victims" also suggests passivity, that they let things happen to them. Again, this isn't the case, because they resist and they struggle. Constantly. Just by existing.

One week in...

So I've been here a little over seven days so far, and it's been quite a week. I arrived at the airport in Tel Aviv and got through security without any real trouble, except for the fact that they didn't give me a visa...that caused a slight hassle for the next few days, but it's a story for another time. What I really want to talk about is my first experience traveling in the West Bank.

On Thursday I went to Hebron, with three Norwegians who are here, one of whom is working with the same organization as I am, Stop the Wall. Hebron is a Palestinian city that's south of Ramallah and Bethlehem, and it used to be the economic centre of the West Bank. It was really something to see this city, to see the reality of living under occupation, a reality that Palestinians have to face every day. Hebron is surrounded by Israeli settlements - which are illegal under international law - and in addition to these surrounding settlements, there's also one right in the middle of the city. The settlement in the middle of the city has about 400-600 people living in it, and interestingly, many of them are from Brooklyn. These are some of the most fanatical settlers around, as most of them are heavily armed, and there has been lots of settler violence directed at Palestinians. Maybe the best example of this fanatical violence came in 1994, when a settler barged into the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, and opened fire on the Palestinians who were praying there. 29 people were killed, and 125 were wounded. Also interesting to note that these 400-600 settlers have some 1500 soldiers stationed there to "protect" them.

Nothing of that scale has happened since then, but violence is still common. For example, the Palestinians had to cover their market with wire mesh because settlers would throw rocks and garbage down onto them from the buildings above (see the picture to the right). Now that the rocks don't work in getting rid of the Palestinians below, settlers have been known to pour boiling water or hot oil out of their buildings instead. The inhumanity of it is shocking. Inhumanity is the best way I can describe it I think, because it's like the settlers don't even consider Palestinians to be human beings. It's really unbelievable to see.

To make matters worse, with the the establishment and expansion of the settlements around Hebron, the city that was once the economic centre of the West Bank has now been economically devastated. What was once a bustling market with thousands of people going through it every day probably now has about 90% of its shops closed and boarded up. So in addition to the physical violence that's always a threat to the Palestinians, we also see economic violence in Hebron that forces people from their homes because they can't make a living in their hometown. Add onto this the psychological impact of growing up in a place like that, where you're constantly under threat...it's really hard to imagine...and this is just one city.

As hard as it is to see this kind of stuff, this is the reason why I came to Palestine - to see the reality on the ground. And this is happening all over the West Bank, so in my time here I'll have plenty more opportunity to experience occupation in a first-hand way.