Dispatches from the East
A friend held in common to several of us in the Huffy Crew, Emiliano, recently sent me this email--I was quite moved by his actions and the content of this letter, so I asked him if I could post it and he graciously allowed. With no further ado-
Family. Friends.
I am in the the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Loafing about Europe has come to an abrupt end. Yesterday, I participated in a nonviolent demonstration protesting the theft of Palestinian farmland by the Israeli government. While doing so, i was assaulted by members of the Israel Defense Force (more accurately termed the Israel Offensive Force or the Israel Occupation Force) as were other demonstrators present. Our intent was to place ourselves in the way of a backhoe and bulldozer uprooting trees in a Palestinain orchard in order to impede the destruction and illegal annexation of Palestinain farm land by a nearby Israeli settlement. As I placed my body beneath the arm of the backhoe, an IOF soldier struck me in the back of the neck with his assault rifle. I wobbled, was held steady by a fellow protestor, a man of gold from Puerto Rican New York, and then we were all rushed by soldiers attempting to drive us back from the area. In the push, a seething Israeli soldier strangled me, his hatred manifest in the ferocity with which he crushed my throat and ripped at my neck skin, in his bulging eyes bulging bigger and his grip getting stronger when i calmly asked him to release me. He beat me with the barrel of his assault rifle, landing forceful hits to my chest, ribs, and arms. Another soldier attempted to rip hair from my head while still others punched and kicked at me and fellow activists. As a result, I have scabs, scratches, aches, and bruises all over my neck, arms, and chest. The act of swallowing is painful. But I didn't get the worst of it.
The worst of it is being visited upon a man named Musa, a Palestinian tomato farmer who is now in Israeli jail being interrogated by the notoriously abusive Shin Bet, the Israeli CIA. Musa is in jail despite being entirely, unassailably nonviolent at the protest yesterday and the days prior. He is in jail while i and three other international activists, all of us handcuffed and then allowed to walk away, are not, because he is Palestinian. Because in Israel, Palestinians are second-class citizens subject to different laws, rights, and burdens than the Jewish residents. Their land, needed for subsistence not lawns, may be stolen and given to Jewish settlers. Their crops may be destroyed by settlers or the military with absolute impunity. Their homes may be demolished on an hours notice, usually not for anything the homeowner did but because he or she happened to be related to someone who may or may not have earned the wrath of the IOF. Palestinians are not free to move the distance many of us go to work in a day. Not without passing checkpoints which at times take hours to get through. They must carry ID cards on them at all times and are arrested and detained in perpetuity if at anytime they are without them. They may be killed without consequence, without trial, as happens weekly at times of relative calm, daily right now.
After the beatings yesterday, those of us not arrested went to the house of Musa's brother and stood on the rooftop patio. We looked over the fields where the demolition continued unabated, trees rising and falling like feather-light granules of earth sifting through the backhoe's hand. Throughout the morning an IOF jeep would drive into the village and then turn back toward the neighboring Israeli settlement from where it came, each time getting closer to the village square. Each time doing nothing but driving in and out. I interpreted the apparent purposelessness of the drive as a taunt to the Palestinians. An _expression of power over them. Whether it was or not (and let there be no doubt that, whether it was or not, the land confiscation going on in the neighboring fields most certainly was) Palestinian children soon responded accordingly with the spirit of resistance so characteristic of Palestinians even when met with a superior, oppressing force. When the jeep finally parked itself along a road on the outskirts of the village, scores of children massed and began slinging stones, a well-practiced art in these parts. They lobbed stones with both the elegance of a ballerina and the passionate intensity so often absent the aloof dance. It was an exercise in futility. Purely symbolic: the armored vehicle stood two football fields down the road and no child's stone came even remotely near the soldiers or their dent-proof vehicle. Still, soldiers thought it appropriate to fire rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters, which indeed could make it two football fields, into the mass of children rather than avert the confrontation by driving away.
As i stood, body aching, on the rooftop watching this scene, my Palestinain friend arrested and beaten, i too felt like my act of resistance of the day was futile. The trees continued to be uprooted. Nothing had changed. The awesome force posessed by the opposing side is overwhelming. It is ruthless. It is deflating. Even a very small task, like saving a plum tree, no grand feat of international political maneuvering, can not be easily accomplished.
But it can be - and in other places in this land has been - done, i was reminded that night while seated in a circle with Musa's family as they strategized ways to be more effective, to gain more support for their right to live free of occupation. Rather than become dispirited, i will try to take my cue from them. Shway Shway, they say here. Little by little. I certainly will not change the big picture here. All the internationals in Palestine together will not. But internationals are indeed a key. Especially internationals in the US, who if enough in number and determination, could possibly change the tune of the superpower that sanctions the tune of ruthlessness here. i have a number of suggestions as to what you can do and there are many many more thoughts of a less-petitioning sort i want to share prompted by the time already spent here. i will try to write regularly. in whatever i send, i hope you will challenge me if you feel so inclined. and if challenges are met i hope you will act. be well, fine people. my love to you.
emiliano
for regular updates on activities i may be involved in
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/category/press
posted by shrf at 7:55 PM
4 Comments:
According to the events described in Emiliano’s letter, the Israeli soldiers acted wrongly. Yet it is important to remember that horrible atrocities have been committed by both sides, and most of the time is it innocent victims who experience the hardships… on both sides.
This is a very touchy issue, but an understanding will never be reached if we focus on the terrible actions committed by one side against another.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that both sides have experienced all sorts of crazy shit that we (living nice and safe in America) can’t even begin to understand. If much of our insight into this conflict is gained from descriptions of personal accounts, such as this letter, our vision becomes even further blurred.
hippie killer,
I disagree..not because of my views in the issue of Israel-Palestine, but because such personal accounts are generally the most direct way we can witness the atrocities that take place, atrocities that are generally "blurred" by the powerful American media. For example, if it were not for personal accounts by Iraqi civilians, we would know half of what is happening on the ground over there. Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc. and their strong link to the American government would merely acknowledge or even ignore the events on the ground that affect civilians' lives. We of course can't allow 100% of our evidence to come from firsthand accounts, but it should be a major factor in our consideration. How else will we know the real-life ramifications of our policies?
I did not mean to say that personal accounts hold no value; they obviously do.
The letter was indeed powerful, but I felt as if its posting would be analogous to me posting an account of a terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.
Say I described, in detail, an Israeli family walking through a market, and a suicide-bomber killing the mother and child, while the father watches them die? Such accounts stir-up emotions in the reader (and rightfully so), yet they do so without the reader necessarily looking at the larger picture.
My fear is that people (not on this blog, because we are all fairly educated on the issue) might read something like this and blindly think: “Innocent people victimized! How horrible! The Israelis/Palestinians must surely be wrong!!!”
In my opinion, that is what the letter asserts.
This however, is not simply emotional wrangling, and I think its purpose is not to pull on one's heartstrings. Granted, it is emotionally charged, and the instance of emphasizing one or two examples does have such an effect. However, in the first and final instance I believe that this is an instantiation of a larger, more systematic program of violence rlated to the occupation. Emiliano of course notes his own experiences, but seeing as how they were carried out by soldiers of an ostensibly sovereign nation, they are in this sense programmatic and (if not purely sanctioned) uncritiqued violence. The larger picture is only a composite of individual instances like these, and this is not even mentioning the fact that we rarely see reports of such incedents in the media. Emiliano's letter was personal, but also reporting
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