End the Occupation Now
On Friday April, 20th, 2007, my friend Ann Patterson and I joined the Bil’in Peoples Committee, a Palestinian peace group (based outside Ramallah) for their weekly nonviolent protest and march to the Apartheid Wall. We were joined by Israeli peace activists and some two hundred other activists from over 20 countries, including France, America, Puerto Rico, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, and India.
Before the peace vigil, I participated in a Press Conference with the Palestinian Minister for Information, Mustafa Barghouti. Minister Barghouti praised the nonviolent vigil of the Bil’in people and the nonviolent resistance of many people around Palestine. He said that the Bil’in resistance movement was a model and example for all. He called for an end to the building of the wall, and for upholding of Palestinian rights under International Law.
I supported his call and thanked the people of Bil’in. I offered my support for the nonviolent resistance to the Wall as it contravenes International Law, including the International Court of Justice decision in the Hague. I also called for an end to the Palestinian occupation, which will mark 40th years in June, and full recognition by the international community of the Palestinian Government, together with restoration of economic and political rights to the people.
Both Dr. Barghouti and I called for the release of the BBC Journalist Alan Johnston. I also called for the protection of journalists all over the world, whose ability to cover the truth, is being daily infringed.
During the conference, the Israeli military drove through the main gate onto Palestinian land. Israeli foot soldiers also came through. They surrounded the journalists and warned us all that if we did not disburse, they would attack in five minutes. Dr. Barghouti and I condemned this threat as an abuse of freedom of the press, freedom of speech and the peoples right to protest peacefully.
During the press conference, an activist from San Paulo climbed to the top of the surveillance tower and released a Palestinian flag. He planned to stay there for 2 days.
So we returned to the village and joined the peace vigil. We walked down the road toward the wall. Several hundred people participated in the walk. Palestinian men and women led the march. Young Palestinian males are often arrested and beaten at these weekly vigils. I walked with my Palestinian interpreter who told me his home was on the other side of the wall. His 12 acres of land was confiscated by Israeli Authorities and his 400 year old olive trees were uprooted, taken to Jerusalem and planted in a new Israeli settlement.
Half way down the road, Israeli soldiers started firing a mystery gas at us, and aimed plastic bullets directly at us. Later, they used water cannons. We were a completely unarmed. It was a peaceful, nonviolent gathering. This vicious attack upon civilians by the Israeli soldiers was totally unprovoked. The soldiers blocked the upper part of the road, thus preventing Dr. Barghouti and some of the Palestinians from joining the main vigil. Then we were tear gassed.
As I helped a French woman, I was shot in the leg with a rubber-covered steel bullet. I was targeted by an Israeli soldier and shot from a distance of 20 metres. This itself was illegal because such lethal weapons, under Israeli military law, are not allowed to be used within a 20 metre range.
Two young women, one from the US and the other New Zealand, helped me to an ambulance. An elderly Palestinian mother was carried away on a stretcher to another ambulance. She was shot in the back with a plastic bullet. I saw one man whose face was covered in blood; he was overcome with the gas. About 20 people were injured.
Afterwards, Ann and I went back to the protest while people were still being viciously attacked with nerve gas and plastic bullets. This time, I was overcome with gas. My nose bled terribly and I was carried again to an ambulance for treatment.
The medical staff advised us to return to the vigil, so we were obliged to leave our friends who were still heroically trying to get near the wall. On the road outside the village, we watched two Palestinian children playing in their garden, oblivious to the nerve gas floating down on the wind toward their home. The gas permeates their clothes, their lungs and their lives, and the question has to be asked–What the health of these children will be like in a few years time?
This is not only an abuse of human rights and international law by the Israeli government; it is a health and environmental issue. We were all traumatized by the Israeli attack. With the gas on the air, I remembered the words from a Palestinian doctor, who said, “the whole Palestinian people, after 40 years of occupation, are traumatized. It is time for the International Community to act and put a stop to this suffering and injustice.”
I agree. Enough is enough. It is time for action to force the Israeli Government to enter into unconditional talks to end this tragedy upon the good and gentle Palestinian people. End the Occupation Now!
Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her peace work in Northern Ireland. She is the author of “The Vision of Peace,” (Orbis Books, edited by John Dear). For information, contact: www.peacepeople.com
What does it take to get news like this into the mainstream media in America. What is it going to take to get the average American citizen to understand that the US and Israeli are terrorist governments. The Israeli government and until 6 1/2 years at a lesser extent the American have been acting like terrorist. In my opinion if you act like the enemy (terrorist) you are the enemy.
Here is a history of the protests brought before the U.N. about such actions, only to get the veto by U.S.!
http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_whyusa03.html
The truth eventually comes out. I am a broken record when it comes to this but I always urge people to check out the CNI, The Council for the National Interest. The only way to resolve this problem is through knowledge and spreading the word.
It’s an interesting phenomenon that children who grow up in violent, abusive families either become abusers as adults, or become the opposite–caretakers. Having developed compassion as a result of their own pained early fates, they elect to help ease human pain, rather than add to it. One could say that victims of the Holocaust are symbolically those “abused children.” With so many of their family members murdered in Germany by the nazis, they moved to a new zone to establish a nation. Many feel the land was abducted to begin with, however, much history is baesd on abduction of land(s). Our own US history involves this as land was taken from the Indigenous. It’s very difficult to watch Israel (not all of its citizens, just as in the US, a purported 70% does NOT support the aggressive policies of its “leaders”) identify with the abuser pattern. The use of force on Lebanon last summer, as Rice & Bush winked, made me incredibly sad, both for the senseless brutality and loss of life & infrastructure in Lebanon, AS WELL AS for the inevitability that Israel will have to pay for that aggression. A writer on commondreams used the euphemism that “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” as metaphor for Israel’s actions, completely out of line. Nations that use force before diplomacy, build weapons before investment in education set their populations up for the ultimate blowback. It’s called karma.
Where there is a military occupation, Art 49 of the Geneva Convention is clear and simple: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”.
Israel’s cannot self-validate its war crime enterprise by procedures for “official approval” of civilian transfers into occupied Palestine - any more than any thief can declare his crimes “legal”. Under Art. 49 of the Geneva Convention, and the ruling of the World Court on July 19, 2004, every civilian transfer, and every official involved in facilitating these transfers, is a war criminal. Israel began this war crime program in 1967 when its leaders, in defiance of what they knew (from their own legal advisers) to be international law, decided to transfer civilians into Palestine [see “Israel’s Tragedy Foretold”, New York Times, March 10, 2006]. Over the 40 years since Israel has profoundly victimized thousands of Palestinians by confiscation of their farmlands, and dispossession from and demolition of their homes - all to make way for civilian transferees from Israel. Israel’s brutalities and inhumanities that have enabled its core civilian transfer war crime enterprise for forty years are a matter of public record too voluminous to even begin recounting here. Its criminal enterprise continues apace today [see “Council pushes through illegal West Bank building plan”, Ha’aretz, Feb. 25, 2007].
Israel’s criminal transfer program has been marketed in the United States with the same infamous rapacity as was the Iraq war. Its perpetration is fashionable and politically correct among an enormous number of Israelis and so-called “supporters of Israel” in the US and western Europe. Discussion which might expose its raw criminality is actively resisted. Its horrific victimization of Palestinian homeowners and farmers has been assisted, facilitated, promoted, financed, and propagandized, by pro-Israel” media and politics at every level and by every means in the US. Huge amounts of money from the US - both official “aid” to Israel as well as private contributions to major Jewish organizations which then assist financing construction of transfer communities in Palestinian territory. So-called “pro-Israel” politics exercised upon Congress resulted in tax laws which allow these contributions to Israel’s criminal enterprise, to be tax deductible (and thus indirectly subsidized by all American taxpayers). Because of this, it is only logical that Americans reap the hatred of those who are righteously “anti-war-crime”. We Americans should be ashamed of, and repelled by, our appeasement of Zionist fanatics and our national role in Israel’s war crime program.
What the Israelies get away with is just plain murder! They have never been held accountable. Sound familiar? USA and Israel think they are the center of the universe and they cannot see their own complicity. If we do not wake up to their faults we will be burned with them. The Palestinians have no State, but Israel is one.
Here is what is truly crucial to remember: NONE of this would be happening without the support and consent — and even encouragement of — the US government.
Ms Maguire begins this excellent piece by referring to the barrier erected by Israel, to steal more Palestinian land (and make their lives even more horrible, if that is possible), the Apartheid Wall.
Please remember that Pelosi and several other Democrats, including Conyers, all rushed out and loudly derided Jimmy Carter for using this term to describe the Israeli occupation. Remember that Hillary Clinton stood in front of this Wall and claimed it was good for the Palestinians.
As long as the Democrats, funded largely by wealthy Zionist donors, continue to support, even cheerlead, the ethnic cleansing and slow-motion genocide in Palestine, we are, as Democrats, guilty of supporting it as well.
“Good and gentle Palestinian people?” Palestinian Arabs are responsible for any number of violent incidents, from the Jaffa riots of 1921 to the Hebron riots of 1929 to countless attacks on peaceful JEwish kibbutzim and moshavim in the 1930s to the massacre of over 60 Jewish doctors and nurses on Mount Scopus to hundreds of people killed in suicide bombers in the last 10 years.
I’m a longtime critic of Israeli government policy, believe Israel should withdraw from the territories and East Jerusalem, and don’t necessarily approve of the wall (although I understand the reason it was built–to deter fanatic violence). However, to blame the Israeli-Arab conflict ONLY on one side is dishonest, mean-spirited, and frankly insulting to my people, my nation and my homeland. If you take the trouble to look up stuff on the Web, you can find any number of extremist Arab web sites (radioislam, for example) that deny the legitimacy of Israel or put it in quotation marks.
Raanan Geberer, NYC
Raanan Geberer
Are you saying every Palestinian is an evil extremist? I find that hard to believe. I can look on the internet and find many hateful, extreme American web sites, doesn’t mean every American is an evil extremists.
This article is very sad. The people share a common heritage, but somehow are unable to see each others’ points of view. This kind of treatment of peaceful demonstrators is abominable. People need to talk, to sit down and hear each other, but the US is not helping. After all, the US way right now seems to be shoot first, ask questions later.
Alberto de Jesus “Tito Kayak” participated in this with two viequenses. Our folks were there to give back some of the solidarity we received from around the world during our struggle to get the US Navy to stop bombing our island municipality of Vieques. The struggle continues. The US Navy has yet to finish cleaning up.
Tito climbed an observation post and placed a Palestinian flag a top of it. It is something we have seen him do several times with both the flag of Vieques and the flag of Puerto Rico. It is a very Puerto Rican way of showing our respect for the cause of our Palensinian sisters and brothers.
As a colony of the US we know a bit of how it feels to have others rule over the lands of your ancestors.
Here in the middle east, we take each american tax payer to be directly responsible for the long misery and suffering of the Palestinian people. USA government is the real culprit. Shame on USA.
Has anyone read The Wrath of Jonah by Ruether and Ruether publishe byHarper and Row in 1989