1-From Carla (from Seattle) in Gaza 2-ISM -the village of Ras Atiya 3-From Khan Yunis refugee camp, Gaza, Palestine 4-what a former Israeli solider has to say about ISM

1-From Carla (from Seattle) in Gaza

Hi all--

Mawasi is a village on the coast side of Rafah (in the Gaza Strip) that
is surrounded by settlements and guarded by a checkpoint that has not
allowed a Palestinian through in 2 years. The villagers survive on
whatever they themselves grow. No food or medicine has been allowed
though for these 2 years. People who leave have not been allowed back.
The action that is happening tomorrow has beem organized by Palestinians
who are going to try & get back to their homes. They estimate that 300
will gather to return. There are 16 internationals here with the I!
nternational Solidarity Movement that have been asked by the
Palestinians to accompany them past the checkpoint. The Palestinians are
very excited about doing this~

Yesterday a group of us went up to a tank to communicate that we have
been getting shot at in homes & our countries would be very upset (so
maybe we lied) if any one were to be hurt. I was so outraged after the
experience. To quote Barbara Kingsolver, I "have the priveledge of a
safe life", even here. I can walk up to the tank and know they would not
directly shoot me (well, it did shoot over our heads and at our feet).
However, any Palestinian is fair game. The soldiers shoot into occupied
houses, down alleys and streets. They just blanket an area with bullets.
Many civilians are killed, children in classrooms, children playing
outside of their houses, women cooking dinner. . . . all unarmed, all
innocent of doing anything other than existing. How th! is helps Israeli
securuty baffels me.

Few of these people have ever seen a soldier, much less spoken to
one--Gaza is so different from what I have heard of the West Bank where
soldiers and civilian Palestinians see each other face to face regularly.
Here the soldiers are up in guard towers at checkpoints or inside of
tanks, APC's & bulldozers. They just shoot. There's no talking, no
negotiating. Yesterday was not a planned action we were just going to
look at the wall being built to better keep Palestinians in and the tank
started firing above our heads. We then started to walk towards it to
speak with the soldiers that we are indeed here to stay.

(ISM has not had a presence in Gaza until this summer, unlike the West
Bank where there have been ISM involvement for 2 years). The group of
Palestinians that hung behind had never been that close to a tank. One
young man who is one of our escorts told me he had nev! er seen the face
of an Israeli until then. They are always too far away. (Gaza is very
traditional, the women with the ISM scarve ourselves, and all of us move
around the city with Palestinians accompanying us).

I've been calling media in Jerusalem to try & get coverage of tomorrow.
This has never been done before--families trying to get back to their
village walking past a checkpoint. They would just get shot. The
determination, the strength of these people is humbling. After all they
live through, all their losses, they laugh & joke & love their children.
The young man who accompanied me & Molly to see the demolished house of
the family she had been with told me, when he saw me in tears as we
walked away, that this is why they laugh so much--a person simply cannot
contain that much grief forever--they see no future different than what
they are experiencing right now. And they go on, setting the lat! est
atrocity behind them. Amazing people, no whinning, no complaints, but
this steady determined day by day perseverance.

Yours (and theirs),
Carla
=================================================================2-ISM
-the village of Ras Atiya

For immediate release:



12 January 03

Ras Atiya



Late Friday night, January 10, after Ras Atiya villagers and officials
had made plans to protect their children and school

from potential harm from construction of the highly controversial Israeli
“security fence”, three Israeli jeeps and a lightweight

tank rolled into the village and threatened its residents with
retaliation. Residents told internationals from International Solidarity


Movement stationed in Ras Atiya that Israeli soldiers said people in Ras
Atiya would be killed and the village put under curfew

for six months if they continued with their plans to confront Israeli
appropriation and destruction of farmland and homes in their area.



On January 8, 2003 nearly 200 people from Ras Atiya and its neighbor,
Daba, had stopped a bulldozer and rock crusher

working near their villages by peacefully placing themselves before the
equipment. At the conclusion of the protests,

Israeli soldiers fired a number of tear gas cannisters, injuring a Ras
Atiya man.(See previous release dated 1-9-03 from ISM)



The official Israeli rationale for the wall is increasing security for
Israel, but Palestinians point out many hard facts to the contrary.

PENGON (Palestinian Environmental NGO’s Network ) and official maps show
the wall making major incursions past the l967

border into Palestinian territory. 160,000 dunums (40,000 acres) will be
confiscated by military order as the eight meter high wall

procedes along its full 350 kilometer (220 mile) length, a seizure of 10%
more of Palestinian lands.



In the Qalqilia district where Ras Atiya is located lie the richest
agricultural lands in the West Bank. Olive, citrus, and nut trees

have already been uprooted and field crops and greenhouses systemically
destroyed as thousands of dunums are being confiscated.

Ras Atiya had suffered these losses, yet more continues.



Sharon’s government will take 30 wells in the Qalqilia district, seizing
water resources already unequally allocated by the Israeli

government at the 1967 level. A huge aquafer , the Western Groundwater
Basin, lies under Palestine, yet Palestine remains water

poor due to Israeli restrictions, a seldom mentioned but primary reason
for Israel’s keen interest in the West Bank.



The people of Ras Atiya point out another contradiction in the term
“security fence”. According to Israeli law there has to be

300 meter buffer distance from the border of a road, but in Ras Atiya
there will be only three meters between the school of

500 students and the wall/road, likewise for a new house near the
school. Israeli soldiers have threatened to reduce the

school to rubble if even one stone is thrown by a schoolchild at
construction equipment. Villagers also fear underground

dynamiting will destabilize the structure of the school, making it unsafe
for use.



Despite previous death threats from Israeli soldiers, things were
peaceful today as internationals escorted schoolchildren

to the school and remained around the periphery during school hours.
They watched with several villagers while boys from

level 9 and 10 as part of English class sprayed statements of peace like
“Let me learn peacefully”, “Stop confiscating land”

and “Tanks + weapons = no learning” on the low walls facing the
construction area.



The villagers displayed the plaque marking the construction of the
school in 1996 with funds from the Swiss government

and World Bank to the internationals, some of whom are American, and
reminded them that the Israeli military is funded in

large part by billions of U.S. dollars annually. Ras Atiya mayor,
Mohamed Samara Marabe, commented, “ I want to bring

delegations from Switzerland and America to see how their money is spent.




Villagers from Daba and Azbet Jalud also requested the presence of the
internationals from International Solidarity

Movement in their villages to observe construction very near their
villages. The villagers of Azbet Jalud face the destruction

of their village for the second time around. In 1948 the village of
Zakur near Narit in Israel was demolished and its residents

fled to the present site of Azbet Jalud where they constructed another
village, soon to be largely demolished, along with orchards,

field crops and greenhouses.




For further information call:



International Solidarity Movement

Susan Van Dongen 054-257-075

Fadi Arar 054-930

Radhika Sainath 054-574--754



3-From Khan Yunis refugee camp, Gaza, Palestine.
The Diary of journalist Christopher Hedges ("Gaza Diary").

"I sit in the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes,
momentarily defeated by the heat, the grit, the jostling crowds, the
stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage. A friend of Azmi's brings
me, on a tray, a cold glass of tart, red carcade juice."

"Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper, and ragged
soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees."

"Men in flowing white or gray galabias -- homespun robes -- smoke
cigarettes in the shade of slim eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs
protruding, are tethered in wooden carts with rubber wheels."

"It is still. The camp waits, as if holding it's breath. And then, out
of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a
loudspeaker."

""COME ON, DOGS," the voice booms in Arabic. "WHERE ARE ALL THE DOGS OF
KHAN YOUNIS? COME! COME!""

"I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew:
"SON OF A BITCH!" "SON OF A WHORE!" "YOUR MOTHER'S CUNT!""

"The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence
that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks
toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with
loudspeakers."

"Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what
is to come."

"A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or
eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They
descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no
sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from
the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight
bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs
ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos."

"Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom
were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill
an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three
of whom are under eighteen."

"Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered -- death
squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with
infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put
children in their sights and watched them crumble onto the pavement in
Sarajevo -- but I have never before watched soldiers entice children
like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

===================================================================================================
4-what a former Israeli solider has to say about ISM
From: Eric Storlie <e_storlie@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Jan 11, 2003 1:43pm


Yesterday I had long conversation with a former Israeli soldier. I'd
like to summarize it, because it probably reflects a c ommon Israeli
response to people who join ISM.

To put our conversation in context, we met a few months ago, after I
presented my ISM experiences in an Australian pub (he's studying and I'm
working at the same university). After my presentation he raised his
hand and said he did not dispute anything I said, but he interpreted
some of my experiences from an Israeli perspective. I was delighted to
have an Israeli soldier in the audience and for him to corroborate my
descriptions of events in the West Bank; people could interpret my
decriptions of checkpoints, walls, settlements and roadblocks as they
wished.

Almost three months later, yesterday, the soldier and I crossed paths at
the university. He asked about my next presentation, which will be at
the university in about a month. I asked if he will be present. He
wasn't sure, saying it was very difficult for him to listen to my
inferences and terminology about walls (apartheid), palestinian life,
soldiers, the occupation... I encouraged him to attend and to provide
an israeli interpretation of a few salient points. He said he did not
think I was justified speaking about Israel/Palestine after my brief, one
week experience in Qalqilya. He said I should have spent time at a
rehabilitation facility for suicide- bomber victims in Israel.

Then he began questioning my intentions for spending time in the West
Bank: why don't I protect Israelis from suicide bombers? why don't I go
to Tibet and resist the Chinese occupation? Why don't I help the
Aboriginals or Native Americans? I responded to all of his questions.
He said I didn't go because I cared about the Palestinians or the
Israelis, there was another reason. I tried to impress upon him that my
feelings do not discriminate amongst the persecutions of any people. He
was offended by my use of the term "persecution" in relation to the
occupation. I asked him to explain the existence of checkpoints, the
fear of farmers who tend their crops...

He described the persecution his family felt before moving to Israel.
"Never again, now we have a home," he said. I asked if he felt
persecuted in Australia. "Not yet," he replied. I told him I would like
to be part of movement that upsets the trend of persecution and
dominance: "the world would be a pretty dull place without Palestinians.
I find the Palestinians to be exhilarating people. I find the Israelis
to be exhilarating." He said I should experiment with this kind of
world in my own country and stay away from Israel.

After our conversation I was a bit stunned by the realization he was very
agitated by my presentation a couple months ago and has devoted a
tremendous amount of thought to my intentions for going to the West Bank.
He remembered everything I said during my presentation and tried to fit
my words and slides into an overall strategy, not necessarily peaceful
and innocent.

We shook hands. I told him I would spend time at a rehabilitation
facility in Israel. He smiled.

E. Storlie