Observations from Occupied Palestine, Part 1 + Part 2
The daily suffering and humiliation of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Zionists is captured by Eva Bartlett, an International Solidarity Movement activist, who has spent much time in Occupied Palestine.
Since May 2007, I have lived in different parts of Occupied Palestine witnessing the crimes of the Zionist entity and sharing in the daily tragedies, injustices and realities of the Palestinians. In 2007, I volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement for eight months in the Occupied West Bank during which time I was detained at a protest against a Jewish-only highway, arrested at a roadblock removal action, and was finally deported and banned from Occupied Palestine.
During those months, I was witness to the ugliest aspects of life under Zionist rule: attacks by illegal armed Jewish colonists and by Zionist soldiers on Palestinian children, women, and the elderly; humiliating military checkpoints, some with zoo-like turnstiles all of which serve to delay or completely prevent the Palestinians’ movement; and raids and weeks-long lockdowns on Palestinian towns and cities, in which the Zionist army ransacked homes and usually abducted one or more member of the family, including children. There are currently 195 Palestinian children in Zionist prisons.
In Susiya, a hamlet in the South Hebron Hills, I witnessed land being stolen and quickly annexed by the illegal Jewish colonists. As we were documenting this annexation, a colonist gleefully admitted that the land was Palestinian but that the grape vines they’d planted on the land were worth 60,000 shekels (roughly $17,500) and were intended for wine production. “It doesn’t matter. See, the grapes we grow will be wine. And I will drink the wine. It doesn’t matter at all that you speak.”
I slept in the tents sharing space with Palestinian families who two decades earlier had been evicted from their homes. They now reside in ramshackle tents that also have been demolished by the Zionist army many times — and always under threat of the next demolition. We stayed with them in hopes of preventing the inevitable attacks by the nearby colonists. Hajj Khalil, an elder in his eighties, had been brutally beaten by the colonists the year before I met him. He was again brutally beaten along with his wife the year after meeting him.
In encounters with the army, which has a military base near Susiya, I would often hear them call the occupied West Bank “Judea and Samaria,” testament to their ignorance and brainwashing. Then again, the Zionist occupation army does not pretend to recognize Palestine either — historic or current — its website likewise referring to it as “Judea and Samaria.”
Al-Khalil (Hebron) itself is one of the most phenomenally brazen examples of illegal Jewish colonists’ control of Palestinian land. Some 800 heavily armed colonists have run H2, an area of al-Khalil under full Zionist control. Particularly in Tel Rumeida, attacks have been frequent and severe over the years, their sadistic aggressions supported by Zionist soldiers. Palestinians of all ages are frequently targeted, and families have been brutally evicted from their homes by the colonists who then occupy them (on February 25, 1994, a Zionist colonist from Brooklyn, New York, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers including children and injured more than 100 others in the Ibrahimi Masjid during Fajr (early morning) prayers. He was overpowered and killed in the melee. The Zionists erected a monument to him to glorify his murderous act).
Many times over in Occupied Palestine, I found myself and other solidarity activists doing things which seemed to be an utter waste of time. In al-Khalil, for instance, we would stand for hours near the military checkpoints and monitor whether Palestinians were unduly being held back or prevented passage by the Zionist soldiers.
In some cases our presence shamed the soldiers and Palestinians were allowed passage, but in most cases the soldiers were so belligerent they didn’t care whether we saw (and filmed) their acts of cruelty against Palestinians. Often we, too, were detained or arrested by the Zionist soldiers when refusing to leave an area suddenly deemed a “closed military zone,” a tactic the Zionist army uses to both keep Palestinians and internationals out of an area, and also to annex more Palestinian land (as was the case of Susiya).
On Shuhada (Martyrs) Street — once a thriving and prosperous main street of al-Khalil, now a ghost-street, homes shuttered and racist, hate-graffiti sprayed on doors and walls — we would sit for hours under the sun, merely as a presence which might dissuade the colonists from attacking Palestinian children as they walked to school, or Palestinian women and elders as they moved about. Sitting for hours seemed like a colossal waste of time, but in many cases being present did actually enable a degree of safe passage.
We participated in rebuilding homes demolished by the Zionist military under feeble pretexts such as lack of building permits (Israeli-granted) or zoning laws. On one such occasion the family we were with was rebuilding for a third time. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions estimates that at least 27,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967 (not including those bombed in Gaza). Under the “Prawer Plan,” the Zionists intend to displace 70,000 Palestinians with “Israeli” citizenship, destroying 35 villages in the Naqab (Negev) desert, Occupied Palestine.
In olive season, we joined families in areas known for brutal attacks by the illegal colonists, harvesting olives with the Palestinian locals until the inevitable attacks occurred. On one occasion, a Palestinian received a nasty head wound from the huge rocks slung at him. I narrowly missed being hit by a rock on the temple, my camera-hand blocking it. The six or so colonists on a hill above us were not chagrined when we yelled that they were going to kill someone. It was, after all, their intent.
Another absurdity during olive harvest season, and in general to any farmer trying to access his/her land, is the need to obtain a permit, one granted (or not) by the Zionists. And even with this permit, there is no guarantee that the Palestinians will be able access and work on their land.
During a military invasion in the old city of Nablus, in the north of the West Bank, we walked the streets to bring food to Palestinians trapped in their homes, and escorted those who had been outside of their homes when the “curfew” (lock-down) was imposed. At one point during the evening lock-down, after escorting three women to houses surrounded by Zionist soldiers, a Palestinian medic we were with was taken captive by the soldiers, blindfolded and hand-cuffed, and used as a human shield to deter Palestinian resistance from fighting back against the invading soldiers. None of our attempts to negotiate his release were successful; informing the soldiers that taking civilians — medics at that — captives as human shields, was illegal but it had absolutely no impact. After all, Zionists are above the law…
Bil‘in, a village north of Ramallah, was one of the first villages to protest the gargantuan, illegal wall the Zionists are building which snakes deeply into the already occupied West Bank. Since 2005, men, women, children, and elders from Bil‘in have marched every Friday on their land, protesting this latest Zionist annexation and the loss of 60% of village land. They are systematically met with an assault of live ammunition, rubber-coated metal bullets, and volleys of tear gas.
The “rubber” bullets are in fact metal bearings with a very thin coating of rubber, often intentionally split open before being shot, in order to inflict maximum injury. They are meant for use only on the legs, but Zionist soldiers routinely shoot at the face.
The amount of tear gas fired on Bil‘in protesters is staggering, but more lethal is the manner in which they are fired: often they are shot directly at the person, which in the case of Bassam Abu Rahme resulted in death. Shot from a mere few metres away with a high-velocity tear gas canister, Bassam did not survive. As of his killing in April 2009, he was the 18th person murdered by the Zionist army for protesting against the wall; many 14–16 year olds and a 10-year-old are among the dead.
Those seen as organizers are systematically abducted, both during the demonstrations and also during night raids on the village, and are usually kept without charge for months on end, some of the 134 Palestinians being held in Zionist prisons under “administrative detention.”
Participating in Bil‘in and the numerous other Palestinian villages holding such nonviolent protests, we marched with them and were likewise debilitated by the clouds of tear gas. When it seemed the army was going to abduct a Palestinian, we would attempt to “de-arrest” him/her. On one occasion, by wrapping our limbs around Adeeb, one of Bil‘in’s many times abducted protester, we managed to fend off his arrest, but took a beating to the body and kicking to the head before the soldiers lobbed a tear gas canister directly at us.
The irony of such brutality on the various nonviolent protests is that corporate media often say, “Why aren’t there any Palestinian peace activists?” But every day of surviving under Zionist rule is in itself nonviolent protest, not to mention the actual demonstrations happening every week.
While I have witnessed horrific acts of violence and degradation against Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist army and colonists, in my nearly four years in Occupied Palestine, I have also surprisingly seen much beauty, generosity, culture, and resilience.
This would not be surprising to anyone who knows Palestinians, but to an observer hearing only of the various wars the Zionist State inflicts on the Palestinians, one would hardly expect beauty and life to flourish.
However, suffering and tragedy far outweigh joy and hope, in an imbalance similar to that of the power imbalance between the heavily-armed Zionist State and the armed-with rocks-and-homemade-rockets occupied Palestinians.
The least I can do, we can do, is to work on shifting that power imbalance, toward one of justice.
Eva Bartlett is a member of the International Solidarity Movement and spent much time in Occupied Palestine. In December 2008 she was in Gaza and lived through the Israeli onslaught against the enclave.
Observations from Occupied Palestine Part 2
The tiny Gaza Strip has suffered for decades at the hands of the zionists. Eva Bartlett shares her personal experiences from the besieged strip.
Unusually heavy torrential rains last month inundated much of Gaza, which was already reeling from a tight Israeli-Egyptian siege since 2006. Hundreds of thousands of people have been affected with more than 5,000 evacuated from their homes. The Gaza Strip, a 40km long, 12km at its widest point, 365 square metre strip of land is host to 1.7 million Palestinians, two thirds of whom are refugees.
While Gaza’s suffering extends several decades, since 2006 much of the world has cut ties with Gaza, and since 2007 Israel, supported by Egyptian and Western powers, has enforced a full blockade on the Strip. It is not merely an economic blockade, but rather a full lock-down on movement, goods, access to health care abroad, and limiting the import of fuel, cooking gas, and medicines, to name some items, into the enclave. It impacts on every facet of life imaginable.
In November 2008, I joined a boat of European parliamentarians sailing from Cyprus to the Strip, attempting to symbolically break the blockade. Apart from the act of solidarity, it was also my sole means of entering Gaza. With all but one border crossing controlled by Israel, and the remaining crossing by the complicit Mubarak regime in Egypt, entry by sea was the only option. However, the outcome was not certain: Israel also controls Palestinian waters.
Organized by the Free Gaza movement, the November sailing was the third of its kind. Two more boats reached Palestinian shores before Israeli warships began violently obstructing passage, including ramming one boat. Two years later, machine-gun firing elite Israeli commandos air-dropped onto one of a fleet of six boats sailing to Gaza. They boarded the other boats, beating passengers. Nine passengers were killed and over 50 injured on the Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010 in this illegal act in international waters.
I joined a handful of other human rights activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to begin what would be over two years of the most surreal and horrific experiences as an activist I have ever had. Our work comprised accompanying farmers and fishermen as they attempted to work their trades, routinely coming under machine-gun fire from Zionist soldiers. In the case of the fishermen, they are also subject to shelling and heavy-powered water cannon attacks — the force of which shatters windows, splits wooden structural components of boats, and destroys electronic navigation equipment. The Israeli navy also often adds a chemical to the spray which leaves the soaked victims stinking of excrement for days.
In one assault on fishermen, the navy first sprayed machine-gun fire at a fishing trawler one kilometer off Gaza’s northern coast for about 15 minutes then fired a missile which set the boat aflame. The fishermen jumped overboard and were saved, but the boat did not make it. Gutted by flames, the vessel was destroyed, and along with it the livelihood of the eight or so fishermen who regularly worked on the boat.
Half an hour into my first venture out with fishermen, in November 2008, an Israeli gunboat charged us, swerving at the last minute. Intimidation. The fishermen scrambled to reel up their nets. Soon after, another gunboat sped toward us, water cannon firing. Our trawler managed to escape before the dousing. This minor harassment pales in comparison to the repeated assaults that usually occur when fishermen try to fish even a few miles off the coast. Under the Oslo Accords, Palestinian fishermen have the right to fish 20 nautical miles out into the sea, but under Israeli rule six miles is the limit. Often, when the fishermen are attacked at sea, it is repeatedly as the Israeli navy follows them from one location to the next, rendering their fishing efforts largely fruitless.
Fishermen are routinely abducted, their boats stolen by the navy. If the boats are returned, it is usually after many months, and stripped bare of nets and equipment. The process of abducting fishermen usually plays out as follows: one or more Zionist gunboats attack the fishing trawler (or the small, rowed boats common in Gaza) with machine-gun fire and/or shelling; the navy orders the fishermen to strip down to their underwear, dive into the water, and often makes the fishermen swim or tread water for extended periods, regardless of water temperature. Fishermen are then hauled aboard, abducted to a detention centre, and interrogated about anything but fishing.
A similar policy of intimidation plays out daily in Gaza’s border regions, where farmers and anyone working or living near the border face potential machine-gun fire or shelling. This includes some of the Strip’s poorest — usually children — who work in border regions collecting stones and rubble (from Zionist-destroyed homes) for resale in the construction industry. These laborers face danger twice over: the threat of being targeted by machine-gunning/shelling, and the threat of unexploded ordnances beneath the rubble exploding when disturbed.
During the 2008–2009 war on Gaza, in addition to warplane bombings, many homes in the border regions were destroyed by demolition explosives. This tactic was in tandem with the intentional destruction of wells and cisterns in border regions. Tanks and bulldozers churned up huge swaths of land into unworkable mounds of earth. The combination of this rendered the areas flanking the border unlivable, and almost impossible to farm.
Zionist soldiers routinely target farmers who attempt to access their land, be they elderly or children (male and female). A 50-meter “buffer zone” established unilaterally by the Israelis on the Palestinian side in the mid-1990s, has over the years been expanded to the current 300-metre “buffer zone.” In reality, the actual policy is one of attacking Palestinians as far as two kilometres from the border.
This off-limits area steals roughly one third of Gaza's agricultural land, which happens to be some of the most fertile soil in the Strip. This is an area formerly known as Gaza’s “bread-basket” for the many olive, fruit and nut trees, wheat and rye, lentils and chickpeas, and various vegetables and fruit that once grew abundantly on these lands. Now, in the name of “security,” every week or two, armored bulldozers accompanied by tanks, flatten swaths of farmland, even beyond the Zionist-imposed 300-metre limit.
We accompanied farmers planting wheat or harvesting their crops, often low-growing crops like parsley or lentils. While doing this, they routinely come under fire from Zionist soldiers in jeeps or shooting sniper-style from dirt mounds along the border fence. Some of the farmers are paid laborers, earning the equivalent of five dollars a day, at best, which they contribute to their families' income. Others are grandparents, grandchildren, working land their families have farmed for generations.
Military gun towers are spread along the length of the border, including remotely-controlled towers with swiveling machine guns fired by soldiers with joysticks in control rooms, kilometres away. Our policy was to stand with arms raised and visibly empty of anything that could be construed as threatening, and to stay in place until the farmers wanted to leave. It was about farmers reclaiming land they are being forcibly pushed off by Zionist policies and shootings. We wore only a thin fluorescent vest, and most of us carried still or video cameras to document the aggressions.
When the soldiers shoot, it is often after monitoring farmers for extended periods to find a suitable time (from their perspective) to shoot. In one such instance, the army watched us working on land over 500 metres from the border for two hours, choosing the moment when the farm laborers were pushing a stalled pickup truck full of parsley to begin sniping at them. Although we stood in front of the farmers, between them and the soldiers, the latter shot around us, hitting a 17-year-old deaf farm laborer in his calf.
In another instance, we came under heavy fire for over 40 minutes from Israeli soldiers roughly 500 metres away. The farmers lay flat on the ground, with no cover to protect them. We stood, bullets flying within metres of our hands, head, feet. The Canadian embassy called me to say they would do nothing and that humanitarian workers should be aware of the Israeli security policies in Gaza's border regions.
Even if the injury is not immediately fatal, people who are shot in the border areas risk bleeding to death before reaching medical care. Ambulances, also targeted by Zionist shooting and shelling, cannot risk coming too close to the border. So when Ahmed Deeb, a 21-year-old who attended a protest against the border policies, was shot in his femoral artery, by the time a group of young men carried him to an ambulance further away, he had lost so much blood that he died upon reaching the hospital.
On my birthday in 2009, we joined Palestinian volunteers in Gaza’s northern region of Beit Hanoun to search for the corpse of a young man gone missing two months prior. A shepherd in the area had reported having smelt what seemed to be a dead body in the northeastern region near the border fence. As we walked in line, combing the ground for the body, Zionist soldiers began firing at us. The dead man’s father walked with us, ducking with each shot fired our way. The bullets came closer and more quickly as we located the badly decomposed body, loaded him onto a sheet, and hauled him away, the father wailing. The Zionists deny Palestinians even the dignity of recovering the bodies of their loved ones.
During the 2008–2009 war on Gaza, which killed at least 1419, we volunteered with the Palestinian Red Crescent, riding in their ambulances and documenting the atrocities and war crimes. Our intent in accompanying the ambulances was to deter the warplanes, tanks and drones from attacking medics. We were spurned on by the fact that in the first week two medical workers were killed and 15 more injured in the line of duty (by the end of the 23 days of attacks, 23 emergency workers had been killed and 50 injured). Medics and rescue workers under the Geneva Conventions are to be provided safe access to the injured and dead. In Gaza, as with so many other things, international law is totally ignored by the Zionists and medics are prevented from reaching those calling for them. Medics are also targeted.
In the first few minutes of the 2008–2009 attack, Zionist warplanes targeted police stations in densely populated areas throughout the Strip. Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s main hospital, was a chaotic mass of people seeking out loved ones amongst bodies scattered all over the place. The floors were covered with people suffering from wounds of varying degrees of severity, waiting for treatment, including in the under-equipped ICU. Ambulances and cars screamed past in an endless stream, dropping off the injured and the dead.
The Red Crescent station in the east of Jabalia, Northern Gaza, was as of our second morning with the medics too dangerous to access: the land invasion had begun during the night, shells flying dangerously close to the building. By morning it was impossible to access, and by the end of the attacks we returned to find it studded with machine-gun fire and hit by shells. Also by the second morning, a medic I had worked with throughout the evening was killed by a dart bomb fired at his ambulance.
During the course of accompanying the medics I saw people horrifically burned and maimed by white phosphorous used in various locations throughout Gaza. The most infamous was the bombing over Fakhoura, the UN school, then a sanctuary for internally-displaced. When white phosphorous rained down on the school, 42 civilians were killed and many more horrifically maimed by the chemical weapon. White phosphorous burns until deprived of oxygen.
I also saw terrified civilians who had been kept hostage by the army, denied food, water, medicine, and in many cases terrorized. People streaming from areas all over northern Gaza, on foot, under the bombs, seeking safety where none is to be had. And victims of drone strikes: the army employs the “double-tap” bombing method: strike an area and strike again within minutes, precision-bombing those who have come to help victims of the first strike. I will never forget the shrill wailing of a man whose wife was caught in that fatal second “tap,” shrieking as he picked up the pieces of his beloved and accompanied her to the morgue.
Many atrocities later, at the end of 23 days of incessant bombing, we began to see the immensity of the attacks Strip-wide. People assassinated point-blank, including children; families buried alive in bombings of entire buildings, the survivors then denied medical care for days until many died of injuries; racist hate graffiti left on the walls of homes occupied by Zionist soldiers; football-field sized earthen pits used to hold prisoners stripped naked, held for days, some of whom were then taken to Israeli prisons; hospitals bombed, including with white phosphorous, a rehabilitation hospital where most of the patients were invalids; kindergartens, universities, mosques, markets, schools, and farms, bombed and destroyed.
This nightmare scenario replayed itself in November 2012 during eight days of Israeli bombing which killed 171 Palestinians. Not only did the army massacre more Palestinians, but it also wreaked havoc on the Strip’s infrastructure, again destroying key bridges, water and sewage lines, schools, a soccer stadium, health clinics and hospitals, and television stations, leaving Palestinians again to clean up the mess of Israel’s war games. At the same time, Israeli authorities have restricted and now banned construction materials into Gaza, rendering the re-building of destroyed homes and buildings nearly impossible.
Even without the massacres and shootings, life is beyond unbearable in Gaza. In 2006, Zionist warplanes bombed Gaza’s sole power plant, which at the time provided roughly half of the Strip’s energy needs. Since then, the ban on construction materials and replacement parts has meant that the plant has never fully been rehabilitated, the dearth of power causing rolling blackouts. In good times, power outages are only 6–8 hours long every day. Currently, with a fuel shortage generated both by the complicity of the Ramallah regime and bombing of the lifeline tunnels between Gaza and Egypt, Gaza is so short of fuel to run its power plant that the power outages average 14–18 hours per day.
This dangerously impacts the health, sanitation, water, education, and industrial sectors. Hospital life-support equipment, operation rooms, ICUs, dialysis machines, refrigerators for plasma and medicines, and even simple hygienic laundering services are all affected. Sanitation plants, already over-worked for want of repair and expanded sewage holding pools, end up dumping 90 million litres or more sewage into the sea; under power outages dumping is compounded, and sewage pools sometimes overflow into residential areas, as has recently happened in a district of Gaza City.
I visited a few tunnels during my time in Gaza. Though some of the hundreds of tunnels running from Gaza to Egypt have been fortified and are large enough to bring in banned items, like vehicles, or even camels, the tunnels I saw were small, weakly-fortified in patches with wood planks, and overlapping neighbouring tunnels side by side, one over another. Those working in the tunnels are among Gaza’s desperately poor, working long, unbearably hot hours for a pittance, and always subject to the dangers of tunnel collapse, electrocution from poor wiring inside, or Zionist bombings.
But the tunnels at least allowed into Gaza things banned or limited by the Zionist regime. From 2008 to 2010, these banned items included random things like diapers, A4 paper, livestock, seeds, fertilizers, shoes, and pasta. The Israeli regime went as far as to calculate the minimum amount of calories needed to keep Palestinians not quite fully starving (see: Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines). Even after partial easing of some of these ridiculous restrictions, the tunnels were still critical to the import of adequate amounts of fuel and cooking gas.
Following the July 2013 military coup in Egypt, the majority of Gaza’s tunnels have been destroyed on orders from Israel, resulting in drastic shortage of fuel, cooking gas, and construction materials.
Damage to the coastal aquifer from over-extraction will be irreversible in 2020 if no action is taken now, a 2012 UN report notes. At the moment, 95% of water in Gaza is undrinkable according to WHO standards.
The manufactured layers of crises rendering life in Gaza utterly unbearable, and dangerous, have continued to escalate while at the same time, the media blackout on Gaza continues. From my experiences in the Strip, including meetings with the different water, sanitation, health and agriculture officials, I learned that the current 80% dependence on food aid could be reversed, unemployment rates lowered, and a decent quality of life possible if, and only if, the blockade is lifted, exports and freedom of movement allowed, and Israeli attacks on farmers and fishermen halted.
Until then, and until world leaders, including Canada's own, stop their blind support of the Zionist regime and act to enforce the numerous UN resolutions affording justice to Palestinians, the suffering will only worsen.
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Source: Crescent - Part 1, Part 2. Photo 1: The People's Voice. Photo 2: © N/A
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2014/01/31/observations-from-occupied-palestine-part
