Sacramento Coalition to End the War

BETHLEHEM UPDATE #14, FEBRUARY 17, 2009

In this update:

- Life in Bethlehem
- Take Action
- Increasing Repression in a No-Justice System
- Blog Update and News Briefs
- Update from Iraqi Refugees
- Davis Enterprise article from February 8: Reporting from Palestine

Take Action:

Please use this email as a reminder to once again contact President Obama and tell him it is time for the U.S. to stop its economic and political support of Israel's apartheid and occupation. Call: (202-456-1111 or email through http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact.

Also please contact your Senators and Congress members: 202-224-3121.

Life in Bethlehem

Since our return to Palestine from Jordan at the end of January, we are finding our days very full. Much of this work involves moving along Sacramento to Bethlehem Sister City projects which include: refurbishing a prominently-located signboard to educate tourists about the occupation, making connections between school children in Sacramento and in Bethlehem, and a garden and composting project with the children of the SOS Children's Village of Bethlehem. Our efforts have been greatly augmented by a woman who has just come back to her roots in Beit Sahour from Michigan.

Last week Patricia planted olive trees in a Bethlehem-district village which is threatened by an encroaching illegal settlement, a bypass road and an Israeli military outpost. This is essentially the situation for all the land in the West Bank outside of Palestinian city or town centers. Palestinians are being squeezed into existing urban areas, enclosed and cut off from each other by the Apartheid Wall, fences, Jewish-only bypass roads and the ever growing illegal Jewish-only settlements constructed on confiscated (stolen) land.

Just two days ago on February 15, the Israeli online Daily Haaretz reported Israeli plans to seize 420 acres of Palestinian-owned lands in Bethlehem for the expansion of the illegal Israeli Jewish only settlement of Efrat. Efrat, of course, is built entirely upon stolen Palestinian land. About a month ago, Efrat settlers trespassed onto the lands of the Palestinians village of Artas and uprooted 120 olive trees; a huge economic loss for the traumatized villagers.

Israel has a number of ways to confiscate or limit Palestinians' access to their land. One is to "claim" that it is not in use - even while Israel creates the barriers and dangers to reach the land. When we first arrived last fall, we helped harvest olives in an area that just a few weeks later was ravaged by illegal Israeli settler rampages in Hebron. These attacks made world headlines. Most don't.

Accompanying farmers in their fields is important witness and support of daily nonviolent struggle against the Israeli military occupation. You can learn more about this at: http://www.jai-pal.org/content.php?page=1 Please contact Patricia for further information: pdmc1234@gmail.com

Increasing Repression in a No-Justice System

As we have mentioned in past updates, repression here in the West Bank has increased in conjunction with the massive assault on Gaza. (The attacks and siege on Gaza continue.) Since the beginning of 2009, there has been a sharp increase in Israeli Occupation Forces raiding, detaining and arresting West Bank Palestinians (repression against Palestinian-Israelis has also increased). Dozens of West Bank children have been detained or arrested for allegedly throwing stones. (In January there were several protests against the massacre of Gaza that ended up at the wall, where indeed, some young people did throw stones at the Apartheid Wall. This is the same wall that was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004.)

Last Thursday Patricia spent the day in the Ofer Israeli Military Court. There she witnessed first hand how these teens are treated during "their day in the military court." Beyond the shock that they are children being held without charge, without contact with parents for up to 8 days, it is abundantly clear that the Occupier's system assumes guilt by accusation. The next shock is that lawyers for these children are essentially placed in a situation of obtaining the best plea bargain arrangement for them. To argue innocence is to effectively ensure that their inevitable sentence will be longer. Patricia plans to continue researching and writing about the situation of Palestinian Children Political Prisoners.

Blog Update
We have also made some changes to the blogs, adding articles that have appeared in print (but not in the updates) as well as links to some of our photo albums.
Please check it out! www.bethlehemnarratives.blogspot.com

News Briefs:
Israeli military terrorizes civilians in Jayyous - http://palsolidarity.org/2009/02/5320
Like a Drum – Shelling of Gaza's Beach front continues – http://palsolidarity.org/2009/02/5446
Israeli military kidnaps 26 West Bank Palestinian civilians - http://www.imemc.org/article/58913

Iraqi Refugees Report on their Homeland

While we were in Jordan last month, we were able to meet with Iraqis refugees living in Amman. Now in her thirties, Najlaa Wahwah and her family left Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. She now works with Direct Aid which helps Iraqi refugee families with specific health care needs, like cancer treatment and surgery.
Although some Iraqis who fled the country were able to retain their wealth, the situation for most Iraqi refugees in Jordan is difficult and often desperate, Najlaa explains. They face discrimination, many don't get the services they should receive as refugees, and many live in poverty.
A few days earlier we had met an American woman living in Amman. She told us to come to the Saturday market in the old city. There we would find once-well-off Iraqis selling their family treasures for a pittance (a doleful bargain).
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled the country since the U.S. first attacked militarily in 1991; followed up by more than a decade of deadly sanctions and the 2003 invasion. There are now over 2 million refugees in the neighboring countries and another estimated 2 million Iraqis are internally displaced.
Faiza Al Araji, 54, left Iraq in 2005 after her son was kidnapped; she now has asylum in Jordan. She works with an NGO that helps Iraqi refugee children. (Faiza spoke in Sacramento in early 2000 as part of a national tour sponsored by Global Exchange.)
Faiza gets most of her information about Iraq from Iraqis who are still there. "You have to find the news from different aspects," Najlaa notes. "You can't trust any one news source."
While both women said that security had improved in some areas of Iraq, both also painted a bleak picture.
"The basic infrastructure is still not functioning," says Najlaa. "The soil and water are contaminated with chemicals from the U.S. weapons including enriched uranium and phosphorus."
"The last time I was in Iraq was November, 2006 and it was very sad," laments Faiza. "Villages have been destroyed. Life is hard. The environmental pollution from the war has caused a high number of cancers. I have talked to doctors at the Al Mauser Hospital for Children in Baghdad and they say they are seeing a high rate of birth defects."
"There are no jobs," reports Najlaa. "Although schools and universities are now open, there are two million illiterate children in Iraq. There are also 5 million orphans, 2 million widows, and 1 million disabled people." (This in a county of approximately 28 million people.)
Not only did the U.S. severely damage Iraq physically, it also has devastated the society. Both women were horrified at the recent executions of professors, doctors, and scientists. While they had heard a number of theories about who was doing the killing and their motives, the result is to prevent Iraq from regaining any normalcy.
We have seen the political demography go from non-religious to a religious one," says Najlaa. "We hope with time this will change again to what Iraqis use to before, asking about qualification regardless what the religion is."
Both commented that the U.S. has fomented the dissent between Sunni and Shia with neighborhoods that were once mixed, now have physical barriers between newly segregated religious groups.
"Inside the U.S., they say 'united we win', but in Iraq, they say 'divide them'" says Faiza, a Shia married to a Sunni. "If the U.S. wants to split up Iraq, they will just install more of their puppets."
Neither was optimistic about Iraq's government. "The Iraqi government has no control; it is isolated in the green zone," explains Faiza. "The leaders are corrupt, including the Kurd leaders."
"We still don't have freedom in Iraq," says Najlaa. She noted that while under Saddam Hussein, there also was no freedom, at least "we did have good medical care and good education as well, both free. Now the economic situation is very bad, the basics were destroyed."
"In the mid-1970s, Iraq had the highest living standard in the Middle East," said Faiza. "Now it is occupied and lost so many good people. The U.S. has destroyed Iraq and wants to keep it backward."
"I was in Italy at the end of 2007 at an international women's conference where participants were talking about the dark era in Brazil and Argentina and in Somalia since 1990," said Faiza. "The U.S. got rid of the government, created a civil war. Now life is ruined in Somalia. A whole generation is lost. There I saw the future of Iraq. It is the same procedures and same hands."

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Printed in the Davis Enterprise, Sunday, February 8, 2009:

Reporting from Palestine

"The Israeli state has dishonored the holocaust and the people who hid Jews to save their lives. They would be horrified at what Israel has done to the Palestinians." Susan Nathan, British-born Jewish-Israeli author of The Other Side of Israel.

For 3 weeks, beginning December 27, Israel carried out a full scale, nearly round-the-clock military assault (air, ground, and sea) on the entire population of the Gaza strip. Despite Israel's having barred journalists from Gaza before and during the assault, the horrific scenes of suffering, destruction and carnage could not be hidden.

The world watched while Israel massively bombed the densely populated area, destroying municipal buildings, police stations, media buildings, UN schools, hospitals, ambulances, mosques, universities and thousands of homes. Nothing was spared and nowhere was safe for the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza who live in an area about the size of Sacramento.

Gazans have long suffered Israeli aggression. Eighty percent are refugees from the violence and expulsions of 1948 and 1967. The history of Israeli military assaults, incursions, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings is too long to list here. And the history of Palestinian resistance to Israel's colonial occupation and military rule could also fill volumes. In June 2008, a ceasefire was negotiated that was to include Israel's lifting of its crippling siege on Gaza. Israel failed to comply, but the fragile ceasefire still held for nearly 6 months until Israel broke it in early November. Homemade rockets from Gaza followed.

For more than 18 months, Israel has effectively imprisoned Gaza, limiting fuel, food, medicines and other essentials. The suffering caused by this "low intensity warfare" has been well documented by aid agencies and human rights organizations. Even now, during this time of extreme and dire need, Israel refuses to lift its deadly blockade, hindering humanitarian relief and rebuilding efforts, guaranteeing further loss of life.

Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur, said that Israel's actions against the besieged Gazans were reminiscent of "the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto." Falk, a Jewish-American, was one of the first to condemn the Israeli assaults on Gaza as "war crimes," also condemning nations, like the United States, which provide military support to Israel and participate in the siege on Gaza.

Palestinians in the militarily occupied West Bank watched the news nonstop, helpless to do much else. "Only God is with them," said one woman to me tearfully, "They are utterly alone!" On an evening when images of white phosphorus bombs raining over Gaza were being televised, I entered my corner vegetable stand. The grocer was holding back tears and rage. I speak very little Arabic but understood when he said to me pointing at the TV, "this is against international law!" Of the over 1300 people killed in Gaza, an estimated third were children; the overwhelming majority of the over 5000 wounded are civilians. (Three Israeli civilians and ten soldiers were killed; 230 soldiers were injured.)

Protests of Israel's assault erupted all over the world, including in Palestine. Here in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers and the police responded with repression and violence. In January, dozens of Palestinian children were abducted by soldiers from their homes in the middle of the night, most for throwing stones at the Apartheid Wall. (The 26-foot wall was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in July 2004, a ruling that has been completely ignored by Israel and the U.S. as Israel continues its planned 400 mile path through illegally confiscated Palestinian land.)

United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Committee for the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, as well as Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups are calling for a thorough investigation and appropriate prosecution of Israel's conduct as allegations of Israeli war crimes continue to mount.

If there is any hope to be found in this sickening massacre, it is that perhaps the world has had enough of turning a blind eye to Israel's decades of illegal occupation and brutality against the Palestinians. This recent horror may finally end Israel's impunity as prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are preparing charges against Israeli military leaders. Prominent Jewish activists such as Naomi Klein and others are joining the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

This will not happen easily. Neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the International Criminal Court. Political courage is in short supply. In the midst of this most recent assault on the essentially defenseless Palestinian population, the U.S. Congress responded by overwhelmingly passing a resolution stating that Israel has a right to protect itself. Not surprising since the same Congress approved billions for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But we can no longer just watch. The Geneva Conventions arose from a global awakening after atrocities of Nazi Germany. If "never again" is to mean anything at all, it must apply to every situation where crimes against humanity are being committed, including those committed by Israel and the U.S.