Sunday 21 February 2010

Breaking the Siege: Driving to Gaza with Viva Palestina's aid convoy (December 09/January 2010)


"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Martin Luther King Jr

We are driving through Turkey. It's December and bitterly cold, with what seems like almost non-stop sleet hurling through the skies at us. But warmth has come from the Turkish people who, all the way through this huge country, have lined the streets as the convoy has gone past, waving flags, cheering, passing food, water and flowers through our windows. They've mobbed us at service stations to greet us when we've stopped for breaks, congregated on the hard shoulder at motorway junctions to point us in the right direction, and gathered en masse at the tollbooths to ensure the operators keep the barriers open for all of our 200+ vehicles as we surge through. Women, men and children, all urging us on to Gaza.

At night, we unroll our sleeping bags and make ourselves comfortable on the floors of sports halls, the sleeping arrangements generously provided for us by the Turkish humanitarian organisation, IHH, whose people and vehicles have joined the convoy. Welcoming committees of hundreds meet us every night at the halls - ordinary people who live in whichever town we've stopped in - Konya, Adana, Gazientep - who want to talk to us and wish us well. Often, the women are in tears as they ask us to take their love to the children of Gaza.

After hours of driving through the dark, cold and rain, we walk into these halls to be hit by a warm wave of enthusiasm. The love and support of the people of Turkey for the people of Palestine is an inspiration to every single person on the convoy.


Syria - first time round

As border crossings go, it was certainly different. We drove out of Turkey, across no-man's land, and towards the Syrian checkpoint. We could hear the sound of the Big Band before we got there, and then customs officers were at our windows offering us plates of baklava. None of them wanted to see a passport in return. A massive reception was waiting for us at the checkpoint - local VIPs, the Syrian Red Crescent, hundreds of flag-waving Palestinians, speeches, music and food. It was amazing - I've never got this kind of welcome at Heathrow.

The two day drive through Syria, with a stopover just outside Damascus, brought the convoy into its first contact with members of the Palestinian disapora - the seven million Palestinians banned from their native country after the UN voted in 1948 to remove their forefathers and another population was imported to take their land and their homes. Seven million - the largest refugee population in the world.

I realise that the ache of this uninvited punishment is carried in the hearts of all generations. In Damascus, as crowds gather to welcome us, a 12-year-old Palestinian girl gives me a white carnation and a note she's written on a torn-out page of her schoolbook. In careful English, which her mother tells me she's taken an hour to write out, trying to get the words and the neatness just right, she's penned: 'I'd like to come with you to my country, to see my land, but I'm not allowed. Thank you for going. It gives me the strength to carry on.'

The next day, a grandmother who fled the massacre in her village in Palestine in 1948 holds both my hands and, shaking, tells me: 'I want to hold your hands again when you return from Palestine. Then I'll feel as though I'm holding a part of my homeland.' I can barely hear her tiny, old person's voice. Her daughter tells me what she's said.

Jordan

Hot weather, stunning scenery, and a desert reception in the sands near Petra from the tribal chiefs of Karak.

We also stopped for a couple of days in Amman, where a huge outdoor rally was held for us and the generosity of ordinary people was again in evidence. Throughout this journey, people have wanted to help us, fixing our vehicles without charge, feeding us, giving us money to take to those trapped in Gaza. In Turkey, women took the wedding rings from their fingers and insisted we take them, in lieu of money they didn't have. 17 wedding rings collected this way; 17 little bands of hope. And here, in Amman, an old man, obviously poor, tried to give us the crutches he used to help him walk - for an amputee in Gaza, he kept saying - while a little boy came to the rally to hand over his tin box of pocket money.

And again and again I hope that the people of Gaza, who must despair at being abandoned to their fate under Israel's brutal occupation, can know how many prayers for their freedom wash across to them from all over the world.

From Amman we drove south through the desert to the port of Aqaba, from where we were due to sail to Egypt and then continue the drive to Gaza. So close now, and then the politics kicked in. The Egyptian government informed us that, should we set sail, we wouldn't be given permission to land in Egypt.

Four days of negotiations between the Egyptian and Turkish governments, and the convoy organisers ensue, while we wait in the dusty outdoor compound of the Jordan Professional Association (a trade union organisation).

Every day, Palestinian Jordanians come to the compound to donate money to the people of Gaza, to bring us food, and to offer us their homes to sleep in. I sit amongst some Palestinian women, answering their questions, chatting. One of them has a little girl with the same name as my eldest niece, so I show her pictures of my niece on my mobile and we play. Her mother tells me how her father, as a child, was expelled from Palestine with his family, and how she has never seen her homeland. 'You'll go home one day, God willing,' I say, thinking that's quite positive, but really I'm at a loss for words, and suddenly she's crying; deep, heaving sobs that come from somewhere far within. I hold her hand and cry as well, wondering at the same time what the right words would have been; would someone else have known what to say? Her daughter watches us. The same name as my eldest niece, two totally different lives.

That night, I walk down to the beach and sit alone on the shore. Across the water, black as ink now, but sparkling blue when the sun shines on it, is occupied Palestine. During the day, the beautiful, hazy mountains seem close enough to touch; at night, the lights are in such seeming proximity, it makes your heart ache. If this is how we feel at being so close we can see, but not help, Palestine, how much sharper the anguish for the Palestinians in Aqaba who look out every day at the land they were cleansed from, knowing it is being lived in by someone else.

And underneath an upside down half moon, I try and contemplate the pain of exile. The lights of Palestine shine opposite.

Syria - second time round

In the end, while the medicines and powdered baby milk we were carrying baked in our vehicles under a hot Middle Eastern sun, the Egyptians held fast. We weren't able to sail from Jordan. On 27 December, marking a year to the day when Israel began its land, air and sea assault on a besieged Gaza, massacring 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks, we held a candlelit vigil in our compound. We were joined by about 200 of our new Jordanian Palestinian friends, many of whom lived through the agony of those three weeks not knowing if family and friends in Gaza were alive or dead.

Two days later, we left the compound to begin the drive back to Syria. Egypt was giving us permission to dock in its port of Al Arish, which meant sailing from the Syrian port of Lattakia. Sailing to Al Arish meant sailing far too close to Israel for anyone's liking, raising the possibility of losing our precious cargo if we were attacked, but it had become the only option we had left.

We reached Lattakia on New Year's Eve, to the sound of distant fireworks, and were made welcome in a Palestinian refugee camp whose inhabitants originate from the northern Palestinian town of Acre, now occupied by Israel. We went to sleep that night mentally preparing ourselves for the struggle to get into a country they may never see.

The next day, the convoy was hit by a hideous bout of sickness. Although there were nearly 500 of us, nearly everyone had a tale of vomiting and diorrhea and drivers wandered around looking like ghosts. But again, the Palestinians were wonderful, opening their homes to us, taking us away from the exposed, windy conditions of the camp, and insisting that the sickest stay with them until they recovered.

Then, on 2 January, we drove all the ambulances, all the trucks, the jeeps, the vans, that had travelled so far from London to the city's port. The Palestinians of the camp came out to cheer us on our way, roads were blocked as drivers stopped their cars and hung over bridges to wave us on.

And then came the port itself: if love, pride and sheer passion alone could free Palestine, then it would've been freed that day. Hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian refugees crammed into that space by the sea, surrounding our vehicles as they drove in, clambering up cranes and any other structures they could find, shouting, cheering, waving Palestinian flags, a band playing and the huge doors of the ship open and the ramp down, as vehicle after vehicle inched its way in, ready for the journey to Egypt. It was awesome, it was incredible, it was inspiring; it was the face of the struggle that the Western media will never report.

A handful of volunteers travelled with the vehicles and the aid, enduring 20 hours at sea with no seats or beds, and trailed for the entire journey by a fleet of Israeli warships despite never entering Israeli waters. However, our fears that the IDF might illegally board the ship, kidnap its passengers and seize the aid didn't materialise and it docked safely the next day in Al Arish, with all its cargo being cleared by Egyptian customs.

The rest of us were to fly to Al Arish in a chartered plane, but, as it took off from Lattakia, a loud bang exploded from an engine and we saw sparks flying. Two more huge bangs followed mid-air, and we were diverted to Damascus on a single engine.

And so, with people still sick and vomiting, we spent the night in Damascus airport, sprawled out on chairs and in sleeping bags on the hard floor, waiting for a new plane to arrive from Athens, which it finally did ten hours later.

A four hour flight to Al Arish, hours spent at that airport as Egyptian customs officials refused to issue us with entry visas, protests and bargaining, and then finally we were through and reunited at the port with our aid-filled vehicles and the volunteers who had sailed with them.

We were, now, only 20 miles from Gaza, from the Rafah border crossing but the Egyptians had more in store for us. As we celebrated the safe arrival of our vehicles in Al Arish, we were quietly surrounded on one side by Egyptian riot and plain clothes police. Behind us was the sea, with warships lurking on the horizon. We were completely trapped in a small space and, as night fell, the attacks with tear gas and huge rocks raining down began.

It was a long, long night, with no sleep. We had many injured, who had to be mended with the medical supplies we were taking to Gaza, and some of the trucks suffered smashed windows. My thoughts turned often to the Palestinians of Jenin, of Sabra, of Shatila, of Gaza, of every refugee camp that has been completely surrounded by Israeli soldiers, with no escape as those soldiers begin their massacres. Yes, we were scared that night, the fear increasing when armed police arrived and threatened to start shooting, but compared to the terror suffered by the Palestinians, it was nothing.

Gaza

As the dust cleared in the morning - the police having retreated at around 4am - the convoy leaders began the task of negotiating our release from the compound and guaranteeing passage to Gaza. Many people had spent the night vomiting from the effects of tear gas and water cannon. Others had blood seeping through the bandages applied to heads and limbs, where they'd been hit by rocks hurled by the police. We waited, without food, sharing our water.

Finally, late in the afternoon, the all-clear was given. All vehicles, except jeeps, would be allowed to make that final journey of less than 20 miles to the Rafah Gate. We were going to Gaza; we were going to enter the prison.

It took hours for every vehicle to make it out of the compound, as the Egyptian authorities processed us through at a snail's pace. But when we arrived at the Rafah border crossing, exactly a month to the day after the convoy had left London in December, with that wonderful sign saying 'Welcome to Palestine' above us, nothing else mattered.

We'd made it, we'd broken a medieval and brutal siege imposed as collective punishment nearly four years before, to stand in solidarity with the brave Palestinians trapped inside. We'd made our stand against ethnic cleansing, against genocide, against fascism.

And what a welcome we received from the people of Gaza who, a year earlier, were being burnt by white phosphorus as bombs and missiles rained down on them, whose homes, schools and hospitals were shelled by Israeli tanks, whose children were shot at close range by Israeli soldiers going from house to house.

They came out in their thousands to welcome us, lining the streets all the way from Rafah to Gaza City, nearly 25 miles away, mobbing our vehicles, banging on the sides, thrusting their arms through the windows to shake our hands, shouting, in Arabic and in English, 'thank you, thank you', and 'welcome to Gaza'. Babies, children, women, men, from teenagers to the very old - they were all there. We'd heard they'd been waiting days for our arrival.

As I inched our ambulance at about 1mph through one throng, an old man in a red keffiyeh looked at me through my open window and said quietly: 'Thank you for breaking the siege'.

Two hours later, we completed that 25 mile journey. A yellow moon hung like a slice of lemon above Gaza City, and a night breeze swayed through the palms.

Inside Gaza

We delivered our aid and vehicles the next day. To NGOs, and to specific organisations, we handed over life-support machines, dental equipment, Braille machines, kidney-dialysis units, laptops, medicines, toys for children, and everything else we'd brought with us, to a people who aren't even allowed to import paper.

We weren't able to give them the concrete and steel they so desperately need, and are denied by Israel, to rebuild the homes and infrastructure destroyed by their occupiers.

We visited people living in the rubble of their bombed and bullet-ridden homes, enduring the cold nights of January without sufficient cover, clothes or blankets, living without sanitation facilities.

We saw the destroyed Parliament building, the destroyed government ministries, the destroyed police stations, the destroyed milk factories, the destroyed hospitals, the destroyed schools.

We saw the once fertile agricultural fields, now turned to wasteland, the land once covered by trees, now uprooted by Israeli tanks.

We saw the harbour and the empty light-blue sea, devoid of fishing boats which could bring in much needed food for the Gazans, but which stay away because they are shot at by Israeli gunboats.

We visited the families whose only source of food comes from the tunnels dug deep under Gaza into Egypt and ate precious meals with them, knowing that, once Egypt completes the underground steel wall it is building, they face starvation. 'We'll cope,' they told us.

We listened to stories of last January's massacre, of the father who took his wife and children to sleep in an empty grave every night because that was safer than being at home, of the father who stitched his eight-year old son's leg with a needle and thread and no anaesthetic after a rocket attack, of the family who lost 31 members in one attack, their large house now empty and broken.

We heard that night's Israeli shelling - a constant feature of life in Gaza - three strikes in Rafah and Khan Younis, and felt floors and windows shake. We found out about Gaza's new dead the next day.

And most of all, we saw and we felt the pride, and the determination, the bravery, the generosity and the resilience of the Palestinians of Gaza. We saw the beauty of Gaza City, its tall date palms, the cleanliness of the streets despite everything, smelled the sweet air coming in from the Mediterranean, tasted that special lemonade made from Palestinian lemons. We realised how ordinary and beautiful are the lives that have been ripped to shreds by Israel.

And when we left the next day, turned around at the Rafah Gate and looked at the border closed again behind us, trapping those ordinary lives inside, no-one allowed out, nothing, not even food, allowed in, it broke my heart.

Gaza is our Guernica, it is our South Africa; we cannot turn away. The Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, has described what is happening there as 'slow motion genocide'. I have a badge - in Arabic it reads 'Gaza, In Our Hearts'.

Always. We are all Gaza.

Tuesday 26 May 2009

Welcome to the Occupation

'There is no humanity here,' says S, my new-found friend.

'I guess that means we've had it then,' I reply, and I try to laugh so that she realises this is an attempt to lighten the mood, but the laugh comes out dry and hoarse and I can hear the wobble in my voice as I say the words.

I'm annoyed at myself, and I want to tell her - a feisty, young, beautiful-looking Palestinian - that I'm not really the pathetic, anxious individual I'm currently coming across as.

But I've been in this holding pen alone for three-and-a-half hours, without food or water, and have, already, in that period of time, been hauled out five times for interrogating (the first couple of times, I'd describe it as questioning; after that, it became worse) by four different people.

On top of that, I came in on a night flight, landing at 6am on Sunday, so I haven't slept since Friday night, and I'd find that upsetting at the best of times. In this situation, the lack of sleep has led me to make some appalling slip ups during the questionings.

S and I are being held at Tel Aviv airport, Israel. She's just come in on a flight from New York, with the aim of making it to Ramallah to edit a newsletter being started by Palestinian friends. Orginally from Gaza, she knows she has no chance of being allowed in to that brutally-punished strip of land, even though her family lives there, so instead she comes to the West Bank to do her bit against the occupation. This time, she tells me, she has no intention of leaving.

Thinking only of my stomach, I ask her if we're likely to get any food or something to drink. 'No,' she replies. 'There is no humanity here.'

My first questioning had seemed pretty straightforward: 'Are you Muslim?' asked the uniformed woman with the blue eye shadow. 'What is your father's name?'; 'Where was he born?'; 'What was his father's name?'; 'Where was he born?'; 'Why have you come to Israel?'; 'Are you going to the West Bank or Gaza?'.

The woman had even apologised for having to ask the questions. It all put me in the wrong frame of mind...I thought this was going to be ok, and I relaxed.

S opens her hand luggage, which is stuffed full of granola bars and oatcakes, and offers me one. Bloody hell, has this woman been sent to me from heaven??

'They do this because they don't want Arabs using their aiport,' she says. 'They want to make it so difficult for us that we stop coming through here. You've got to hang on. They'll let you through in the end.'

I quickly realise that I can't eat the granola bar because of the anxiety knots tying and untying themselves in my stomach. The combination of that plus food gives me the runs, and I depart hastily to the toilet.

When I return, M, the leader of the Surrey-based group I'd flown into Tel Aviv with (which intends to stay in the West Bank for a week - secretly meeting human-rights organisations - and who've all got through customs) is in the holding pen. He's been allowed in to give me my bag, and also brings me a baguette and a bottle of water. I tell him briefly what's happened so far. 'Welcome to the occupation,' he says wryly, and then he has to leave.

Possibly the worst questioning was with the man in plain-clothes. He was young and wore a black t-shirt. Fit and strong, he made sure his attitude was one of intimidation. When we walked into a tiny metal room, the door clanged shut behind us, and then it was just me and him, and a desk between us. I considered the possibilities of assault. Focus on the questions, focus...

'We know you've been in Israel before'; (I've never been: 'No I haven't,' I say); 'You've been here before, just tell us the truth'; ('I've never been to Israel'); 'Don't lie to us, or we'll stop being nice to you'; 'Why is your passport so new?'; 'Who have you been communicating with in the West Bank?'; ('No-one'); 'We know you've been communicating with people in the West Bank. Tell us who they are'; ('I don't know anyone in the West Bank'); 'I know you're lying. You've got one more chance to tell me the truth. I might look nice, but I'm not'.

And so it went on. My tongue kept sticking to the top of my dry, dry mouth, and I tried not to cluck every time I unstuck it. My lips were dryer than I ever thought it possible for them to be, and I worked hard to control my shaking. Was I shaking because I was tired and hungry? Maybe. I hoped it wasn't fear. That would just make me cross.

S has just come back from her second interrogation with the woman we call The Bitch. She is another one of the plain-clothes squad, in a khaki t-shirt and jeans and I've also done two rounds with her. By now, nearly four hours after she arrived in the holding pen, S and I are laughing and chatting, and I know I can cope for however long this takes, regardless of the constant, anxious churning in my stomach.

But S comes back from this interrogation furious. 'How dare she? How dare she?' she fumes. She goes over the details of her questioning with me, angry, raging.

'I'm Palestinian. Why aren't I allowed into my own country?' she demands. 'We have no control over our own airspace, our own borders. Why do I have to beg the Israelis for a visa to enter my own country? When are we going to stop being herded in and out of the West Bank like cattle?'

Then she kind of collapses in on herself, totally defeated. 'You have to be strong,' I tell her, remembering her words to me several hours previously. 'You'll get in eventually.'

The second time I was in with The Bitch, I completely c*cked up. Thinking it would help me get in, I told her I had a friend who was travelling in Israel, which I do, and that we were going to meet up and travel together. She asked me for his email address, but I didn't want to give it to her, so I said I couldn't remember it. The Bitch softened and implied that if I could prove the existence of an Israeli friend, they'd let me go. 'Do you have his email address in your email contacts list?' she asked. God, I was tired. What harm could giving someone an email address do? 'Yes,' I said.

She turned her computer screen towards me on the desk, and pushed the keyboard in front of me. 'Give it to me,' she ordered. Suddenly my stupid brain clicked back on. 'What are you doing??' it screamed at me. 'Get out of this.'

I entered a really old email address that I'd used when I was freelancing three years ago, opened the account, looked through the contacts list, and told her my friend's address wasn't in there. She took the keyboard from me and typed 'Israel' into the search bar. Bizarrely, three reports I'd emailed to myself in 2006 came up - one on young offenders, a second on funding for women's refuges, and the third was a Housing Corporation report on overcrowding amongst Muslim children in Tower Hamlets.

She seized on the third one. 'What's this? What's this?' she demanded to know. I told her and sensed her anger at having been denied the prize - the proof she was looking for. Despite the situation, I felt a rising giggle at the absurdity of it all and quickly suppressed it. Then total fear struck as I realised what she'd discover if she managed to get into my current email account, including the link to this blog.

During our first questioning, The Bitch asked me if I'd ever done voluntary work. I said I'd done some stuff with homeless people years ago in England, but she was unimpressed. 'We know why you're here,' she told me, 'But we want you to tell us before we send you back.'

Why was I there? To work with children in a Bethlehem school, to live with a Palestinian family (a couple and their four teenage daughters) and share their lives for three months, to witness the reality of the occupation. It's hardly the stuff of revolution, but every human rights sympathiser, every international observer that is allowed in weakens Israel's iron stranglehold on the West Bank, even if only symbolically, interupts its systematic crushing of the Palestinians and refuses to let the name of Palestine die on the world stage.

Just a few miles from where I sat for 14 hours in that holding pen, convoys of lorries carrying emergency medical aid, food, rebuilding materials, even children's toys and musical instruments, are regularly denied entry into the sealed-off Gaza Strip, where 80% of the Palestinian population lives in poverty amongst houses that have been destroyed, power plants and sewage-treatment centres that have been shelled, hospitals and schools that have been bombed, and farmland that has been uprooted by Israel's bulldozers. Treated like animals, the Palestinians are not allowed out and humanitarian aid is not allowed in.

My pen was nothing like the open pen they are trapped in, and I was eventually given my freedom. During the hours and hours I spent in there, Palestinians other than S came and went. Some were kept for several hours, others only for an hour or two. At one point, every chair in there was occupied by men, women, teenage children, whose faces displayed nothing but patience. This was the narrative of their existence, and they bore it with dignity. For me, used to the freedom to roam at will, it was a tiny, shocking insight into the tactics of humiliation and control, tactics the Palestinians of the West Bank face daily at any one of around 600 checkpoints that control their movement. Checkpoints where they start queuing at 2, 3 or 4 in the morning in order to make it to work, where 69 women on their way to hospital have been forced to give birth since September 2000.

Somehow, in the Israeli mentality, allowing me in to work with children would have been an unthinkable concession to humanity.

After 11 hours, I was taken for questioning by the Ministry of the Interior. More relentless interrogation, more psychological mind games and then I was told that my story didn't add up and I would be deported.

I was photographed, finger-printed, and a copy of my passport taken. There was a bag search, body search and yet more questions.

For the final two hours before my bmi flight back to London, I was escorted by two armed guards if I wanted to go to the toilet and a close watch was kept on me in the holding pen. Then finally it was time to go. Two different armed security staff put me into a van and drove me across the tarmac to the plane. I was taken up the metal steps by one of the guards and we waited at the door of the plane for a few minutes until some security clearance came through on her radio. And then, for the first time since it was taken from me at 6 that morning, my passport was returned to me. I boarded the plane and went and sat in the seat allocated to me at the very back. For the first time also since that morning, I was free from surveillance and control. It felt weird.

I opened my passport. The stamp inside it said: 'Ben-Gurion Airport: Entry Denied'.
And, with that stamp, the human rights of Palestine were denied once more.

Links: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign campaigns for justice for the Palestinians. It also advocates for Palestinians' civil, political and human rights, in accordance with international law.
Annual membership is £24.

Medical Aid for Palestinians is a British charity that delivers health and medical care to Palestinians. It also contributes to psycho-social support efforts for women and children affected by the occupation.

Friday 22 May 2009

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine 1948

In 1947, the population of Palestine was 1,750,000, of which 70% were Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian.

The UN partitioned Palestine and gave 55% of the land to the Jewish population to create the state of Israel.

The Palestinian inhabitants of the land weren't consulted on the partition plan, rendering it illegal.

In March 1948, Jewish forces put into effect a carefully prepared plan (Plan D) to seize more Palestinian land for the state of Israel.

Extract from Plan D, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine of its Arab population: 'These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble)...or by encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them.'

A total of 31 massacres were carried out by the Jewish forces, including in the village of Deir Yassin, where approximately 250 women, children and men were killed in what began as a dawn raid and lasted two days. (April 1948)

A 12-year-old Palestinian child at Deir Yassin said later: 'They took us out one after the other, shot an old man and, when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too.

'Then they called my brother Muhammed and shot him in front of us. And when my mother yelled, bending over him - carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her - they shot her too.'

Like other Palestinian villages, Deir Yassin was then burnt to the ground.

In the village of Tantura, in May 1948, Jewish forces separated 200 men and boys between the ages of 13 and 30 from the rest of the village and shot them dead in cold blood.

Palestinians in the cities weren't spared from the atrocities. Terrorism was used against the 75,000 strong Palestinian population of Haifa. They were subjected to heavy shelling, bombing, sniper fire and the igniting of deliberately spilled oil. Civilians trying to flee the port town by sea were shelled.

The orders to the Jewish troops were: 'Kill any Arab you see; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.'

They succeeded in their objectives and the Arab population in Haifa was reduced from 45% to just 4%.

A witness to the flight from Haifa said: 'Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.'

By the time Jewish troops had finished their ethnic cleansing and land grab, 13,000 Palestinians lay dead, nearly 500 Palestinian villages had been burnt to the ground, and 750,000 Palestinians driven from the country of their birth and forced to live abroad, or in the camps of Gaza and the West Bank, as refugees, where they remain today - the largest refugee population in the world. (There are currently 7.2m Palestinian refugees worldwide)

But the operation was a success. When it ended, in 1949, the state of Israel had grown to occupy 78% of what, just two years earlier, had been Palestine.

Menachem Begin, the leader of one of the Jewish military organisations (Irgun) which carried out the massacres, and who later became a Prime Minister of Israel, said: 'As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere...Oh Lord, Oh Lord, you have chosen us for conquest.'

The remaining 22% of the land is now known as the Gaza Strip (bordering the Mediterranean) and the West Bank (bordering Jordan).

Both areas were occupied by Israeli troops in 1967 and the Palestinian population is subject to ongoing terror.

UN Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from the territories it has illegally occupied. Israel refuses and, instead, has removed the borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from all its maps, including in Israeli schoolbooks and tourist maps.

Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Friends of Al Aqsa (Peace in Palestine)

In Quotes: The Road to Gaza, January 2009

'In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country...Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.' Lord Arthur James Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, 1919.

'I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.' Sir Winston Churchill, discussing the fate of the Palestinians, 1937.

'Palestinians do not exist.' Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, 1969.

'(They are) two-legged beasts.' Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister, on the Palestinians.

'They are grasshoppers who can be crushed.' Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli Prime Minister.

'The Palestinians must be made to understand, in the deepest recesses of their consciousness, that they are a defeated people.' Moshe Yaalon, Israeli army chief, 2002

Source: 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire' by Arundhati Roy (pub. Harper Perennial)

Gaza

The Gaza Strip - quite literally a strip of land, about 25 miles long and four miles wide, crammed to bursting with 1.4 million Palestinians whose olive groves, their primary source of income, have been systematically destroyed by Israeli troops, and whose fishermen are shot at by Israeli soldiers when they set out in their boats to catch an alternative source of food.

The Gaza Strip was invaded in 1967 by Israeli troops and subjected to a 38 year brutal military occupation, which included the 'settling' of Israelis in Gaza as a key strategy of the occupation, and in contravention of international law.

In 2005, Israel withdrew the settlers from Gaza, which allowed it to then hermetically seal off the tiny strip of land, trapping the population inside, and placing severe restrictions on those seeking to deliver aid, including food, water and medical supplies to its impoverished people.

Over the next two years, Israel fired around 16,000 artillery shells into Gaza, killing 120 of the increasingly malnourished civilian population.

In 2004, Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects of the 2005 'settler' withdrawal, explained the Israeli government's reasoning for the forthcoming siege and entrapment of Gaza.

'In a few years' time, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today.

'It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.'

He added: 'The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.' (Interview in The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004)

Between October 2001 and November 2008, nearly 3,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by those Israeli boys and men (a further 2,000 killed in the West Bank), and another 1,300 were massacred in 22 days between December 2008 and January 2009, trapped with no hope of escape. The shelling and killing has continued daily since then, unreported in the Western media.

Israeli spokespeople have admitted that the January assaults on Gaza were planned eight months before Israel broke a six-month ceasefire, negotiated with Hamas - the supposed catalyst for the massacre.

In the same 2001 to 2008 period, Israel has suffered 13 fatalities from home-made Qassam rockets. The Palestinians have no army, no other weapons.

At Israel's disposal are US F-16s, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and naval gunships. Israel's right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has also urged the Israeli government to use its nuclear arsenal against the people of Gaza.

The UN permits an occupied people to resist their occupation; small comfort to a civilian population in the iron grip of the world's fourth-largest military power.

Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Electronic Intifada

Link: International Solidarity Movement

Remember Jenin

It isn't my intention to catalogue on this blog the massacres that have taken place in Palestinian refugee camps since 1949 - eight, including the horrors at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, which led me to go on my first ever protest march, aged 12 - all of which have born the same trademarks of sealing off all entrances to the camp, the systematic and barbarically deliberate execution of babies, children and adults, the banning of the media, the refusal to allow the UN to conduct an inquiry afterwards amid claims of 'bias against Israel', and the complicit observation of those who have the power to intervene, but don't, while Israel's army 'finishes off the job'.

However, I was sent the following blog posting by a friend and said I would pass it on. The original can be found on http://www.palestinechronicle.com/

Remembering Jenin
'Jenin: Such ordinary homes. Such ordinary people..'
By Stephen Williams

The Martyrs' Cemetery is but a few meters from Jenin Refugee Camp. On a warm, sunny day I stood in front of the memorial to the victims of the massacre of 2002 and remembered them, I had long promised to do. I remembered the forgotten.

It is not an imposing monument; had the victims been Israeli, a more grandiose memorial would have been built, perhaps with a museum, perhaps with a carefully-maintained eternal flame. I was disappointed at first. Is this what I had travelled from Occupied Jerusalem to see? Through Ramallah, Nablus and those checkpoints manned by bored, surly adolescent soldiers?

But then I understood; the victims were ordinary people- men, women and children- trying to live ordinary lives, until they came face to face with an extraordinary interruption; the appearance of the highly-mechanised, US- resourced Israel Defence Force at their very their doorsteps. Most of them died in or just outside their homes. Such ordinary homes. Such ordinary people. No huge, imposing monument for them.

The story of the invasion, the heroic resistance and the demolition of Jenin Camp is related in Ramzy Baroud’s "Searching Jenin". The author had written a message to me, “Remember Jenin”, inside the cover of my copy and I was here; to remember.

It had begun on 3 April 2002 with an artillery barrage. The next day, access was blocked; there was no escape for the residents. Apaches, Cobras and tanks did their work. And bulldozers. One of the drivers, known as Kurdi Bear, enjoyed his fifteen minutes of celebrity as he recounted the relish with which he had destroyed the homes of the residents.

“If I’d been given three weeks, I would have had more fun,” he said. As it happens he had only ten days to complete his grisly work while the world’s population watched, some uncaring, some impotently angry, some with smug satisfaction, from outside.

Ramzy Baroud records the names of over sixty shahid, though it is likely that there were many more. The IDF had been able to work in total secrecy during the period the camp was sealed. The camera crews waited beyond the road blocks until it was done.

In retrospect, the attack on Jenin appears to be a ghastly dress-rehearsal for Gaza, the closure, the refusal to allow media access, the executions, the demolitions; and the excuses and the denials. Jenin was “a nest of vipers”, Gaza a “hotbed of fundamentalism”. The IDF is the most moral army in the world.

And just as the UN was coerced by Israel and the US into abandoning an enquiry into Jenin, it would be unwise to expect a different response to Gaza. The victims of the Gaza are no less ordinary than those of Jenin.

But one aspect is different; there is hardly any photographic evidence of what happened during the Jenin assault; we have only moving testimonies and photographs of the aftermath.

In Gaza, on the other hand and much to the unconcealed fury of the Israeli government and its apologists, footage was broadcast, some of it live. The media ban had failed. 21st century technology had played a unique role in an old conflict. And any activist here in the UK will tell you what a devastating effect this has had on public opinion.

Exploring with my Palestinian friend the refugee camp, I confirmed that the houses had been re-built by the UN. He said they were better, much better, than what had been there before.
But Jenin Refugee Camp is still a refugee camp. The streets are narrow, the houses small, the facilities for the children, well over half of the population, depressingly limited.

And they are still refugees. Their homes are across the border. Their fathers’ bones call for them. I remembered another, surprising, victim; my fellow-Briton Ian Hook, a UN engineer employed in the rebuilding. He was shot dead by the Israelis during the reconstruction; his mobile phone, apparently, looked like a gun.

As in all Palestinian refugee camps, the shahid are revered; their posters adorn the shabby streets. I was observing one of them, of two young men in the familiar military pose, when an old man called and invited us into his home.

The two boys were his sons, assassinated by the IDF years after the invasion. Jenin’s agony, Palestine’s agony, did not end with the demolition of the camp, nor did resistance. As he told the story, I couldn’t find the words to console him and so I put my arms around him. He was moved and kissed me.

As I left, I turned to look at him at his door and put my hand on my heart.” I shall remember,” I said in a language he did not understand. He returned the gesture.

Back at the Martyrs’ Graveyard, I stood again in front of that little memorial, so mean and yet now so splendid.

I remembered the shahid of Jenin; thirteen year old Mohammed Omar Hawashin, killed by a sniper; sixty-five year old Muhammed Masoud Abu al- Sibah, crushed to death when an Israeli bulldozer destroyed his home while he was still in it; Miriam Abdullah Wishahe, a fifty-two year old woman who also killed by a sniper. And many, many more.

I remembered the shebab who held the mightiest army in the region at bay for all those terrible, long bloody days, matching their AK47s against Apaches.

And I said a Christian prayer for the souls of the shahid.

- Stephen Williams is based in the UK. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Notes:
  • Jenin Refugee Camp is in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine. The majority of its residents come from Palestinian villages in the Haifa district of what is now Israel. The villages were destroyed by Jewish troops during the ethnic cleansing of 1948/9, and their populations expelled.
  • For 15 days in April 2002, the Israeli army assaulted the camp with helicopters, tanks, bulldozers and troops.
  • In November 2002, co-director of the Jenin Refugee Camp, UNRWA employee, and British national Ian Hook was shot twice in the abdomen. Attempts to evacuate him were delayed for two hours, causing him to bleed to death. He was shot dead while trying to negotiate with Israeli soldiers to evacuate the hundreds of women and children in the UN headquarters receivingvaccinations that day. Witnesses testify to the soldiers’ announcement in English over a loudspeaker not long before shooting Mr. Hook: “We don’t care who you are. Fuck the UN.”
  • See also The Jenin Inquiry Report, compiled by international human rights volunteers, for a detailed account of the atrocities.

The West Bank - Illegal Settlements

'We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. Yes, we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.'

The infamous words of Ariel Sharon, a former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking in 1973. Five years after Israel had invaded and occupied the Palestinian territory known as the West Bank, he outlined the key role that 'settlements' would play in the military strategy of occupation, control and, ultimately, the expansion of Israel.

Another 36 years down the line, with Israel free to ignore UN resolution 242 to withdraw from its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, there are now close to half a million Israeli occupiers, better known as 'settlers', living in the Palestinian West Bank.

This in itself breaches UN resolution 446, which states: ' The policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories [Syria's Golan Heights] occupied since 1967 have no legal validity, and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.'

The occupiers are housed in 200 settlements, which are strategically built on hilltops and surrounded by high walls, on land taken from the Palestinians.

Palestinian villages have been demolished and their inhabitants left homeless, olive groves uprooted by bulldozers and farmland expropriated to construct the settlements, which are then illegally annexed to Israel by the building of major 'by-pass' roads.

These roads take more land from the native Palestinian population and provide high speed links, connecting the settlements to each other and back to Israel.

In a system that reminded Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when he visited the West Bank, of apartheid South Africa, Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads or to cross them, despite the fact that many of the roads separate Palestinian villagers from their farms, schools, or water supply.

This policy has devasted the economic life of the West Bank, with an estimated 46% of Palestinians in the West Bank now living below the poverty line. (In sealed-off Gaza, the figure is 80%)

For every 100km of by-pass road, Israel confiscates around 2,500 acres of Palestinian land, destroying whatever homes or farms happen to be in the way.

Huge earth mounds are built around the roads to prevent Palestinians, reduced to second-class citizens and crammed into ever-shrinking enclaves, from gaining access to them.

Changing the 'physical character and demographic composition' of territories occupied by Israel since 1967 flouts UN resolution 465.

Additionally, 'Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population...in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention'. (Resolution 465)

And while the occupiers, as citizens of Israel, enjoy full civil rights, these same rights are denied to the Palestinians living under military occupation in their own land.

Ironically, settlement building doubled between 1993 and 1995, the period of the Oslo Accords - the US-brokered peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians - even as Israel was signing treaties to freeze settlement building and conduct a staged withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.

'Settlers' are encouraged to populate the West Bank through tax breaks given by the Israeli government, while glossy advertising campaigns in America promise 'fresh mountain air', 'stunning views' and 'wide open spaces' to those who decide to buy a settlement property and emigrate.

Each settler is allocated 1,450 cubic metres of water a year - vital when you have a swimming pool to fill. Palestinians are allocated 83 cubic metres a year, and are forced to pay double for it. The water tanks which sit on the roof of Palestinian houses are a regular target for pot shots by Israeli soldiers.

Settlers are armed and are not prosecuted for shooting Palestinians, making Palestinians a legitimate target as they go to school, to their farms and about their daily business. Road blocks are set up, cars burned , windows smashed and crops destroyed as the settlers violently try to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.

In the meantime, education has virtually ground to a halt, basic healthcare services are dangerously inadequate and the building of the illegal Separation Wall, in addition to just over 1,000 permanent and 'flying' checkpoints has made it almost impossible for Palestinians to move freely within the West Bank.

Since September 2000, 69 Palestinian women have been forced to give birth at Israeli checkpoints resulting in the deaths of 35 newborn babies.

The Wall and the settlements have reduced Palestinian territory within the West Bank to nothing more than a series of bantustans (named after the territory that was set aside for the black inhabitants of South Africa during apartheid).

These enclaves are delibarately separated from each other - leaving no contiguous area that could feasibly form a Palestinian state - by the Wall and the settlements, which are arguably too entrenched now, with fixed populations, to remove.

Ariel Sharon's 1973 vision for the West Bank is, 36 years on, a reality.

Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Innovative Minds
Palestine Monitor: Exposing Life under Occupation
Interpal

Recommended reading: Palestinian Walks - Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh (pub. Profile Books)