Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Eve Spangler: The Deaths of Children, Counterpunch, July 18, 2008

We are not shown that far more Palestinian than Israeli children live in daily danger: lacking medical treatment in Gaza, on the verge of malnutrition, caught up in brutality at check points or simply walking home from school. We learn little of what every Israeli might easily know from consulting the B’Tselem web site (B’Tselem is dedicated to documenting and contesting human rights violations in the Occupied Terrirtories). Their data show, for example, that in the seven years between September, 2000 and August, 2007, the Israeli defense forces killed 4233 Palestinians and Israeli civilians killed an additional 41. During that same period, which includes the suicide bombings of the second Intifada, 320 Israeli soldiers and 471 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians. Even more to the point for people who wish to base their political arguments on the lives of children: during those same years, 857 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis and 119 Israeli children were killed by Palestinians.

And, of course the death toll is merely the tip of the iceberg. It does not count the school closures or ill-stocked clinics. It does not count the cost of watching the grown-ups in your world being humiliated. It does not count the fear that there is no reliable economy to sustain your future. It does not count the cost of sleep interrupted by missiles and rocket-fire.

Perhaps those 857 dead Palestinian children are best represented by the life and death of 9 year old Abir Aramin. On January 16, 2007, Abir Aramin was walking home from school when the Israeli Border Police, a branch of the Israeli army, swept through the town, as they had on many other days right around the time of school closing. Children fled before their jeeps. Abir took shelter against a store and was shot in the back of the head at close range. She died soon thereafter at Hadassah Hospital. She was the child of Bassam and Salwa Aramin. Her father, a member of Fateh, had been labeled a terrorist and served 9 years in an Israeli jail for his attempt to throw a grenade at an Israeli jeep. Upon emerging from prison, he became one of the Palestinian founders of Combatants for Peace and continues to work with his Israeli counterparts to bring an end to the occupation, even after Abir’s death. No Israeli soldier has been charged in the case.

An account of Abir’s death was written by Nurit Elhanan-Peled [Peled-Elhanan] , an Israeli mother whose daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber . Nurit Elhanan-Peled is one of the founders of Parents Circle-Family Forum, a grassroots organization for bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. She offers these observations:

“I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, ‘We are all victims of occupation.’ As I say it, I know that her hell is more terrible than mine. My daughter’s murderer had the decency to kill himself … The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night. Abir is in a grave.”

Dan Izenberg, High Court ruling keeps Palestinian village in limbo, Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2008

The 200 Palestinians living in El-Nu’man, a village in the extreme southeast corner of Jerusalem, will continue to live in their never-never land, trapped without status between the West Bank and Jerusalem, in the wake of a High Court of Justice decision handed down earlier this week.

Israel does not recognize the residents of Nu’man as living in Jerusalem and has never granted them residency status. It claims that they moved illegally from the West Bank into the city after a post-Six Day War census that determined exactly which Palestinians lived in areas annexed to Jerusalem as a result of the war. Since the war, the city of Jerusalem has not provided the village with municipal services, including water and garbage collection, nor has it collected city taxes.

Since for many years there were no travel restrictions between Jerusalem and the West Bank, Nu’man residents had strong day-to-day ties there, including employment, commerce, social, family and religious connections.

Despite the de facto exclusion of Nu’man from Jerusalem, Israel built the West Bank separation barrier to include the village within the city, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. In order to maintain their West Bank ties, residents have had to pass through the fence gate and be subjected to security checks by soldiers. The residents claimed that the soldiers would regularly abuse their power and humiliate the residents.

Under this article’s title “It Takes a Village,” The Guardian has this phrase: “The iron resistance of one Palestinian hamlet to Israel’s ‘ring of steel’ has caught the imagination of the world’s media.” But the ongoing protests against the wall are not getting much coverage in the mainstream print and broadcast media in the US.

Seth Freedman: The village defying Israel’s wall, guardian.co.uk, July 11, 2008

After four days of curfew, the village of Nilin is not a pretty sight. Torched cars lie strewn on the sides of the road, bedroom windows sport gaping bullet holes, and debris is scattered the length and breadth of the town: evidence of the brutality meted out indiscriminately by the army against the locals.

As I followed the trail of destruction, the tales of woe grew ever darker and ever more indicting of the Israel Defence Force’s cruelty. “Look what they did to me!” screamed an elderly grandmother, hoisting up her robes to display the raw wounds inflicted by soldiers who had thrown her against a stone wall during a raid. She began sobbing as she recounted the events of earlier in the week, utterly bewildered as to how she had come to be mistreated so.

Upstairs, her middle-aged son clutched his two children to his side as he recounted the night the troops burst into his home.

“Imagine what it does to your son and daughter when they see you beaten by a soldier,” Hillal Khawaja said flatly. He showed us the wreckage of a room that had borne the brunt of the military’s ire: computers ripped from their sockets, beds smashed and furniture overturned, nothing had been spared the wrath of the marauding infantry.

Bereaved Parents for Peace, the Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2002

Palestinians and Israelis who have lost children to the conflict make use of their moral authority to speak out together against hatred
by Tracy Wilkinson

RAANANA, Israel — Both Israeli and Palestinian societies bestow a special, if undesired, status on parents whose children have been killed in conflict. It is an unhappy collective that has grown tremendously in a war now staggering through its third year.

Their status gives these families a moral authority to speak out, and a group of Israelis and Palestinians is using the platform to fight an atmosphere of hate. Calling themselves the Parents’ Forum, they first came together seven years ago; what is remarkable is that they continue even now to meet and reach out to an increasingly resistant audience.

Their message is the antithesis of today’s mainstream: No to revenge. Turn the other cheek. Peace over pain.

Choosing a potent symbol for one of their latest projects, they gave blood to the other side one day last month: Jerusalem resident Rami Elhanan and other Israeli parents trudged past their army’s machine guns, across the dust-caked Kalandiya checkpoint, and donated blood at a Ramallah hospital. Palestinians did likewise at a Red Star of David emergency-services center in Jerusalem.

When Elhanan, a graphic designer whose daughter was killed in a suicide bombing five years ago, went on Israeli TV that night to talk about it, the artist applying his makeup demanded: “How could you give blood to the enemy?”

That’s a typical reaction, said Elhanan, a man of boundless energy and indomitable spirit.

“In Israel, bereaved families are sacred. We can say anything, do anything,” he said. “We use this admiration to push a new way of thinking through a narrow hole …. The whole point of this is to show that if those who paid the price, the ultimate price, can talk to each other, then anyone can.”

To prove the point, Elhanan and Palestinian lumber contractor Khaled Awwad drove to Ostrovsky High School in Raanana, a middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv, on a recent sunny morning.

The Parents’ Forum had written to dozens of schools offering to address pupils on the need for peace and reconciliation; only a few have taken them up on the offer. This was one of them, thanks largely to the principal, a former combat pilot who supports the project.

Elhanan is relaxed; he has spoken to such groups before. But it is the first time they’ll bring a Palestinian to an Israeli school, and Awwad is both nervous and exhilarated.

Two of Awwad’s brothers — 14-year-old Said and 30-year-old Yusuf — were killed within six months by Israeli soldiers who invaded their West Bank village of Beit Ummar during the current fighting. Awwad’s mother, Fatima, a 60-year-old stalwart, joined the parents organization and then drew Khaled into its activities.

Standing before the chalkboard, Elhanan opens his talk to a classroom of 29 seniors, most of whom will be going into the army in a few months. They are slumped in their chairs. Most of them have their arms crossed.

He tells them that on the fourth of September — 1997 — Thursday — at 3 p.m. — a Palestinian suicide bomber killed his 13-year-old daughter Smadar as she shopped for school supplies in Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. A friend with her was also killed. Another was seriously injured.

It gets their attention.

Combatants for Peace

WHO ARE WE?
The “Combatants for Peace” movement was started jointly by Palestinians and Israelis, who have taken an active part in the cycle of violence; Israelis as soldiers in the Israeli army (IDF) and Palestinians as part of the violent struggle for Palestinian freedom. After brandishing weapons for so many years, and having seen one another only through weapon sights, we have decided to put down our guns, and to fight for peace.

WE BELIEVE
That only by joining forces, will we be able to end the cycle of violence, the bloodshed and the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. We no longer believe that it is possible to resolve the conflict between the two peoples through violent means; therefore we declare that we refuse to take part any more in the mutual bloodletting. We will act only by non-violent means so that each side will come to understand the national aspirations of the other side. We see dialogue and reconciliation as the only way to act in order to terminate the Israeli occupation, to halt the settlement project and to establish a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, alongside the State of Israel.
WHAT ARE OUR GOALS?

* To raise the consciousness in both publics regarding the hopes and suffering of the other side, and to create partners in dialogue.
* To educate towards reconciliation and non-violent struggle in both the Israeli and Palestinian societies.
* To create political pressure on both Governments to stop the cycle of violence, end the occupation and resume a constructive dialog.

A plea for peace from a bereaved Palestinian father by Bassam Aramin – Common Ground News Service, Feb. 15, 2007

ANATA, West Bank – I fought with my daughter on the day she was shot.

On her way out the door to school, Abir announced, in that way children have of doing, that she would be playing with a friend that afternoon rather than coming straight home to study for an exam scheduled for the next day. She was 10 years old, smart, dedicated to her schoolwork and still a little girl.

She wanted to play. I told her to not even think about it.

If I could tell her anything now, it would be: Go. Do whatever you want. Play.

Because now, she never will. She will never laugh again, never hear her friends calling her name, never feel the love of her family wrapped around her at night like a warm blanket.

Abir, the third of my six children, was shot in the head as she left school January 16, caught in an altercation between Israel Border Guard troops and older kids who may or may not have been throwing rocks. She died two days later.

I am Bassam Aramin by Rami Elhanan – Common Ground News Service

JERUSALEM—Last Thursday evening, my family was invited to dinner at the home of Bassam Aramin, in Anata.

Anata is a twenty minute ride from Motza, twenty light years away from Jerusalem.

We ate a mountain of maqloube with almonds and yogurt. Bassam told us about his meeting with the actor Shlomo Wizcinski who is slated to play Bassam in a new play. And my wife gave his wife, Salwa, a gift: a silver pendant with the name of her daughter Abir, may she rest in peace, made by a Jerusalem silversmith.

We laughed. It was fun. It was emotional.

And then, on the television screen, we saw the images of the attack on the Jerusalem Merkaz Harav school.

And again a cold hand seizes your heart, and again the blood freezes in your veins, again that sword twists inside you, knowing again there will be no rest until that blood is avenged. On the side of the screen, a news ticker of stark updates from Gaza: eight dead in one hour.

And beside the television, Salwa is bitter with tears for the mothers of the dead.

It was hard. Truly hard.

“Alright,” said Bassam when we parted. “At least we’ll see each other in Warsaw on Sunday…”

The two of use were invited by Warsaw television and HBO for the premier of a new documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian bereaved families organization, Parents Circle-Families Forum. I was glad. I knew that together we would be able to pass on a message of hope to people who, for the most part, had not the faintest idea about the conflict. I knew that by virtue of our shared grief people would listen to us—and perhaps even talk about peace.

Avishai Margalit, A Moral Witness to the ‘Intricate Machine’ – The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 2007 issue

“I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” This is the opening line of David Shulman’s powerful and memorable book, Dark Hope, a diary of four years of political activity in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is a record of the author’s intense involvement with a volunteer organization composed of Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews, called Ta’ayush, an Arabic term for “living together” or “life in common.” The group was founded in October 2000, soon after the start of the second Palestinian intifada.

“This book aims,” Shulman writes,

at showing something of the Israeli peace movement in action, on the basis of one individual’s very limited experience…. I want to give you some sense of what it feels like to be part of this struggle and of why we do it.

Struggle with whom? Shulman explains:

Israel, like any society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population; to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill—all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews’ exclusive right to it.

His diary proceeds to show how this happens.

Shulman speaks of “the last four decades.” It is forty years since the Israeli victory of 1967 brought the West Bank under occupation.

Jared Malsin, Walled in? openDemocracy, November 9, 2007

In towns and villages all over the West Bank, Palestinians demonstrate every week, usually on Fridays after the noon prayer. The spirit and persistence of these protests have generated a small international buzz about a nonviolent resurgence in Palestine, a return to the days of the First Intifada when a largely peaceful uprising brought renewed attention to the Palestinian cause in the late 1980s.

Hoping to gauge the alleged revival of nonviolent resistance in Palestine, I visited the small village of Al-Walajeh, four kilometres north of Bethlehem. Every Friday, Al-Walajeh’s residents gather in protest of the construction of the controversial wall around the West Bank. The planned route of a 30-foot high concrete section of the barrier will slice the village in half. Shireen Al-Araj, a member of Al-Walajeh’s municipal council, says the wall, which has already been raised in parts of the village as a barbed wire fence, will result in the annexation of much of the village’s land by Israel.

One blazing hot September day, the villagers, joined by eight Israeli anarchists, a young activist from Japan, and a few elderly women with Christian Peacemaker Teams, prayed, then marched on the construction site. They set about blocking the access road used by Israeli construction vehicles. Israeli soldiers watched from their post higher on the hillside, but held their fire. The protesters built mounds of rocks, sand, and tree branches, eventually setting one of the piles ablaze: a literal firewall against invading bulldozers and trucks.

Bil’in – Four nonviolent activists wounded in Bil’in’s weekly protest, October 26, 2007
Source : IMEMC

by George Rishmawi

At least four nonviolent activists have been wounded in the weekly nonviolent anti-wall demonstration in the village of Bilin, near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday.

A number of International and Israeli peace activists joined the villagers of Bilin in their weekly protest carrying banners condemning the harassment of the Palestinian prisoners by the Israeli police. The protestors demanded the international committee of the Red Cross to pressure Israel to probe the death of one of Mohammad al-Ashqar few days ago in the desert jail of Ketsiot.

Protestors walked through the streets of the town and attempted to go to the olive orchards behind the annexation wall. However, they were stopped by the Israeli soldiers who placed barricades on the way to prevent the villagers from reaching their olive trees.

Troops threatened to shoot anyone who attempts to go through the barricade. As the protestors attempted to walk through, troops fired several gas and sound bombs and rubber-coated metal bullets at them wounding four.