Report from Palestine 4

by Michael Berg

July 12

I sleep in a very hot, crowded guest house in a hot crowded refugee camp. The people I stay with and travel with and join Palestinians to get gassed and abused with are mostly French or French speaking Belgians. Today on the bus someone asked me where I was from and I told him St. Louis. He asked the state and I told him Missouri. A woman in the bus then told me it was a French word and that it should be pronounced differently and slowly sounded out the "correct" way to pronounce Missouri. I tried her way once and she corrected me and then I stopped her and told her that I wasn't playing that game - I can pronounce the name of my own state any way I want to. A French accent doesn't make non-French words better, and Missouri is not a French word.

I included this at the beginning because I thought it better to begin with something not horrible and perhaps mildly funny.

Today we went south to Hebron. I rode in the car with Mazin Qumseyeh to get there. Between Bethlehem and Hebron a large area is completely controlled by Jewish settlers. The native inhabitants have been almost completely cleansed from their land. This land is rich agricultural land. There are many grape orchards where the settlers make wine. Not too long ago Palestinians were growing the grapes in the area.

Mazin took us into a small area where a few Palestinians still live. It is surrounded by settler grape fields. The Palestinians live in shacks because they cannot get permission to build. They have to use generators for electricity and roof tanks for water because Israeli authorities will not authorize provisions of either. This does not mean that they are all poor. There was a doctor’s office and the doctor had a fancy car in front of his shack. He is not poor but he lives like a pauper because he is one of the few that is resisting to the end getting kicked off of his land.

The buildings in the settlements, in contract, would not be out of place in Brentwood. They all have ample electricity and water.

Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank. According to Mazin, people from Hebron are famous for being business people. People from Hebron used to own a lot of the businesses in Jerusalem before it was taken by the state of Israel. They are also doing business all over the world.

The old city of Hebron is really interesting, with twisting alleys. I plan to return after our program is finished and probably write more about the place and its situation. It also insane - as fanatical Jewish religious settlers have set up settlements not only on the entire eastern side of the city, but in the center of the city itself. It is the only case where settlers have come to the center of a Palestinian city in the West Bank.

We went straight to Shuhadeh St. This street was the central thoroughfare street for Hebron until it was closed in 1994. That year radical settler Jewish Baruch Goldstein went into the Tomb of the Patriarchs and used a machine gun to massacre 29 Palestinians and wound 125. The Tomb of the Patriarchs is an ancient mosque where many of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the old testament are thought to have been buried.

We marched to the point where the street is closed off, just under a giant Jewish synagogue, where settlers were sitting on top and watching. The march was peaceful, and after a bit we were walking away when I heard some very loud booms. The IDF soldiers threw sound bombs and took the street in front of the Shuhadeh St. closure. The soldiers marched around some, and then threw more sound bombs, one of which killed a pigeon.

From there we went to the town of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron. This town of 17,000 has settlements to its north and settlements to its south. The settlement of Karma Zur set up on a hill in the 1980s, stealing land from Beit Ummar. In 2006 the settlers built a secondary fence, confiscating privately owned Palestinian lands. Settlers routinely dump their sewage on the Palestinian farms outside of the fence.

Now that the fence is built there is a new security perimeter. Those farmers who own land just outside of the fence get shot at by settlers and arrested by the military if they try to farm. It is likely that there will be a new fence even farther out to defend this new perimeter. This is how settlements grow.

International and Israeli activists accompanied residents of Beit Ummar to the lands adjacent to fence. One of these residents was the man who owned the land. He has not been able to clear his field this year because he keeps getting shot at when he tries. So we went there to help the man clear his land of stones. Immediately over twenty Israeli soldiers approached. An Israeli activist said something in Hebrew and one of the soldiers got in his face and started screaming at him. The head officer showed a piece of paper and said that the land we were on was a closed military area and we had 10 minutes to leave, after which time we would all be arrested.

The Israeli military can at any time close any amount of land anywhere in the West Bank or Gaza, therefore denying foreigners to right to enter the land.

We all started clearing the stones. After 10 minutes the soldiers yelled at us all to get out. We asked them why this man could not work in his field, if they felt good about what they were doing. They screamed and then threw sound bombs. They grabbed and arrested five members of our group, including a Moroccan-Belgian man who arrived on July 8. He was peaceful - he was unarmed. They smashed his face in the ground so that he could not breathe and one soldiers put all his weight on the man's head. You can see the photograph here. Then they beat him. He is now being deported.

While all of this was going on, settlers were watching from their vehicles, with their guns, on the top of the hill.

After the action I talked to an activist from the Israeli Anarchist Against the Wall. She told me stories about life in Israel. She said that in Israel everything is about race. He uncle lived on a kibbutz. He fell in love with a Dutch woman who came to live on the kibbutz. The woman decided that she wanted to be a Jew. According to the state of Israel, if you are born to a Jew you are a Jew, no matter what you believe. But if you want to convert to Judaism, it must be done in accordance with Orthodox rabbis.

So she went about to do what she thought she needed to do. She studied Judaism, so adhered to all the rules, she let the rabbis follow her around. She let them come in and out of her house inspect her refrigerator to see if she was storing the right food in the correct way.

When the time came for the wedding, right before the rabbi was going to sign the piece of paper, he turned to the groom and said to him, out loud, as if the bride did not exist, "Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to marry this shicktza (gentile woman)? We can find you a Jewish girl right here in Israel."

They got married, but they were humiliated.

There is a man named Suhail with our group. He is Palestinian-German. He is a German citizen. He is also a Muslim who wants to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. But he can't do it. His parents are refugees from what is now the state of Israel and he has papers allowing him to stay in the West Bank, but they do not allow him to enter Jerusalem. If he just uses his German passport to try to enter, it is likely that they will look up his information and take away his Palestinian identification papers and force him to leave the West Bank.

I've got more stories written down - about Palestinian prisoners who offer no resistance having their eyes opened up by force so they can be pepper sprayed, about children getting beaten in the head by the butt of guns, but I'm pretty tired. What's draining here is all the hate. It is hard for me to understand how people can hate so much.

July 13

Today we were going to go to the Negev to learn about the plight of Bedouins there, but most people were kind of emotionally drained from yesterday. The soldiers in Beit Ummar were so vicious, and we lost one of our people to arrest. I really wanted to go Negev, but I was only one of four, so it was canceled. I'm going to do it next week.

So the organizers arranged a tour of Bethlehem. It was a little bit tedious. Bethlehem is beautiful, but I am getting a bit tired of going around very slowly with a big group of people, all of whom speak French. I think the most interesting part was in the Catholic section of the Church of the Nativity there was a three foot tall old man sitting on a child's tricycle asking more money. Also I took a picture of the place where Jesus is said to have been born. Also the cresh.

Oh, right, I forgot. I am also tired because there was a party last night on the roof of the family home of Fadi Kattan, one of the organizers. It is a four hundred year old building in the heart of the old city of Bethlehem. There was an amazing view of the valley below and the Church of the Nativity. Fadi is a Christian Palestinian who is baffled about how little so many Christians, especially American Christians, care about what happens to the city of Bethlehem and its inhabitants, even when the Church of the Nativity is shot up, as happened in 2002 (his house was also hit with missiles during the Israeli attack on the town).

Tomorrow we will go to Jerusalem, then I will leave this group and go around on my own.