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Boston support group for the International Solidarity Movement

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1) July 20th 2005 The people of Palestine

2)July 24th 2005 "Khalil"

3) August 2nd, 2005 "The roots of the trees are the bones of our grandfathers"

4) August 8th 2005 "Mai salame Felestine"

4) August 8th 2005 "mai salame Felestine"

Journal excerpts from my last days in Palestine...

Last night was supposed to me my last night here, but the IDF closed the road I needed to travel on. I will try again tomorrow.

It is too hot to sleep and my mind is awake. Tonight is my 2nd to last night in Palestine, but my last night in the "occupied territories." Tomorrow I will pass through the now familiar checkpoint at Kalundia for the last time. I will see the mural on the wall there of a piece of blue sky, as if someone had broken a whole through the wall revealing what was on the other side.

I lie here tonight in this room with Khadra (my 16 year old host sister) for the last time, thinking of the people I have met and their stories. Thinking about myself in each of those moments, hearing those stories. Sometimes they were in English, sometimes in Arabic, it almost didn't matter, my reaction was a similar silence of sadness dulled slightly by the numbness I've acquired in my short time here.

Stories of prison, stories of snipers, stories of torture. Stories that often involve children. You just sit in the sadness and listen. There is nothing to say. You sit there a moment more and then you move on. You've already paused a moment longer that the storyteller, there's nothing else to do. But with a moment now to reflect, it's scary. It's scary how normalized these stories have become. My own ability to adapt to this scares me.

My deepest fear in leaving Palestine is not fulfilling the heavy responsibility I have in returning to the U.S. Many people have welcomed me into their homes, told me their stories, fed me and at the same time told me how many Americans have come, documented what they saw, and returned home to do nothing. I think they want to believe as much as I do that I will be different. I need your help. The Palestinians need our help. Our responsibility is great, for it is our tax dollars that are funding this occupation. We have no choice but to act, not just to educate, but to organize, To Do Something.

In talking to Palestinians, I have repeatedly asked, "What should Americans be doing?" In addition to education, many people have talked about the apartheid wall (funded largely by the U.S.), taxes, divestment campaigns, boycotts, and in general doing a better job of coordinating our efforts throughout the US. Some of you have written me to ask what you can do. The first thing is to spread the word that there is a major human rights crisis happening here and it is being funded by the U.S. govt. In terms of action, there is short term and long term work to be done.

In working towards the long term goal of ending the occupation, we can all think about divestment in our own spheres of influence. Do you know anyone who personally has money, stocks, bonds invested in Israel? Whether or not that person supports the idea of a Jewish state, having money invested in Israel means personally contributing to a violent and inhumane occupation that violates international law. Next think about organizations and institutions you are connected to, in the present and in the past (the college you went to) and do some research to find out if they have investments in Israel. At the moment I think we could be most effective by starting well-organized divestment campaigns across the country. There are good models of people working on such campaigns if you are interested in starting one or getting involved in a pre-existing one.

Today I am here, surrounded by people whose basic needs of survival are not being met. Today, and in the past few weeks I have been thinking of short term ideas to support the Palestinian people whose livelihood has been and continues to be destroyed. In my heart, I believe that we should all refuse to pay our taxes which are funding this inhumanity. I know that few people are willing to accept the consequences for such an action. Instead I suggest that if we each pay $100 this year in taxes, then we need to send this same amount to Palestine. It is not a solution, by any means, but it is necessary, and on a large scale could have at least a small impact. I think it is the very least that we can each do individually. We are all capable of doing fundraising to come up with this money. I will be working on this and other ideas when I get home, and will pass on more ideas and information.

In a few hours I will board the plane home, leaving behind all the people I have met who do not have the freedom of travel. Yesterday I succeeded in traveling South from Tulkarm to Al Quds (Jerusalem). It took 8 hours to travel 60 miles. To travel 60 miles, we passed through 3 checkpoints, 2 passable roadblocks, and were stopped and forced to turn back on 5 separate roads that were blocked by impassable roadblocks. It felt like a sick video game where we were trapped in this maze, lined with soldiers looking on and laughing as we tried road after road that was blocked. Each time we'd think we were ok and then in the middle of nowhere half an hour down the road were these huge concrete blocks. I befriended a family on the bus: a woman traveling with her 5 children to go visit her sister (60 miles away) for the first time in 2 years. When she found out I was Jewish, she asked, "why are you on this bus, you can go and travel on the other road, you'd be there in one hour"!
I told her, "That road is racist, I would rather be here with you."

This report is a little longer (and maybe a  bit more blatant) than my
earlier ones.  It is an attempt to share with you the horrific reality of
the situation here.  i hope you can read to the end..

Life here is like prison, it is an intense system of control set up by the
IDF to drive the Palestinians off of the little bit of land they have left.
Parallel to this system of control is a strategic and manipulative form of
censorship that prevents the international community from seeing this hell
that the Palestinians are being forced to live in.  With guns pointed, the
soldiers tell us where we can and cannot take a picture.  If they don't like
a picture you've taken, they'll force you to erase it.  Censorship in the
states is more subtle, here it is live and armed.

Racism and opression in the states are also more subtle, here they take the
form of a 30 foot  apartheid wall made from cement and topped with barbed
wire, lined with watchtowers resembling a maximun security prison.  The IDF
has nearly completed building this wall under the guise of "security."
Before coming here, I was under the impression that the wall was a division
between Israel and Palestine.  Once arriving and seeing it with my own eyes,
it quickly became clear that the wall has little to do with this border.  It
snakes all around the occupied territories, separating Palestinians not from
Israeli's, but from their own land, livelihood, families, and villages.  The
wall cuts right through the center, and in places around the circumference
of Palestinian villages that are nowhere near Israel.  Graffiti on the wall
reads, "From the Warsaw ghetto to the Kalkilya ghetto," referring to a
village that has been completely surrounded, 360 degrees by the wall.
Business is dead because nothing can be delivered in or out, farmers canot
access their land which has been stolen, people canot travel to work outside
the village, which is now a prison.  This is not security, it is control, it
is an attempt to make life so difficult for Palestinians to survive that
they are driven off their land.

But Palestinians are survivors with deep connections to their land.  I have
heard from several people that they would rather die on their land than
leave it.  Munira, the poet I spoke of in an earlier report told me, "The
roots of the trees are the bones of our grandafthers... If you cut open my
arm, and looked at my blood, every particle of my blood would say
Palestine." Over and over again I have met people whose strength to live a
life of resistance is beyond anything i could ever imagine.  We met a woman
who lives in a Palestinian village that now borders a Jewish settlement.
The IDF wanted to build the wall right over her house, but she refused to
leave, so they built it right next to her house, separating her from the
village, putting her on the same side of the wall of the settlers, her
enemies.  She literally lives in a cage with the wall on one side, and a
fence on the other.  You have to go through a checkpoint just to go to her
house.  We went to visit her, to have tea and hear her story.  The soldiers
told us that we couldn't go to her house because it was a closed military
zone.  These decisions are made at the whim of the 18-year-old soldiers on
duty.  Despite all this, she chooses to stay, living out her beliefs.

Inside this prison, the IDF murders Palestinians indiscriminately.  These
murders are not reported, at least not in the international media.  Last
night I was invited to dinner at one of the refugee camps in Tulkarm, where
I am now staying.  As we sat on the roof, looking out on the tiny cluster of
land (10,000 sq meters) that is the home to 20,000 people, we heard an
announcent broadcasted from the Mosque that someone was killed by the IDF
yesterday in a neighboring village. (If you're interested, try looking for
this murder yesterday-7/28 in Anabta, West Bank)   There was a brief pause
to listen to the announcement and then conversation resumes as normal.  The
person I was talking to, noticing my concern, told me this is normal- you
can't find a single person in the refugee camp that hasn't lost a family
member.  If they're not dead they're in prison, or both.  The person I was
talking with has survived 5 assasination attempts by the IDF and was
recently released from prison where he was held, tortured, and interrogated
for several months.  When he was released, he couldn't walk and had to be
hopitalized.  This is part of the censorship- he is a writer who has several
friends who are journalists.  He has several books he has written about the
situation that he has not published for fear of assasination.

Last week we met with Addameer, a human rights organization focusing on
prisoners.  here is some of what we learned.  Over the past week since this
meeting, I have heard much of this repeated in first-hand accounts.  The IDF
can legally arrest children of any age, and can hold children ages 14-16 for
up to 6 months.  650,000 people have been arrested in the current intifada,
almost every family has a member that has been arrested.  Interrogation can
last up to 180 days.  Since 1967, torture has been used routinely as part of
interrgation.  Methods of torture include severe beating, sodomy, electric
shock, burning with cigars.  More recently pychological torture has been
used, and other forms of torture that do not leave a trace on the body such
as: stretching the body, continuous sleep deprivation, exposure to loud
sounds, placing foul smelling sacks on the head of the prisoner, and shaking
profusely which can lead to brain damage.

I have come to understand "suicide bombing" in a different way in the past
week.  I put it in quotes because when we say "suicide bomber," some
Palestinians say freedom fighter.  Before I came here, I understood these
actions to be part of the armed resistance movement to the Israeli
occupation.  While I did not and do not condone violence on either side, I
realize that under extreme violence and oppression, people are driven to
violence.   What has changed is my understanding of the suicide.  I have
often heard people say things like, "suicide goes against human instinct" as
if these people who would take their own lives are inhuman.  What I now
understand is that they are living under conditions that are inhuman.  The
Israeli army is inhuman.  If you had survived torture and imprisonment, your
home was destroyed, your land stolen, your friends and family members
killed, your son in jail, and you had no food or money to feed your family,
there wouldn't be much will left to live.  Under these conditions, it is
surprising that more people don't turn to suicide.

*Jen is an educator, an activist, a gardener and a rock climber brought up
in the Jewish tradition of social justice. As an American Jew, she feels a
personal responsibility to work towards an end of the occupation

July 24th 2005 "Khalil"

I have been here almost a week now. There are moments when all I can do is cry uncontrollably, and there are longer moments where like the Palestinians, I listen to stories of torture, violence, imprisonment, despair and take them in as part of the daily reality here. For me the most painful part of this experience is the fact that the people who are commiting these violent, ugly, dehumanizing crimes are Jews. My people.
A few days ago we were in Khalil (known in Israel as Hebron). It is an old Palestinian city in the West Bank, that has been taken over by Jewish settlers. Before I came here, I had an impression of settlers as radical right wing Jews who felt entitled to steal the little bit of land that the Palestinians now live on. I did not realize how violent and hateful they were. Settlers carry guns, issued by the Israeli government, settlers throw stones, garbage, anything they can find at the Palestinians.
Khalil has an old city with cobble stone streets lined with Palestinian shops that until recently thrived as the central part of the city. Two years ago, the settlers took over the old city by siege, forcing the Palestinian shopkeepers out, and then moving into their stolen stores. This Palestinian city is now covered with Israeli flags and violent, hateful graffiti written in Hebrew towards the Palestinians. On one shop door the graffiti reads, "What's the difference between a Palestinian and a trampoline? On a trampoline, you take your shoes off."
After walking through the Old City, we went to have coffee in the home of Abu Salim, an older Palestinian man whose family has been in Khalil for several generations (pre 1948). Directly across a narrow street from Abu Salim's house there is now a large settlement paid for by American Jews. We were told to stay together and walk quickly up the street and into the house, as the settlers are known to throw rocks both at Palestinians and at internationals. Abu Salim has literally built a cage covering his house, to prevent the settlers from breaking the windows when they throw rocks at the house. As we approached, he noticed that they had come and cut several large holes in this cage. All over Khalil, we saw cages and nets over Palestinian homes to protect them from the garbage, rocks, and other objects that settlers throw at them. Each of these nets that we saw was sagging with the weight of these objects. Once inside Abu Salim's house, we spoke with his family. The daughters showed us bruises and scars from where settlers had hit them with rocks. The youngest daughter, age 8 told us of some of the teenagers kidnapping her for a day, and other times in which the tried to hit her with their car. The leader of the settlement, a man named Marzyl has a bumper sticker on his car that reads, " I've killed an Arab, how about you?" Still Abu Salim tells us that when he meets Marzyl in the street, he greets him in Hebrew, "Shalom, ErevTov" (Hello, Good Evening). Marzyl ignores him. He told us that when the settlers first moved in, he would turn off their lights for them on shabbat as his grandfather had done for their Jewish neighbors growing up. He told us, "I sent my children to bring fruit, he sent his children to throw stones."As I left Abu Salim's house to walk cautiously by the settlement, I looked up and saw a plaque written in Hebrew. I stood in the middle of this street filled with hate and violence and was haunted by the fact that the Hebrew was the only thing around that felt familiar. It is painful to be Jewish here.

Dear friends,
I have been here only 2 full days, and I have so many stories to tell it's hard to know how to write. I want to share with you the details, the facts, the stories, but most importantly I want to share with you the spirit of the Palestinians I've met. They are a people who have lived their whole lives under severe oppression, who have lost their homes, their land, their friends, and their relatives to the Israeli army. You would expect that they would have nothing but hatred for Israel, you might expect that they would be driven to violence. There is an organized resistance movement, but the majority of the people are the most peaceful, forgiving, hopeful people I have met.

Last night I stayed with an Orthodox Christian Palestinian poet named Manira. We were strangers as I traveled with one of the other women from my delegation to her house, but we stayed up until after midnight talking, and singing, and reading poetry and when we said goodbye this morning we all had tears in our eyes. She read me some of her love poems, and she explained that she had written a poem in which she tried to imagine how the soil feels as a person is about to be buried in it. She wrote the poem from the perspective of the earth, talking to the person (this is one small part of it)...
I have always loved you, you have struggled for me, for this land and now I can hold you, I can press my shoulders around your waist and every part of you will grow into me. I love you.
-paraphrased from Manira Razqallah

On Monday we met a man named Salim whose home was demolished by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) 5 times in 7 years. He has a deed to his land going back 200 years, but in order to build on it, you must get a permit. When he applied for a permit, he was denied and given the reason that the land was unsafe to build, as it was on a slope. Meanwhile, 500 yards away on the same sloped land, Israel built a huge secret police center. Each time Salim's house was demolished, he would rebuild it with the help of The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD). At one point he and his family were living in a tent next to the pile of rubble that was once their home. The IDF came and removed the tent, telling him he needed a permit to have a tent on his own land. He told us, "It is like giving someone bread and saying to them this is your bread, but you cannot eat it." After the 5th time his home was demolished, he rebuilt it as a peace center.

Next we met Salah, a man whose family has lived in a village called Abu Dis, 2 kilometers from the Old City of Jerusalem, for 50 years. With the most peaceful resolve, he told us his story. Imagine the neighborhood you live in, or grew up in, the place where you feel most at home, where all of your family and friends live. Now imagine an occupying army coming in and building a wall right through the middle of your neighborhood. You live on one side of the wall, but your family, friends, and job are on the other side. The wall is a huge cement 30 foot barrier with one checkpoint guarded by teenagers with huge guns bigger that half of their bodies. They decide at will when you can or cannot pass. For days, sometimes weeks on end, they declare closure in which no one can pass, not for food, medical treatment, school, work, not for anything. Sometimes you or your friends are detained and tortured in a building that belongs to your cousin, but was stolen by the army. In September, you know that the army, the teenagers, will come and demolish your home and force you to move to the other side of the wall. Then they will complete their plan to encircle your entire neighborhood with the wall. Your neighborhood will have been turned into a prison. This is illegal under international law. This is happening right now to Salah. This is happening everywhere in Palestine.

There is so much more, but I will leave you with this.

Love from Palestine,
Jen