Dear friends,
The Boston delegation has left and I have a couple days off before going back to work in Hares, so I guess there’s no excuse not to write. These two weeks have been stressful but truly incredible. The stress comes from helping to plan and lead a group of people around a place in which it is impossible to plan ahead or know how long it might take to get from place to place on any given day. I feel really blessed to have been able to do this, though, both to share my knowledge, experiences, and relationships with the folks from Boston and also to meet new people and see new places.
I think the condensed West Bank experience helps elucidate the real issues of occupation. Almost every place we went has been or will be severely affected by the Wall. In rural areas the loss of land is by far the most significant issue. Israel continues to operate with a policy of “maximum land, minimum people,” meaning that the Wall is often built between villages’ lands and their buildings, effectively annexing the land into Israel while leaving the people in the West Bank. Already farmers question the monetary value of harvesting their crops, in part because the system of roadblocks and checkpoints make it virtually impossible to transport Palestinian goods from place to place. Israeli trucks pass with no problem and Israeli goods flood the Palestinian market. Now, with the Wall separating Palestinians from their land and requiring them to get permits to pass through at designated times (which are not always respected) and with designated people (who are not always respected), farmers are almost positive that working their land will provide them with a net loss. The problem: if they don’t harvest their land for three years, Israel can “legally” claim it as state land, meaning Jewish-only land. Perhaps you can begin to see how the system works.
Urban areas face similar issues, although we hear the word “unemployment” far more often. The Wall is just one more obstruction to freedom of movement and thus access to employment, one more blow to a population who has received far too many blows already.
And of course, in both urban and rural areas, both Muslim and Christian areas, the prison issue is never far from people’s minds. Between 650,000 and 700,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. This comprises about 20% of the population, and since a vast majority of them are men, this means that about 40% of Palestinian men have been in prison. Very few of them have had civil trials. Military tribunals are the rule of law here. The judges and lawyers are military officers who, until recently, were not required to have had any legal training to assume these posts. The defense lawyers are often not allowed to communicate with their clients and neither the lawyer nor the accused is allowed to attend the proceedings or see any of the evidence (if there is any) against the accused. In fact, no evidence is needed if two witnesses testify against someone. So if a 14 year old boy is arrested and the army can convince two of his friends to testify that he threw a stone at a jeep, the boy could spend a few years in prison. Then there’s administrative detention, where any Palestinian can be held without charges for a period of 6 months, and that 6-month period is indefinitely renewable. Sound familiar to any Americans out there? It seems like the US has been learning a little something from Israel (many people said this after the Abu Ghraib story broke, since the methods of torture used there were so similar to the methods of torture Israel has used against Palestinians for years).
The military orders themselves, upon which all of this is based, are constantly updated and not often publicized. For example, the military keeps a list of banned books for which Palestinians can be imprisoned for possessing. One of them is a list of UN resolutions on the issue of Palestine. No commentary, no analysis, just the list.
I’m writing so much about the prisoner issue here not only because it is one near and dear to my heart, but because the 7,500 Palestinian prisoners who are currently being held in Israeli jails are on their 15th day of a hunger strike. It overwhelms me when I really think about it, and makes me incredibly upset when I realize that the mainstream world press has virtually ignored this and I’m not even sure that most of you know about the strike.
The hunger strike is different than previous ones of years past. They have no political demands (for instance, their release), but instead a whole list of humanitarian demands. They want adequate food and water, they want the Israeli guards to stop throwing tear gas into their prison cells, they want medical care, they want their families to be able to visit them. Israel’s response has been, “Let them die.” The guards have taken to barbecuing meat in front of the fasting prisoners, and, more significantly, refusing to give them salt. Apparently a little bit of salt in water can prevent the human stomach from deteriorating completely. Many prisoners have been taken to the hospital already, and every day I wait to hear news of prisoner deaths. I don’t think there have been any so far, but it’s only a matter of time.
Our delegation visited the prisoner solidarity tents in many cities and villages, and found women, men, and children sitting and fasting from dawn to dusk as they held framed pictures of their loved ones in prison. Most of them want to tell us their stories. They tell us how the soldiers barged into their houses at night, beat them and/or their children, threw their food on the floor and stamped on it, poured water on their furniture, and, most importantly, took their sons away. Most have not been able to visit. The Red Cross is the only organization that can obtain visitor permits for relatives, and, in my opinion, they could be a bit more effective in this task.
I don’t know if all this information will be too matter-of-fact to affect you or if it will overwhelm you on a human level the same way it does for me everytime I hear a woman tell me her family’s story. Often I think of a Holly Near song in which she sings about a Latin American friend who had been disappeared and tortured. The only line I remember now is, “I cannot bear to hear your story.” (If anyone knows this song will you send me the lyrics?)
I had planned to discuss more people, places, and issues in this report, but I think instead I’ll try to get all my pictures up on my online photo album when I get back to Hares and then send you the link. Until then, please give a few moments of your time to think of those living under occupation here, and specifically those in prison and their families. And don’t forget those in the US – the thousands of people who have been in prison since September 11, 2001 or shortly thereafter simply for being from Arab countries, and the thousands of other political prisoners in our own midst (including 250 bicyclists arrested in New York yesterday and, I’m sure, many more to come in the next few days).
Love Hannah
