Author: jameswagner

Finally, some very good pictures of the enormous Apartheid Wall (far higher than the Berlin Wall) being built by Israel on occupied Palestinian lands to separate Israelis from Palestinians. For virtually an entire photo essay, including an outside link to more photographs, see the ISM pages.

Steve writes today:

East Jerusalem, Thursday afternoon, July 10, 2003
We’re off to the West Bank tomorrow morning for our
two-day training. We’re still working on where we’ll
go and what project(s) we’ll work on. Our affinity
group includes one activist with dual American and
Israeli citizenship and an obviously Israeli name. It
will be difficult for her to pass through Israeli army
checkpoints because Israeli law forbids Israeli
citizens from entering Palestinian areas (and vice
versa–for me, a strong reminder of South Africa’s
apartheid Pass Laws of years gone by).
In addition to the checkpoint problem, there are some
West Bank regions where we can’t work, because the
local people are just too suspicious of Israelis. For
instance, a woman who said she was an Israeli reporter
recently went to Tulkarm Refugee Camp to interview men
wanted by the Israeli army. She returned a week later
in uniform with an army unit that then arrested the
men she had interviewed. After experiences like this,
people in Tulkarm are not ready to accept an Israeli
who presents herself as a peace activist, even though
it’s true.
Fortunately, there are other areas who are willing to
accept Israeli allies and eager to work with them.
Our affinity group will go to one of those areas,
provided we can get through (around?) the relevant
checkpoints.
Below, I’ve copied action alerts about the Jenin
arrestees, and today’s detentions in Nablus. If
you’re one of the people on this list who has
political reasons for receiving my reports, rather
than only personal reasons, read on, please make the
suggested phone calls and send the suggested emails,
and forward the reports widely.
Peace,
Steve

I did not include the alerts and contact information here, but I will forward that material to anyone who emails me a request.
Otherwise, for more information, and for pictures, see the ISM site and the Electronic Intifada site.
These heroes are so tough it’s scary!

Steve writes today:

I’m still in Jerusalem, safe and sound. The press
release below describes what happened today outside
Jenin. The international Arab media are already
running the story; don’t know about CNN/BBC/Times etc.
The media team here is stretched really thin;
anything media folks can do back home will help
greatly.
Steve

I don’t see the following report anywhere else on the internet, so I will post it here complete as received.

> INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
> July 9, 2003
> For Immediate Release
>
>
> FOUR INTERNATIONALS ARRESTED AT PEACE CAMP
>
> [ARRABONY, Jenin Region] Four international
> volunteers with the
> International Solidarity Movement were arrested
> today while
> maintaining a presence at the peace camp set up by
> Arrabony
> villagers and the ISM to protest the confiscation of
> Palestinian
> land for the Apartheid Wall. The four arrested are:
>
>
> Tobias Karlsson from Sweden
> Tariq Loubani from Canada
> Bill Capowski from New York, USA
> Fredrick Lind from Denmark
>
> Full details are not yet known and none of the peace
> activists are
> answering their phones, however we just received the
> following text
> message: “at Salem abused and beaten”. This seems
> to indicate that
> the four are being held at the Salem Military Base,
> north of Jenin.
>
> Since the peace camp was set up on Monday, July 7,
> 2003, activists
> have faced threats and harassment from the Israeli
> Military, from
> heavily armed security guards working for the
> Israeli company
> building that section of the Wall, and from Israeli
> settlers.
> Activists have been threatened with violence,
> removal, and arrest.
> The response of international activists was that
> they were there at
> the request of the people of the village, and didn’t
> recognize
> Israeli military authority over the area. On
> Monday, soldiers came
> to the area of the camp to photograph international
> activists and
> local villagers and yesterday armed guards
> threatened to destroy the
> camp.
>
> Despite the harassment there has been steady and
> enthusiastic
> support from the people of the village of Arrabony.
> Men, women, and
> children have been a twenty-four-hour presence at
> the camp, and are
> coming every day in greater numbers. Activities at
> the camp have
> included games and sports, music, and more.
>
> For the past year the Israeli government has been
> building a massive
> wall that it claims is for purposes of “security”.
> The wall,
> however, is being built inside of the West Bank,
> destroying and
> confiscating from Palestinians their most fertile
> agricultural
> grounds and de facto annexing into Israeli illegal
> settlements and
> valuable underground water aquifers. Tens of
> thousands of
> Palestinian fruit and olive trees have already been
> destroyed and
> farmers are being prevented from working on land
> that they’ve lived
> off of for decades. The Palestinian people have
> been marching and
> protesting this land confiscation and destruction of
> livelihood but
> have been met with violence from the Israeli
> authorities and silence
> from the international community. The Arrabony
> peace camp is one of
> 4 similar protest camps in the West Bank.
>
> For more information, please call:
> ISM Office: 02-277-4602
> Huwaida: 067-473-308
> Jordan: 066-312-547
> www.palsolidarity.org
>
> END

Update the afternoon of July 10: see bottom of this post
Some Americans don’t deserve to live in a world where there’s a France.

First it was French wines. Then French fries. Now it’s French exchange students who are getting the cold shoulder from American families still smarting over France’s opposition to the war in Iraq.

Only half of the 250 teenagers who signed up this year with one well-established summer program have been placed with American families.

The first wave began arriving on Monday, and unless homes can be found quickly, four Boston-bound teenagers in that group will get refunds instead of trips. At least 100 participants in the program who expected to come in August are also in limbo.
. . . .
“This has been a horrible year,” said Deborah Bertrand, the New York area manager for Loisirs Culturels à L’Étranger, a not-for-profit exchange program based in Paris. “Usually I have no problem finding host families. The only thing I can attribute it to is the anti-French feeling going on because of the Iraq war. My coordinators all up and down the East Coast are having the same problem.”

One R.I. recruiter reports her frustration.

“This year, with everything that happened with the war, people locally have just taken it personally. When I ask them, ‘Would you open your home to a French teenager?’ they look at me like, ‘Are you out of your mind? Why would we, when they’ve been so ungiving to us?'”

Meanwhile, some Americans really do take the French “personally,” and have done so most of their lives. An American B-17 tail gunner was hidden from the Germans after he parachuted into a tiny French village as his plane went down in flames on the 4th of July in 1943. David Butcher remembers the French. He couldn’t make it to the celebrations this week, but the sister of one of his crew mates who died that day was there.

In a conversation late on Friday, she told him what he had missed, saving the best for last.
“Dave,” she said, “they renamed the street by the monument `Route of the Flying Fortress.’ ”
As for French-American tensions generated recently by the Iraq war, speakers seemed to echo the sentiment expressed by Mr. Butcher when he said, “I love them people.”
Mayor Ploncard’s assessment was perhaps the most elegantly put: “Despite our governments’ divergent ideas, the French remember with gratitude that it is to the Americans that we owe our freedom.”

I’m going to take Bastille Day “personally” myself this year, and with more gusto/l’entrain than usual. Gotta make up for what’s being lost by Americans elsewhere.
How can we send those French kids home?
___________________
The update on the French teenagers: I’ve found the American LEC website, and I’ve been told that as a result of the news article all New York-area students have now been placed for this year. There is still a need for homes in the D.C. area however. Would I be reading too much into that report if I thought it might say something about the difference between Gotham and our other Capital city, at least these days?
These are two of the teenagers who applied for the program this year, Marie and Julien. The images are from the LEC site.

Steve was in a Tel Aviv court today – as an observer. The indented email text below is complete as it was received.

Hi folks,
I’m in Haifa at the apartment of parents of a member
of JATO. We were in Tel Aviv today to observe a court
hearing with broad implications for ISM. Our report
of the hearing is below.
(A little background: anyone perceived by Israeli
border authorities to be a peace activist of any sort
is routinely turned away. We believe that thousands
have been turned away since the spring of 2002, most
of them undoubtedly tourists believed erroneously by
the border authorities to be activists. Since the
murder of Rachel Corrie by an Israeli soldier in
March of 2003 and its attendant bad publicity
for the state of Israel, the authorities have
been particularly on the lookout for ISM activists.)
Peace,
Steve
Today, July 7, 2003, the District Court in Tel Aviv
held a hearing on Patrick Connor’s complaint against
the Israeli Ministry of the Interior for refusing him
entry into Israel this past March. The Israeli
attorneys representing Patrick received the Ministry’s
brief only today, and got an adjournment to July 22
for a decision, so that they could respond to the
brief. The chief of the Shabak (Israel’s General
Security Service) was in the courtroom, and the
Ministry’s lawyer kept looking back at him, apparently
for guidance.
Here is our translation of the relevant page of the
Ministry’s brief. We can’t vouch that the translation
is 100% accurate, but we did our best. It starts at
item #12; as far as we know, items 1-11 are just
procedural.
The Position of the Ministry of the Interior
12. As was told to the plaintiff, the position of
the Ministry of the Interior is that his entry into
Israel is not permitted due to a security concern and
because of a lack of proper authorization.
13. It is the position of the Ministry of the
Interior that the plaintiff should not be allowed to
enter Israel on the basis of the recommendation of
security sources.
14. Security sources are in possession of information
according to which the plaintiff is a senior activist
in the organization ISM.
15. This organization has as its goal to hamper the
activities of the security forces in the territories
and to impede their work in preventing terrorism via
altercations with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]
soldiers, staying in the houses of suicide terrorists
to prevent their destruction, transporting Palestinians
among various areas during periods of closure, and all
that proceeds from this.
16. The activities of members of the organization, as
described above, interfere with the security
activities of the IDF and sometimes even endanger the
well-being of the IDF soldiers.
17. In the framework of activism in the organization
the plaintiff initiated, organized, and took part in
demonstrations in the territories of Judea and Samaria
against the activities of the security forces during
the period November 2002 – January 2003.
18. From past experience with activists with this
organization, it comes up that some of these activists
tend to deceive the border authorities on entrance to
Israel and do not convey the true purpose of their
arrival in Israel.
19. As was told to the plaintiff in the letter from
the legal office (that was attached to the original
complaint), the entrance of the plaintiff in March
2003 was denied also because he did not have proper
authorization. In order to serve various
organizations as the plaintiff requested (some for pay
and some on a voluntary basis) he must equip himself
with the proper authorization of Type B1 or Type B,
and not suffice with a tourist authorization of Type
B2. The plaintiff is aware of this, and he himself
acknowledges that in the past he has been in Israel
with authorization of Type B1.

I expect to hear about another, much uglier reality in future reports. This one is an account of the almost-civilized side of the policies produced by Israeli insecurity. It seems that Israel is at least giving a hearing to the people who complain about being kept from entering the country, although the state may really only be going through the motions.
I think we can say that the U.S. is being a lot less generous with its own prejudices and insecurity.
Still, notice that on Israel’s own terms, item #15 admits that Connor, as a member of the ISM, is to be kept out because he might end up “staying in the houses of suicide terrorists to prevent their destruction, transporting Palestinians among various areas during periods of closure.” This is not a nice picture of the Israeli state’s dominion in an illegally-occupied territory.

[updated July 18 to include contact information for Steve this summer]
Our friend Steve Quester is back in the Middle East. I posted his reports from Palestine in the spring and summer of last year, and I expect to be able to post all of his current dispatches from today.
This is Steve’s first email this summer, sent just after he arrived to resume work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). The text appears here with edits only eliminating his contact information – for his security and that of others while he’s there.
Steve’s suggestion for reaching him his summer:

While I prefer not to receive email while I’m away, I love to get phone calls on my cell phone here. If you’re in the eastern United States, the best time to call is when you wake up in the morning; since we’re 7 hours ahead, that corresponds to mid-afternoon here. To call me, dial the international access code (011 if calling from the U.S.), followed by country code 972, mobile phone code 67, and telephone number 308-192. There is voice mail on my cell phone in case I can’t pick up or am in an area without coverage.

lockquote>I’m in Tel Aviv at the moment. Got into Israel without too much fuss; it helped to be traveling with an Israeli. There was a young Palestinian man on the plane with his wife and baby. He was whisked off to the police at the airport while his wife held the baby and waited.
We’re staying with a couple who are members of Black Laundry*, Israel’s queer anti-occupation movement. One of them described being pulled aside and interrogated when she tried to enter the U.K.; for some reason she
was profiled along with 2 Palestinians and 4 Pakistanis. She described how infuriating and humiliating the experience was, and also how important
for her, as an Israeli, to be on the receiving end of profiling for once. As an anti-occupation organizer, she had always understood how terrible the practice is, but had never felt it herself.
Tomorrow we’ll attend the trial in absentia of an American member of ISM who was arrested and deported. We leave from Jerusalem on Friday morning to attend the two-day ISM training in an as yet undisclosed West Bank city.
*
See these sites for New York information about and Tel Aviv photos of the amazing group which call itself “Black Laundry,” for the phrase’s perverse combination of English and Hebrew meanings related to “black sheep” and “dirty laundry.”

Sue Coe, “What a Golden Beak! (They Want War)” (1999)
The White House lied in order to get its war. More evidence has just emerged, and from one of its own.
As usual, it’s not an embarassment for Bush, who is beyond shame [the idiot thought he could be president, for chrissakes!], but for all Americans who ever lived or will yet live.

A former U.S. ambassador, who was hired by the CIA to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein bought uranium from Niger, has gone public with his anger that his findings discrediting the reports were ignored by the Bush.
Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was ambassador to Gabon from ’92 to ’95, traveled to Niger at the request of the CIA in February 2002, and found no evidence that any uranium sale had taken place.
Nonetheless, the White House cited Iraq’s alleged purchase of uranium as evidence that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons – one of President Bush’s justifications for toppling the brutal Iraqi dictator. The uranium-sale accusation turned out to have been based on a forged document.
“If they’ll lie about things like this, there’s no telling what else they’ll lie about,” Wilson, who is now an international business consultant, told The Post from his Washington home. Wilson first aired his frustrations in an Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times.

[It’s interesting that there’s a news story on the Post site, but no news story in the NYTimes.]
The ambassador’s statement ends with the somber words of a moderate man.

America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor “revisionist history,” as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

But solid evidence for Bush’s mendacity is already all over the place. There has never been a president guilty of higher crimes and misdemeaners, more worthy of impeachment and removal from office, and yet we know it will never happen.
How did we get to this?

Sue Coe, “They Cut Off Their Hands So They Couldn’t Vote” (2000)

We’re not going to last in Iraq.
It’s not working. Not surprisingly, we are being blamed for everything bad that happens there, which these days may be most everything, and that country appears to be literally up in arms [curious that a well-armed citizenry, traditionally just a fetish of the American radical right, did not save Iraq from tyranny]. I don’t expect we will hold out very long. We don’t seem to have a plan, we almost certainly don’t have the commitment needed, and we don’t even have the advantage of the kind of [courage of conviction?] which was able to maintain the last Iraqi dictatorship for so long.
They don’t love us.
Americans, incredibly uninformed or misinformed anyway, are increasingly confused about what’s going on over there, and now even military families are getting very upset, although their anger is not focused or directed at a target – yet.
The administration didn’t tell them that we wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms, that we weren’t going to spend much money or manpower on rebuilding what we destroyed, that the world wouldn’t support our unilateral invasion and wouldn’t bail us out in our occupation duties afterward, especially since we look increasingly like sitting ducks, that the lights would still be out in much of the country months after we decided we won, that the numbers of Americans being maimed and killed would accelerate as time passed, that we would end up fighting an insurgency which might never end, that this was not Japan or Germany in 1945.
Perhaps most important, it’s certainly unlikely the administration told its corporate backers that, since we could not make friends or even keep order in a country we boasted we had liberated, in the end there would be no fortunes made in Iraq, and this may ultimately be the decisive factor when we decide to abandon our self-appointed role.
At least it’s clear once again that for this administration it was never about “nation building.” The Bushies did not change their tune as they marketed the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq with generous promises of liberation gifts. The talk about democracy, schools, health care and repair of infrastructure was domestic and foreign Realpolitik, mouthed as cover for the cynical objectives of national power and party advantage.
It’s just not working out the way the White House thought it would. Unfortunately that may not be any better news for Iraq than it is for an American republic now corrupted and compromised, perhaps beyond repair.