To Exist is To Resist

Dear friends,

please find below my first "on-the-ground" report from Palestine. Since arriving in Palestine things have been extremely busy, so please accept my apologies for not sending any reports through earlier. I hope to make up for this in the next week and write up much more from my experiences here this time around.


Upon arriving after being away for sometime, it is clear to me that Israel's illegal occupation continues to deepen. While there is some economic prosperity evident in cities like Ramallah, it is clear that there is a growing class divide, with the disparity particularly noticeable between the rural areas of the Occupied West Bank and cities like Ramallah. At the same time, however, it is clear to me that the Palestinian people continue to resist.


Meeting with old friends and new acquaintances and contacts over the last little while, it is very evident that the Palestinian initiated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign enjoys a lot of support amongst ordinary Palestinians, with many of the families and friends I know actively engaging in or supporting the campaign. When discussing BDS with my Palestinian friends and acquaintances here, they have been heartened to hear about the support for the campaign in Australia.

Please feel free to distribute the reports to your networks.

Wishing you all the best,

In solidarity,
Kim

****


TO EXIST IS TO RESIST

by Kim Bullimore -16.01.2011


On Tuesday, the Israeli military demolished the dreams of a family of five in the Palestinian village of Azzoun Atma. At 8.30am, on January 11, more than 100 Israeli soldiers surrounded their home, forced them onto the street and then locked them in the neighouring house for the next three and half hours. As “the most moral army in the world” stood guard around the neighbouring house, ensuring the family could do nothing to stop what was about to happen, a heavily armoured Caterpillar bulldozer smashed down the walls of the home they had lived in for more than 8 years. The Israeli occupation forces then made their way to the other side of the village and demolished a farm house belonging to another family, along with their agricultural pens.


First home demolished by Israeli Occupation Forces


First home demolished by Israeli Occupation Forces

The day after the demolition of their dreams, myself and my team mates from the International Women's Peace Service visited the family to take a report. As we walked around what was once the home of the family we could see, even among the destruction and rubble which lay before us, the loving care they had put into their home. The trees in front of their home were pruned, shaped and manicured. Stepping through the rubble, their garden which was located at the back of their small home, was neat, green and well cared for. In the drive way of the neighbouring house, where they were locked and which belonged to the parents of the husband of the family, there was well-worn, but well-cared for modern style furniture which has subsequently been rescued from the demolished wreckage nearby.

The family’s “crime” was that they built their home on their own land without the permit of the Israeli military occupation administration, which is known in the Orwellian parlance of the Israeli state and its occupation forces, as the “Israeli Civil Administration”.

The administration which was established by the Israeli military to administer the Palestinian territories that Israel illegal seized in 1967 claims to administer the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the interests of the Palestinian population. According to Israeli Military decree 947 which established the administration: “We hereby establish a Civil Administration in the region [West Bank and Gaza]. The Civil Administration shall run all regional civil matters, correspondingly to this [military] degree, for the wellbeing and for the sake of [the local] population and with the purpose of providing and operating the public services, considering the need to maintain a proper governance and public order”. [1]

However, rather caring for the “well being” of the Palestinian population or governing in their interest, the Israel military occupation administration has actively enacted policies which seeks to ethnic cleanse the people they are occupying, an act which is illegal under international law. Not only has Israel, as an “Occupying Power”, violated the Fourth Geneva Convention (which outlines the role and responsibilities of an occupying power) by engaging in illegal detentions, extra-judicial killings, the transfer of settler populations in to an Occupied Territory and the transfer of the resident indigenous population out of the Occupied Territory, it has also systematically violated Article 53 of the Convention, which prohibits an “occupying power” from destroying the personal property of the people they occupy [2]


First home demolished by Israeli Occupation Forces


First home demolished by Israeli Occupation Forces

Since its 1967 seizure of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, Israel has systematically demolished between 18,000 and 24,000 Palestinian homes [3 & 4]. The majority of these homes have been destroyed under the guise of an Orwellian system of “building permits”, which seeks to establish a faux legal system which prevents the Palestinian population from building homes and infrastructure. This system allows the Israeli military occupation administration to establish a “legal” precedent to demolish any Palestinian house and infrastructure built without its permission, in order to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, the Zionist state demolished more than 600 Palestinian homes in the Mughrabi Quarter in order to build a plaza in front of the Western (Wailing) Wall in Occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli state went onto demolish more than 6,000 other homes, including four entire villages in the Latrun area, which is now known as “Canada” Park [5]. The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD) note that in 1971, another 2000 homes were demolished in Gaza under the instructions of Ariel Sharon, who was at the time, the Commander of the South Command. The houses, which were located in the different refugee camps in Gaza were demolished to enable military control of the region. According to ICAHD, Israel destroyed another 2000 homes during the first intifada (1987 – 1993) and another 1700 during the Oslo Peace process between 1993 and 2000.

Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, ICAHD documents that Israel has carried out numerous military operations which have destroyed Palestinian residential homes. This has resulted in up to 5000 Palestinian homes being destroyed in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and other cities, while at least 2500 were destroyed in Gaza. According to a 2010 survey done by the United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (UN OCHA oPt) between January and July 2010, 199 Palestinian structures, including 59 homes were demolished, leaving 242 people homeless [6]. UNOCHA notes that in 2009 the demolition of homes by the Israeli military left 891 Palestinians homeless, including 499 children. In 2004, international human rights organisation, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 50,000 Palestinians have been made homeless by military home demolitions since 1967.

Since 1967, Israel and its military occupation administration have made it almost impossible for Palestinian families to obtain building permits to build or extend their homes. This has been particularly noticeable in Area C, where Azzoun Atma is located.

Azzoun Atma is a “seamline” village located in “Area C” between the 1967 Green Line and Israel’s Apartheid Wall. Under the terms of the Oslo Accords “Area C”, which covers 62 percent of the Occupied West Bank, is under full Israeli control. Area C is home to up to 150,000 Palestinians and contains not only the area necessary for the expansion of Palestinian population centres (more than 270 communities) but also contains the bulk of Palestinian agricultural and grazing land. However, according to UNOCHA oPt, the Israeli Civil Administration (ie. The Israeli Military Occupation Administration) have continually refused to allow Palestinians to build in 99 percent of region covered by Area C, only allowing construction in only 1 percent of the region.

Similarly, according to a 2008 study by Israeli group, Peace Now, between 2000 and 2007, 94% of all Palestinian permit applications for Area C were rejected by the Israeli “Civil Administration”. [7]. During this period only 91 permits were granted. However, Peace Now noted that during that same time the number of building permits granted to settlers in illegal Jewish settlements located in Area C totalled 18, 472. According to Peace Now, during this period, the Israeli occupation forces demolished 33 percent of almost 5000 supposedly “illegal” Palestinians houses and structures, while in contrast only 7 percent of the 2,900 cases of illegal settler construction which had been place under demolition orders were torn down.



Second house demolition by Israeli occupation forces

The demolition of the home belonging to the family in Azzoun Atma on January 11 had nothing to do with the lack of a “legal” building permit. Instead, it was the act of settler-colonial state which seeks to permanently cleanse the land they have occupied of its indigenous inhabitants. Not only did Israel, in the words of one member of the family, seek to “destroy our dreams” by demolishing the houses in Azzoun Atma, the Zionist state also sought to destroy the dreams of an entire people by systematically restricting their right to decent housing with the aim of pushing them of their land permanently

However, despite, the hardships faced under Israel’s brutal military occupation, the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have continued to remain “sumoud” (steadfast) in the face of the human rights violations visited upon them. In Palestine, resistance comes in many forms. Not only will the family in Azzoun Atma rebuild the home of their dreams, so will thousands of other Palestinian families who have also experienced the same devastating destruction. As the slogans of resistance scrawled on Israel’s apartheid wall testify: “to exist is to resist”.

-Kim Bullimore is currently living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where she is a human rights volunteer with the International Women's Peace Service (www.iwps.info). She writes regularly on the Palestine-Israel conflict for the Australian newspaper, Direct Action (www.directaction.org.au) and has a blog at www.livefromoccupiedpalestine.blogspot.com.


[1] http://www.israellawresourcecenter.org/israelmilitaryorders/fulltext/mo0947.htm
[2]http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256739003e636d/6756482d86146898c125641e004aa3c5
[3] http://www.icahd.org/?page_id=313
[4]http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_area_c_humanitarian_response_plan_fact_sheet_2010_09_03_english.pdf
[5] http://www.icahd.org/?page_id=313
[6]http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_area_c_humanitarian_response_plan_fact_sheet_2010_09_03_english.pdf
[7] http://peacenow.org/entries/archive4606

Today in Jerusalem

Dear friends,

My friend, Dominique, who I worked with in Palestine a year or two ago is currently back in Palestine working with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

Please find below Dominique's account of what happened in Jerusalem today when the Israeli state destroyed more Palestinian homes.

I have asked her if I could share her account of it with all of you and she was fine for me to pass it on. As you will see, Dominique's writing is informative, insightful and very moving.

According to Dominique in another post I recieved from her, all up today three house were demolished and 40 people were left homeless. As she notes in her blog, the rains and winter have just started and I can say for personal experience, winter is very, very cold in Palestine.

With her permission, I will also be regularly posting up a variety of her updates onto the Live from Occupied Palestine blog.

You can visit her blog: De L'autre Cote du Mur (From The Other Side of the Wall), which has a range of photos as well at http://delautrecotedumur.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-talking-about-palestine-and.html

In solidarity,
Kim

***
Dominique writes:


Today in Jerusalem
2 November, 2009


When talking about Palestine and Palestinian's rights it is difficult to decide where to start. So I will just tell you day about my day of today.

9:39am: I am drinking my second cup of tea, trying to do my arabic homework, (last minute as usual) when I got a text message “ DWG alert : demolition ongoing of a structure in Abu Dur in East Jerusalem. For further info call xxx”. I ring the number, try to get info about this address and figure out if it is still time to get there or if everything is already over.

I jump into a taxi, and start grumbling against Jerusalem's traffic. When we reach Abu Dur, a truck blocks the street. I get out the taxi, decided to find the place walking. But I realize I am in a very Jewish and “bourgeois” neighbourhood. Obviously nobody is going to demolish anything here. Did I misunderstood the indication? Did the taxi driver make a bad joke? I get down the hill looking for buldozers. Finally the neighbourhood's look changes. Smaller houses, pourer, narrow streets. Much more arabic looking. And suddenly 4 soldiers heavily equipped. They stare at me. I don't look very local. “Where are you going?” “I'm visiting” “Visiting whom? “nobody, just looking for a nice place to take photos” “Passport?”


Soldiers at today's house demolitions making way for bulldozer
Photo by ICAHD:http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=745

10:25am: After checking my passport they let me go through. I hate them but at least I know I am on the right way now. And a few hundreds meters further I reach the crime scene. The house, I mean the rubble.

A woman crying, another shouting her anger. Buldozers and police left a few minutes ago. Men from the family and neighbours are already active trying to clean the place. They received an order from the municipal representative to clear out all the rubble that used to be their home within a week, otherwise they would receive a fine.

The few belongings the family managed to save are piled on the street. A children bike, books, a cupboard, toys, kitchen items. That's it. 2 houses, 16 persons just lost their all house, home, history, dignity, hope.

The father of the family fainted twice during the demolition, and was hospitalized.

Atmosphere is oppressive. A few people taking pictures, a few journalists. I meet people from Icahd, the ngo I volunteer with. Closed faces. What can we do or say? I don't know and feel ashamed and sad.

11am: Time to go. I'm already late for my arabic class though I promised myself I would not miss any.

During an hour and half I try to focus on grammar. I don't feel comfortable to speak about much with other students. This is life in Israel. Deal with ignorance at the best, and hate at the worst in your daily life.But I am the lucky one, I can go from one side to the other.

13h50: I am at Icahd' office in West Jerusalem. I am determined to focus on the advocacy document I am supposed to work on.

14h: phone call: new house demolition in Beit Hanina. We try to get more information before jumping into a taxi again, an arab one preferably cause others usually refuse to go to this part of Jerusalem.

14h30 : still in the taxi, tens of phone calls to try to locate the house.

15h : we found it. Again to late. Buldozers left half an hour ago. 22 persons homeless. A family with 10 children, plus grand-children. This house was built seven years ago. They have already payed 42000 shekels ( more than 8000 euros) as fines to 'regularize' their situation. Yesterday, the court ruled it was illegal. This morning the family received demolition order. this afternoon the buldozers.
Some families live years under demolition order. Not them. You never know when and where they are going to demolish one of the thousands of houses declared illegal. And one day, you see the buldozers coming, you have ten minutes to pack and then it's over. A woman from the family fainted when she saw the buldozers. The army called an ambulance. The ambulance treated her. Then the army gave the family the bill for the ambulance... They will then receive the bill for the demolition cost. Arrogance, cynism have no limit here.

A few months ago, the municipality told the family that if they would destroy by themselves the small annex they have, they would not touch the main house. The owner did it. He took off the roof and walls of the adjacent small building. Now he has absolutely nothing.

Is it necessary to add that it is raining and cold winter has just started.

I am there with an israeli activist from Icahd. Communication is therefore in hebrew. I can just take a few pictures. The only one smiling here is the little girl, maybe 4 years old. She asks me “Leish?” showing the destroyed house. This, I understand : “Why?”. I cannot answer anything, in whatever language.

After a few months of pause, the municipality of Jerusalem has clearly reinstated its illegal and racist policy of house demolitions in East Jerusalem. 11 within the last 3 weeks. These houses are ruled illegal by a municipality which does not grant any construction permits to Arabs but who promotes illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.

My day is not over but it's enough for now, Masalama.

The censoring of Jeff Halper & Israeli / Jewish critics of Israel in Australia

Dear friends,
please find below an article by Israeli anti-occupation activist, Dr Jeff Halper, who recently did a speaking tour of Australia. Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and an outspoken critic of Israel's occupation policies and the war on Gaza. Halper was one of the first Israelis to enter Gaza aboard the Free Gaza boats which broke the illegal and ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza.

The article below is Halper's response to the Australian Jewish News (AJN), Australia's leading Jewish newspaper refusal to publish an paid adverstiment regarding his speaking tour and the attempts by the Zionist lobby in Australia to discredit and censor Halper.

Halper submitted the article for publication to the AJN, who refused to publish it. As a result it was subsequently published on the blog of Antony Loewenstein, an independent Sydney based journalist. Loewenstein is an outspoken Australian Jew, who is opposed to the Israeli occupation. He the co-founder of Australian Independent Jewish Voices and the author of My Israel Question - a book which was inspired by the Australian Zionist lobby's hysterical and laughable over-reaction to Palestinian activist, Hanan Ashrawi, being awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in 2003.

It was Loewenstein's article, The Peace Activist the Jewish News rejects (see below), which first exposed the refusal of AJN to run the Halper advertisement.

In solidarity, Kim

***
http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/2009/03/31/an-unhelpful-discourse-on-israel/

Loewenstein's introduction: The following article is written by Israeli/American peace activist Jeff Halper for the Australian Jewish News but the paper refuses to run the piece, despite spending weeks attacking Halper and his supporters in its pages.



Israeli anti-occupation activist, Dr Jeff Halper

An unhelpful discourse on Israel
By Jeff Halper.

The uproar in the organized Jewish community over the prospect of my speaking in Australia is truly startling to an Israeli like me. Granted, I am very critical of Israel ’s policies of Occupation and doubt whether a two-state solution is still possible given the extent of Israel ’s settlements, but this hardly warrants the kind of demonization I received in the pages of The AJN. Opinions similar to mine are readily available in the mainstream Israeli media. Indeed, I myself write frequently for the Israeli press and appear regularly on Israeli TV and radio.

Why, then, the hysteria? Why was I banned from Temple Emmanuel in Sydney , a self-proclaimed progressive synagogue? Why did I, an Israeli, have to address the Jewish community from a church? Why was I invited to speak in every university in eastern Australia yet, at Monash University, I was forced to hold a secret meeting with Jewish faculty in a darkened room far from the halls of intellectual discourse? Why, when the “leaders” of the Jewish community were excoriating me and my positions, did the Israelis who attended my talks express such appreciation that “real” Israeli views were finally getting aired in Australia, even if they did not all agree with me? Given the support my right to speak evidenced by most of the letters published in The AJN, this all raises disturbing questions over the right of Australian Jews to hear divergent views on Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians held by Israelis themselves.

It raises an even deeper issue, however. What should be the relationship of Diaspora Jewry to Israel ? Whatever threat I represented to the organized Jewish community of Australia had less to do with Israel , I suspect, than with some damage I might to do to the idealized “Leon Uris” image of Israel which you hold onto so dearly. This might seem like a strange thing to say, but I do not believe that you in the Diaspora have internalized the fact that Israel is a foreign country as far from your idealized version as Australia is far from its image as kangaroo-land. Countries change, they evolve. What would Australia ’s European founders think – even those who until very recently pursued a “White Australia” policy – if they were to see the multi-cultural country you have become? Well, almost 30% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, we may very well have permanently incorporated another four million Palestinians – the residents of the Occupied Territories – into our country and, to top it off, it’s clear by now that the vast majority of the world’s Jews are not going to emigrate to Israel . Those facts, plus the urgent need of Israel to make peace with its neighbors, mean something. They mean that Israel must change in ways Ben Gurion, Leon Uris and Mark Leibler never envisioned, even if that’s hard for you to accept.

Yet I see this as a positive thing, a sign of a healthy country coming to grips with reality, some of it of its own creation, even if it means that Israel will evolve from a Jewish state into a state of all its citizens – a bi-national or democratic state. Rather than “eliminating” Israel , this challenge is in fact a natural and probably inevitable development. It will not be easy, but if you can become multi-cultural, so can we.

But that’s our problem as Israelis. What’s your problem? Why should discussing such important issues for Israel be the cause of such distress for you? Because, I venture to say, you have a stake in preserving Israel ’s idealized image that trumps dealing with the real country. In my view, Israel is being used as the lynchpin of your ethnic identity in Australia ; mobilizing around a beleaguered Israel is essential for keeping your kids Jewish. I would go so far as to accuse you of needing an Israel in conflict, which is why you seem so threatened by an Israel at peace, why you deny that peace is even possible, why a peaceful Israel that is neither threatened nor “Jewish” cannot fulfill the role you have cast for it, and thus why you characterize my message as “vile lies.”


Halper at protest attempting to stop Israeli bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian residence


This, to be honest, is the threat I represent. Only this can explain why rabbis, community “leaders” and Jewish professors choose to meet me secretly rather than have me, a critical Israel , in their synagogues or classrooms. This is all understandable. You do need a lynchpin if you are to preserve your identity as a prosperous community in a tolerant multi-cultural society. I would just question whether the real country of Israel can fulfill that role, or even if it’s fair to Israel to expect it to.

We are different peoples. Israel can no more define Diaspora Jewish life than you can define Israel . Rather than knee-jerk defense of an imaginary place, you need to develop a respect for Israel and Israeli voices, a respect that will come only when you start regarding Israel as a real country. And you have to get a life of your own. You have to develop alternative Diaspora Jewish cultures and identities. Ironically, after all I have said, the Israeli government will resist that, for it uses you as agents to support its policies, often extreme right-wing and militaristic policies that contradict your very values of cultural pluralism and human rights. Remember: Israel does what it does in your name. Unless you take an independent position, you are complicit.

What befell me in Australia is just a tiny piece of a sad story of mutual exploitation: you using Israel to keep your community together, Israel using you to defend its indefensible policies. Perhaps something good can emerge from all this: robust discussion on the nature of Israeli-Diaspora relations. I’m going home to Jerusalem . You have to let Israel go and get a [Jewish] life.

Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a peace and human rights organization dedicated to achieving a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He can be reached at

***

The peace activist the Jewish News rejects
by Antony Loewenstein
12 March 2009
http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/2009/03/12/the-peace-activist-the-jewish-news-rejects/


Antony Loewenstein

Dr Jeff Halper is an American born, Israeli-based professor of anthropology, author and co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). This 2006 Nobel Peace Prize nominated group resists the Israeli policy of demolishing Palestinian homes in the illegally occupied West Bank. It uses non-violence and civil obedience.

In 2008 Halper sailed as the only Jew on a protest boat from Cyprus to Gaza to highlight Israel’s collective punishment of the Strip. He told an audience in Canada in January that, “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not because there was a hurricane. There are [Western] countries that are creating starvation in Gaza”.

Halper has just arrived in Australia for a two-week national tour, appeared on yesterday’s Radio National Breakfast and ABC Radio PM, with much more media to come, and will be speaking at universities and public meetings across the country.

But you won’t be reading about his Sydney events in the Australian Jewish News (AJN). The publisher has refused to run ads by Jews Against the Occupation (JAO) that simply inform people of Halper’s schedule. The group was given no reason for the decision except that the publisher had instructed the paper not to allow the ads to appear. Crikey has seen the ad and it only contains titles and locations of the lectures and contact phone numbers.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald also confirms that a planned talk at a leading Sydney liberal synagogue was cancelled due to pressure from the Zionist lobby.

I contacted the AJN’s National Editor, Ashley Browne, to shed more light on the decision to block the ad. He said that the paper was not obliged to run the ads and refused ads all the time.

When pushed, he acknowledged that he supported the publisher, Polaris Media’s Robert Magid – who recently claimed in the paper that the late English playwright Harold Pinter was a “political extremist” for daring to criticise Israel – to cut ads that would “offend significant members of the community, especially subscribers”. I asked him how an ad that simply listed a handful of events would be “offensive”, but he gave no further information.

Magid told the Herald that he rejected the ad because he didn’t “like the crowd who are bringing him out.” He went on: “I am familiar with them. They use their Judaism to bash other Jews and issues associated with the Jewish community.”

I queried Browne why the paper seemed happy to run irregular ads from the fundamentalist, West Bank settler movement. “Nobody has ever complained about those ads,” he replied. Clearly the message of the colonial project in the West Bank – a recent EU report found yet more evidence of illegal development around East Jerusalem – is less “offensive” than a mild-mannered Jewish peace activist.

This latest example of censorship follows a long history of the mainstream Jewish establishment being fearful over honestly debating Israel/Palestine (something we’ve seen over the last days in the US over the forced resignation of Israel critic Charles W Freeman from the post of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Read more here.)

It’s hard to disagree with leading British Jewish thinker, Antony Lerman, who wrote in last week’s London Independent that until Jews stop always seeing themselves as victims, peace in the Middle East is impossible. It’s a shame the AJN doesn’t take its democratic responsibility seriously. Debate over the Middle East is raging overseas and new, more moderate voices, are emerging. Such perspectives are largely absent from the country’s only national, Jewish paper.

Instead, the AJN ran a piece last week by novelist Alan Gold, arguing against the UN’s upcoming anti-racism conference, Durban II: “And now that the storm clouds are gathering over Geneva, we can only look on in horror, and feel as our parents or grandparents must have felt in 1933.”

Memo to the AJN: Hitler died in 1945.

POWER TO THE (PALESTINIAN) PEOPLE!

Dear friends,
one day after I wrote my last blog, the Palestinian resistance detonated the wall that separated Palestinian Rafah from Egypt. Within hours, tens of thousands of Palestinians were flooding into the Sinai to buy much needed food, clothing, heating oil, fuel and other supplies. By afternoon, the Egyptian authorities put the figure at 60,000 while the UN put the figure as high as 350,000.

According to Israeli journalists, such as Amira Hass, the detonation of the wall had been planned for months by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza. They had covertly weakened the foundations of the wall over a period of time and then on the morning of January 23, they detonated up to 20 explosions bringing down two section of the wall.

Please find below an excellent piece by Israeli activist, Jeff Halper from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. The title of his piece says it all!

POWER TO THE (PALESTINIAN)PEOPLE!

in solidarity, Kim
*************************************

POWER TO THE (PALESTINIAN)PEOPLE!
by Jeff Halper
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
January 23, 2008


The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own "moderate" political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom. Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them by an Arab government in collaboration with Israel.

We, the peoples of the world, should take great pride and encouragement in this quintessentially civil society refusal to accept subjugation, to abandon their fate to governments, including their own, for whom the lives of ordinary people are simply grist for their political charades – Annapolis and its subsequent "peace process" being but the last cynical expression. For the Palestinians represent far more than just themselves. Their refusal to submit to the dictates of governments, or to governments' lack of interest in the well-being of people in general, reflects the desire of billions of oppressed people for identity, freedom, a decent life and actualization of their collective and individual rights and potentials. Most of the oppressed, the "wretched of the earth" as Franz Fanon called them a half-century ago, are too preoccupied with the daunting daily struggle for survival to organize and resist. Others do resist in a myriad of ways, but are most often repressed by their own political and economic "leaders," disappearing anonymously from view. In a few cases they have managed to mount effective resistance to oppression, even to prevail – though the billions spent on "counterinsurgency" warfare by the US, Europe, Russia, Israel and many "developing" nations augur ill for peoples attempting to
overthrow oppressive regimes.

In this the Palestinians stand at the forefront, in the front lines of peoples' insistence everywhere that their rights, well-being and fundamental values as human beings be respected by governments. And they do so (and I write this as an Israeli with great sorrow and shame) against one of the world's strongest and most ruthless military powers – a power that has dispossessed them from 85% of their land, which is trying to transform its occupation into a permanent regime of apartheid, which has spent decades impoverishing and disenfranchising them; the fourth largest nuclear power
which nevertheless casts itself as the victim. Not only have the Palestinians experienced the dehumanization all oppressed and colonized peoples experience, not only have they been made into the embodiment of the rich and powerful's greatest fear, evil "terrorists" who may tear down their privileged "civilization," but they have been turned into guinea pigs. Israel is able to gain an edge in the counterinsurgency industry and win entree into the heart of the American military/hi tech complex by turning the Occupied Territories into a laboratory for the development of fiendish weaponry and tactics intended for use against people.

And yet the Palestinian people – and in particular those who remain *sumud*, steadfast, in Palestine – continue not only to resist but to surprise and confound its would-be Israeli master at every turn. Despite unlimited control, a complete monopoly over the use of force, utter callousness and a vaunted Shin Beit, Israel's military intelligence, Palestinians vote as they want, resist, carry on their daily lives with dignity – and blow huge holes in the walls and policies constructed in order to imprison and defeat them.

All this is not on the minds of those desperate people who surged into Egypt today. They may not have the "Big Picture." Yet they deserve the respect and gratefulness of every person who cherishes a better world based on human rights and dignity, a world that is inclusive. As an Israeli Jew, I have been saddened and mortified that my own people, after all they have experienced, cannot see what they are doing to others. But on a larger scale, not as an Israeli Jew but as a human being, I take heart in the Palestinians' active refusal to be ground under a global system that is producing unimaginable wealth and power for a few at the expense of the growing ranks of the wretched.

I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed. I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power. We may each express our responsibility towards the people of Gaza in whatever way most suits us, but as the privileged we must do something. We owe the Palestinians and the Palestinians writ large at least that.