Dismantle the Occupation Wall and Stop the Military Occupation of Palestine

Silence allows savagery to flourish, and solidarity makes space for hope.

In 2006, we are still living in an age of barbarism. In 2001, America and the UK invaded Afghanistan. Five years have passed and still the people of Afghanistan live in fear. Then, America and the UK invaded Iraq in 2003 to bring freedom and peace, and now the only freedoms left in that country are the freedom for American capital to use Iraqi oil as it pleases and for Iraqis to die without regard to age or gender.

On June 28, 2006, more than 60 years into their military occupation, Israel amplified its brutal attacks on the Palestinians in Operation Summer Rain. Roads and power plants have been destroyed, and Palestinians have been prevented from going outside. From the end of June until October, over 300 Palestinians were killed and over 1,500 were arrested. Thousands were wounded and hundreds have sustained permanent injuries.

We should accurately identify Israel’s slaughter and savagery, without letting the tragedies of the Holocaust blind us to continuing injustice. The lesson is not that one nation, formerly repressed, should be allowed to continue to repress others, but rather that there can be no excuse for one people to inflict cruelty on another people.

Shortly after the commencement of Operation Summer Rain, Israel invaded Lebanon once more on July 12, 2006. Despite the rhetoric, this invasion is simply the latest in a series of Israeli invasions of Lebanon, such as Operation Litani in ’78, Operation Peace for Galilee in ’82, Operation Accountability in ’93, and Operation Grapes of Wrath in ’96. Though this latest is called Operation Just Reward, it has manifested itself through unjust punishments of the Lebanese.

When the strong rule the weak, when the world serves to profit only the rich, this is called the age of barbarism.

When the distinctions between the strong and the weak disappear, when humanity moves according to the basic fundamental principles of cooperation and solidarity, this is called the age of enlightenment.

We are at a crucial moment of decision, in which people must choose between savagery and humanity.

Israel was established in 1948 under the auspices of British imperialism, and now the Israeli government oppresses and evicts the Palestinians from their land without end and with the approval and aid of US imperialism. Millions of Palestinians are now scattered over the world, unable to return to their homeland where their parents are buried and where their memories remain.

The remaining Palestinians have been posed with the choice: leave or submit. But they have chosen neither to leave nor submit, and in response to their legitimate right to resist military occupation under the Geneva conventions, Israel began work on the Separation Wall. Also known as the Apartheid Wall, it encloses Palestinian residential districts in concrete and barbed wire. Israel has plans to permanently annex the areas surrounding the wall. The cumulative effects of these actions are to deprive Palestinians of normal lives, of their family and neighbors, as well as of their remaining arable land and water resources. Israel has essentially created a prison out of their land, aided by the design of Oslo.

Qalqiliya, home to tens of thousands in the northern West Bank, is a typical example. Israel has built the wall around its edges, and there is now only one checkpoint through which people are allowed to pass to enter and exit the city. In addition, Qalqiliya’s economy has been ruined by Israeli sanctions, which prevents farmers from importing or exporting.

Palestine has yielded and compromised on countless occasions in the past 60 years, but received only suppression and death in return. Accordingly, to the Palestinians, fighting against Israel is a matter of living—in life, one can walk the streets freely. Though the sky, sea, and land are blocked, though the democratically elected government faces is being rendered incapacitated though Israeli, American, and EU offensives, the Palestinians continue to resist.

We create history with our own hands and feet.
Just as American history began with the genocide of the Native Americans, Israel’s history began with the slaughter and expulsion of the Palestinians. These two countries occupy Palestine with bullets and tanks, money and media, and they above all others are responsible for what has occurred. We want peace, not war, but we want a peace based on a popular outcry for justice, stemming from the voices of those who would end their repression and suffering, and not a peace based on the silence of the weak.

Today was the Fourth National and International Week against the Apartheid Wall. While Israeli and American money and power continue to write the pages of history, we met today to write the history of hope with our hands and feet. If they are engines of despair, we are humans creating hope.

We who maintain hope in this age of savagery demand the following of Israel and the United States.
- Cease construction on the wall and remove those parts already built.
- Cease Israeli military attacks against the Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip.
- Ensure freedom and peace for all those living on the land of historical Palestine, regardless of race, religion, or nationality.

November 9, 2006
By the participants of the Fourth National and International Week Against The Apartheid Wall

New strategies...

From Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org):

Palestinian Gathering at Targeted Home Prevents Israeli Airstrike
In the Occupied Territories, the Israeli military called off a planned air strike on the Gaza home of a wanted militant Sunday after hundreds of Palestinians gathered at the home to protect it. Hamas activist Nizar Riyan described the scene.

Nizar Riyan: "In the beginning hundreds of people gathered and in less than an hour, there are thousands gathered on the roof. Now the men and woman are taking shifts, meaning the women came this morning and said, 'We will be here during the day and you cover during the night'. Now, our sisters sitting on top of the roof and said now go and get some rest inside the house. This approach initiated by our people, whether they are men or women, is a great approach that will break the strength of the (Israeli) F-16 planes."

An Israeli spokesperson called the Palestinian action “a cynical exploitation of our attempt to avoid harm to civilians.” But Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said the tactic had broken new ground and would be used to stop future Israeli attacks.

Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh: "Israel will not break our will and we will stand together for a long path, starting by what has happened here today at this house, to Protect our house, our children, our women and our elderly."

Alive in Baghdad

"Alive in Baghdad was formed to counter the sound-bite driven, “Live From” news model. Through the work of a team of Americans and Iraqi correspondents on the ground, Alive in Baghdad shows the occupation through the voices of Iraqis. Alive in Baghdad brings testimonies from individual Iraqis, footage of daily life in Iraq, and short news segments from Iraq to you."

Alive in Baghdad

stuff from palestine

http://palestineonlinestore.com/

Apparently you can order things like kuffiyahs (sp?) here, although the pages for apparel are under construction.

"The Palestine Online Store, launched in December, 2003, is a not-for-profit activist project striving to make Palestine-related materials more widely available. While the focus is on informational resources, other products such as apparel, handcrafts, and solidarity items are also featured."

http://pcwf.org/ --Palestine Children's Welfare Fund...you can buy stuff here too!

Robert Fisk article

Dirty Bombs Over Lebanon

By ROBERT FISK

Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians?

We know that the Israelis used American "bunker-buster" bombs on Hizbollah's Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week. And we now know--after it first categorically denied using such munitions--that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.

But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory--and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry--used by the Ministry of Defence--which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.

Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium." A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.

Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste productof the enrichment process is depleted uranium, it is an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armour. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.

Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas--until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.

I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer--except for "marking" targets--even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.

Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government and parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that "according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms".

Asked by if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions." This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.

American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 1991--their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry--and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.

Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public health if such weapons were used against armoured vehicles. But the US administration and the British government later went out of their way to belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports that civilians in Bosnia--where DU was also used by Nato aircraft--were suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any health effects.

"When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the explosion are very long-lived in the environment," Dr Busby said yesterday. "They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as dangerous as it is." Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its targets--in the case of Khiam, for example--were only two miles from the Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both sides in the First World War often blew back on its perpetrators.

Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report, said: "At worst it's some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don't yet know. At best--if you can say that--it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."

The soil sample from Khiam--site of a notorious torture prison when Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a frontline Hizbollah stronghold in the summer war--was a piece of impacted red earth from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence of enriched uranium. "The health effects on local civilian populations following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere," the Busby report says, "are likely to be significant ... we recommend that the area is examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up."

This summer's Lebanon war began after Hizbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of Lebanon's villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked civilians, but that Hizbollah was also guilty of such crimes because it fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.

Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.

What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk's new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

Amira Hass article

How a Beit Hanun family was destroyed
By Amira Hass

The first shell that struck the house sent up a big cloud of dust and smoke. The parents and older children felt around in the sudden darkness of the morning, looking for the small children - to see if anyone had been hurt, to find and hold them, to run with them into the street.

Zahar, 33, is now lying wounded in the hospital in Beit Hanun; she has undergone one operation to remove shrapnel from her abdomen and is waiting for another on her leg. She was unhurt by the first shell. So was her 9-year-old son Sa'ed. They lived on the first floor of the house, in the east wing. After the first shell, she ran to where he was sleeping under the window. The light filtered in through the cloud of dust, and she saw his blanket was covered by fragments of broken glass. She pulled it off and found him shaking. "You weren't hit," she said, urging him to run and join her other children, May, Rami and Fadi, who fled with her downstairs.

Her 14-year-old daughter May helped her find her headscarf, skirt and pants, but she had no time to cover her head. Holding 5-month-old Maha, Zahar ran to the lane below the house. She gave the baby to a sister-in-law so she could put on her scarf, and then the second shell fell on the east wing of the house.

Was Sa'ed killed by this shell or by the third one, which also struck the house dead on? She does not remember. She was hit by the fourth shell, which struck the veranda.

But at this point, Zahar was still unharmed. She bent over Sa'ed, who was lying with all the other dead and wounded in the lane. A few seconds earlier, the other family members had run panicked into the street to get out of the house after the first shell. Zahar wiped the blood from Sa'ed's mouth and ran to the main street, calling for help. She ran back to her son to try to revive him, to wake him, and then the fourth shell hit.

At first she did not notice she had been wounded, that she was bleeding and her leg was torn down to the bone. She sat down among the bodies and tried to bring Sa'ed back to life. Her second son, Fadi, was injured. She doesn't know which shell did it. Her third son, Rami, fled into the garden of his uncle and neighbor, Dr. Hussein Athamneh, but the sixth shell found him there. Rami then ran into the street, toward the house of his uncle and aunt. The seventh shell found him outside their house, where it exploded.

The seven shells killed 18 members of the Athamneh family that day.

The shells had eyes

"It was as if the shells had eyes: Wherever we ran, they followed us," said Tahani, Zahar's sister-in-law, whose 12-year-old son Mahmoud was killed by the second shell. "The first shell woke us. I gathered the children. The son whose hand I was holding, Mahmoud, is the one I lost. We didn't know where to go. We ran downstairs, we were barefoot. My daughter said her feet were burning from the heat of the explosion. The second shell fell when we were already downstairs. I went and turned over the children's bodies, to see who was who, until I found Mahmoud.

"Not even one day had passed since we buried my brother Mazen. The army detained him and thousands of other men. They took them for a short interrogation and then released them. He and our cousin were arrested together and freed together. They told them at the detention point in Erez that they could go home. They went home, but there was a curfew. So other soldiers shot him because they violated the curfew. My cousin is in the hospital, seriously wounded. And Mazen, the uncle of my son Mahmoud, is dead.

"Less than one day after we buried his uncle, Mahmoud was lying on the floor among the dead. I tried to wake him, but he did not respond. Then the third shell hit. I fled into the house. The daughter of my brother-in-law also fled, but the shell followed her. My 14-year-old nephew fled and the shell followed him. It exploded, and he saw his hand fall to the floor. Now he is hospitalized in Egypt. Only people without a conscience could do that."

Hayat Athamneh, 55, Tahani and Zahar's mother-in-law, lost three children and two grandchildren in the shelling. "When the shells had enough of us, they went to the house of our relatives, but, thank God, they had fled. When the shells had enough of our relatives, they went to our neighbors. My children also fled, but the shells found them. And my ears started to go deaf from the noise. I could not hear a thing. I could only see. Black smoke, a lot of black smoke.

"And then I saw my son Mahdi, lying here in the west part of the house, near the garden." Athamneh bent down, picked up a bloodstained stone and kissed it. "It is my son Mahdi's blood," she said. "I saw him lying here, his brains on one side and his head on the other."

Thousands of mourners

Dressed in black, Athamneh came from the mourners' tent in the yard of a neighboring building. For three days, thousands of mourners have streamed there from all over the Gaza Strip. Some of them went to look at the Athamneh family's house, passing through the lane still filled with rubble, shell fragments, shrapnel and pools of blood. On Friday afternoon, some of the mourners gathered outside the home of Bassam Kafarneh, the neighbor who was hit by a shell when he ran to help the first casualties. He died in an Israeli hospital. His mother, also hospitalized in Israel, is in very serious condition.

Athamneh walked to where her son Majdi sits with other mourners. Praising the lord, she told the group how her family died and pointed to the places where every person fell. "I saw Tahani, Mahmoud's mother. I told her that Mahmoud was thrown on the floor here. Dead. And I saw my husband's brother Mas'oud and his wife Sabah, and Sanaa, whose husband died a year ago, and Manal, the wife of his son Ramez, and their two daughters, one eight months old and the other three. I saw them all. Dead.

"The steel in the house was bent and torn from its place. How could people not be torn apart by those shells?"

No tears

Athamneh's eyes were dry as she told about her dead. So were Tahani's. Zahar, lying in a hospital bed surrounded by family and friends, began to cry only when she remembered that Sa'ed's new glasses were ready. They had ordered them a day or two before the Israel Defense Forces invaded.

The day the shells fell, Athamneh's daughters Tamam and Najat had been sleeping in the house with their children, because their houses had been badly damaged during the last IDF invasion. No one is investigating whether they were hit by tanks or bulldozers, shells or missiles, or from an explosion when the soldiers blasted holes in the walls to pass between houses. Four hundred homes were damaged in Beit Hanun in one week, including 25 that were completely destroyed.

The soldiers' invasion of the Athamneh family home has also been almost forgotten. At 10 A.M., on November 1, a tank entered the garden, destroying hothouses, trees, pipes and a generator, until it hit a wall. The soldiers made a hole in the wall and entered the house, gathered all the family members and sent the women to a room on the first floor. The men were put in the kitchen and bathroom.

The soldiers collected all the cell phones, and with leashed dogs, searched all the rooms on all four floors. They called out the names of all the family members. Majdi, Zahar's husband, has a pacemaker. He said he felt ill and asked the soldiers to call an ambulance. He overheard one say someone was sick. Another soldier responded, "Let him die."

Majdi showed the soldiers his medical papers. One of the soldiers hit him in the chest and his nose started bleeding. After two hours, the soldiers left. They returned three days later through the hole in the wall. They again gathered all the family members, counted them, searched and left after three hours.

"They knew very well who was in the house, how many children, how many women. They knew very well there were no terrorists and no arms in this house," said Majdi.

Majdi showed visitors the walls and ceilings hit by the shells, the clothes strewn by the blast, the broken furniture and concrete. "I believe the soldiers are happy they killed us," he said. "They had an order from [Defense Minister Amir] Peretz and [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert to kill us. They wouldn't do it without orders. What kind of a mistake is it, if 10 shells hit one after the other, killing people in their beds? Not one shell was a mistake. I collected the martyrs. One by one. Avigdor Lieberman said Israel must act like the Russians in Chechnya. He just joined the government, and they immediately started doing what he said."

Haitham speaks on the Situation in Iraq

This is an article I wrote for ROKon, an expat 'zine in Seoul. I will post a link to my notes from this evening (which contain more information than I could include in the article) soon.

While looking for People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy on Wednesday, September 29, I run into Mini, who shows us where the lecture is. He leads Alex and me into the correct building, up a set of stairs, across a hall, back down another set of stairs, and then around a corner, where we find ourselves in a small, stuffy lecture hall. After some waiting, the speaker arrives, and there are about 20 to 25 people in all. His name is Haitham, a doctor from Baghdad. He is in Korea to visit friends that he met two years ago, when he was here to testify at a military tribunal in his capacity as doctor. The talk had been organized by Iraq Solidarity for Peace, a Korean peace group.

After introductions, he begins by outlining a picture of general Iraqi life—suffering. The two basic reasons for this are an increasingly severe lack of security and skyrocketing prices, especially for food and petrol. Where one liter of gas used to cost 3¢, now the same liter costs 40¢ and requires the buyer to wait in a queue that often exceeds seven or eight hours. Conditions had never been this severe, he says, even during the eight-year war with Iran. Health problems are increasingly worse—facilities and supplies are scarce. "Mostly we can do nothing to our patients." He outlines three new health problems that are the result of the current war. First, starvation and malnutrition. Second, increasing rates of cancer, especially skin cancer--evidence, Haitham states, of the use of chemical weapons during the war. The third is psychological trauma, which will affect the Iraqis for generations to come.

"All America brought to Iraq is destruction [...] we see death every day, blood. People starving, people dying […] But the worst thing for me as an Iraqi to see is for Iraqis to kill each other." The main cause of suffering is the American army. It is they who impose a curfew and shoot anyone who is outside during those hours—even Iraqis who try to go to the hospital because of an emergency. "This is like living in hell." The Americans are the ones who speak of dividing Iraq, and it is they who fuel the insurgency, because chaos is more favorable to them than a peaceful Iraq. Three cities in northern Kurd-dominated Iraq have been exempt from this curfew and stand as shining examples of what the Americans can do if peace were truly on their agenda. He dismisses claims of a civil war, attributing inter-Iraqi fighting as a small minority. The militias have a good spirit and represent resistance in Iraq, while those who attack fellow Iraqis: "They are few." They are also the poor and uneducated, he says. He also dismisses concerns that the Kurds, who have not had a lucky history in Iraq or in any other part of the world, and who are also the largest ethnic group without a nation, would come under attacks from Iraqis if the Americans leave, taking their protection with them. He dismisses Iranian influence on Iraqi Shiites in general and Iraqi Shiite government officials in particular, saying that it is not significant. He also dismisses the conflicts between the Shiites and the Sunnis as inflated, saying that ordinary Iraqis see themselves as Iraqis first and Muslims second. Shiites and Sunnis live together, work together, get married.

"With America still inside of Iraq, there no hope for peace inside Iraq." He does not pretend that there won't be problems once the Americans pull out, but is firm in his belief that with time, the Iraqi people will unite and "learn to love one another."