There are 2 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

1. Rafa - Israeli army terrorize 2 ISM activists while destroying
Mosque
From: "International Solidarity Movement"

2. ISM Reports: A Bone from Rafah / Ethnic cleansing
From: Huwaida Arraf


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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 14:13:50 +0200
From: "International Solidarity Movement"

Subject: Rafa - Israeli army terrorize 2 ISM activists while destroying
Mosque



International Solidarity Movement






Israeli army terrorize 2 ISM activists while destroying Mosque

Wed. Mar.27, 03

Brazil Block area of Rafa



Last night, Israeli forces destroyed a Mosque with a bullozer. While
doing so, they terrorized a house containing Internationals just a few
doors down. The two Internationals are both American and are members of
ISM, the International Solidarity Movement. They have been staying in
the house trying to provide protection for the family, the house, and
themselves. Last night, the Israeli forces shot a tank shell at the house
knowing that the unarmed Internationals and a civilian family were
inside.



We contacted the American Embassy and then the Embassy Duty Officer
contacted both the Americans under siege and the Israeli Army. It was
actually following his contact that the soldiers fired the tank shell. Not
long after, there was an explosion followed by a lot of gunfire. Some
of this gunfire was clearly directed at the house in order to intimidate
the Americans and the Palestinian family inside. This all seems to be
part of an increased effort on the part of the Israeli army to
intimidate Internationals into leaving. It escalated last week with the murder
of Rachel Corrie by an Israeli soldier. Rachel was also an American
member od ISM.



For more information contact:

Laura: 054 635 622

Joe: 067 628 507


Tom

ISM Media Coordinator
Beit Sahour
Occupied Palestine
Phone: +972-2-2774602
Cell: +972-67-862 439
web:  http://www.palsolidarity.org





[This message contained attachments]



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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 07:02:05 -0800 (PST)
From: Huwaida Arraf
Subject: ISM Reports: A Bone from Rafah / Ethnic cleansing


1) A Bone from Rafah _ Starhawk
2) Myriad forms of ethnic cleansing _ Kristen Ess
=========================
1)
A Bone from Rafah
By Starhawk

While bombs are falling on Baghdad, killing uncounted numbers, and my
friends around the world are marching, blockading, shutting down
corporations and roadways and cities in protest, I find myself in Rafah, at
the southern border of the Gaza strip, dealing intimately with one
woman¹s death.



A week ago Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she
tried to prevent it from demolishing Palestinian homes. I’ve come down
here to support her friends and the activists who were with her and saw
the murder. Their accounts leave no doubt that the soldier who drove
the bulldozer saw her and chose to kill her.



Rachel has become a shahida, a Palestinian martyr. She is, in fact,
one of over a thousand shahids from this intifada. Their posters adorn
walls all over Palestine. They are the fighters who are killed in
battle and the children shot on their way to school.



They are the suicide bombers and the boys who throw stones at tanks in
a gesture of defiance, and the “collateral damage” every time the
Israelis blow up a political leader in a crowded tenement with missiles.
And now they include Rachel, with her all-American blond beauty. On one
poster: she looks earnest and sweet as any graduating student in High
School yearbook. In another, she is giving a speech, hair tied back,
mouth open, her whole face ablaze with passion.



I¹m listening to her friends describe her death and holding their hands
as they cry and thinking about how all of this pain and grief and
sorrow is being multiplied over and over again right now, in Baghdad, on
people who are nameless and faceless and not reported on by our media. As
Rachel’s death would have gone unremarked had she been Palestinian.
You didn’t hear, I imagine, about the death of Ahmed, a fifty year old
street cleaner from Rafah, who heard about Rachel’s death and stepped
outside to smoke a cigarette. He

was gunned down on his doorstep, for no particular reason anyone can
fathom. He has his own Shahid poster, which is up on the wall next to
Rachel’s, and we mourn him, too.



The Palestinians have traditions about Shahids; the poster is one. The
Shahid’s body is not touched with water: the blood on the body is
sacred, and bloody the body is laid into the grave.



These traditions are of some comfort to the Palestinians but are
difficult for her friends who cannot escape her face and their loss anywhere
in this city, and who struggle to remember her not as a saint but as
the real woman that she was: sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes
loving, sometimes irritable, funny, annoying, angry - all the things
human beings are. Rachel was a courageous woman

but no more so, really, than any of these others who have come here on
their school breaks or in the midst of their life changes to stand in
front of tanks and walk kids to school and sleep in a different,
threatened house each night. They are all remarkable, courageous - which
doesn’t mean noble and saintly but just that at some

point in their lives they decided not to let fear stop them from doing
something they hope will make some slight positive impact on an
unendurable situation. What is remarkable about them is that they are not so
remarkable, not really so different than anyone else. A laid-off dot
commer, a football player, a website designer, a student, a sweet young
man who drives a horse and carriage in the park: some are deeply
political, involved in actions for many years.

Some just somehow found themselves drawn to come here.



I am drinking coffee with Chris, who was Rachel’s friend and

encouraged her to come to Gaza, and Mohammed, who has lived his whole
life in the Gaza strip and works with a human rights agency. Mohammed is
telling us how he felt on his trip to Japan when he took the train from
Tokyo to Osaka.



"I had never before been such a long way without a single

checkpoint, without having to show a passport or an ID card, without
seeing a soldier," he says. "That was when I knew what freedom felt
like."



We are talking about sadness and death and what we believe.

I¹ve been having ongoing dialogues with various friends about

compassion, and I admit that I just can’t get there with the

bulldozer operator. The closest I can come to compassion is a kind of
blank incomprehension. Chris suggests that Rachel died because the
soldier didn’t see her. Not that he didn¹t see her physically, for it is
only too clear that he did, but that in some larger sense he didn’t See
her, see her as a human being, see her as a precious life to be valued.



That Unseeing is the root of my own people’s relationship to the
Palestinians. I was never taught to hate them, only to discount them. When
they taught me the story of Israel¹s founding in Hebrew School, the
Palestinians were brushed aside, either not mentioned or dismissed as
somehow not mattering.



I can understand how, to my grandmother raised in abject poverty in a
Russian shtetl and living in slightly-less-abject poverty in Duluth, the
Palestinians could disappear she never came to this land, never met one
of its people. I can comprehend how Jews from the concentration camps
and refugees fleeing Nazi Europe could long for a

state of their own, and how from Hitler’s Germany Palestinians weren’t
much of a visible presence in the consciousness of terrified people
needing a refuge.



But those who were actually there on the land, creating the “facts on
the ground” of their time, must have noticed and deliberately chosen to
unsee that there was another people standing in the way, doing their
best not to be bulldozed into oblivion. As Sharon and Bush and all their
supporters and all who stand by silently and justify the current
murders don’t see. As we are not shown the victims of the bombs of Baghdad.



There’s a Bible story haunting me that seems tangled up with this all.
It’s one they never focused on in Hebrew School: the story of the
Levite and the Concubine. It goes like this:



A Levite was traveling with his concubine and is given shelter for the
night by an old man in the town of Gideon in the territory of the tribe
of Benjamin. During the night a pack of men demand to have sex with
him. Instead, the host and the Levite send out the concubine, who is
gang-raped and left for dead on the doorstep. When the traveler reaches
home, he cuts up her body into twelve pieces and sends one to each
tribe, to call them to war.



The war is bloody and involves several rounds of smiting and

killing sixteen thousand here, twenty thousand there, in a frenzy
almost as senseless as our current assault on Iraq, until Benjamin is
defeated and all the other tribes swear not to give their daughters to wife
with Benjamin. Whereupon they realize they have committed genocide,
wiped out a tribe of their own. Repenting of this ethnic cleansing, they
find some innocent town which has not participated in

this oath and simply kill all the men and all the women who have known
men, and give all the virgins to Benjamin.



I am thinking about this as I try to fathom what has been done to the
mind of the bulldozer operator to make him capable of deliberately
crushing a beautiful young woman under his machine, and trying to comprehend
the hatemail and diatribes her death has evoked along with the paeons
of praise and the martyr posters.



And I conclude that the soldier was only doing what colonization makes
necessary. To be a colonizer, we cannot afford to see the colonized as
fully human.



So when you tell me, "The Palestinians are taught to hate; Barak
offered them everything but they don’t want peace--they don’t love their
children; they are animals; there is no one to talk to" I say, "That is
what colonization requires you to believe."



It diminishes you, as the driver of that bulldozer is diminished by his
act far, far more than the crushing of Rachel¹s body can ever diminish
her.



And if I could, I would send you a bone. Not to call you to war, but
away from it. Something you cannot avoid seeing, touching. Something to
make the blood on our hands visible, unmistakable. A limb, a shoulder,
a hunk of flesh dripping real blood, from the rubble beneath the
bulldozer, the doorstep, from the child shot dead in the gunfight or buried
under the house, from the bomb shelters of Baghdad and from the bloody
busses of Tel Aviv. A bone red with

blood to say:



This is what colonization requires: blood soaked sand, holy earth
defiled with death, human sacrifice.



For more information contact:

Starhawk (USA):059-713-923

==============================


2)
Myriad Forms of Ethnic Cleansing

Kristen Ess

27 March, 2003



There are reports that US soldiers have joined the Israelis
in terrorizing the people of Jenin. A woman working in Gaza
City says, "They think there will be street fighting when
they invade Baghdad, so they want to practice on Jenin."



The woman who is speaking about this tells me, "Always I am
worried about my children." She is worried that her house
will be blown up. Her neighbor was killed while fighting
invading Israeli soldiers. If precedent holds, this means
the Israeli military will come to blow up her neighbor's
house--the house the fighter no longer lives in because he
is dead, but rather his mom and dad's house as a form of

collective 'punishment,' a frequent practice of the Israeli
military government. Generally when the Israeli military
blows up someone's home, the homes next to it explode with
the force. I ask the woman, "What will you do?" She grins
lipstick and says, "We will run out and go back when it's over to see
if there is anything left."



Israeli soldiers finished demolishing a mosque today, one
they have been destroying slowly in Rafah. They also tore
down a family's home.



At 3am the Israeli military invaded the northern Gaza Strip
town of Beit Hanoun with Apache helicopters and tanks. The
bulldozers demolished 100s of trees, further desecrating
the land. If one were not watching this happen, it might
be easy to arrive here next year and truly believe that
this was a land without a people. The Israeli military has
destroyed thousands of dunams of orange and olive trees,
shrubs, grass, and life. The US donated helicopters fired
missiles into the Beit Hanoun Palestinian National Security
building, killing two men who were at work.



The Palestinian Authority cannot fight back in these
situations; one because there are no weapons strong enough
to fight the US funded Israeli military machine here, and
two, because the PA has been backed into a corner. It is
required to play along with the colonizing force of the
Israeli state, accepting the mandate that the occupied must
provide for the protection of the occupier. The PA is pushed
and pulled; going so far as to accept a US/Israeli approved
Prime Minister, Abu Mazen.



The Palestinian people, whether in the PA or a political
party, are not allowed to resist this brutal military
occupation, a constant horror since 1967. The Palestinian
people are not being allowed to claim their individual
legitimate right of return, the right of return to their
homes and land that are currently occupied by Israeli
citizens, where people were torn from in 1948.



The Right of Return is a clear-cut UN Resolution, put forth
in 1948. It is an international law that is an individual
right. As such it cannot be bartered away.



In Bethlehem there is a great deal of talk about a massive
transfer of Aida Camp. The Israelis built the illegal
settlement, Gilo, nearby, several years ago. This is how it
often works: the Israeli military destroys Palestinian homes
and terrorizes the people, kicking them out off their own
land to nowhere. They begin just in the area where they build
the settlements. Then the people who are living in the area
nearby have to suffer increased repression at the hands of
the Israeli military and heavily armed settlers. Next,
little by little, using the excuse of the nearby settlement,
the Palestinian people are kicked out of their homes and land,
and the area for the settlement grows larger and larger. This
is part of the process of ethnic cleansing--creating new
facts on the ground.



Israeli settlements are illegal under international law,
but the Israeli military government has never stopped
building them. Under the dissembling Barak, settlement
building increased by some 70 percent.



Settlements are military installations. Tanks and bulldozers
regularly roll out from settlements throughout the Gaza
Strip. The Israeli military built its base inside a
settlement near Ramallah. Israeli settlements tower the
hills around West Bank towns, hills that used to be forests
or vineyards or people's homes.



A man calls from Bethlehem, "They [Israeli soldiers]
dressed like Arabs and went into Cinema [a crowded area
of Bethlehem where people sell plants and find taxis].
They shot the car completely. The guys they killed were
from Aida Camp." His voice is so sad and so finished.
"And they killed a little girl, she's nine."



Kristen Ess

Gaza City



011.972.59.357.526
011.972.67.341.268



INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
www.palsolidarity.org

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human
history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to
improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends
forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can
sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." Robert F.
Kennedy