Report 6: Steadfastness—In Many Forms?

See pictures at: http://www.forusa.org/programs/ipb/photos/del19-7.htm

Tuesday, July 25

Journey to Bil’in: Condoleeza Rice Intercepts IFPB Delegation near Ramallah

“Thank you for your courage and steadfastness,” said Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, as she concluded a surprise visit to Lebanon and headed to Israel.

Reading these words in the July 25 edition of the International Herald Tribune, I pondered which aggressor Secretary Rice had in mind—Hezbollah, Israel, or her own government. Little did I realize that her visit would require courage and steadfastness of our delegation!

Our destination on Tuesday, July 25, was Bil’in, a Palestinian village north and east of Jerusalem, which has lost more than 50% of its farmland to the wall.  Our plan had been to visit Bil’in first and then proceed to the village of Biddu to spend the night with Palestinian families. We were to connect with our Palestinian guide for these visits in the city of Ramallah.

Not until we arrived in Ramallah did we discover that Palestinians in Ramallah were on strike and were demonstrating against the visit of Secretary Rice, due in Ramallah that very day.  All checkpoints in the area were shut down in order to constrict the movement of traffic. Thus the usual 40 minute drive from Jerusalem to Bil’in became a 3-hour marathon as our bus driver was forced to circle Ramallah trying checkpoint after checkpoint in an attempt to find one where Israeli soldiers would permit us to pass through. At one point we met a speeding convoy of about 30 SUVs, which we assumed to be the entourage of Secretary Rice.

At about 5:00 pm we finally entered the shuttered city of Ramallah, only to learn that the Palestinian who was going to accompany us to Bil’in had been injured in the demonstration and would not be able to come with us. We also discovered that the Israeli military had placed roadblocks around Biddu making it impossible to enter the village for our overnight stays with Palestinian families.

From the newspapers we don’t know exactly what transpired in Secretary Rice’s meetings in Beirut, Jerusalem and Ramallah, but the Palestinians with whom I have spoken are confused and angry with the Secretary’s message that talk of a ceasefire in the war in Lebanon is ‘premature.’

--Don Christensen

Steadfastness

One of the classic Palestinian forms of nonviolent resistance is “sumud,” often translated as ‘steadfastness,’ sticking to the land regardless of the hardships one faces. I was struck by this principle in action as we were shown around Bil’in by Rateb, an organizer with the Popular Committee against the Wall. Despite the fact that we were 2 hours late and the fact that he was unexpectedly our guide since Mansour had been injured, Rateb was full of enthusiasm as he gave us an animated account of Bil’in’s ongoing nonviolent struggle against the wall that has been completed in the area of their village.

Every Friday for over a year and a half, the residents of Bil’in, joined by Israelis and international citizens, have protested the wall which divides the village from its land. Rateb shared with us some of the creative means of resistance: the holding of a wedding party right outside the edge of the military zone that is declared each Friday; the creation of coffins with various human rights painted on their lids, etc. As he walked us up the hill toward a gate in the fence, Rateb told us of the village’s history of struggle, and of their victory in a court case that led to the freezing of construction of the Mattiayahu East settlement on their village lands.

We approached the gate in the fence, guarded by at least 6 Israeli soldiers, and Rateb held his head high, sure of his right to pass through the gate. He interacted with the soldiers with dignity, introducing himself to them as they were ‘new’ soldiers, the regular ones having been sent north due to the war with Lebanon. After brief conversation we went through and walked down to the ‘outpost’ that Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists had erected on a rainy night in December after their original caravan outpost was removed by the Israelis. Despite the pouring rains that fell that night, the group worked to build a small shelter that seemed like a mushroom that appeared out of thin air when the soldiers came back to inspect the area the next morning.

We visited the outpost, a small concrete building and a covered shelter area, complete with mini-generator, satellite dish, and movie screen where they showed “Gandhi” a few weeks ago. Rateb stated proudly that this outpost would only come down once Mattiayahu East came down. They will remain rooted, steadfastly in the land, today, tomorrow, and as long as it takes, protesting creatively each Friday to show that they were here to stay and that they were not willing to lose their land to the wall.

--Maia Hallward

Wednesday, July 26

Reactions to Yad Vashem

On Wednesday, we spent the morning at the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, in West Jerusalem.

The main triangular-shaped building lies like straw buried just under the ground’s surface, so its top is not really seen from an aerial vantage point. This is significant, because the message to me is that the building itself is an intractable part of the land.

Upon entering one end of the building, the first thing that visitors see embedded in the wall is a video of Jews who lived in Poland. It depicts their tranquil lives before they were completely denigrated and slaughtered by the Nazis. The video takes up the entire wall. I could have stayed right there to watch it for some time, not only because it was informative, but also because of its high-quality production values.

As we zigzagged through the triangular tube we were led in and out of exhibits that depicted the entire history of the events that led up to, and beyond, the Holocaust. Each exhibit was accompanied by posters that offered explanations of corresponding historical events. A few quotes from the posters along the way were particularly interesting to me. They were as follows:

“Despoiling the Jews was an integral part of Nazi policy… When war began, the Nazis applied these policies of dispossession and theft to the occupied territories. They confiscated all types of property—homes, real estate, factories, businesses, and artistic and cultural treasures…the plundering continued in the Ghettos….”

“There are in this part of the world [east and central Europe] 6,000,000 Jews…for whom the world is divided into places they cannot enter.” Source: Chaim Weizman, Press of the World Zionist Organization, 1936

“Although Nazi ideology decreed one fate for all Jews in Europe, the occupied countries differed in the way the Nazis implemented their Jewish policies. In Eastern Europe, the Germans incarcerated the Jews in severely overcrowded Ghettos, behind fences and walls. They cut the Jews off from their surroundings and their sources of livelihood, and condemned them to a life of humiliation, poverty, degeneration and death. In Western Europe, the Nazis did not establish Ghettos for the Jews, but rather enforced racist legislation and a policy of Aryanization and discrimination. The anti-Jewish policy was applied gradually, taking into account the attitude of the local population.  Despite the differences in the implementation of anti-Jewish policies in occupied countries, the German’s overall goal regarding the Jews was the same throughout Europe.” [No source.]

These quotes are telling, aren’t they?.  They are to me the starkest example that I have seen here of how people who have been oppressed can fall into the tragic pattern of oppressing others. It was very clear to me that if a few words in these quotes were changed, they would describe the relationship that exists currently between the Israeli government and the Palestinians who live under its occupation.

The museum experience reached a crescendo as the crowds came to the end of the triangular tube-like structure. At its end was a large balcony that led to an opening which exposed the vast landscape of Israel. On the horizon Israeli communities could be seen. All of the emotion which was stimulated in its viewers could easily be transposed to the land. Again, it was clear to me that manipulating visitors into solidifying their commitment to the State of Israel—at all costs—was an objective of those who designed the museum. And if the post-traumatic expression on the faces of those who exited the building was any indication, the designers succeeded in getting the reaction they sought. A clear connection was made between the threat of non-existence and the possession of a “place” they where Jews could dwell in peace.

I found that the museum was not merely for remembrance, but also was used as propaganda to justify Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and its sustained war against “Arab terrorists” in the Middle East. That connection too, I imagine, was made subliminally in the minds of more than a few of those who have visited the museum.

--Diane Ford Jones

Ma’ale Adumin:  Living in a Settlement as a Peace Activist

In the afternoon, we went to visit Leah, an Israeli peace activist, who lives in a beautiful East Jerusalem settlement that was built in 1977.

Leah is a former orthodox Jew who was born in New York and has lived in Canada. She admits that she was extremely right wing when she moved with her husband to Israel to care for her father. She wasn’t interested in knowing “any but her own kind” until the second Intifada. It was then that she felt that neither Palestinians nor the Israeli government were doing anything that would move things forward toward peace.

At that time she met the Interfaith Encounter Association, people who were promoting peace between Palestinians and Israelis by listening to each other’s stories about centuries-old attachment “to what is really God’s land.” Now Leah is trying to initiate Arabic studies from kindergarten up to promote mutual understanding, volunteers with Rabbis for Human Rights, and demonstrates with Palestinians who are harassed while trying to harvest their olive crops.

She was born into a family of Holocaust survivors but rebelled at the social restrictions that placed upon her. She became “a gung-ho Zionist,” but later began to rethink the Sara and Hagar story and to reconsider the relationship between their descendants. She believes in God but a forgiving God, not a punitive God, who is the God of all people. “Revenge leads us all nowhere; Jerusalem means the city of peace and wholeness,” she said.

She favors mixed communities of Palestinians and Jews where socializing together would be natural. There is a village where she says this currently happens. There is no place of worship there except an inter-religious spiritual center which is open to all. And there are some mixed families in residence.

Leah said that that the existence of Yad Vashem affirms that the Holocaust actually happened, but also feels “the lack of memorials for Arab villages that have been demolished. Before the 1880’s there were always Arab/Jewish communities here. After that there was a large scale Jewish influx that resulted in second class citizenship for Arabs.” Nevertheless, her group feels that the wall is needed for now, but they don’t like it.

Ma’ale Adumim, the settlement that Leah lives in, has a population of 40,000, a community college,  three medical clinics and banks, a mayor, and government ministries. Leah seems pleased that “Bedouin Arab service people maintain it as a well kept city set apart from the poorer municipally of greater Jerusalem.”

Her group tries to meet in public places in West Jerusalem so that others can actually see a mixed group and she regrets that “once the children of Palestinians leave here and go to the US for a while, they cannot come back.” Her organization emphasizes “finding commonalities in the Muslim, Jewish and Christian faiths,” and they try to stick to that.  She says Palestinians don’t tell their families about their interfaith participation for fear of being labeled collaborators and subjected to death threats.

Between 5pm - 8 pm tomorrow, she said, there would be a “Sulha,” the Arabic word for reconciliation, a gathering of bereaved parents who are Palestinian and Israeli who would stand together in front of the Knesset with banners emphasizing the need for forgiveness. A much larger Sulha is planned for later but she wondered if Palestinians would be able to participate saying, “Why won’t they let them out?”

--Diane Ford Jones