I can't believe they shot at Grandma!
Eyewitness to Israeli State Terrorism
Anne Gwynne is a 65-year-old grandmother and retired bank manager from Wales, Great Britain, who traveled to Palestine to see for herself the situation there. She now lives in the ancient city of Nablus, in the illegally occupied West Bank in Palestine. She has long been an advocate of the rights of the oppressed, and of their struggle for self-determination.
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AG (Anne Gwynne): We all know the stories, we all know the facts, and the figures, we’ve read the books, we’ve seen the films, and listened to the broadcasts. But somehow, there comes a point where you’ve just got to go and really have a look. And I really went to Palestine in December [2002] just to have a look. I went to Nablus for one week only. I went because Dr. Mustava Barghouti asked me to go to Nablus for one week. And then followed one week in other cities, like Al Kilia (?), Jenin, and so on. And then, I’ve just come back to Nablus, and then I just stayed there --- I couldn’t leave --- it’s a wonderful place.
Anne Gwynne interviewed by Jeffery A. Blankfort 08-06-03 over Mendocino, California, radio station KZYX ("kzyx.org"), on Jeffrey’s program, "Takes on the World." The next day (08-07-03), Jeffrey aired the interview over San Francisco’s KPOO (89.5 FM Radio), "Connecting the Dots," heard every Thursday from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
JAB (Jeffrey Blankfort): What did you find in Nablus?
AG: I found suffering on a scale that is absolutely unimaginable. It’s inconceivable anywhere else, and it’s completely . . . I think the Israelis have counted on it being a crime of such magnitude that no one can keep up with it, and no one will ever be able to understand it, because it’s . . . it’s . . . unbelievable. In Nablus, I found a city of nearly 200,000 people, a great city, a beautiful city, a strong city, a city 10,000 years old in its underlayers --- the second or third oldest inhabited city on the planet. Destroyed in large measure. Destroyed houses, factories, shops, roads, every kind of infrastructure --- ambulances, hospitals, everything fired on, destroyed, bombed.
I found there men . . . very few men who haven’t got a bullet wound, and all these thousands of men, almost all men have been shot at one time or another by the Israelis, some of them many times, the greatest number of bullet wounds --- I actually met and talked to the man --- was 16.
I met people whose skulls have been crushed by Israelis wielding rocks, and who’ve got titanium skulls now on top ---
unbelievable surgery.
I met children whose faces are off their skull, like a rubber mask, like in films, when you pull off a rubber mask, well that’s how the front of the face is, when a child has been deliberately fired on with a dum-dum bullet. I came to a city where every family has lost someone.
I have not yet met a family that hasn’t lost someone dead to the Israelis. I mean, it’s unbelievable.
And where every family . . . oh, and where every man has been to prison. I actually not met a man who has not been to prison, an Israeli prison --- an unbelievable level of terrorism. It’s inconceivable --- can you imagine Oakland or Mendocino, where no one . . . you know --- there’s not a man who hasn’t been in prison, there’s not a man who hasn’t been shot, there isn’t a family who hasn’t had someone murdered.
JAB: You, yourself, were wounded. How did that happen?
AG: We were going up a small alley off the city center square to take a woman, February 18, Tuesday, she was in the last stages of labor, and her husband came to me on the other side of the square and said, please, could I help. Well, of course, I can’t help. Internationals think they can help, but actually they can’t. So I got the ambulance, and Feras al Bakri, the greatest and bravest ambulance driver on the West Bank, he was holding the stretcher with his left hand, and I was holding it with my right hand, and someone was bringing up the rear. And we asked if we could pass these soldiers --- there were two on the left who held their guns in the non-firing position, but the one on the right-hand side was clearly, completely out of control, and we asked if we could pass, and his response was to fire between our feet --- I got a graze and a piece of shrapnel, but Feras got the second bullet through his hand in two days, because he was also fired at in the ambulance on the Sunday, on the 16th, a day in which the Israelis came to the city to torment children, and incite them to come out onto the streets, which they do --- they’re very brave. They shot five dead, and injured 35 on the Sunday, and killed 2 and injured, I think it was 19 or 20 on a Tuesday --- just for fun. It’s their sport, like people shoot, I don’t know, like gamehunters.
JAB: You’ve had experiences with the ambulances. What happens to the Palestinians when they are wounded and Palestinian ambulance drivers try to get them to a hospital?
AG: If you’re within a city or if there is no roadblock between you and the hospital, then you’re OK. But if you are outside the city, for example, in the village of Beitforeik (?), and Sallem, whose suffering is, my God, unbelievable, or Kalkilia, about which everyone is hearing now because of the Wall, but Kalkilia’s suffering did not start with the Wall, then you can wait at the checkpoint . . . roadblock, checkpoint, until your patient dies. And it happens --- 79, I think, have died at roadblocks. You know, we have checkpoints in Jordan. When you cross the border into Jordan, there are 13 checkpoints between the bridge and Amman. They stop you and look at your papers, and then they say OK and you go. Not so in Palestine. It’s not a checkpoint at all. You show them your papers, you submit your British passport, you’re just a woman of 65 on foot. They can refuse you entry. They can just keep you there for 6 hours. They can arrest you. They can do anything they like.
JAB: And you’re there as an independent person, not as part of any group.
AG: Yes, I went alone, because Dr. Mustava told me not --- I went to join ISM initially --- but Dr. Mustava told me, no, no, don’t do that. We don’t want you in UPMRC --- United Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.
JAB: And he is the head of them, correct?
AG: Yes. He is so . . . I think he may be the most loved man in Palestine.
JAB: It’s a very difficult position when your medical person --- you can’t give aid your people who are being hurt and maimed and shot.
AG: Especially when women bleed to death, having a miscarriage. They insist on having a look. They’re very prurient. Their conversation is all about prostitutes and lewd sexual things when they’re talking and you’re sitting there listening for 2 hours. They want to have a look --- if someone’s in labor, or bleeding. And, of course, I wouldn’t either. They say, "No, I prefer to die." And they do --- die.
JAB: What other kinds of humiliation takes place at these checkpoints or by the occupying army that you’ve seen?
AG: Everything they can possibly do --- from spitting in people’s faces. This is a very unpleasant thing. One doesn’t imagine soldiers spitting in civilian’s faces. Insisting that women lift up their dress, right up as far as their breasts, so they can see what’s underneath. They strip men naked, including underpants, and then make them stand, including ambulance drivers, in front of all the crowd, and even unload the ambulance naked. I mean, there are cases, documented, signed, with times and dates, where they have made the doctor strip in front of a huge waiting crowd and then have to empty the ambulance while they were naked. And then lie on the ground on their face for up to 4 hours in the mud, or crawl through the mud to the other side of the roadblock. And, of course, this is no mean feat, because one side of the roadblock can be one kilometer or more from the other side. They shoot people at checkpoints, they make them dance — this is one of their favorite things: "You must dance, or we shoot you dead." They try to insist that men kiss girls — this is a very beautiful society, not sex-obsessed. The men find this just --- they couldn’t humiliate a girl like this, by kissing a strange girl. So they prefer to die. They paint star of David with paint on the naked bodies of the men. Oh, God, I could go on.
JAB: I saw a picture on the Internet where, at one checkpoint, they actually etched a star of David, they scratched it into a man’s arm.
AG: Oh, it wouldn’t surprise me. The worst incident I saw was at a que at a checkpoint was when they beat a man — 4 of them. They asked him for his ID, he gave it, 5 of them came, they beat him with rifles, broke — I’ve written about this on "Counterpunch" and "Palestine Chronicles" — where they beat him and broke some ribs, and then one of the soldiers went behind him and squeezed him so that the ribs came out through the skin. If the ambulance had not been there at the time, the Medical Relief ambulance, of course, he would have died. He was a nurse . . . I think he was a medical person. I’ve forgotten now. There’ve been too many incidents. I mean, total, gratuitous brutality. I mean, everyone in Nablus will say to you, "Anna, they are not human." And they are not human. Nobody can behave like this for 55 years and be called human beings.
JAB: Now, everything is supposed to be on the road to peace, through this so-called "Road Map." What is your view of the Road Map from what you’ve seen on the ground?
AG: Since the Road Map, since June 3, colonies have sprung up everywhere, there has been at least 1 . .
JAB: These are settler colonies.
AG: Well, we don’t call them settlements because settlers are legitimate, colonies are illegal. Every colony, every single Jew in those colonies is an illegal colonial. Now we’ve got the new phrase, Jeffrey, haven’t we? He’s going to demolish a few . . . Sharon is going to demolish a few "illegal" colonies. ALL colonies are illegal.
JAB: They call them "unauthorized."
AG: Words. In Alice in Wonderland, The Queen of Hearts says, "Shut up! Words will mean what I say they mean!" Well, that’s the situation we have here. So we have these colonies, which are expanding everywhere. We have a new one near Nablus, I saw it a few days ago. We have 2 new ones near Nablus last week. We have the huge colony of Shiloh, which has expanded now with 200 more houses, almost to the border of the beautiful village of Kariout (?), between Nablus and Ramallah. It has, incidentally, a university . . . a university to which American Jewish students come, in the middle of Palestine, a place from which they shoot innocent villagers. Not really the purpose of a university, I feel, in any other country. They have killed someone almost every day. Every day since June 3, they have committed one or multiple violations of the conditions of the Road Map. And, believe me, if you’ve read it, you know there are not many conditions on Israel. All the conditions are on the Palestinians, of course.
JAB: Just the other day, the Israelis launched an attack in Gaza, killed 15 people. This is somehow minimized in the American media, but none of these are considered violations of the so-called "Road Map" or the cease-fire, which Palestinian groups have been observing.
AG: Of course. The Palestinian groups have been observing the cease-fire, and they have been killed. They have demolished at least one house every day since June 3. They have arrested — every night, they come into Nablus, the Balata (?) refugee camp — that’s a disgrace! A refugee camp, refugees for 56 years! Nowhere else [to go]. They come into Askar refugee camp, which is also near Nablus, every day. They take from one, 3, 17. I mean, you never heard of them for months. They pick up girls. They take . . . One night, we lost 13 girls from Nablus, and from Balata refugee camp. For 3 months, they were held incommunicado, as ALL prisoners . . . sorry, "detainees," are. They’d done nothing. They were good girls --- sixteen, seventeen, in school. And, at the end of 3 months, the parents are given notice that the girls will be tried . . . TRIED . . . at the Jenin Military Court at Salem, a village near
Jenin.
They [the parents] appear there month after month after month. It can be a year, or 2 or 3 years, for men, especially. They’re remanded, they’re remanded, it’s adjourned, it’s adjourned, it’s adjourned. During this time, until they’re sentenced, there’s no communication allowed, no letter, no phone call, no communication, no lawyer, if they have a lawyer at all, it has to be paid for, it’s an Israeli lawyer, and has to be paid $2,500 Jordanian dinars for each appearance by the parents from Balata (?). If they can’t find the $2,500 Jordanian dinars (one is 1 ½ dollars = approx. $3,753), then the sentence will be anything from twice to eight times what it would have been had they been able to pay the Israeli lawyer. Finally, the girls come up for trial, which my friend’s daughter came up for in June, he is George Ibrahim, the director of Al-Kasaba (?) Theater, which won the World Theater Competition in 2001. His daughter was in school — the Quaker School in Ramallah. They came to the school, they took her, she was held for 3 months, incommunicado, and then she was sentenced to 3 years in Arumalak (?) Prison in Israel.
JAB: What was the charge?
AG: The charge was that she was planning something. And he is fluent in English, world-famous, he was in the great film, "Divine Intervention," Elia Suliman’s great film, which was, of course, banned from the Oscars because the Oscars are Zionist. His daughter got 3 years sentence. During that time, you can’t speak to them. You can only speak to them across a room. There are up to 20 soldiers in the room, and the girls are at one end. And when the mother, the mother of Abir, my friend from Balata, she’s very near-sighted, nearly blind, asked, "May I go up closer, as I can’t actually see my daughter," who is 16, and she doesn’t have a photograph of her because they destroyed the photographs when they raided the house, they said, "You move one step, we shoot you dead!"
JAB: Paid for by U.S. taxpayers’ dollars.
AG: The problem is not conditions or talks or anything you could put on 2 pages, 20 lines to a page. The problem is the occupation. Everything is the occupation. And, unless the occupation ends, there can be nothing to come. There cannot be negotiations on anything until the occupation ends. And I have talked to hundreds of people now. I have hundreds of articles to publish. No time. There are 5 conditions and they have to be fulfilled. No one in the north . . . I can only speak for [Nablus] and Jenin — I don’t know the other areas as well. Al-Cuds Jerusalem has to be the capital of an independent Palestinian State — no negotiation. All the prisoners have to be released — this is unique in history that the prisons have some 13,000 (by our count) Palestinian prisoners who have done nothing illegal. Because, of course, under the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1976 reaffirmed in 1982 every . . . especially the people of Africa and Palestinian people have the right to fight for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation, from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation, by all available means, including armed struggle. None of those prisoners have done anything illegal. The 350 they are going to release . . . sorry, I mean, "said" they will release . . .
JAB: They did actually release some today.
AG: Yes, well, 100 of them are "detainees." They’ve never even been spoken to.
JAB: Not charged with any crime.
AG: No, because they’re "detainees." One of my friends was a detainee twice, for a month each time, tortured and beaten. Never interviewed once. There for no charge. So they are released. And the other 350 are what Palestinians call "petty criminals," usually operating within Israel, mostly car thieves. There is quite a flourishing trade in stolen cars, you know, from Israel to Palestine, as there was indeed in Europe, when Eastern Europe was poor, from Germany there was a huge trade. And so, one doesn’t particularly want them back in the sense that they literally have done something. So they are not going to release anyone, they say, "with Palestinian blood on his hands," but every day, we . . . I’m sorry, the Palestinians, have to look into the eyes of Israeli soldiers who are dripping with Palestinian blood.
JAB: We have some of those "criminals" being arrested, according to the BBC, and I know from the past, our folks who . . . Palestinians who got into Israel "illegally" and were caught there sleeping overnight. And that has been a cause for being imprisoned within Israel.
My guest is Anne Gwynne.
Now, there seems to be some discussion and some criticism from the State Department, our weak-kneed Colin Powell, ready to have his knees taken out from under him again. The State Department is suggesting that Israel be penalized for building this Wall . . . penalized by having some of the money . . . the taxpayers’ money in loan guarantees, reduced by the amount the Wall is costing, although Condoleeza Rice says that’s not happening, and Congress, of course, is already getting up in arms about any money being taken away from Israel. What do you think about the effect of the Wall that’s being built?
AG: For those of us who’ve stood by it and touched it, you have to climb up a huge concrete base to touch it. Unbelievable crimes Israel is committing. Six hundred kilometers long eventually, when it has wound its way like a piece of knitting wool around Palestinian villages and towns, at a cost of between $1 million and $3 million per mile, so let’s say $2 million — take the middle one — UK taxpayers’ money. Dispossessing up to 90,000, could be up to 95,000 farmers, taking 10% of the best agricultural land in the Middle East for the Wall, and another 10% which is now on the Israeli side of the Wall. |
