brucetaub

         It is more painfully unjust for the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories than I let in on a daily basis or can bear consciously knowing is being inflicted upon an entire people under the guise of democracy. Apartheid is an accurate a word to decribe the situation, whether politically effective to use or not. Kafkaesque is right on the mark too. The daily abuses are endless, repetitive, confirmed, grotesque, filled with brutality, humiliation, and degradation. Ordinary Palestinian citizens subject to arbitrary cruelty, imprisonment, theft of their lands. It is all so "ordinary" we become inured to the increasingly unrestrained use of displacement, torture, psychological warfare, blocking of access to food and water, arbitrary arrest, and violation of basic civil and human rights as a means toward the annihilation by Israel of Palestinians within the borders of "greater" Israel.

          I do not really know what can be done to change this course, if anything, but I think about it much as I think about the question of what "good Germans" and other citizens of the world did and didn't do (could and couldn't do) as evidence of the Jewish holocaust became more and more familiar to the citizens of Germany and the world. I will tell you quite frankly that the smell of the annihilation of the Palestinians is in the air and their fate as reservation Indians at best is no longer in doubt. International boycott, divestment, and other sanctioning of Israel are absolute necessities if there is any hope of restraining the Israeli state from this path toward Palestinian extermination.

          Do not be fooled by any talk of peace in Israel and Palestine unless it is offered in the context of one truly democratic state. The human rights violations carried out and endorsed by the Israeli state on a massive scale amount to pure ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

It is a beautiful sunny morning

At gate 927

The Israeli soldiers are listening to rock music

They are in their 20s

They have automatic weapons

Uniforms, walkie talkies

Humvies, tanks

F16 fighter jets, a nuclear arsenal

We are four Americans over fifty

With cameras, cell phones, and bottled water

We are Palestinian farmers

With donkeys and tractors

With seed

Fertilizer

And lunch in plastic bags

We are Bedouin with sheep and goats and identity cards

We dismount from our donkeys and tractors

And wait

Wait long enough to see the falcon hunting

To see the wild dog with the stolen chicken

Wait to be admitted through the small gate

To the turnstile

Then into the concrete bunker

To wait at the counter

To show our passes

To be released into a holding area

To go back through the sliding gate

To get back on our donkeys and tractors

To pass through the big gate

Opened only certain hours

Of certain days

To get onto our land

Our own land

On the other side of this fence

That separates us from our fields with trees and fruit

From our grass, our rocks, our graves

On the other side of this fence

That separates us from our brothers and sisters

We stand in the sun two hours

On the side of this fence

That separates us from our livelihoods

On the side of the fence

That separates us

The Palestinian terrorists

Offer you food until you are full

And then offer more

In order to explode you

Serve you tea, coffee, juice, soda, milk, water

Until you are sprouting

Force you to say things

Only people being tortured say

Like please, I can't take any more, I will tell you anything

Only please stop forcing such kindness and hospitality on me

Please, no more meats, greens, rice, falafel

No more olives, lemons, grapefruit,

Or four different kinds of oranges we must learn to distinguish the tastes of

The bitter, the sweet, the Spanish, the French collaborationist

The zatar, the hummus, home made cheeses, bread

Admiring pictures of our grandchildren

As if such caring will cause us to drop our guard

Quoting Wordsworth to make us cry

Bringing by their daughters

The teacher and the poetess

Their granddaughters

The artist and the singer

Their son in laws

The professor and the engineer

Who must go through four checkpoints

To get to work

A twenty minute trip

That takes two hours

Their entire family

Terrorists all

Offering us a bed

A drive in their tractor to the occupied fields

To plant olive trees with us on a hillside

While telling us stories from Byzantine days

And singing "We Shall Overcome"

"Why are you not afraid?"

Asks the distracted Israeli soldier

At the wall and the gate to the fields

His fingers tracing absently over his machine gun

"They are terrorists.

They kill people." 

And you say nothing

Having noticed well

Who the terrorists actually are

Falafel in Hawara

First the chalky dusty streets

Without sidewalks

The dated Coca Cola sign

The trucks and taxis

All with white and green license plates

Specifically designated for Palestinians

To bar them from Israeli only roads

And from passing Israeli check points

Then the merchants and mechanics

And the falafel shop - also only for Palestinians

Because no Israelis or foreigners ever pass this way

Except brave Israeli women who monitor human rights abuses

And if they do pass through they do not stop

Do not see the warmth of the people

Kissing their children

Trusting, open, deep in dialogue

About injustice

Helping themselves to the falafel

As if in their own kitchens

Preparing their own combinations

Of hummus, peppers, salad

Licking their fingers

Flicking the flies

Dipping into the French fries

Reaching into their pockets

To make change

For the veiled beggar woman

Who returns the smallest Israeli coins

Because they also don't work in the Occupied Territories

On Saturday, members of the JVP/HAHRP joined with over 100 Israeli Jews and international activists to help Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the Qalqiliya district of the Occupied Palestinian Territories where farmers have been isolated from and/or denied access to their agricultural lands by the Separation Wall. I worked on the farm of Shareef Omar Khalid and his wife Siham in the village of Ja'ayus, an ancient Palestinian village of about 650 households, some in homes originally built over caves that have been lived in since at least the pre-Christian era. Although Ja'ayus lies six kilometers on the Palestinian side of the Green Line the Separation Wall that the Israelis have constructed runs right through the village and separates the farmers from their lands. It consists of a series of fences and ditches, razor wire, gates, a trench of 2-3 meters depth, an unpaved road 3 to 4 meters above the surrounding ground, then a main fence 4 meters high supplied with electronic sensors, then a paved road, then another trench and razor wire with a gate. The whole of this separation barrier ranges between 40 and 80 meters wide. It isolates 8,600 dunums (75% of Ja'ayus' land) from the villagers. Its construction alone destroyed 650 dunums of Ja'ayus land and over 4,000 trees were uprooted. Shareef, who has worked this land for over six decades, as did his parents and grandparents before him, has recently been denied access to his fields, so too his sons and daughters, so too 419 out of 650 heads of households in Ja'ayus. Hence we are here to help with the harvest. Can there be any purpose to this denial of access other than the theft of Palestinian lands, the theft of the farmers' trees, and ultimately the theft of their livelihoods and the basis for their very economic survival?