[IPSM] Report #2 - Occupied Elections]

[aaron at resist.ca]

http://aaron.resist.ca/?q=node/20

Occupied Elections
By Aaron Lakoff
Jerusalem - January 9th, 2005
Miraculously, I awoke at 6:30am this morning.  Izzy, the British girl I
asked to wake me up, didn’t even need to.  I groggily rolled out of my
bunk and headed to a quick ISM meeting in the tea room of the hostel.
	We decided that we were going to split up into groups of three and head
out to the different polling stations located at post offices in East
Jerusalem.
	The first station we got to was a few blocks away from our hostel, a
large post office called Al-Saladin.  Palestinians of all shapes and
stripes were beginning to arrive at 7:00am, and there were just as many
(if not more) internationals, journalists, and foreign observers.  This
was going to be quite the show.
	The first crazy incident of the day happened at about 7:15am.  A man with
a bright red kafiyeh showed up at started to aggressively hand out simple
flyers in Arabic.  The flyers were a religious message encouraging people
not to vote.  Many of the middle-aged men in line were clearly offended
and started to shove the man.  A fight almost broke out, but the PA
security came out to clear it up and remove the man handing out the
flyers.  Later on, we found the ripped up flyers scattered about the
sidewalk.
	As the morning unfolded, things seemed to be going smoothly to an
unscrutinizing eye.  Palestinians were lining up, going in, and coming
out.  We had heard rumors of a large settler protest to take place against
the elections in Jerusalem, but no sign was to be seen.  We felt kind of
strange standing there with our “International Human Rights Observer”
badges on, as nothing out of the ordinary was happening yet.
	All of the sudden, a motorcade of 3 or 4 giant SUV’s pulled up, and out
stepped former US President Jimmy Carter and his entourage.  They were
immediately swamped by reporters and the strobe show of one thousand
camera flashes.  They headed straight into the polling station.  A group
of Palestinian boys were very excited that I snapped a close-up of Carter.
	On his way out, he made a statement saying there were too many observers
around, and they were preventing Palestinians from voting.  What about the
difficulty of holding an election under occupation, eh Jimmy?
	More and more now, we were seeing how many Palestinians were being turned
away without a vote because they weren’t on the lists.  They were really
pissed off, and they deserved to be.  Even though there were PA-sponsored
vans waiting to drive rejected voters to alternate polling stations,
hardly anyone seemed to be getting into them.  As one man said later on in
the day, “This is my home!  I was born in Jerusalem!  Why can’t I vote
here?”  Those who can’t vote at Al-Saladin are unsympathetically given a
white rejection slip and told to move on.
	Of the people we spoke with, many were voting for Abbas, but weren’t too
hopeful.  One 17-year old I talked to who voted says Abbas is “not too
good, not too bad.”  That seemed to be a popular sentiment.
	A few hours later, another group came to relieve us, and we headed to the
Jaffa gate post office.  This is where the trouble really started.
	This time at the Jaffa gate, far fewer Palestinians were showing up to
vote.  We heard that not one person had been able to vote there in the
morning, and by the end of the day, only four people had been able to. 
Seeing the people coming out of the station with faces of dismay, it was
easy to believe that.
	Unfortunately, as we suspected, settlers and ultra-right wing Zionists
began to arrive one by one.  Some of them were from a settler radio
station, Arutz Sheva (or Israel National News), and tried to interview
visible solidarity activists.
	Everything people have told me about the settlers appears to be true.  I
hate generalizing, but the ones here were crazy, crazy people.  First of
all, they wear those orange stars of David on their clothes to evoke
images of Jewish persecution in the Holocaust in order to protest the Gaza
disengagement.  How disgusting.  The stars say “settler” on them.  They
are horribly offensive, especially to me as a Jew.  These people are the
extreme of the extreme.
	They ask you leading questions and try to put words into your mouth.
They call you racist.  They call you a looser.  They call Palestinians
terrorists.  They shout at you, and they accuse you of collaborating in
the Holocaust, all with a snide grin on their faces.  It takes a lot of
courage and stamina to face them down, even to ignore them!  My heart goes
out to Palestinians on a regular basis.
	As there were fewer and fewer Palestinians showing up to vote, and more
and more settlers, we decided to head back to the hostel for a quick break.
	By the end of the day, the East Jerusalem voting process had been
rendered a complete disaster by the Israeli authorities.  Thankfully we
heard reports that voting went smoothly in other parts of the West Bank
and Gaza, where it was actually Palestinians and not Israelis controlling
the Palestinian elections.  By 2:30pm, some of the voter rejection
problems in the city had been cleared up, but it was too little to late
for many Jerusalemites, ripped-off from their democratic rights.
As night fell, we discuss the day’s activities and await the imminent
victory of Abu Mazen, the new winner of an occupied election for an
occupied people.

To view my pictures from the day's events, visit:
http://gallery.cmaq.net/album21
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