Stories From Occupied Palestine

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Monday August 02, 2010 14:26 by JMC & YOD mccabej1 at tcd dot ie

This is a brief account of our travels to the West Bank in June 2010.

We visited the West Bank in June of this year for nine days - far too short a time to do justice to such a wonderful place and such welcoming people.

After being held at the Israeli border for over 5 hours we made our way to Jerusalem. When you dare to visit Syria you are, by default, deemed a security threat to the Israeli state. Unfortunately two of our travel party had Syrian visas in their passports. Only after lying to the authorities that we had no intention of visiting the West Bank were we allowed to continue on our way. Interestingly, just one week earlier at the same border crossing Noam Chomsky made the mistake of being honest enough to admit he intended to visit the West Bank on a lecturing tour. He was denied access. Obviously Professor Chomsky is a security threat. He might encourage Palestinian people to continue their legitimate struggle against Israeli occupation.

There is no city in the world comparable to Jerusalem with its cultural and religious mix, Muslims, Christians and Jews, mosques, synagogues and churches. As much of mankind’s history and culture as possible is concentrated in one city. If the world were to have a capital city, Jerusalem would have to be it. Breath taking as it is, you cannot help but feel intimidated and unsettled in Jerusalem by the weight of the Israeli security presence there. With Israeli soldiers and policemen at every corner of the street, always in pairs, always armed to the hilt and almost always too young, it doesn’t take long to get the message that the Israeli state is very much in charge here and Palestinians are not free. It doesn’t take very long to realise that this is a place of occupation: the Israelis are the occupiers and the Palestinians the occupied.

We arrived in Bethlehem next and it was there we saw the grey ugly separation barrier that cordons off most of the West Bank (and the Palestinian inhabitants within) from Jerusalem. It is this security wall that symbolises Israel as an Apartheid state. In April 2006, the length of the barrier approved by the Israeli government was 703km. In a 2004 the International Court of Justice found that "the construction of the wall, and its associated regime, are contrary to international law." In urban areas such as Bethlehem the barrier consists of an 8 metre high concrete wall. The wall in Bethlehem has virtually imprisoned the Palestinian occupants within, most of whom are not permitted from travelling to their capital city, Jerusalem, just 10km away. Can you imagine living in Palmerstown or Finglas or Blanchardstown and not being allowed travel to Dublin city centre, your own capital city, to work, to visit your family and friends, to socialise?

We made contact with a Palestinian guide in Bethlehem. He was a second-generation refugee. Like 750,000 other Palestinians, the Israelis had driven his parents from their homes in 1948 before he was born. He had been imprisoned at the age of 16 by the Israeli government for protesting during the First Intifada in the 1980s, when the Palestinian people rose up in resistance against the Israeli occupation. It was illegal in those days even to raise a Palestinian flag in the refugee camp. Now he makes his living as a tourist guide. He has recently been threatened by the Israeli authorities and is in danger of losing his licence as a guide for telling visitors to Bethlehem about the political situation. He brought us up to a height overlooking the town from where we could see the grey Apartheid wall surrounding the historic town with several Israeli settlements looming large outside. Israeli settlements are small to medium sized towns constructed on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As of July 2009, approximately 304,569 Israelis live in the 121 officially recognised settlements in the West Bank and a further 192,000 Israelis live in settlements in East Jerusalem. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights centre, more than fifty percent of the land of the West Bank has been expropriated from Palestinian owners "mainly to establish settlements and create reserves of land for the future expansion of the settlements".

Our guide brought us to Hebron, another Palestinian town under heavy occupation by Israeli forces. What we saw in Hebron will haunt us for the rest of our lives. An Israeli settlement of about 500 people exists right in the town centre under the protection of hundreds of Israeli soldiers who impose the brutality of the occupation on the local Palestinian people. Checkpoints, curfews and security cameras restrict Palestinians' every waking moment, their work, their social life, their worship, and their freedom of movement. There are daily reports of harassment, physical attacks and property damage by Israeli soldiers and settlers on the local population. We will never forget the image of piles of rubbish built up on the barbed wire above the Palestinian market, which had been thrown down by the Israeli settlers from their settlements above. Nor will we forget the bullet holes in the walls of the Ibrahimi Mosque, where on February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler opened fire on Muslims at prayer, killing 29 people. These are images of Israeli oppression that are etched in our memory.

We arrived in Ramallah, which is one of Palestine’s cultural capitals. It is here you get a strong sense of the Palestinian identity. It is a town alive with young students. Everyone is friendly. Everybody wants to tell you their story of what life is like under siege. They are quick to identify you as somebody who is sympathetic to their cause and they welcome you as a guest and as a comrade. When you say that you are Irish they reply ‘Ah yes, then you understand what this is like. The same thing has happened to you. Occupation.’ To be fair, we could never have understood just how bad the situation is in Palestine had we not seen it with our own eyes. Nevertheless it shows how ordinary people can be from entirely different backgrounds and cultures, and yet they can understand and relate to one another through struggle.

In the town of Nablus we visited Balata refugee camp. This is one of the most densely populated spots on the planet with between 30,000 to 40,000 people living in 2 kilometres squared. It was the refugees of Balata who were the first Palestinians in the West Bank to rise up and resist the occupation at the beginning of the First Intifada in the 1980s. The spirit of resistance is strong here. We met the family of a Palestinian freedom fighter who was murdered by the notorious Israeli Defence Force (IDF). His parents and his brother took us into their living room and made us some coffee. There were pictures of him on the wall, a young man in his twenties, about the same age as us. It was then we began to fully realise the true nature of the struggle that Palestinian people are engaged in. In situations where a whole nation of people are oppressed, occupied, humiliated and terrorised, there comes a time when ordinary people begin to resist. When you hold someone down long enough and humiliate them, when you lock them in a cage and degrade them, and when you steal from them the land that is theirs, you should not find it surprising when they begin to fight you back with everything they’ve got. To Israel, the United States and vast swaths of the western media, anyone who resists in this manner is a terrorist. Of course this is not surprising coming from the same people who once deemed Nelson Mandela a terrorist. He resisted too. The Israeli occupation is illegitimate and illegal. Where there is oppression there is resistance, and the Palestinian people have a right to resist.

Jenin, in the north, was the last stop on our trip. We visited Jenin refugee Camp which houses 16,000 people in 0.5 square kilometres. It was here that a famous battle took place between the occupying IDF and Palestinian militants during the Second Intifada in April 2002. During the course of the battle the IDF used Caterpillar Bulldozers to force their way into the camp, demolishing homes and neighbourhoods in their path. By the end of the end of the battle, over 50 Palestinians were killed, about half of whom were civilians, hundreds of people were injured and 4,000 were left homeless. In the aftermath, Human Rights Watch claimed that many of the cases of civilian casualties constituted war crimes. The camp had been reconstructed when we visited it, but many hallmarks of the destruction were still clearly to be seen. We were also shown the Freedom Theatre, in the heart of Jenin Camp. It is a project set up to encourage the growth of the arts and theatre among the youth of Jenin, to empower them and give them the means to challenge the harsh social reality they find themselves in. The project is a continuation of the Stone Theatre, which was set up by a Jewish lady, Arna Mer Khamis, and destroyed by the Israeli Invasion of the camp in 2002. One thing we learned about on our travels was that resistance to the occupation comes in many diverse forms other than just the physical aspect of resistance. The Western media neglect to mention projects such as the Freedom Theatre, the Siraj Centre in Bethlehem, which we also visited, and the many projects in towns and refugee camps throughout Palestine that aim to inspire and to educate the Palestinian people, especially the youth, to acquire the skills to resist and organise against the occupation through non-violent means.

Our travels in Palestine came to an end in Jericho. The struggle for justice for Palestine and its people goes on, but they are not alone, nor are they forgotten. We will never forget the kindness and warmth of the Palestinian people who welcomed us into their homes and their land, and taught us the importance of ordinary people sticking together and resisting oppression whenever or wherever we are faced with it.

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