The morning after I returned from a two-week trip to Israel and
the Palestinian territories, I awoke to appalling news.
A suicide bombing by a member of Hamas, a Palestinian liberation
group, killed at least 15 people, including several children, last
Thursday during lunch hour at a crowded pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem.
The bombing came in retaliation for an Israeli attack July 31 that
killed eight people, including two Hamas members, in the West Bank
city of Nablus. Hamas is one of several Palestinian groups seeking
to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through
political and military means.
I had just come back from a two-week trip with Christian Peacemaker
Teams, a pacifist group that documents human rights abuses and works
with Israelis and Palestinians to promote peaceful and just means
for ending the ongoing warfare.
Before I left, several well-intentioned acquaintances politely
informed me I was crazy. "Palestinians don't know any
way other than violence," they said. "They kill Jews left
and right, after all that the Israelis have done for them. Pacifism
won't work in the Middle East."
This perception is understandable. As Israeli Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres so astutely pointed out after Thursday's atrocity
in Jerusalem, the world has allowed rogue militants to speak for
all of Palestine. "If we say we won't talk under fire,
it means every mad gunman can decide there will be no dialogue."
At the same time, we ignore Palestine's lively peace movement
- you, dear reader, have likely never heard of it, even though it
works at a grass-roots level in every Palestinian community throughout
the occupied territories.
And by our silence, we condone Israel's own atrocities against
the Palestinian people. The Israeli death toll from the current
10-month conflict is around 140. In the same period, more than 550
Palestinians have been killed. As with the Israeli deaths, many
of the dead Palestinians were civilians who just happened to be
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That's right. Middle East terrorism goes both ways.
Aweek ago Monday, I visited a desert community of about 75 cave-dwelling
shepherds near the West Bank town of Yatta. Only two weeks before,
the Israeli Defense Forces had bulldozed every one of the community's
centuries-old caves, burying clothing, cars and even live sheep
under tons of rock. When the Red Cross supplied emergency tents
to the families, the Israelis returned with their heavy machinery
and buried those as well.
An elderly shepherd named Jaber led me from crumbled cave to crumbled
cave. It was early in the afternoon, a time when most Middle Easterners
stay indoors or under a canopy. But Jaber and I had no choice. The
entrances to the caves were blocked by jagged stones, crumpled cars
and torn tents. His face glowed a deep pink from days on end of
living under the desert sun with almost no access to shade.
He led me past his surviving goats and sheep, several of whom were
gnawing on a fallen tree, to the cave where he had kept them at
night and during the harsher parts of day. Through a gap in the
stones, we could see buried containers of feed. "Everything
is in there," he said in Arabic. "I have no food to give
them."
The Israeli government has justified the cave demolitions, saying
that they were built without the required construction permits.
Israel has used this process to block virtually all Palestinian
construction - schools, homes, you name it - on these lands.
And it regularly demolishes structures that predate the 1967 permit
law in order to make way for Israeli colonies in the West Bank that
are illegal under international law. In its occupation of the Palestinian
territories, Israel continuously violates the Fourth Geneva Convention,
which outlaws attacks against civilians and forbids permanent settlements
by any nation outside of its boundaries, even though Israel itself
pushed for this convention and signed onto it.
These home demolitions are only one part of Israel's ongoing
policy of harassing, impoverishing, torturing and killing Palestinian
civilians in an effort to force them to flee their homeland.
Take the two children and several bystanders who were killed as
"collateral damage" during the Israeli attack two weeks
ago in Nablus. Or the Palestinian pacifist, Isaac Saada, who was
murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces last month in Bethlehem.
Or my Palestinian friend who was stopped by an Israeli security
officer as he drove on an ostensibly Palestinian-controlled road,
ordered out of his car, beaten and threatened with death. Or my
encounter early last week with a group of Israeli soldiers who surrounded
my group's Palestinian taxi drivers and calmly discussed kidnapping
and torturing them, forgetting that the Israeli peace activists
among us would understand Hebrew.
The policy of terror is working. Jacob, a Palestinian friend of
mine who lives in Beit Jala, a village just outside of Bethlehem,
recently told me of his plans to move to Bolivia. The tourist-dependent
Bethlehem economy has crashed since the beginning of this intifada.
"There's no work," he told me. "And I'm
sick of this shooting." He waved his hand in the direction
of Gilo, a walled Israeli settlement that stands like a fortress
on a nearby hill. Besides housing Israelis, Gilo holds a military
outpost that regularly barrages Bethlehem and its surrounding villages
with shells and machine gun fire.
The night before, Jacob and I had huddled in a corner room of the
house with several other friends as Israeli bullets zipped through
the hallway and burst holes in the gas and water tanks on the roof.
Israel claimed that the shelling was in response to Palestinian
gunfire. If so, why did the Israeli Defense Forces blanket residential
areas with bombs and bullets, rather than targeting the handful
of gunmen who were acting in opposition to the majority will of
Beit Jala residents?
The Israeli government is as guilty as Palestinian military groups
of waging war against civilians. But unlike Hamas or Islamic Jihad,
it is using U.S. taxpayers' money to do so - to the tune of
$2.23 billion in military aid a year.
It is time for the United States to wake up and hold Israel accountable
for its war crimes.
Kathryn Kingsbury is a reporter for The Capital
Times.
Copyright 2001 The Capital Times
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