[Onthebarricades] PALESTINE: Everyday resistance and survival, October 2007

[Andy]

*  NGO starts checkpoint library initiative

*  MLK disciples work for peace in Palestine

*  Article on Dheisheh media activists 

*  Beer contest glimpses rare aspect of Palestinian Christian life

*  Canaan fair trade group formed

 

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/TAM750783.htm



Palestinians liven up checkpoints with a good book

01 Oct 2007 08:45:24 GMT

Source: Reuters

 By Haitham Tamimi 

HEBRON, West Bank, Oct 1 (Reuters) - A new charity is easing Palestinians' frustration with their regular long waits at Israeli army checkpoints by stocking taxis with books for them to read. 

The checkpoints, which Israel says are needed to stop suicide bombers, dot the occupied West Bank, hampering travel between Palestinian towns and villages. 

"People spend many hours at checkpoints," said Nafiz Asilah, head of the Palestinian Library on Wheels for Non-Violence and Peace, an independent organisation funded by European NGOs. 

"We are providing the passengers with books for their benefit and enjoyment during the long wait." 

The scheme started about a week ago, providing some 15 taxi drivers based in the city of Hebron with a bag containing about 10 books, ranging from short stories to quiz books and books about Muslim history and practices. 

Passengers get a book at the start of a journey, then hand it back when they arrive. The aim is to expand the campaign to some 50 drivers in other West Bank towns. 

Palestinians say the checkpoints amount to collective punishment and are pressing Israel to dismantle some of them ahead of a U.S.-sponsored peace conference expected in November. 

 

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2007/09/16/king_0916.html

 

MLK disciples work for peace in the Mideast

By MARGARET COKER 
Published on: 09/16/07 

Bethlehem, West Bank - For decades, the rocky soil in the Holy Land has been notoriously hostile to peace. But civil rights activist Bernard Lafayette believes he has the right spiritual fertilizer to change that.

Lafayette, a longtime assistant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is training a group of Palestinian social workers, civil rights activists and political leaders to spread King's teachings of nonviolence across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"People talk about how hopeless this place is ... but I feel that these are problems with a solution," said Lafayette, a former resident of Atlanta. "I've seen places where peace looked just as impossible. ... These places turned around. It's never too late for the seeds of justice to bloom."

Last week, 32 Palestinians involved in organizations committed to peace completed a yearlong course sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Center for Non-Violence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island, which Lafayette heads.

Last year the SCLC opened two centers for nonviolence training in the Middle East. One is in Bethlehem and the other is in the southern Israeli city of Dimona, a desert town that is home to the African Hebrew Israelites, a group of African-Americans who have encountered antipathy and concern over their 30-year attempt to settle permanently in Israel.

The SCLC's mission is part of the Atlanta-based organization's goal to spread King's goal of peace and reconciliation across America and in international hot spots as well.

Lafayette and his associate Charles Alphin, a Decatur resident and former head of education at the King Center, have played starring roles in both efforts.

Since King's death in 1968, Lafayette has devoted his life to conflict resolution and spreading King's ideas of a beloved - all-inclusive, caring - community.

Alphin, a retired deputy police chief in St. Louis, worked with King's widow, Coretta Scott King, to implement lessons in nonviolence for inner-city youths across America.

Over 15 years the two men have traveled to Haiti, Colombia, India and the former Soviet Union to reconcile former fighters and teach those seeking political and social justice the philosophy of nonviolence.

Their focus on the Mideast was a much-needed boost to the dozen or so Palestinian organizations whose own work in this area has been overshadowed by the upsurge of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in recent years.

"It's an inspiration for us to have such a famous person come to help us in our struggle. We remember that we aren't alone," said Lucy Nusseibeh, who runs the Middle East Nonviolence and Democracy center in Jerusalem.

Since 2000, the Palestinian fight for independence from Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has become synonymous with suicide bombings and fighting.

But the tactics of civil disobedience have also been used as part of the struggle for statehood.

Labor strikes, consumer boycotts and the refusal to pay taxes were common during the 1980s in the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

Campaigns of nonviolence lost credibility among a large swath of Palestinians, however, when such work didn't yield an independent state.

In the five-day seminar held in Bethlehem last week, Lafayette told his Palestinian students about historic moments in the U.S. civil rights movement such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls attending Sunday school.

He said they would have to convince their society that King's beliefs needed patience as well as courage to bear fruit.

"God is on the side of justice. You have to keep believing that and you have to be determined to suffer for this belief," he said.

"The key is how you react to conflict, whether you decide to escalate it or not."

Awni Jawad, 36, was one of the Palestinians who studied with Lafayette during the last year.

Jawad co-founded Holyland Trust eight years ago as a group dedicated to conflict resolution. That was after he spent his youth as a fighter affiliated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party.

He was jailed by Israel for the first time when he was 15, injured in gunbattles with Israeli soldiers and watched two of his best friends die. He said he didn't know of another way to live his life or work for his national goals - except for fighting.

"We needed a Lafayette when I was young, but we didn't have one. Now, I'm trying to teach our youth the lessons of love that he taught me, and that I didn't know earlier," Jawad said.

 

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article8993.shtml

 

Turning our tongues: Journals from Dheisheh 
Dina Awad, The Electronic Intifada, Sep 17, 2007

 

"Palestinian girls have a lot of power," said 17-year-old Haneen Owdeh on a hot summer day in the Dheisheh refugee camp near the West Bank city of Bethlehem. She then added, "but they don't know how to use it. They need someone to point them to ways on how to use it, to show them what to do."

Haneen Owdeh and her friends, 18 young Palestinian women in total, aged 16-19, form a grassroots girls' art collective in the Dheisheh camp, where over 10,000 refugees live on one-and-a-half square kilometers of land. It is not very far from here to their original homes in the villages of the Jerusalem and Hebron districts that were destroyed in 1948 when the Israeli state was established by expelling these youths' grandparents.

The girls of Dheisheh produce audio journals about their lives. They work under the mentorship of 6+, an American women's collective whose goal is to empower female artists from different cultural backgrounds. Their audio journals have been exhibited by the 6+ collective around Europe and the US under the title of Turning our Tongues: Audio Journals from the Young Women of Dheisheh refugee camp.

Haneen explains that the themes the girls cover in their recordings vary from love, life, politics and school. However, every subject occurs against the backdrop of the Israeli occupation. "Every girl speaks about the occupation in a personal manner. It's unavoidable, it's impossible not to touch upon it, it envelops our lives," says Haneen.

The conditions in the camp have been strained recently, especially in light of the siege imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since the election of Hamas in January 2006. The ensuing poverty as well as the political tensions have meant that girls in the camp have very little to do after school in terms of social and artistic activity.

Seventeen-year-old Zahra Salem, another member of the Dheisheh collective, explains that the project drew her in precisely because it offered an opportunity for the girls in the camp to socialize and carve out a niche for themselves amidst continued social upheaval. "This is the first time that there has been a project like this for girls in Dheisheh camp," she says. "I like this project because we can speak about our lives without restriction, we can express ourselves regardless of what is happening outside. These are our personal journals."

There were multiple steps to putting together the journals. First, the American women from 6+ taught the young women of Dheisheh how to make paper journals. After each girl wrote out her narrative, she then picked an excerpt to record. Then the girls were taught how to use audio equipment to edit and mix sounds. They worked together to create background sounds to go with each girl's entry. The finished product is a recording which tries to bring the listener into the girl's world, to demonstrate how she felt at the moment of the experience.

There were some difficulties involved with setting up the collective, as Haneen explains with a giggle. "When the American women came and said they wanted to do this project with us, it was hard to convince some of the girls to participate. Their parents had their reservations. But after they saw how the girls in the collective were able to work together and work so well and do this, now all the girls ask to participate in the future if we are to do this again!"

Haneen and Zahra say that they and the rest of the Dheisheh collective now want to start up a similar project with a younger generation of women in the camp. They want to take the skills that they learned and use them to help a group of 15-year-old girls produce their own audio journals, which they hope will also be exhibited on the 6+ site. "This project helped us express ourselves, but it also taught us how to work together and how to be good figures for girls in the camp," said Haneen.

Currently based in Arizona, 6+ member and cofounder Sama Alshaibi, an artist with Iraqi and Palestinian roots, explained that her collective's main goal in Dheisheh was to empower the young women of the camp. "We wanted to do something on a community level, as teachers and as artists for a demographic that has become completely undeserved," she said.

Sama says that the interest in Turning our Tongues has been paramount. The journals were recorded last September and were then put on exhibit at a national conference two weeks later. The exhibit has been presented multiple times since then in the US and in Europe. It most recently showed in New York City.

It is quite an accomplishment for the girls from Dheisheh to have their reflections play out around the world through a creative medium whose production they have control over. While 6+ taught the young women in the camp how to create the audio journals and how to function as a collective, Sama is humbled by the experience, explaining that, "in reality, we learned so much more from these girls than we taught them."

The young girls of Dheisheh would be proud to hear Sama's assertion. Perhaps their audience from around the world feels that they have as much to learn from them as the women of 6+ did. Such an audience would have been brought one step closer to understanding what it means to be a teenage girl living under occupation, a teenage girl full of power just waiting to be actualized.

Dina Awad lives in Toronto, Canada. Her grandparents hail from Palestine, where she feels most at home.

This article was originally published by Al Wattan and is republished with permission.

 

http://blogs.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/a_view_from_palestine/2007/09/taybeh_or_not_taybeh_that_is_t_1.html

Taybeh, or not Taybeh; that is the question
I'M WRITING this not having samped the curious delights of a Palestinian beer festival. (Yeah, unlikely I know, but this is in the Christian village of Taybeh, near Ramallah; home of some pretty impressive Crusader Church ruins, and . the only brewery in the Palestinian territories.) I was really looking forward to going, but having spent half-an-hour moving no more than two yards towards the front of the queue to go through Huwarra checkpoint, I decided life was too short and gave up for the day.

Above you can see the scrum ahead of me just before I gave up. At the top of the picture you can just see the turnstiles that all men aged between 18 and 35, 40 or 45 (depending on the mood of the soldiers) have to queue to pass through - followed by metal detectors and intensive questioning by soldiers sometimes half their ages.

The people in front of me were the women, children and older men who are exempt from going through the turnstiles; it's supposed to be a quicker, easier process, but it certainly didn't feel that way to me this afternoon.

One of the most annoying aspects of my wasted half-an-hour was having rock-all else to do other than watch four soldiers supposed to be inspecting incoming and outgoing vehicles propping up a roadblock and chatting and laughing amongst themselves because there were no cars for them to inspect. (I didn't get a picture because I didn't want to risk getting my head kicked in.)

Perhaps if I'd asked them why they didn't open another "lane" of the checkpoint for humans - the women, children and older men - they would have told me they couldn't "for security reasons". But to me it looked like a complete lack of respect for the Palestinians (aka fellow human beings). And, in fact, sheer bloody bad manners.


According to the UN's OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the oPt), as of April this year, Huwarra was one of 71 checkpoints proper in the West Bank.

In addition to the checkpoints, there were 13 "partial" - ie "flying" or occasional - checkpoints; 93 road gates; 60 road blocks; 210 earth mounds; 16 earth walls, 12 trenches and 73 road barriers - a total of 549 "closures" in all - in the way of any Palestinian with the audacity to try to move about the West Bank.

According to my (admittedly usually pretty crappy) reckoning, the West Bank is around 88 miles long and 38 miles wide at its longest and widest points, and, according to the Palestinian Authority the West Bank covers a total area of 2,305 square miles. If you realise that the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland covers 93, 638 square miles, maybe then you get an idea of how locked-down the West Bank is. And this list of closures doesn't even include the number of "settler roads" that Palestinians are banned from using.

The Israeli authorities say these closures are necessary for "security reasons". I presume by this they mean the "security" of the Jewish settlers, who shouldn't even be here anyway. Because, to be honest, I can't really see (despite what the more articulate readers of Haaretz have to say if you follow the link close to the end of this post) how they ensure security inside Israel proper.

I'm not an expert on such things, but I reckon you must be able to get pretty much everything you would need to make a bomb inside Israel itself, (especially when, as we learned at Glasgow Airport this Summer, even Calor Gaz bottles can be turned into a bomb) so all any potential bomber would have to do is get themselves inside Israel, and then go shopping. So, it might not be exactly a breeze getting from the West Bank (or Gaza) into Israel, but it's not impossible - plus there are people inside Israel itself who might want to make a bomb: disgrunted Palestinians from the 48 territories, say, or perhaps, even-nuttier-than-usual settlers (especially those evicted from their settlements). So surely, if the Israeli authorities wanted to be as close to 100 per cent certain as possible that their cities were "safe" they would subject everyone entering them to the same sort of "security" measures that they impose on the Palestinians within the West Bank? Or would that inconvenience and humiliate ordinary (Jewish) Israelis????

Some people might accuse me of being ungrateful. After all, it was only last December when the Israeli Government announced (to any international media that would listen) that it was lifting 59 checkpoints throughout the West Bank. Trouble was, though, that it turned out that hardly any of these "checkpoints" actually existed: they'd actually been created solely to be "lifted" in this grand gesture.

The Israeli authorities have been talking again about lifting checkpoints as a contribution to the peace process. Sounds good. But, as the brave (Jewish) Israeli journalist Amira Hass pointed out this week in the newspaper Haaretz, these checkpoints are redundant anyway, because the Israeli authorities have drastically reduced the number of roads accessible to Palestinians, and if the Palestinians can't actually travel on a road, what's the point of having a checkpoint on it?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/901373.html

(It's worth visiting that page if only to read the reader responses to Amira's piece. Especially delightful is the contribution from one John Ryan from Paris who urges everyone to email Amira to encourage her to blow herself up.)

As for me, well, I will probably spontaneously human combust (without a bomb!) if I don't make it to the second - and final - day of the Oktoberfest tomorrow. Fingers crosed that there's just a handful of teenage conscript (Israeli) soldiers to greet me at Huwarra.

Posted by Clare Simon on September 8, 2007 11:50 PM | Permalink

 


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