October 30 – November 20, 2003
Reporting the Middle East, From the Road Map to Iraq: A Lecture Series

Amira Hass
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Morgridge Auditorium, UW-Madison Grainger Hall
7:30 pm

Amira Hass covers Palestinian affairs for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. She is the only Israeli journalist who actually lives in the Occupied Territories. Author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza, she has just published a second book, Reporting from Ramallah. Known for her honest and often brutal portrayals of the impact of Israeli occupation on the lives of ordinary Palestinians, she received the 1999 International World Press Freedom Award in recognition of her work in the Gaza Strip.

Ali Abunimah
Thursday, November 6, 2003
Madison Area Technical College, Room D240
211 N. Carroll St.
7:00 pm

Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of and major contributor to The Electronic Intifada, an online educational gateway to the Palestine-Israel conflict, and one of today’s most prominent critics of mainstream U.S. media coverage of that conflict. He is also vice-president of the Arab-American Action Network of Chicago.

As’ad Abukhalil
Thursday, November 13, 2003
The “War on Terrorism” and its Impact on Middle East Politics”
UW-Madison Memorial Union, Great Hall
7:30 pm

Dr. Abukhalil is a Professor of Political Science in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at California State University-Stanislaus. He is the author of the just-released book, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.: The Tale of the ‘Good’ Taliban.

Robert Fisk
Thursday, November 20, 2003
The Fantasy War: “Democracy”, WMD’s and “Liberation”
Orpheum Theater, Madison
8:00 pm

Robert Fisk covers the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia for the London Independent. One of the leading independent journalists in the world today, Beirut-based Fisk has put the mainstream American media to shame for 28 years with his unflinching on-the-ground reports from the frontlines in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon and more. He has received more awards for excellence in reporting than any other journalist in his league. Author of Pity the Nation on the Lebanese civil war and Israelís invasion, he is currently working on a book covering events in Iraq since the first Gulf War.

Sponsored by the the A. Eugene Havens Center of the University of Wisconsin – Madison Department of Sociology, Madison Area Technical College Global Horizons Series, Global Studies Program, Middle Eastern Studies Program, the Harvey Goldberg Memorial Fund, the Palestine-Israel Peace and Justice Alliance (PIPAJA), The Borders and Transcultural Research Circle, Chadbourne Residency Center, and WORT 89.9 FM.

Endorsed by the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project (MRSCP), the Madison Area Peace Coalition, the Madison Islamic community, Progressive magazine, the Wisconsin Book Festival, and the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative.

Financial support provided in part by the UW-Madison Office of International Studies

Contacts:
http://groups.Yahoo.com/group/PIPAJA
RafahSisterCity at Yahoo.com

Eyewitness account of the invasion of Rafah

(Photo: Rafah Today, 2003)

Laura Gordon, The Electronic Intifada, 14 Oct 2003

Then the streets started screaming and we were running almost without thinking, down the edges of the street around the people who had lost their fear, around donkey carts loaded full, ran until we fround a corner to turn into and then we ran past families and children, through narrow streets far enough from the main street not to know the worst, far enough that we were the ones spreading the news that the army had come back.

Old men’s eyes opened wide and mothers pulled their children inside, casting weary gazes in the direction from where we had come. We found Sea Street and a taxi and headed towards Block J. A machine gun fired from a tank as it entered Yibneh. It was maghreb time. The sun burning a hole in the sky as it fell behind the wall at the edge of town.

When we’d come to Yibneh the camp was already in exodus mode. Donkey carts piled high with furniture, men removing the doors of their homes from the hinges, children holding the keys to their homes on neon green keychains, the modern picture of a refugee descended from refugees, meeting exile every other generation.

The army had come during the night leaving a city stripped bare, the broken bones of houses like twisted bodies reaching up to heaven. Trees and streets, power lines and water pipes, broken, twisted around each other, uprooted. A graveyard of life things. The real dead had been carried out on stretchers, mostly after lying on the street for hours between tanks and the fearful closed doors of curfew, while the ambulances negotiated with the army to gain access. It was a perfect autumn day, soft clouds dotting a sky blue as swimming pools.

The army had come during the night in the sound of thunder rumbling down the border frightening the whole town. It left, not through the streets as it had come, but by creating a path through the homes still standing in Yibneh, demolishing anything in its way and driving over the remains.

It left 10 people dead and upwards of 80 injured; over 100 homes demolished and 2,000 people homeless, according to the UN’s estimate. And even then, the army left incompletely and provisionally, remaining stationed along the border, and Moshe Allon calling to deploy more reserves. The word on the street is that the army has left just long enough for the frightened families to leave the camp, an empty shell for the army to finish demolishing.

That night I stayed with Noura and the family down by Salah el-Deen gate. In the morning we peeked over the balcony. A tank was still sitting by the Block O tower. It didn’t stop shooting either. All day in spurts.


Most of the dead were teenage boys with more curiosity than fear who went outside just to see what was in their street keeping them inside their homes. They were wheeled out on stretchers to sit in the hospital refrigerators for days, waiting for their family to identify them, some unidentifiable. Held in limbo waiting for the army could leave so their families could bury them.

When they did hold funerals it was not in the camp where the army was threatening to reinvade, but far away, in the center of the city, in Hay Il-Ijnena. But not far enough. An Apache dropped a missile on an empty field next to a funeral on the second day of invasion, the funeral for someone who lives in Hay Il-Ijnena, the most expensive part of town, known for its distance from the border. They died when an Apache fired explosive bullets through the roof of his home.

When the army entered we were on the roof passing aroung stories and dreams. The Apaches came in like a foreboding signal of the end of the world, dropping fist-sized bombs — boom boom boom, explosions every several minutes from the planes and the tanks. We spent the night in the office waking with fear and coffee, every bullet sounding like it was coming through our windows. We are in the center of the city. All the shooting comes from the borders, and even if it doesn’t reach our walls it shoots in our direction, it sounds awful, like wretching rain.

People filled up the hospital and in the morning it was already low on supplies. Nobody could get to the European Gaza Hospital, the only descent facility in the area, where tanks had been parked for days not letting anyone out or in. The dead waited in the refrigerators for identification. The beds were full and overflowing.

My friend Adwan was the first to identify his friend since 12 years. 19-year-old Mabrouk, whose name means “congratulations”, was shot three times in the head and five in the back while walking home.

In the mosque, men gathered for prayer and sharing information. Mohammed came back with news. The sheikh at the library, the one we all know, had been killed while walking down the street, a bullet in the heart. One of the ambulance drivers that drove Rachel Corrie to the hospital had also been killed on his way to rescue the injured. His was one of two ambulances the army shot at that night.

Down the street from my friend Feryal in Block J, an eight-year-old boy — her neighbor’s son — was killed at the door of his home when a tank backed into his home and then shot him as he ran out, and then denied the ambulance entrance for two hours while he bled to death. Feryal was pregnant and expecting her fifth child any day. Four tanks were parked at each corner of her block.


I went with the municipality workers to negotiate with the army to let them fix the water and electricity on a street that hadn’t had for days. The real heros here are the municipality workers and the ambulance drivers who have lost their fear in order to keep the city together. I spoke from a distance of ten yards with a soldier in an APC, to see if the workers could fix the water system. He gave me a thumbs up sign. He appeared to be trying to understand. Parallel universes colliding. I couldn’t believe I was talking with a real person inside this massive machine, I was so hungry for human contact, to put a face with the military machinery. We shouted to each other from opposite sides of a road block the army had put up, the divide was a gulf none of us could cross. I stood for too long, gawking at him, wishing I could talk to him for hours until he left his tank, feeling naive and silly in the afternoon sun.

The army had uprooted the entire street. Water was filling the sand everywhere in the places water pipes had been broken. People had run out of food, had no water or electricity for two days at that point. Two women who wanted to bring clothes for their children inside the militarized area were denied entry. The municipality, who wanted to bring food relief to the people in the sealed-off area and to fix the water and electrical systems there, was denied entry.


The night before I had slept with Naela’s family. The invasion was one day old. Jenin was the word on everyone’s lips, Bb’eyn Allah (“God sees”).


My friend Anees’ house was partially demolished. Abu Ahmed, the carob juice vendor, his house was demolished.


The army used some kind of nerve gas for the first time in Rafah, leaving people in convulsions for days.


And last night, I ran from Yibneh’s streets as the army came back in and found my way directly to Feryal’s house in Block J, better to be with her under curfew than to worry from outside. The army didn’t come as it had before but drove in enough to scare the people into exodus and then shot all night long. I began to mix all loud noises with gunfire, the way I used to when I first arrived here.

We slept incompletely. Outside, everything around had been demolished. The morning was still. Families were sitting on the doorsteps of their neighbors’ homes gazing at the damage. The area had gone from a crowded lively neighborhood to a strange antique gallery, children rummaging through the best climbing spots of twisted cars and broken homes. A few more weeks and the army will finish its work and “clean” the area — dig away the dead bones of the city – until nothing remains but a flat, sandy expanse, a military parking lot. Even the ghosts will leave the area, searching for better horizons.

Even as I sit by Feryal now in the crowded clinic benches full of pregnant women and screaming children, tanks shoot into the camps. It hasn’t stopped all morning or all night, and there are four new injuries. The whole town is frightened, afraid to let out its breath. The sadness is dry and wordless. People are staying in tents on the street, some families have room to take in the new homeless.

The army is lying as usual, saying only 10 homes were destroyed and that the people killed were gunmen. Journalists are trying to get here but with difficulty and under the guidelines that they follow military instruction. The ultrasound machine sounds like gunfire to my frightened ears. Feryal looks forward, eyes cynical, sarcastic, watching from a distance.

Laura Gordon is a 20-year-old American Jew who came to Israel in December 2002 with the Birthright Israel program and proceeded, three months later, to begin work with the International Solidarity Movement in Rafah.

Al Mezan Condemns Israel’s Crimes in Rafah and Calls for International Intervention

Reference: 43/2003
Date: October 13, 2003
Al Mezan Center For Human Rights

On Monday 12 October 2003 Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) redeployed their forces around the town and refugee camp of Rafah. Mezan’s fieldworkers visited the area, under direct occupation since Friday 10 October, to collect information and meet with victims and their families.

According to the field investigations the Israeli military committed war crimes in the town, as defined by international humanitarian law. Soldiers destroyed 192 houses, homes to 1,952 people. Ninety-three of these homes were completely demolished and 99 others partially destroyed. Tens of other homes were damaged by the IOF as well. This raises the total number of destroyed homes in Rafah since the beginning of the Intifada to 1,631 and of displaced persons to 12,430.

Eight Palestinians were killed by the IOF and 81 were wounded during this incursion. Since the beginning of the current Intifada, Occupation Forces have killed 238 people in Rafah, two of them international citizens. Soldiers also restricted movement in the area, including by ambulances and relief staff, and caused a serious shortage of food and medical supplies.

According to Articles 146 and 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (12 August 1949) such practices are defined as “grave breaches”, and necessitate the pursuit and trial of the perpetrators, and of those who ordered them to be committed.

The Mezan Center for Human Rights emphasizes the urgent need for effective international intervention at this time. The international community is called upon to carry out its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention by putting an end to Israel’s breaches. Silence only encourages Israel to continue committing such crimes. The Center also appeals for international relief agencies to provide urgent aid to the Palestinian civilians under occupation.

Israeli Occupation Forces Withdraw from Rafah Leaving Behind Devastation

Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, October 12, 2003
 
In the early morning hours of Monday 13 October 2003, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) withdrew from the refugee camp of Rafah after a three-day incursion. Initial reports from the camp revealed massive home demolitions and damage to the city’s infrastructure. Israeli soldiers killed eight people and wounded dozens. 
 
Al Mezan condemns all incursions into Rafah, and the silence they are met with on the part of the international community. Such silence reveals a moral indifference to Israel’s persistent violations of Palestinians human rights.
 
The Mezan Center calls upon the international community to fulfill its responsibilities towards Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and provide effective protection to them. The Center also emphasizes the urgent need for relief aid and shelter in the camp and asks relief agencies and governments to provide assistance for the victims of home demolitions and curfews.

Amira Hass: Explaining the occupation to the occupier

Allen Ruff, Palestine-Israel Peace and Justice Alliance (PIPAJA), 12 Oct 2003

Amira Hass, the author of the article below, will be appearing in Madison on October 30th as the second speaker in the “Reporting the Middle East” speakers’ series produced by the Palestine-Israel Peace and Justice Alliance (PIPAJA). Hass will appear at the Morgridge Auditorium, Grainger Hall (Brooks & University) at 7:30 on the 30th.

(The first speaker in the series, ROBERT FISK, will be at the Union Theater at 8:00pm on the 23rd. Hass will be followed by Ali Abunimah of the “electrinicintifadfa”, on Novemebr 6th at MATC-Downtown , Rm D240, 7:30. A’sad AbuKhalil will speak on November 13th in the Great Hall, Memorial Union.)

Please spread the word!


Jewish Peace News

Last week, a Palestinian woman working with Islamic Jihad carried out a horrible suicide bombing that killed 19 people including 4 children, and wounded many many more in a joint Arab and Jewish owned restaurant in Haifa.

It is both natural and appropriate to wonder how anyone could commit such a vicious act, an act that was intended to ruin and end the lives of so many innocent people. Amira Hass guides us through the pitfalls of this question, with characteristic intelligence and candor. She points to two types of answers, one acceptable to the Israeli political establishment and one not. The acceptable type of answer involves demonizing Islam, attributing Palestinian criminal behavior to fundamentalist tendencies in the Muslim religion, real or imagined. The unacceptable answer involves pointing to the acute and growing despair of the Palestinian population in the territories, who daily experience the humility of the occupation, their land being stolen and destroyed, their children being starved, and their loved ones being shot and incarcerated.

It is certainly much easier to blame Islam (or the Palestinian educational system for that matter); and people reeling from the trauma of a gruesome terror attack are experiencing enough suffering without adding the pain of self-critique. But if the imperative is to stop these horrible attacks from happening again, and this should be the immediate imperative of the Israeli government, looking honestly and critically at the effects of the occupation has the very great advantage offering an immediate solution to Israel’s crisis of terror. And after a suicide bombing, what could be more important than this?


Explaining the occupation to the occupier

Amira Hass, Haaretz, 8 October 2003

How can a tiny Palestinian organization like Islamic Jihad produce so many walking bombs, suicide bombers who choose babies in strollers and their grandparents as targets? And how does an organization that once declared it would only target soldiers send its latest suicide bomber to a mixed Jewish-Arab city, to sow death and sorrow in a restaurant whose owners, workers and customers are Jews and Arabs, old and young.

Intelligence experts and Arabists on our side say it’s because of Islam, which sanctifies wars, that there is unceasing incitement in the mosques, that Iran and Syria are behind it, that the suicide bombers and those who send them are out to destroy the State of Israel, that the people who blow themselves up are animals and that Arafat encourages terror.

There’s a concept behind all these explanations, in which this sickening form of the Palestinian struggle has nothing to do with the occupation, that Israelis should not believe Palestinians who say there is a connection to the Israeli occupation. The concept says there is no connection between the proliferation of suicide bombings and the prevailing view in Palestinian society, which is that Israel, as a military and nuclear power, wants to squeeze a surrender out of the Palestinians that will legitimize the Israeli takeover of land in the West Bank and Gaza.

In other words, the concept is that the historical, political and geopolitical connections, the sociological and psychological ramifications – none of it is relevant. The concept is that there is something inherent to the heritage of the suicide bombers and those who send them that is to blame, because the Palestinians won’t give up their dream of destroying Israel and that Muslims only believe in the most radical interpretation of their religion.

Israeli society can accept this insane situation – investing billions in something called “defense” and then being afraid of primitive walking bombs made up of a few kilograms of explosives and nails – because of a belief in the Israeli intelligence apparatus and the “objectivity” of its information. After all, the intelligence officers are fluent in Arabic, they analyze the speeches of every imam, they watch all the Arab TV stations that broadcast incitement, they get their hands on texts that are barely known to Palestinian writers and their audiences, and they have personal human intelligence from all sorts of collaborators and informants.

Indeed, from Islamic Jihad’s perspective, now is a good time to intensify the sense of chaos in the country and region. As a tiny group, it is able to disregard and scorn the condemnations and warnings of the Palestinian Authority; it isn’t looking for an electoral constituency. But that perspective does not explain why Islamic Jihad, despite the blows it suffers from the army, is able to find candidates to conduct a policy that is dictated from abroad and is foreign to the Palestinian longing for normalcy. Yes, only the Israeli occupation can explain that. All the rest of the explanations are appendices, marginal footnotes.

So, how does one explain the occupation to the occupier? The knowledge of daily life of 3.5 million people, whose future offers no chance of normalcy: the daily experience of the land of their grandparents and parents falling prey to this or that army order, for some “public” expropriation or pirate outpost? How does one explain to the bulldozer what it means to live when the land is constantly shrinking under your feet, when across the way, meanwhile, some rich settlement of Jews grows and a brand new road is paved just for them? How can the paper on which the army orders are written know what it’s like to live for 37 years under the arbitrary rule of the representatives of the foreign occupation, many of whom are residents of the settlements, who make arbitrary decisions about who will be able to travel and who won’t, who will get medical treatment and who won’t, how many inches a water pipe can have as its diameter, if and when a water tanker reaches the village, which tree will be uprooted and which won’t?

How to explain to the tanks and planes what a little boy’s fear is like – not the fear of 10 or 100 but hundreds of thousands, not once a month or every other week, but daily, for three years, and what happens to a daughter and grandmother whose loved ones, civilians, are killed in front of their eyes, not by the dozens but the hundreds. How to explain to Israelis, who get only the most partial of reports about the horrors of the military occupation, that the Palestinians also suffer daily from horrific scenes, indeed, from the very first day of the renewed clashes, when they were still only throwing rocks and not blowing up in our cities?

Yes, the suicide bombers feel they represent their society. That’s their strength. They represent their society’s sense that it’s no use living under the occupation, with the terrible weakness against the Israeli military power, the impotence as they watch their land vandalized and degraded, the rage over the stupidity of the Palestinian leadership. They are willingly represented by the vengeance.

Israel tends to blame those who demand to explain the phenomenon of the suicide bombers in the context of the occupation, as if they understand and even justify the terrorist means. That might be understandable for a developed society, but it does not help Israeli society when dealing with the threat of the terror.


Jewish Peace News (JPN) is an edited news-clipping and commentary service provided by A Jewish Voice for Peace. JPN’s editors are Adam Gutride, Amichai Kronfeld, Rela Mazali, Sarah Anne Minkin, Judith Norman, Mitchell Plitnick, Lincoln Shlensky, and Alistair Welchman. The opinions expressed by the editors and presented in the articles sent to this list are solely those of their authors, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of A Jewish Voice for Peace.

A Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a San Francisco Bay Area grassroots organization dedicated to the human, civil and economic rights of Jews, Palestinians, and all peoples in the Middle East.

The mirror of fire and tears

Laura Gordon, The Electronic Intifada, 10 October 2003

9 October 2003 — This Yom Kippur (October 6th), the most holy day on the Jewish calendar, the day of atonement in which we are supposed to cease every form of work in order to pray and request forgiveness from God, the Israeli army began construction on a new permanent checkpoint in the Gaza Strip, another slice.

Tanks cut off the main road between Rafah and Khan Younis (the city just north of Rafah) by driving ten tanks right in front of the European Gaza Hospital, the only decent hospital south of Gaza City, and the road has been closed for days. Nothing can get to Rafah, many things in Rafah are simply not available right now, things like medicine, the ability to cash checks, basic supplies.

People who study or work in Gaza City and Khan Younis haven’t been to work or university for days. It makes me think of high school, when snow and ice could shut a city down. Upstairs from our apartment, Rasha can’t hide the small relief she feels from this reprieve of study. I wonder how much the relief Rasha feels has to do with getting let off the hook from dealing with checkpoints.

The week before this closure, she spent 5 hours one day waiting for Abu Holi to open so she could go home and the next day it closed all night, leaving her to sleep at her friend’s sister’s house in Gaza City after waiting for 4 hours in a hot taxi in line with hundreds of cars waiting for the checkpoint to open. I compare our worlds, like parallel universes, squinting at each other from both sides of a mirror.

When tanks cut off the main road, people trying to get home used the sandy road and tanks cut that road too, shooting all the time, and bulldozers followed, demolishing anything anywhere near Moraj settlement, mostly olive trees. They are still demolishing. They’ve also started construction of something, people are saying it’s a permanent checkpoint, another Abu Holi.

Nobody knows much, not even the human rights organizations are going, nobody is risking going near the place because the tanks are shooting anyone who approaches. Nobody has dared approach since the first day of the incursion, when the army invaded without announcement, taking people by surprise as they drove to and from work. They injured four people, including a doctor who was shot in the head and is in critical condition in the European Gaza Hospital where he used to work.

In addition Rafah has accumulated another shaheed (“martyr”), Said Abu Azzum, 26 years old, who was driving with his wife and their two sons on a routine trip to Khan Younis, without any idea what was happening some meters down the road; shot in the heart as he turned a corner. He had no job, no money, and no house, and now he leaves behind a 21-year-old widow with nowhere to go, a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old with nowhere to go. They couldn’t even have the wake in his sister’s house where he used to stay because it’s near the border and because it’s too small to accomodate visitors, so they sat for three days in a cousin’s house in Shabura so that people wouldn’t be afraid to come and pay their respects.

When I went on the third day, his mother was angry. She said, Where is your camera, where are the journalists? Not one person from the media had come to photograph her. I was embarrassed. I hadn’t brought my camera, thinking it disrespectful to bring journalism to a wake. She said, if you’re going to write, at least take notes that I can see, write in your book that Sharon and Bush murdered my son, from the comfort of their offices.

On the same day Said Abu Azzum was killed, Mohammed’s older sister Wisam was coming home from the European Gaza Hospital, where she works as a nurse, when she heard the army had cut the road, and her taxi went with the other taxis towards the sandy road to bypass the tanks, but not fast enough. Tanks drove into the road as they were crossing into Rafah and began shooting indiscriminately, and it was at this point that people were injured and killed upon running from their cars to try to reach safety. Wisam was part of a group of women that walked together after the men had left, holding a white mendeel to signify surrender and peace.

The tanks shot at them anyway — is this the way to tell this story? — as they were walking — the words are so vile — and they lay down on the ground in the sand for a half an hour while a tank rode back and forth right next to them, a meter away — vile bastards — before retreating. Wisam did not walk to Rafah, she ran, in bare feet (having left her sandals somewhere on the ground) and arrived in her family’s home, her abaya torn, with the black glove of a woman she didn’t know that somehow found its way to her shoe. With her family, she cried for hours, saying that she would never go back to work. The road is closed in any case so, for now, it’s not even a possibility.

She is taking her respite with her family, in Tel Zorrob, farther from the border than the main street in town but not far enough that their third floor flat can’t be seen by the Zorrob sniper tower, which effectively keeps them from using the kitchen and one bedroom. The tower shoots all day and night. It shot at us while we were eating kabbab in the living room, and as Wisam impressed me from room to room with the delicate furnishings in her home. She said, “Yesterday, I couldn’t stop thinking about your friend Rachel. I thought I was going to meet the same fate.”

So it goes. There is nobody in Rafah who doesn’t feel the effect of this new blockage. Feryal is wondering where she will go if the road is closed when she gives birth to her fifth child, who is turning in her belly for the ninth month. When I visit them, her daughter Rula tells me, They’ve closed the road. What can we do? We want to see the world, we want some fresh air, we can’t go anywhere, we’re Palestinians.

Rula is 7 years old. Her older brother Mohammed, 11 years old, has been given an assignment by school to draw something related to human rights. He draws a world, an armed man shaking hands with an unarmed figure. The armed figure is America, he tells me, and the unarmed is Israel. Palestine is a cloud raining down lightning bolts of anger onto them, separate, alone, excluded from the conversation, unable to hold anything but its own fire and tears.

Laura Gordon is a 20-year-old American Jew who came to Israel in December 2002 with the Birthright Israel program and proceeded, three months later, to begin work with the International Solidarity Movement in Rafah.