History of a Struggle for Survival

The Second Palestinian Intifada

By FRED WILCOX

All too often, historians and scholars write about war from a comfortable distance. Readers do not feel the pain of families driven from their homes by invading armies. We do not hear children scream in terror when their siblings and parents are murdered in front of them. Human suffering is just another episode in a war-torn world.

In The Second Palestinian Intifada, Ramzy Baroud defies such polite conventions by taking readers on a journey into the heart of the Palestinian peoples' struggle to survive war, massacres, assassinations, poverty, and exile.

A prominent writer, scholar, historian, and editor, (Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion), Mr. Baroud grew up in a poverty-stricken refugee camp. He lived among Palestinians who grew old holding the rusted keys to homes confiscated by the Israeli government. His own grandfather kept hope alive by listening to the radio, believing that one day he would hear the call to return to his beloved olive orchards and the only way of life he and his ancestors had ever known. Instead, the author's grandfather died hearing the sounds of an army determined to destroy the will of the Palestinian people.

Ramzy Baroud was a high school student in Gaza when the first Palestinian Intifada broke out on December, 1987. At the time, he writes, .grief stricken residents of my Gaza refugee camp were consumed with other more worldly matters; would they eat today, would they find clean water, would they seize their long-awaited freedom? In spite of these concerns, Palestinians rose together against an illegal and relentlessly brutal occupation. Writes Baroud:

It was an awesome awakening which forced all parties that had traditionally laid claim to the Palestinian struggle to relinquish their stake. Ordinary Palestinians took to the streets, defying the Israeli army and articulating a collective stance that echoed a seemingly eternal commitment across the generations.

Ramzy Baroud does not romanticize violence. He simply states, without rancor and with a quiet passion, what it is like to live, not year after year, but decade after decade, watching children go hungry and suffer brain damage from malnutrition, watching the Israeli army harass, insult, disappear, and murder friends and family; watching, perhaps most tragically, young men and women blow themselves to pieces in crowded Israeli cafes. Baroud wants readers to understand the reasons behind these attacks, but he argues that suicide bombers mimic the indiscriminate brutality of the occupation.

Palestinians who resist the occupation suffer terrible consequences, but they are not alone. An Israeli sniper in the Jenin refugee wounded Ian Hook, a United Nations coordinator. Mr. Hook bled to death when the IDF refused to permit an ambulance to take him to a hospital. On the same day Hook was murdered, Israeli soldiers shot and wounded a twenty-three year-old Irish activist, Caoimhe Butterly, who was standing in the line of fire between the IDF and Palestinian children. On March 16, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was attempting to keep an Israeli bulldozer driver from destroying a house in the Rafah refugee camp south of Gaza City. Rachel was wearing a florescent orange vest and calling through a megaphone, but the driver deliberately ran her over, then reversed his machine and ran back over her body again. Commentators in the United States called Rachel stupid, while the pro-Israeli crowd claimed that she was offering protection to a gang of terrorists.

The Second Palestinian Intifida chronicles the crimes that former Prime Minister Arial Sharon and many other Israeli politicians have committed against the Palestinian people. But these details are less important, really, than the questions the author poses time and again in this book: Why does the United States continue to fund the expropriation of Palestinian land? Why have a succession of U.S. administrations supported Israel's illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank? How could it be that the lives of Palestinian children are so much less important than their counterparts in Israel?

Writing about the Camp David accords, the author points out that Israel did not place a legitimate offer on the table. On the contrary, according to Palestinian intellectual, Hanan Ashrawi, Israeli negotiators failed to present a written proposal to their counterparts in the Palestinian delegation. The offer, touted by the American media as a reasonable settlement, was for the occupied territories to be cut into three cantons, separated by Israeli military zones and Israeli-only bypass roads, of the continuous presence of illegal settlements, and of Israel's domination over Occupied East Jerusalem

This is not a book for those who want surface, sanitized, accounts of the Palestinian Diaspora. Ramzy Baroud is committed to truth telling, and his new book will undoubtedly disturb, shock, and outrage his readers. One can only hope that those who claim to love and support the state of Israel will not only read, but study, this important book. Not to make anyone feel ashamed, but so that even Israel's most ardent supporters will understand that no nation can brutalize, indeed terrorize, an innocent people forever.

The Second Palestinian Intifada is available in many gift shops across the US and Europe, and can be obtained from Amazon.com, plutobooks.com, and other online venues.

Fred A. Wilcox is an associate professor in the writing department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. He is the editor and author of many books. He has spent his entire adult life writing and teaching about war and nonviolence. His book: Waiting for an Army To Die, was chosen by the American Library Association as among its "most notable books" in two categories.

I can't really tell what's real and what's not, because I don't know who anyone is.

Let's see the entire picture:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/hidden.php?id=184339#184397

he commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon has said force may have to be used to stop repeated Israeli violations of Lebanese air space.

General Alain Pellegrini, the French commander of the Unifil force in Lebanon, said on Thursday that the UN was relying on diplomacy to try to end the violations.

"If the diplomatic means should not be enough, maybe it could be considered other ways," he added, referring to the possible use of anti-aircraft missiles equipping French forces in Lebanon.

But Pellegrini made it clear that such a move would require "new rules of engagement drafted and decided here [at UN headquarters]".

"Air violations is our major concern. They are not to be accepted. Every time these occur, we report them first to the secretary general immediately and we protest to the Israelis."

'Clear violation'

Pellegrini said that, at the moment, Unifil had "no other means to prevent these kinds of violations" than diplomacy.

He pointedly noted that the French contingent of Unifil was currently equipped with "anti-aircraft missiles but only for its self-defence.

"At the moment even if these violations are going on, there are less numerous than before."

More

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C3ED51AD-EA03-4444-AFE5-C6D1B3C965EE.htm

Apartheid in the Holy Land By Desmond Tutu

Posted on MAY-15-2002

Guardian

April 29, 2002 In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."

My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.

Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?

My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."

But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?

People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.

We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.

Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.