Brutality of Israel's occupation against the Christian communities of Ramallah and Bethlehem as seen from the of a young American student!
And this is why no matter how hard Zionists try to lie and decieve people, some brave soul will actually take a trip to Palestine and see for themselves the holocaust the Jews are perpetuating in Palestine against the civilian population.
This is what this American student witnessed. Is it any wonder Zionst Jews are more and more disliked by the nations of the world?. They can whine about anti-semitism all they want, but their dissimulation will not hide the reality of their genocidal activities against the Palestinian people.
March 19, 2002
The Madness of Occupation
By Lori Allen
Ramallah, Palestine
It's noon on a Monday in the second week of March and I'm going mad. Mad from frustration, anger, anxiety, worry, fear--every possible negative response in my emotional cauldron...
Despite a promise to myself that I would follow everyone's advice to stop watching the news, I find myself, once again, sitting in front of the television, tuned to Bethlehem TV. It is showing groups of men and boys from Daheisha refugee camp being rounded up, stuffing their jackets into plastic bags, presenting their IDs to the heavily armed Israeli soldiers, pulling up their shirts to bare their stomachs and backs, the older men with their love-handles and the prominent ribs of underfed teenagers equally exposed to the cameras, equally powerless in the face of the M-16s pointed at them. Then one by one I watch as their hands are bound with tight plastic strips, as they are blindfolded and prodded ahead to be processed and imprisoned. It is impossible not to be reminded of similar scenes that I know of only from pictures, books, and movies. I hear the echoes of the voices of those who said then: "I didn't know what was happening, I didn't think it would be this bad, I didn't know what to do"
And while I see what is happening, and fear only that it will get unimaginably worse, I, in fact, do not know what to do. No one here knows what to do. Protest? There is no press. What effect could it have? Write articles? They probably won't be published, and even if they are, the news seems merely to slide in and out of the consciousness of the indifferent and/or powerless readers. The overwhelming force of state power is such a heavy anchor on the spirit, on the sense that something could be done. Yet something compels me to at least persist in writing, recording, witnessing, fretting, whether the impulse is youth, naiveté, or perhaps a fear that two weeks from now, or two years from now, or twenty years from now I will still be hating myself for not having made some effort, however slight, to obstruct this increasingly barbarous and lethal system.
The question is, what can be done? People here like to tell me, with that grim resignation that Palestinians have been forced to perfect, "Our fate is written by God, and if it's your time to go it's your time to go." I'm not terribly worried about my time for going, nor do I put much stock in religious fatalism. I am, however, worried about what's happening right here, right now, just a ten minute drive away in the little town that is said to have shielded Jesus in his fragile first days. Bethlehem, a town so happy to receive pilgrims and tourists praising the saints in peaceful times, now lacks the protection of pious communities, unable to save the living, breathing people who have done nothing to warrant this treatment; nothing, that is, other than having been born the wrong nationality, and in the wrong place.
I'm worried about what's going to happen in the next few days when the same brutal measures are taken against the refugee camps that are only two minutes away in Ramallah. But at this minute I'm especially worried about my friends in the Bethlehem refugee camps, the camps that are, right now, having their guts pulled out through their noses while the residents wait for their turn to have their house torn apart while trying to keep their children calm and away from the windows, out of range of snipers' bullets. I was comforted to learn that the house of a family I know has not yet been searched. They think the Israelis have purposefully skipped their house, believing them to be Christians, a different kind of pass-over.
And all I can do is sit here and watch the news and listen to the burping grumbles of the tanks, the high pitched buzz of the unmanned drones, and the lung-rattling thunder of the F-16s as they fly over Ramallah.
A friend in the US recently remarked, "How can we hear about what's happening to people in refugee camps and not be shocked? We're taught to feel sorry for refugees." But it seems that Israeli propaganda has been singularly successful, so much so that the Palestinians are denied even the world's pity. American policy seems content to follow the belief, as Israeli propaganda implies and its policy assumes, that every Palestinian is a potential or actual gunman or terrorist or suicide bomber. That every Palestinian warrants the suspicion or torture or death that the Israeli soldiers deal out to him or her.
Certainly the young man, Samer Awis, deserved his death by disintegration two days ago. He was a Palestinian man, after all, a refugee, a member of an organization that actively opposes the occupation, and the brother of another Palestinian activist whom the Israelis have had their sights on for quite some time. That's more than reason enough to melt his body into the charred remains of the little blue car he had been driving past a refugee camp in Ramallah, isn't it? Certainly the security of the Israeli state and the security of its Jewish citizens warrants the taking of this, surely satanic, life. (Never mind the fact that Israel had already made an attempt or two on his elder brother's life, never mind the fact that his sister-in-law miscarried when shelling started in their town some months ago, never mind his uncle's years as a political prisoner and demolished home, and never mind what were surely his long-held dreams to return to the land stolen from his family in what has now become Israel. Clearly, none of that was punishment enough.)
But what of others, like the women and children of the Kweik family, recently turned to bloody charcoal by a missile fired from a US Apache helicopter in front of that same camp where Samer lost his life? Well, maybe they didn't deserve it as much as this young man. But still, they are Palestinian, after all, and they are probably related to someone the Israelis feel threatened by. And anyway, we said we were sorry Maybe we won't do anything for all those traumatized teenage girls weeping and fainting from grief for their classmates who died that grizzly missile death, but a belligerent military occupation can really only do so much
I woke up two nights ago when that missile was fired at Samer sometime after midnight, and went smoothly back to sleep, comforted by the fact that I heard no ambulance sirens. I assumed it was just an attack at yet another already-destroyed PA building. I was horrified to read the morning news and discover that, no, the missiles had actually destroyed yet another human being. While the large sums of (mostly EU) money going up in smoke and coming down as rubble as Israeli F-16s and tank shells demolish PA infrastructure does seem like something of a waste, an immoderate effort at demonstrating to the PA who, really, is boss. But aren't human beings supposed to be sacred somehow, less dispensable than the contents of state coffers and the probably poorly organized PA filing cabinets? Aren't we all supposed to distinguish between the metal of Samer's car or the Kweik family's truck and the flesh and blood and potential futures they contained? That humanitarian, enlightenment philosophy apparently hasn't yet shone upon Sharon and Ben-Eliezer, Israel's War Minister. Nor has it brightened the dim bulb of President Bush or his administration, who are content to fiddle and watch while people's homes, hearts, and murdered bodies are blazing in Palestine.
I finally did turn off the TV, unable to continue watching the rows of men being herded around like dumb animals, only to be interrupted by a call from a friend in Bethlehem. It happens that he was at his brother's house, outside the refugee camp where he lives, when Israeli soldiers invaded the camp, put it under curfew, and proceeded to trash the place, gather up all the male residents-and, of course, kill some people. At his brother's house, stranded now, he had no milk for his four-month-old baby girl. He had no pampers. He told me, with a voice strained by exhaustion and frustration, that the Israelis permitted no one to leave their houses, and his baby was going hungry.
I've met and held this baby, whose name seems to fit her calm and philosophical countenance. They call her Sophia, which means "wisdom". I wonder what that little girl will make of the stories her parents will surely tell her as she grows up, about the time they were hiding from the occupation army without any food. I wonder what effect growing up under a brutal regime that corrals you, and brands you as suspect, a potential target, simply by virtue of your nationality, will have on her placid, smart demeanor. And I wonder how many more people are going to be murdered and driven mad from grief and worry before people start protesting effectively against this insanity.
Lori Allen is a University of Chicago graduate student, currently conducting research in the West Bank under the auspices of an SSRC grant. She is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch.
counterpunch.org |
