Palestine Update By ISM

1. Holding Back Tears by Hanna 2. Qawawis by Flo 3. Replace correctness with reality, Bil'in demonstration By Henry 4. Work for peace, Wallaje action By Henry *********

1.Holding Back Tears by Hanna from IWPS April 8, 2005

I tend to say I'm the most stable person I know, I tend to stay emotionally separated from the situations I'm involved in, at least in the moment that they're happening. This week has made that more difficult. This week has seen tragedies, frustrations, and discussions of past tragedies and frustrations. There are only two of us in the house at IWPS now, so the stress level is high and neither of us really has the option to check out and choose not to participate. All week I've been holding back tears of sorrow and anger, and all week I've been wondering how Palestinians continue to live this way, tragedy on top of tragedy, and remain calm, collected, and on top of everything, nonviolent. Where does the anger go?

Last week I had a conversation with Abu Rabia (our landlord) in which, for the first time, I heard a complete account of the story of his brother Issa's shooting and paralysis. For the first time I heard about the tear gas the army was constantly throwing into that part of the village during those weeks. For the first time I heard about the system of gathering the people and taking them to safety when the army showed up, and despite that, about Um Rabia's 8-month pregnancy that she lost. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia had slept on the roof the night before Issa was shot, and that another brother of his had called him to say, "Don't sit up, the soldiers are pointing guns at you." For the first time I heard about how Abu Rabia climbed down the side of the house in the morning and went to work in Salfit, only to get a call a few hours later that his brother had been shot and that soldiers would not let anyone (including cars or ambulances) approach him. For the first time I heard that Abu Rabia thinks the bullets may have been meant for him.

The soldiers had been scattered in the olive groves, and Issa was trying to help the kids get out of the street so no trouble would arise. Suddenly two soldiers came walking down a different street on foot and shot directly at Issa. He fell, and the soldiers essentially left him to die, not letting anyone approach him. He lived, but was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to continue his career as a strength trainer. He remembers going to the doctor once or twice in his life before his injury, and now goes a few times a month. His wife has been transformed into a nurse, his son who was born only a few months before is now 4 years old and does not remember nor will he ever remember seeing his father walk.

I sat on Abu Rabia's couch listening to him speak, unable to open my mouth for fear the tears would just start flowing. I wanted to ask how they're able to continue with their lives. I didn't have to. The next sentence out of his mouth was, "When I think back about that time, I don't know how we continued with our lives and with our nonviolence." And yet they continue.

The next day I went down to visit Abu and Um Rabia again, only to find a tearful woman in their house asking Abu Rabia for help. Her husband has been dead for years, and the older of her two sons (who had some mental disabilities) was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier in 2002. Last week, on the day I saw her in Abu Rabia's house, her younger son, who also has mental disabilities, had gone to his older brother's tomb to visit. When he reached down to place a flower on the spot, a dumdum bullet that had presumably been left there by soldiers (intentionally or not) exploded and entered his hand and his leg. He was rushed to a hospital in Qalqilya, where the doctors began operations that are going to cost far more money than this woman has. She had come to Abu Rabia for help because of his connections with the Palestinian Authority.

A few more days pass, and we come to the biggest tragedy of the week. I was outside our house, saying goodbye to Issa as he was getting ready to leave for an appointment at the hospital, and trying to understand as a woman took me aside and told me a member of the family had just been arrested at the entrance of Hares. And then Abu Rabia called: "There were people shot in Deir Ballut," he said. Deir Ballut is a beautiful village in the Salfit district, widely known for its variety of crops and its wonderful people. The Wall is currently being built through their land, and they've held demonstrations against the Wall, but there had been no demonstration that morning. "People were shot?" I asked. Through phone calls and a visit, we began to piece together the story, at least from the perspective of the Palestinian witnesses: Apparently, several families (all part of the same larger family) were working on their land. Five of the men walked down a few meters from where their families were, and they could see the bulldozers destroying their land below, as they do everyday. The men yelled up to the guards, who were standing on a hill at least 300 meters away, something along the lines of, "This is our land, why are you destroying it?" The private security guards opened fire, and four of the five men were hit – in the chest, shoulder, butt, and leg.

They range in age from 24-58. Everyone swears there was not one stone thrown (not that it could have reached so far anyway), and people were completely in shock that these guards, most of whom they knew from previous days, had fired directly at them. There were no soldiers or police present at the time. [As I write, two days later, the village is demonstrating, and as far as I know, all four men are still alive, two in hospitals in Israel, and two in hospitals in Ramallah. The fact that two were taken to Israel means that Israeli authorities know they did something wrong.]

We showed up on the scene to find a few of the older women wailing, others trying to comfort them (or, at times, force them to stop – it seemed they didn't want to show any weakness in front of the soldiers who were now there). Some of the women had made it to the rocks below, or hadn't left since the incident happened a few hours earlier, but the soldiers were blocking everyone else from going down to that group. They were playing games, telling people to move back from one rock to the next, to be 5 meters away, 10 meters away, and so on. If someone wanted to go down below, the soldier in charge would say, "If you get one person to come back, you can go down." One of the women said, "What are you doing here? This is our land." One of the soldiers, who seemed to be having a good time and was actually laughing most of the time the women were crying, responded, "No, this is our land." "The government says it's our land, so it's our land," said the soldier in charge. "I do what my government tells me." "You can think for yourself," I replied. "When I take off this uniform and put down this gun, I can think for myself," he responded. "Not now."

"What will you say to your wives and children when you go home?" screamed one woman in desperation. Another yelled, "If our sons die, they will be martyrs, they will go to heaven! If you die you will go to hell!" Most of the soldiers didn't speak Arabic, and most of the villagers didn't speak Hebrew, so when the soldiers wanted to communicate with the people they would pull aside one of the Hebrew-speaking men and ask him to translate for the group. This man, the brother of one of the people shot, was himself covered in blood from having carried his brother to the ambulance. He looked dazed and exhausted, and when the soldiers told him, "If you care about these people, tell them to move back," he did as told.

When I finally made my way down to the scene of the shooting, I found women praying, kissing the ground, sitting and crying. At first I didn't see the blood. Then Anna pointed to a rock, and then another one, and suddenly everywhere I looked I saw drops of blood, or puddles of blood on the scarves and jackets the women were clutching. I started to feel sick, wanting desperately to know where the security guards were now, what they were thinking, what they had been thinking as they opened fire on the small group of unarmed Palestinian men.

A few minutes later the press showed up – people from Reuters, AP, and French Press. All the journalists were Palestinian, and apparently they had been held up for a few minutes at the top of the hill by soldiers who told them, "You're Palestinians first, then you're journalists." They were finally allowed down, and the women picked up the blood-soaked clothing one more time for the photographs. We headed back to the village, people still waiting to hear news from their family members, and Anna promised she'd be back later to sleep in the village that night.

If there's any positive story I can tell this week, it's a bittersweet one. It is positive in its current implications, but a commemoration of a tragedy: the massacre at Deir Yassin. On April 9, 1948, members of two different Jewish Zionist terrorist groups broke into Palestinians' homes in the middle of the night and killed between 110-140 people. This was not the only massacre of the time, and probably not the biggest, but it was the one people heard about, the one that caused so many thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in fear, not realizing that 57 years later, they still would not be allowed to return.

Zochrot, one of my favorite Israeli organizations, planned this trip to Deir Yassin with a group of refugees called Deir Yassin Remembered. Most of the village's land has been taken by the modern Jewish religious neighborhood Har Nof, and the remaining buildings have become part of a hospital in the neighborhood. We walked towards the land, with survivors, organizers from the sponsoring groups, and Mordecai Vanunu (the Israeli who disclosed Israel's nuclear weapons program and spent almost 20 years in jail) leading the crowd. We carried white flowers, one to represent each of the 93 victims' names that are known. The names were written in Arabic and Hebrew on placards. At first I thought there were only a few Palestinians in the crowd, but as I started hearing Arabic spoken all around me, I realized I had only been counting head scarves. The crowd was a mix of Israeli citizens and internationals, and the Israeli citizens were a mix of Jews and Palestinians.

We were watched by the young orthodox Jewish children from their playground as we approached the area set aside for us. Speeches began, and singing – mostly songs whose lyrics were Mahmoud Darwish's poetry. Translation was constant, Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa on stage, and then Hebrew to English in the audience for a small group of us sitting in the back. One survivor of the massacre was there, and she began to tell stories, personal stories about many of the killings. She talked about the good relations the Palestinians and Jews had previously, how they had been friends, how she doesn't know what the Palestinians could have done to the Jews to make them do this to her family. She talked about pregnant women being sliced through the stomach and killed; old men thrown off the roofs of houses; seven young boys sleeping in bed who were rounded up, taken outside, lined up, and shot; a few members of her family (herself included) who were given the choice of whether they wanted to be shot or stabbed to death, only to be saved at the last minute by one soldier who said, "Don't kill them, let them go." This is how she escaped, along with the other survivors of the village who were put on a truck and shipped out, away from their village where they'd been for so many centuries. Still they cannot go back. Even as we looked down towards what was Deir Yassin, the modern-day hospital was enclosed by a fence that we could not go through.

The survivor sang a song, and the lyrics went something like this: "They put a mountain between us… I wish it could become sand and disappear…" Between whom? I wondered. Jews and Palestinians? Palestinians and their family members? Both? "We need everyone in the world to know what happened in Deir Yassin," she closed by saying, and added that she still had the newspaper articles from the time about her family members who were killed. She said this with such urgency, trying to convince a world that has deliberately remembered certain massacres and forgotten others, that we can forget none. That the way to peace is not to forget the past and move on, but to acknowledge the past and move on. As if to spite her, the group of Israeli kids from Har Nof, instructed by an adult, had begun to tear up the booklets that said "Remember Deir Yassin." I tried to take a picture and one said, "Are you going to put this in the paper?" He then covered his face with a torn booklet, put his middle finger up in front of it, and said, "Put this in the paper." [It's not in the paper, but you can see it with my other photos online.]

I was sad to see the boys' reaction, to see them laughing at others' pain, to see them denying the biggest catastrophe that has ever happened to the Palestinian people. At the same time, I think it's good that they were exposed to this, good that they saw Palestinians who were from the place where they now lived, who not so long ago were kicked off their land by some of these kids' grandparents. As disappointing and disgusting as the boys' reaction was, the fact that so many Jewish Israelis were there to remember and acknowledge the sordid history of Zionism was just as incredible. First the tragedy needs to be exposed, then acknowledged, and then hopefully, someday, dealt with justly. If any people should know the importance of this, it is certainly we Jews. _____________________________________________________________________

For photos from this week, see http://community.webshots.com/album/311043526hlRLlA.

2. Qawawis by Flo

March 31, 2005

Last Friday I went down to a village called Qawawis, located in the south Hebron hills. Qawawis is a village of caves with one standing house and a few tents dotted throughout the hillsides. The people of this village say the caves were built by their great grandfathers and they have been living there since. Four years ago, the residents of Qawawis abandoned their village in fear of the settlers living the settlement and two outposts on the surrounding hillsides.

One year before, the residents won a court battle stating that they had a right to live there and graze their sheep. Since one month, the people of Qawawis have been returned to their land living amongst the one settlement, two outposts and military base. Daily now,the settlers confront the people in Qawawis, using violence, threats and carrying guns.

Since returning to their village, the residents have asked for a presence from the ISM because of these daily attacks. The area is isolated and the families have no protection from the settlers as the military and police in the area are there to protect the settlers. Many of the police are actually residents of the nearby settlement. Without outside eyes, this situation occurs in a vacuum.

I went to stay in Qawawis because the ISM internationals that had been present and one of the shepherds were attacked and beaten by the settlers two days before and had been arrested while trying to file a report of these attacks.

Arriving in Qawawis close to sunset, it struck me as so much does in this land, of the juxtaposition of the heaven and hell that exists here. The green rolling hills stretch as far as the eye can see, the overwhelming sound of silence broken only by the wind and songs of the birds. It could have been the most peaceful place on earth if not for the settler road carved into the land and the settlement and two outposts ringing the valley. These things reminded me of the looming threat that exists and the reason for my being there. With that, the heaven turned to hell, the fear began.

In order to reach the cluster of caves that is Qawawis, we had to climb over the guardrail of the settler road, cross the road and over another guardrail. My fear began immediately. I went there knowing of the attack days before, knowing of the anger the settlers have for these shepherds and the internationals who have come to be with them and how this anger manifests. I did not know at this time, from where the settlers would come if they choose to do so and thought that at any moment they could show up, irate at our reasons for being there and try to punish us.

In the distance, I could see a soccer game and hear the laughter of the boys involved. Shepherds were walking with there sheep along the outskirts of what I would come to know as Qawawis. Everyone stopped and stared at these strange foreigners walking towards them. When they realized we were friendly, some of the children ran out to greet us, asking 'what's your name?', as seems the formal greeting from Palestinian children to foreigners. We were welcomed.

After a small tour of the village, which because of the caves looks only to be one house in the midst of open land, we were taken to one of the shepherds amongst the olive trees. The day had been quite, whether it was due to the fact that it was Friday, the first day of the Jewish Sabbath, or for other reasons, we didn't know. At one point in the day though, a group of 12 or so settler cars had come from the outpost nearest to Qawawis and stopped near to where the shepherds were grazing their flocks. Since the attack on the internationals, the police,for some reason, have been more helpful. When the settlers' cars stopped on the hill overlooking the shepherds, the police were called. When they arrived they made the settlers return to their homes, helping to diffuse that situation.

That day, we were able to enjoy the peace, meet the people and eat. There is no electricity in Qawawis, so after spending most nights up until 3am and waking up at 8am, at 7pm in the Qawawis darkness, I was ready for sleep. Instead of sleep though, we all sat in the candle lit night and communicated as well as our broken Arabic and their sparse English would permit. This limited common language actually allowed for some good discussions though. We spoke about the history of the village, the family connections, and our feelings as internationals in this land of illusion. The full moon backed us up as we spoke into the night.

We were staying in the lone house of Qawawis sharing the room of the patriarch of the family. He was the first shepherd we had met upon entering the village, and spoke in his sleep with the same language we had heard him talking to the sheep. At sunrise the next morning, the mother and father of the house were up at dawn, saying their prayers, setting the fire and waking up the rest of us. The night before I had been told that the mother of the house would bang a hammer against the outer steel door in order to wake everyone up for breakfast. I though it was a joke until at 6am in the morning, through my sleep hazed eyes I watched as she did just that; took a hammer to the steel door, banging out our wake up call. We obeyed the call of the hammer and rose to a fire in the foyer on which the women were making their bread for the day.

One of the neighbouring shepherds summoned us to a clearing outside his cave dwelling and offered us breakfast. I came to realize later that each household took responsibility for feeding us on alternating days. This day it was Mohammed, who would periodically come to check the progress we were making on our breakfast and yell at us if he thought we were not eating enough. After breakfast, the village set to work for the day. The old women would fill a large stomach with goat's milk, set the stomach up on a tripod, and rock it back and forth until the milk turned to yogurt. It was like watching a baby being swung back and forth in a cradle, and produced a beautiful calming sound like waves upon the shore. This day, they forced one of the internationals to bath and give up his clothes for cleaning. In the mean time, they lent him clothes that gave him the appearance of a Mormon going door to door to spread the Word. And then we went out with the sheep.

I've walked with sheep quite a lot in my life. It is always such a peaceful time, wandering through the hills surrounded by the sound of the sheep grazing, which is actually quite loud—a bit like the sound of a small motor running. So the morning went like this; peaceful wanderings with the sheep, sitting amongst the blooming wildflowers, feeling that I was on a vacation from the hell of checkpoints, and the horror of the daily destruction for Israel's wall.

At 11am we headed back to the village for lunch and a few hours reprieve from the already scorching sun. Everyone found spots in the shade to rest and talk away the hours until it was cool enough to go out for the flock's dinner. I forgot the situation I was in and was able to actually sleep for a bit. Twenty minutes into my nap though, one of the other internationals burst into the room where I was hiding for my nap and yelled, 'mostoutan' (settler).

We went to the front of the house to see four young settler boys walking towards us across the valley. Most of the village from young to old were already out there and called to us to join them, pointing out the four boys in white shirts and tan pants, one with an Israeli military issue gun slung over his shoulder. The boys stopped 50 yards from us. One of them sat on the rocks and all four just looked. They started back in the direction they had come, changed their minds and walked through the village land into a grove of trees. We watched them across the hillside as they took a rest under one of the village's almond trees. There was a shepherd out with his flock near to the grove that we worried would get harassed by these boys. It was the same shepherd that had been attacked two days before.

Twenty minutes later, as we continued to watch the trees to which the boys had disappeared, thinking that perhaps they had left without our notice, we saw coming from the same direction, a larger group of boys with the same white shirts and tan pants. This time it was ten settler boys approaching us. The group walked directly towards us, entering into the yard of the house. When I asked one of them what they were doing, he replied that they were on their Sabbath walk, taking a tour of the village that they had been run out of by the Palestinians.

The boys, many with the same Israeli military issue guns on their backs, walked into the village. The people of Qawawis seemed quite intimidated by these young men, and asked us to tell them to leave. The boy I spoke with, an Israeli-American from Sioux City, Iowa, told me of how the original inhabitants of Qawawis had voluntarily left four years ago because they desired the more comfortable conditions of the nearby city. He said after the people had left, the Jewish residents of the settlement had taken over Qawawis and improved it by building new walls around the caves, and that the people of Qawawis only wanted to move back when an Israeli from a peace group incited them to return and force the Jews out.

When I asked him if he thought he intimidated the people by coming into their village with guns, he replied that my camera was a much more dangerous and frightening weapon. I told him that the people of Qawawis had a much different story then his, that they told stories of leaving their village out of fear of the settlers. He responded that he has been living in this settlement for three years now, and that no one would lie to him about the history of this place. The boys sat on one of the stone walls of the village and refused to leave.

Eventually, the police came. Joking and laughing with the settler youth, the police brought them away from the wall and spoke with them in private. At this point, the day seemed to turn into a circus. The police convinced the settlers to leave. I approached the police to ask them what they thought of the situation, to which they responded it was not their job to think, only to follow orders. When I asked if it was within their orders to give these settler boys a good spanking, they said it was not. We noticed that the boys had left the village but had moved up one of the hillsides and were approaching a shepherd there. As the police left the scene, an Israeli military hummer came up into the village and parked in the opening. They did not exit their vehicle, and no one around paid any attention to them. After some time of them sitting there, we approached to ask them what they were doing. They said they were only watching us. Again to the question of what they thought of this situation, they replied that it was not their job to think, only follow orders. Almost word for word the same as the police officer. In all my time talking with Israeli soldiers in Palestine, I have never encountered this response as many times as I did that day.

Then the soldier party started. One by one, Israeli military jeeps came up into the village until there were four jeeps, a hummer and one private security truck, numbering at least 22 armed men (some with multiple weapons). It seems that they came because of a tent that we had constructed earlier in the day. The tent, located at the top of the village, was to be the home of the internationals. It seemed to make the military very nervous. They ordered the tent removed and then watched as we deconstructed it.

Discussion erupted between the men of the village and the highest up in the military about the village's right to raise a tent on their land. A new military jeep showed up with a multi-starred officer. He joined the discussion. Coming from the settler road we could see a friend approaching in his truck. He made a rock star entrance, pulling up in front of the mess of jeeps and screeching to a halt. Three doors of his extended cab flew open from which each emerged a journalist armed with his own professional foot-long zoom lens camera, our friend emerging out the driver's side door, cowboy hat upon his head. At this sight, the soldiers immediately retreated to their respected vehicles and sped out of the village. The party was over.

The village returned to its quiet nature, as if nothing had happened. Dinner was served, conversations were had under the stars. The peace returned. One of the young men joked that the settlers would return in the night and slit all of our throats. Seeing our discomfort with this thought, one of the women told us not to worry, she would lock the door when we retired to sleep.

The next morning the same routine began the day; Haji banging on the door with her hammer to wake the house, no one suffering a slit throat, and breakfast being served by Halil in the next cave down. And then with the sheep.

This day started peaceful as the day before, but the shepherds were nervous seeing a settler grazing his sheep on the hillside opposite us. In the area of Qawawis where I stayed, there were four brothers that made up the leadership.

Each brother had their own flock of sheep. Each day it seemed, they would keep their flocks close to the village, grazing on land that seemed would run out of food for the sheep soon. The shepherds had been told that this was the land they were able to use, and any wandering outside that area would result in trouble.

The brothers continuously pointed out the settler shepherd across from us, watching for some sort of trouble. Soon enough, the trouble came. The man with his flock crossed the settler road and headed his sheep directly at us amongst the village olive grove. There were two young men, both with cloth tied around their faces, with the shepherd.

One of the internationals approached the men, extended a hand in greeting and asked why they were there. His hand was not accepted. A settler on a horse approached us and headed directly into the village. As there were only women in the village, the shepherds of Qawawis became worried as to what that man was doing and asked two of the internationals to go down into the village to monitor the situation. The other two stayed in the grove with the shepherds and the settlers.

One of the masked men approached the Qawawis shepherd and began to tell him in fluent Arabic that he was a bad man for being there. This eighteen year old boy from the outpost treated this elderly shepherd as if he were a child, telling him what he could do and where he could go, calling myself and another international woman 'bitches' and demanding to know where we had come from and why we were there. He told the shepherd that he could not graze his sheep in this olive grove that belonged to Qawawis, and if he continued to disobey, this young man would cause the old man problems. Then the police arrived.

Later, the internationals in the village monitoring the man on the horse, reported that the man told them they were living with murderers. That he refused to speak with them because of this. The police kept asking what the problem was, did any of the settlers use violence, as if it weren't a problem because they hadn't. We refused to go with them to file a report seeing as how the last internationals that had gone to report an attack on them had been arrested.

The settlers left, the police left, and we went to lunch. Another day in Qawawis.

I left Qawawis after that, hitching a ride into town on the back of a wagon being pulled by a tractor. It was time for me to return to the reality of cell phones that get reception, demonstrations that are happening on a daily basis against the wall, tear gas, soldiers that have an (usually Zionist) opinion about the situation and my friends in the north.

In order to return to that reality though, we first had to travel through the city of Hebron, another step in the ladder to hell leaned against the wall of life here.

That is a story for another day though….

For pictures from Qawawis see: http://walkfree.blog.com/album/47875/

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Replace correctness with reality, By Henry Bil'in, Occupied West Bank Friday, April 8

Today produced an image that will forever be imprinted on my mind, and possibly on the camera held by a nearby peace worker. Supporting the community members of this beautiful hillside village, about 20 internationals and a dozen Israeli peace activists joined 120 villagers in their demonstration against the wall and illegal settlement one-mile away. The march was planned despite no scheduled wall construction for Friday. As the march neared the settlement, soldiers appeared, drawing rock fire from the town's youth. Prior to their appearance, the local people planned to light tires and already burnt out vehicles to demonstrate their frustration that the Israeli government was thumbing its collective nose at the Palestinians and the world by continuing their illegal wall.

The soldiers skillfully and methodically pressed their weapons superiority by walking, and sometimes running - but always firing sound grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets - at the demonstrators. As observers, it was often difficult to adhere to the "no running" rule, since the rock throwers would dash back behind the observers, causing a very tense and potentially deadly game of leap frog. While walking/jogging back, the friend with camera heard a shot and felt his left arm move "about two feet back". His camera had been struck with a rubber bullet and was rendered inoperable. Sony Corporation's warrantee policy will be tested in the coming months.

The terrain was very hilly, and as more soldiers joined the fray, it became difficult also to determine where our source of harm came from. Retreat was the only sensible option, and all participants in the protest moved back towards the village center. Sensing that the army had "won" by dispensing the crowd, our group became more relaxed. When I spied a local homeowner gesturing to sit with his family in their small open courtyard, I invited myself and teammates to join in. Soon his son distributed about 15 glasses of tea, and we were enjoying the sun, and friendly conversation. When soldiers appeared down the road, we were surprised: hadn't they won? For what purpose were they entering the village?

Did I mention that the homeowner had 2 or 3 small children, 2-4 years old? Did I say that my own spoken words were to calm the folks, convinced absolutely that the soldiers would just walk past? Have I changed my mind forever which already referred to the Army as the Israeli Defense Forces?

What happened next is not in dispute: a woman soldier pointed her rifle at us all, and then after the briefest of hesitations threw not one, but two percussion grenades right at the children. "No, No!" was shouted before she threw. "There are children here!" But to no avail.

Another soldier pointed his assault rifle in my direction and the fear and terror still linger. Children crying, adults crying, and who's going to pay for removal of the tea stains on my trousers?

Really, I should not joke. My thoughts drifted to 1948, and "so this is how it happened". Without observers, would this have been typical village depopulation"? Will things change in our lifetime - soon? -that will permit this Zionist expansion machine to shred the lives of innocents, in their insatiable appetite for land without people? Do the parents of Rachel Corrie believe this has already occurred?

Where is the world? How can reasonable people allow this thuggery to continue? How can "peace and justice" groups allow the Palestinians to be ignored, while our governments look the other way and praise the "democracy" of Israel and the "peace" of Ariel Sharon? Now who's joking?

Holding myself to a literary standard, I have always referred to the Israeli Army as the Israeli Defense Forces. No longer. They will be called, as the locals refer to them, as the Israeli Occupation Forces. My experience Friday has replaced literary correctness with reality. And these thugs deserve a lot more.

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Work for peace, By Henry

Saturday, April 9 Wallaje, Near Beit Jala

A demonstration without stones. Held in this village with small farms and beautiful wild flowers, towered over by the ugly illegal settlement of Gilo, a tract of homes are primed for the bulldozer's blade.

Local speakers told of the wall that is scheduled to annex part of this village to "Greater Jerusalem". Ibrahim, a young man, explained to me that building permits to Palestinians have been revoked, and notices issued that the wall will be coming soon. Over 250 olive trees have been uprooted. That path of the wall was shown to us.

Does anybody care that Ibrahim is a decent fellow? That three different families in Friday's town of Bil'in poured as much tea down our gullets as possible, while regaling us with wonderful family stories? Like the 3-yr old boy with a broken arm, suffered when he jumped off a chair convinced he could not only fly, but thought as Superman he could convince the soldiers to go away? Whose father poured out love, as he described his fears of traveling to nearby Ramallah and the IOF preventing his return to his family?

But today was peaceful. And why not? No demands were made on anyone or any group, and the event was held under the watchful eyes of hilltop settlements and nearby checkpoints. Kinda like having peace groups meet in church basements pushing paper...

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