Sacramento Coalition to End the War

Bethlehem Updates Number 13, February 3, 2009

For those of you in Sacramento/Davis, don't miss the opportunity to hear Israeli peace activist Shachaf Polakow speak about his work with Anarchists Against the Wall, tomorrow, Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 7pm at 909 12th Street, Sacramento; FMI 916 717-2751 or 916-448-7157

In this update:
Travels in Jordan
Crossing the border
Re-Entry
A Ride to Ramallah
Take Action

Travels in Jordan

For the most part we were tourists in Jordan, taking in the sleepy town beach town of Aqaba, hiking around the seven pillars of wisdom at Wadi Rum, trekking into and around the ancient city of Petra (first built around 800 BCE), wading in a hot springs-fed stream between the Kings and the Dead Sea highways, floating in the Dead Sea, and poking around the crusader castles in Shobak and Kerak and the Roman ruins in Amman, Jerash, and Umm Qays.

Reading the history of some of these ancient enclaves, I reflected on the brutality of the marauding armies and the hard, perhaps-slave, labor that went into building such fortresses and tombs. For a moment, I would lapse into thinking that civilization had advanced since then, but in the next moment, I would remember Gaza, which was still being bombed, and the occupations of Palestine and Iraq and would sadly realize that instead of advancing, the invading Crusaders and Romans and had been replaced by the U.S. and Israel.

In our hotel in Amman, we met a Palestinian mother and three children who had immigrated to Norway from Gaza six years ago. The mother and two daughters had gone to visit relatives in Gaza last summer and were trapped there when Israel closed the borders. In a mixture of Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, and English we talked to the family. Keeping a hold on all of their passports, the 21-year old son had come from Norway to bring his mother and sisters back when they were able to get out of Gaza after the bombing stopped.

The mother described how she and the daughters huddled with 23 other family members in the garage of the extended family's three storey house. They had been able to get some food supplies before the bombing started, but for the next 22 days, they did not leave home. A pregnant family member had gone to work the first day of Israel's assault; she bled to death after her workplace was hit. Water and electricity was available 1-2 hours on some days and not at all on others; sleep was equally scarce as Israel's nearly round-the-clock attacks kept everyone on alert. While their family home had not been hit, neighboring yards and homes were set on fire by bombs.

In Amman, we also met with some Iraqis, part of the estimated 100,000 – 250,000 who fled to Jordan escaping the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. They told us that has there are 4 million orphaned children in Iraq, one million disabled, and two million widows.

Jordan is also home to Palestinians who were forced from their lands by Zionists in 1948 and Israelis in 1967. An estimated 60-70% of Jordan's approximately 6.2 million people are Palestinian.

Crossing the Border

We returned from Jordan on January 29. That morning, we left Amman a little after 9am and arrived at a parking lot on the Jordan side of the Allenby border crossing around 10:15am. We changed taxis and drove less than five minutes to the first border stop. The protocol was not clear, but we found an entrance to a building and figured out to go to one window; the border staff looked at our passports and sent us to a window opposite them; there our passports were taken and we were directed to the window along side where we paid our exit fee (our passports were passed from the one window to the next and then returned to us). We proceeded outside where people were waiting in various locations. After asking several people, we figured out that there was one bus for Palestinian ID holders (who did not have a foreign passport) and one for those with foreign passports.

(We had befriended a couple of Swedes who shared our taxi from Amman. We went through the window series before they did and were waiting outside for them to join us. After 45 minutes or so, they came out with a couple of the Jordanians border staff who had told them that their passports had apparently been misstamped when they came into the Akaba airport. Instead of correcting the problem, the border staff were sending the Swedes to a different border crossing, the Sheikh Hussein bridge, about an hour and a $40 taxi-ride away.)

At 11:30am, a bus pulled up and we joined several others in piling on our luggage and climbing aboard. This bus took us through a series of Jordanian checks, one of which involved collecting all the passports on the bus. After some delay, the bus proceeded across the Allenby bridge to the occupied Palestine side, a distance of perhaps 1 kilometer, a cost of about $6, and a length of over 30 minutes.

When the bus came to a stop everyone piled out, collected their luggage and then joined what seemed like a free-for-all as people jostled to hand their luggage and passports to Israeli attendants. Some attendants would set the luggage down with the passports on top, after a few minutes, another attendant would put labels on the luggage and passports and hand the passports back while the luggage disappeared through what looked like a metal detector. The haphazardness did not appear to provide any security to owners of the luggage, instead it seemed to provide ample opportunity for tampering by the authorities.

Passport in hand, we entered a large room and eventually got into a line where a very polite young Israeli woman asked us some questions about where we were going etc. We mentioned friends we were going to stay with, whom Patricia described as "elderly", I objected to this characterization which made the young woman laugh, in turn making us feel a little bit relaxed. She took our passports and told us to wait. We noted Palestinians who were not receiving the same treatment as another not-so-polite young Israeli woman yelled at a mother and her child.

After some time an also polite young Israeli man came and asked us some questions, then disappeared. Sometime later he reappeared and told us to go back in line. Eventually our passports were stamped, our photographs and finger prints of both forefingers take. We then moved into the next room to collect our luggage. Along the way, we saw individual Palestinians entering what looked like small rooms; we thought these might be where the interrogations we had heard about took place. By this time it was about 3:15pm. We took a short and expensive bus to nearby Jericho and then a shared taxi to Bethlehem after being charged more than double the normal rate (this applied to all of the passengers, not just us).

This border crossing took nearly 5 hours, probably a short time if you were Palestinian.

Re-Entry

As much as we would have liked our vacation to coincide with one for our friends in all of historic Palestine, it did not. The day after our return, I joined local villagers, international accompaniers, and Israelis with Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW) at the weekly protest against the apartheid wall and land seizures in Umm Salamuna.

In a loud voice, I said to the armed Israeli soldiers standing behind the razor wire they had erected, that they should try something different by going home and leaving the people in the village in peace. Some soldiers had told the village mayor that they were blocking the road for the safety of the village children. Speaking in English and Arabic, the mayor told them he did not believe they were concerned about the safety children or they would not be bombing Gaza. One of the AATW activists also spoke to them in Hebrew. I noted no reaction on their part to any of what we said.

After the demonstration, the internationals accompaniers related how soldiers had been invading nearby villages in the middle of the night, taking away children, some of whom reported being forced to stand under cold water for two hours. They also reported that the soldiers had taken a 13-year old disabled boy in the middle of the night.

Israel's attack on Gaza, planned six months ago according to a Haaretz' article,

has now killed 1314 and wounded 5300, most of whom are civilians. Three Israel civilians and 10 soldiers were killed; 230 were wounded. Over 2000 sites were hit in Gaza; thousands of Gazans are homeless. Since the fragile ceasefire, Israel has continued with sporadic bombing causing more injuries and damage. There have also been rockets fired from Gaza with no reported injuries.

Israel's damage to Gaza's buildings and infrastructure is estimated in the billions of dollars. Instead of making even a small step toward addressing the root cause of the problem by opening the borders to Gaza, Israel instead is keeping Gaza under siege, refusing to let in desperately needed building materials. As a result, thousands in Gaza are living in makeshift shacks and tents without water, electricity or basic services.

While we were away, Israeli soldiers continued killing, kidnapping and destroying the homes of West Bank Palestinians. Reports are available at www.imemc.org and www.palsolidarity.org. See also www.electronicintifada.net

A Ride to Ramallah

I have only gone to Ramallah by shared taxi vans, but the way is familiar. Take the bus from the Souq in Beit Shaour to the Bethlehem bus terminal, get on the shared taxi and take it back past the Souq on the way out of town. Beit Sahour gives way to a few patches of open land and then villages; soon you're headed down the steep road into Wadi Nar. Although the pavement has cross slashes to offer more traction, I have seen cars spinning their wheels when it is wet. The road continues past dry hills sides, some dotted with Bedouin homes. It comes into Abu Dis where the wall cut off the town and the university from Jerusalem, which is just on the other side.

At some point along the way, passengers pass their fares to the driver who glances back and forth from the road to make change. We pass stumps of olive trees – an abandoned orchard I assumed. Seat belts get buckled as the van heads onto the road which is shared with the Israelis who occupy the increasingly more visible illegal hilltop settlements. More buildings line the sides of the road and the wall pokes out again near the Kalandia checkpoint. Soon the buildings of Kalandia become those of Ramallah.

At the beginning of this week, I was offered a ride to Ramallah by the husband of a colleague. Born in Beit Sahour in the 1950s, he had spent his youth in the West Bank under Jordanian rule. Since the Israeli occupation started in 1967, he had seen its creeping oppression, evident along the drive we were taking.

He pointed out the current dump site for the Bethlehem district, much easier to see from his front window than the vans. It is a old site, where garbage is piled on the ground with no liner to prevent seepage into the ground water. And it is occupied – the Israelis control it, dumping the trash from their illegal settlements and charging the Palestinians to dump trash from their towns. Not too far away were piles of old cars – dumped by Israel, he explained.

The olive stumps were the handiwork of Israelis, they did not want orchards near the road as they could pose a security risk.

When he was a boy, his family would walk to Jerusalem on a weekend day; it might take a couple of hours. Now the wall, illegal settlements, and settlement roads block the way. Not to mention that Israel now won't let Palestinians who do not live in Jerusalem (and therefore have Jerusalem IDs) go to Jerusalem except with special permits, which are difficult to get.

Bethlehem is on one side of Jerusalem and Ramallah is near another side. To go directly from one to the other used to take 15 or 20 minutes he told me. With the apartheid wall, the Palestinians are routed in a huge circle so it takes more than an hour, checkpoint stopping time not included. There is a plan to re-route the Palestinians off of the road they now share with Israelis to another route that would even further lengthen the trip.

As we approached Kalandia, he pointed toward the wall and told me that there was an airport on the other side. It used to serve people in the area, but the wall severed it from the Palestinians.

The few Bedouins are left from thousands who used to live in the area before Israel forced them out. Many were relocated to the desert where their homes are routinely demolished by the Israelis.

He was dressed in a suit and tie to attend meetings with local government officials. I thought about how back in California, he and I might be co-workers going to talk to some city or county about their solid waste management issues. As we talked, I kept thinking, what it would be like to be him, to be a Palestinian who has seen so much taken away by the Israelis. Who knows the Israelis want all the land with no Palestinians. Who knows they have had the upper hand for his lifetime, stealing land, rights, livelihood, and even life.
At some point, I wanted to shift from an increasing sense of hopelessness, so I asked him how he thought the situation might be able to change. He said that as terrible as Gaza was, the reaction of the world did give him hope: to hear about Jewish women in Canada occupying the Israeli embassy; to see cracks in political support for Israel evidenced by France and Turkey, and to know that internationals were looking at filing criminal charges against Israel.

He hopes the boycott, divestment and sanctions effort will become stronger and force a change as it did in South Africa. He also is hopeful that the election of Obama will make a difference. It might, I commented, but only if people in the U.S. keep up the pressure for a different U.S. foreign policy. One that truly promotes human rights and democratic principles, not mass killing, occupation, and apartheid.

Take Action

Keep calling your Congress members (202-224-3121) and demand that the U.S. stop supporting Israel's apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.

Share our updates and articles with others. Our most recent article was published on January 29 in the Sacramento News and Review: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=901082

Don't buy Israeli products; if the first three numbers of the bar code are 729, it was made in Israel.
Talk to people about the situation. Have people over and show the film Occupation 101 (you can borrow a copy from SacPeace, sacpeace@dcn.org, 916-448-7157.