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Issue: October, 1988

I take a moment to look through the mountain of information we have gathered through the years of doing Palestinian solidarity work and focus on the Updates from the Database Project on Palestinian Human Rights and the report-backs from "Eyewitness Israel" human rights delegations to the Territories. The simple act of reading this material is excruciating. M.T.

The Data Base material is carefully gathered in the West Bank and Gaza by Data Base field workers, primarily American and European. Rumors are checked out thoroughly and nothing is printed unless it has been substantiated. Some of the information comes from Israeli army sources or from Israeli newspapers, most of it from eyewitness accounts. The report-backs are also eyewitness acounts from Americans who experienced them. All of it is so sickening as to make one despair for humanity. The brutality and cruelty of the occupying army, and those who make the policies guiding it, defies imagination. At the same time, a strong sense of hope comes through, along with an understanding of the determination of Palestinians to survive as a people, and the willingness on the part of Palestinians to live side by side with Israel, asking, (no, demanding) only that they be allowed to rule themselves within their own nation, to construct their own victories, and to make their own mistakes.

The Updates and report-backs bring the Intifada home and humanize the anguish. The deaths, injuries, imprisonments, torture, house demolitions and expulsions are happening not just to "a people," but to "people" - mothers and fathers, friends, brothers and sisters, who are no different from ourselves. Because this is information not readily available in mainstream press, nor, sadly, in most alternative press, I would like to share some of those accounts. It is important that all of us have a more concrete sense of the everyday experience of the Uprising. WARNING—The Updates, particularly, make tough reading.

The Eyewitness delegations, modeled after the Central American Witness for Peace program, were/are comprised of volunteers for a three-week trip to the territories, where they live with Palestinian families. Volunteers were solicited by both word-of-mouth and by advertisements in The Nation, The National Catholic Reporter, Christianity and Crisis , Christian Century and the weekly English-language edition of the Jerusalem daily Al-Fajr. I would like to share just a few of the responses from one recently returned delegation.

Robert Anderson (a resource developer for the Rainbow Kitchen Community Center in Pittsburgh, PA) - "I think one of the saddest things I saw was a little nine-year old boy that I interviewed who had his pelvis broken after he was caught by soldiers at a demonstration. They stomped on him until they managed to break his pelvis."

Rev. Carlos C. Jayne (a United Methodist minister in Des Moines, Iowa) - "I was struck by the amount of violence that has been afflicted on the Palestinians. Their life is miserable enough without it but the violence seems to add a sense of hoplessness that I would see if I were living there. But despite this violence, I was impressed with the graciousness and the accepting spirit which these people have for visitors from America, where the money and material comes for the Israelis to perpetrate the violence."

J. A. Roach (news and broadcast producer for KUER-FM in Salt Lake City) "The brutalization by the Israelis is widespread and obviously is Israeli policy. What they are doing is so horrible that I was in shock for the first few days of it, and it kind of scares me that I started to get accustomed to it."

Tara Siler (senior reporter for the Washington D.C. bureau of Pacifica News) "I saw an eight-year old boy in the hospital who had been intentionally run over by Israelis in a jeep because they said he had put a Palestinian flag in the telephone wires."

Craig Mokhiber (a law student from Kenmore, New York) "One of the features of the violence that is perpetrated against the Palestinians is [that it is] random. It is perpetrated against the elderly, the infirm, anyone who happens to be a non-Jewish member of that society. It is very clearly racist violence."

There are reports of soldiers demanding cigarettes to allow a family to pass to the hospital with a seriously injured passenger in the car; of soldiers ejecting the family of a mortally wounded boy from the vehicle in which they were racing him to the hospital, taking the driver's seat from his father and driving at a snail's pace to the hospital, arriving after the boy had bled to death. There are reports of soldiers smearing a child prisoner who was perhaps 10 years old against barbed wire to cut him up (this a letter to the editor in an Israeli paper from an Israeli soldier who witnessed the incident), and of soldiers beating old men and women to death. The stories are endless and unbearable. If this is more than we can stand to hear about, let's at least remember that we are paying for it all, to the tune of $10 million per day.

There is much concern among liberal Israelis (a rapidly shrinking group, according to a multitude of Israeli public opinion polls) about the effect on the soldiers of their own brutality and that of the policy which governs their behavior. The June 26, 1988 Data Base Update quotes Hebrew University Professor Yehosua Leibowitz, in an article in Israeli periodical Kol Hair, June 24&emdash;"The only difference between Israel and Nazi Germany is that Israel hasn't built the gas chambers yet. But the mentality is exactly the same."

Injections. . .
Indeed. From the July 28, 1988 Data Base Update, page 5 - "There have been various reports concerning a military unit calling itself the Black Scorpions. It appears to be a unit of the Golani brigades, identifiable because of its red berets. The IDF denies the existence of such a unit; the name may be one that the unit has given itself. From all reports it acts as a highly trained and coordinated commando unit which specializes in terrorizing people. . . . In addition to the raids reported last month [in Arura village on July 9], during the course of which Black Scorpions traumatized people in a range of ways, including injecting them with a substance the soldiers claimed was 'truth serum', Amari refugee camp has been subjected to repeated raids and brutalization." In these raids, the soldiers not only injected villagers with unknown substances, they beat them, threatened to hack of their ears, and poured boiling cooking oil over two young men, after beating their mother and other relatives.

The June 26 Update tells us of a 17-year old from Amari who was injected in the neck on June 23 and has been in hiding since. It also tells us that "physicians in the Makasad and Augusta Victoria hospitals are trying to find out what is in the injections. Nadr Mhamud Rashid, 24, from Amari, was hospitalized with chills, fever, and chemical poisoning. There were marks of subcutaneous injections near a vein in his arm and under his elbow." The International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza is analyzing a syringe containing residue of a green substance reportedly used in these injections. A chemical analysis of the substance is not yet available.

Beatings. . .
The concern for the effect of the brutality on the soldiers themselves is well taken, though I am angered when that concern takes precedence over the effect of that same brutality on those toward whom it is directed. I quote a letter to the editor from soldier Dov Barak in the Israeli paper Koteret Rashit, February 20, 1988, and excerpted from "Report on the Violations of Human Rights in the Territories During the Uprising, 1988", published by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights: "A curfew. . . everything is desolate. . . suddenly a boy crosses the road - would he remind you of your own children? - and starts to run. A curfew is a curfew and an order is an order. Beatings have become routine. He's a child. My destructive awareness, the fruit of a humanistic education of many years standing comes to his defense. It encircles the child and tries, with all its might to preserve itself. But I'm a soldier, I'm obedient. I raise the club - and with expert blows, employing reasonable force, I beat my awareness to a pulp. When my consciousness is crushed and I find myslf an animal and not a human being, recalling what happened to the Jews 45 years ago, I stand there in my uniform and my metal helmet, with a club and a gun - but no consciousness, as they load what remains of the boy and take him to a hospital and the curfew returns. . ."

Curfews. . .
The constant curfews under which entire cities are placed continue to take their toll. Medical emergencies must be dealt with in the home, including miscarriage, appendicitis, gunshot wounds, etc. Town after town reports serious suffering under curfew. Pleas for food, milk, water, and medical assistance are ignored by the Israeli government, even when communities are under siege for more than 30 consecutive days. Many towns are completely sealed off from outside assistance and communication.

Under curfew, the daily beatings, humiliations and house demolitions which take place are completely hidden from the press, which has grown immune to such stories and bored with their relentless, unvarying horror. The astounding announcement by Minister of Justice Avraham Sharir that the Ministry of Justice is examining ways of amending and streamlining the existing laws in order to facilitate mass deportations from the occupied territories passed almost unnoticed, even though it violates a fundamental accord of the fourth Geneva Convention, written in response to the cruelty of the Nazi occupiers of Europe, particularly toward Jews. But then the twenty-one year old occupation itself violates the Geneva convention, as does the policy of administrative detention, routine torture in jails and prisons, and removal of prisoners from the territories into the state of Israel.

Prisons. . .
And on it goes - the prisons are nightmares, as prisons are in any land. These prisons, however, often beggar description, even in a litany of horrors. The worst, Ansar III, known by Palestinians as the Camp of Slow Death, is a detention camp in the Negev desert which reminds us of the forced labor camps in Europe during World War II. Inspections of this hellhole by humanitarian organizations have been made virtually impossible. The ICRC has only recently been allowed in. During an August inspection, in which the abysmal and inhuman conditions were again noted by ICRC, two men were shot dead upon shouting out stories of abuses by prison authorities.

Ansar III has become a forced labor camp, where the Israelis are forcing Palestinian prisoners to build their own prison, and under inhuman conditions. There are no medical facilities at Ansar III, and the only medicine dispensed is an Israeli form of aspirin, though there are recent reports that tranquilizers are now being dispensed. Scabies, hepatitis, even heart attacks go untreated. Prisoners who are lucky enough to be released say there is inadequate food, that water is available only from slowly dripping taps, never sufficient to satisfy thirst in this desert inferno. Samedoon, an American publication which deals with the subject of Palestinian political prisoners, reports in its June 1988 issue that "soldiers distribute one bucket of water for each tent containing 24 prisoners. Prisoners have rarely been permitted to shower or change their clothes. An open sewer running though the camp is the only bathroom facility available."

The July 28 Data Base Update tells of Saber Faris Nimnim, 23, from Shati refugee camp in Gaza, ". . . found wandering in the Naqab desert in early April, handcuffed and blindfolded. He had been arrested at the end of March and beaten so severely that authorities at Ansar III refused to accept him. He was then apparently simply released, still bound and blindfolded. Nimnim wandered in the desert for several days before he was found; he was then hospitalized for over a week before he recovered his memory enough to establish his identity and let his family know where he was and what had happened. Nimnim spent two months in the hospital, was released and returned repeatedly but never recovered. He died of kidney failure July 16." The inhumanity is simply inconceivable.

Self-Sufficiency. . .
Economic servitude, along with physical intimidation and collective punishment, has served for more than twenty years to subjugate the territories to Israel's economic and political needs. An important non-violent tactic of civil resistance intended to address that servitude is the careful cultivation of gardens and livestock. Israel's deliberate policy of destroying these gardens and livestock through either curfew (which means gardens are not watered and livestock is not fed) or bulldozing is carefully calculated to destroy that self-sufficiency before it becomes strong enough to override Israeli intentions. Indeed, the territories are vital to the economic system of Israel.

Not only has Israel built its economy in the past twenty years around the availability of water from the Jordan River, but also around the captive market in the territories. The territories serve as the second greatest market, after the United States, for Israeli goods, which is the reason Palestinian industry on any competitive level has been actively suppressed. The gardens and livestock called for by the Uprising Committee thus present a grave danger if they succeed. It means that foodstuffs from Israel will not be purchased, and goods which cannot be produced by Palestinians in the territories will be boycotted, and done without. In addition to bearing the military cost of the Uprising (though the United States will most likely reimburse Israel for the entire cost, and then some, in addition to the astronomical amounts of aid presently given), Israel is suffering the loss of tax money from the territories, which they gather from Palestinians and do not return to them in any substantial form, and which many Palestinians are refusing to pay. Now, with a territorial boycott of Israeli goods in its fourth month, Israel is losing the income from a very large percentage of its products. If a threatened boycott of Israeli goods in Europe is implemented, Israel may indeed be in a position of having to negotiate its way to peace, rather than murder its way to domination.

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