"You have a good life"

There are many levels to occupation in Palestine from the obvious to the extremely subtle. A subtle example would be some of the more interesting laws that people must abide by.

Like when you loose your ID document, you must first place an advert in Al Kuds newspaper, apply and go to the court to swear and oath that you are not committing fraud, pay a couple of hundred dollars and finally wait during which time your movement is pretty heavily restricted.

Or the fact that if you have a bank account, you can't have funds transferred in from overseas beyond a certain amount. Otherwise those monitoring the funding of terrorist cells may pay you a visit.

Nor can people ride motorbikes – and it is odd to realize that you haven’t noticed this before – it would make it too easy for people to bypass the hundreds of roadblocks.

Chemical Engineering cannot be taught at university lest it be educating bomb-makers.

The more obvious of course is the ubiquitous checkpoint. Huwwara is one of the checkpoints that affects many people; everyone who passes out of Nablus to the south must go through this checkpoint. Depending on the time of day and the mood of the soldiers operating the checkpoint, it can be closed or take a couple of hours to get through. And if you are special, and your name appears (correctly or incorrectly) on a list, you can be arrested and go straight to jail without passing go.

This was the case with Amer, who is sitting in front of me trying to study psychology whilst watching TV at the same time. This gentle guy was on the way to Lebanon to his father's funeral (his father died over twenty years ago in the war in Lebanon and new DNA analysis was starting to allow identification of remains). His name was on a list and he went to prison for 2 years and remained in administrative detention without a specific charge being brought.

If you are an older man, a woman or traveling with children, you can use the 'Humanitarian line' that avoids the body checks, the x-ray machines and a lot of the shouting. As I am an old woman with some childish behaviors (and carry a British passport) I can use this line too.

Anyhow this is aside. I got to the front of the line and handed over my visa stamp on paper and my driving license, in lieu of my lost passport.

"Where are you from?"

- from the UK.

"Ah, you have a good life."

I gave no response. His voice was almost neutral or numb sounding but there was a hint of melancholy. Was he yearning to get away from this mess? Was he trying to pre-empt any possible judgment of him and his actions in the name of the occupation, by making me reflect on the fact that I could (and would) escape at anytime and therefore had no right to judge?

I don’t know. Either way, as so many things do in Palestine, it made me ponderous and it made me sad.

Being shot at with live ammunition: Ni'lin demonstration 2008.07.17

A plume of white tear gas drifted above the olive groves. Arriving late in Ni’lin it was difficult to locate the head of the demonstration against the wall. But there it must be. Ni’lin has had a history of land dispossession beginning in 1948 with land being acquired for the building of several Jewish settlements. In 2002 Israel began building the separation barrier which will result in about 20 percent of the land that remains in the residents' possession being seized. The objective of these demonstrations, for some, is to temporarily stop the construction of the separation barrier by reaching the earth moving equipment. For others it is about freedom of speech, carrying out their right to protest and letting their voice be heard. Either way, the demonstrations don't get very far with either before they are dispersed with good quantities of tear gas. Once dispersed, it is like small herds of sheep shepherded one way or another by rude placing of CS gas canisters and later, rubber (-coated steel) bullets. The protest is disintegrated and the majority of protesters are eventually persuaded up the hill, back to the village. A group remains at the front line - males from the village throwing, quite professionally, stones. I hung around under the merciless sun for more than two hours with this group of about 40, half curious what would happen, half as a non-Palestinian to witness whatever might happen. With an international presence it is thought that 'less' might happen, that restraint might be shown, but stone throwers are fair game: just having a stone in your hand is enough grounds for arrest. The theatre continues like this on an almost daily basis. The soldiers try to chemically push people backwards into the village away from the construction area, the peaceful part of the protest ends and the youth respond by throwing stones in their direction. Suddenly a shot is heard from an unexpected direction and a helmeted body clad in olive-green clothing is spotted amongst the olive-green olive trees. Everyone runs for cover and then relocates to new stone launching positions. And repeat. I felt sorry for the teenage Rukab ice-cream salesboy who had to run with his coolbox over his shoulder. Many stones were launched with sling-shots and catapults. In return came rubber bullets by which several boys we hit. It looked painful - a bleeding sore on a back, on a shin and on the soft part of the arm where you measure body fat. In return, more stones were thrown and more rubber bullets came back and so on. And so on until the sound changed. Sharper cracking sounds indicated live ammunition was being used. As much as the fear of being hit by a rubber bullet is real, real bullets are simply something else. I asked a soldier once what being hit by a rubber bullet was like. "Just like being hit by a stone" he informed me with a smile. It is possible but pointless to make a comparison between stones and rubber-coated steel. Either can be deadly and certainly injurious but the soldier has range and accuracy with which he can safely fire without risk of being hit by incoming stones. With live ammunition all need to compare evaporates. At a certain point it becomes more serious and the army cross over from containment and dispersion, to what could be called an urban combat training exercise, or punishment, or even revenge. Today soldiers came right the edge of the village. In a narrow street, bullets severed a water pipe who's spray then pleasantly cooled the air, the hydraulic pipes of a digger, a window was shot through, the outer walls of a clinic had several fresh shot wounds, bullet casings were collected and displayed with anger. It is hard to know if anything in particular was in the sights the rifle owners or if the shooting was just random to create panic and put a nail in the coffin of the day's protest. The bullets hit between 10 centimeters and 4 meters from the ground. It was quite surreal, this situation, the panicked run for cover, the call from the lunatic with the megaphone to move forward again, the sharp crack and immediate fizz as a bullet ricocheted, the woman screaming for us to move away as one of her window's had already been expensively shot through, the kids watching from windows and roof-tops who would ask "what's your name?" if you so much as looked at them as if oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, the ambulance co-driver patiently waiting having already stretched his rubber gloves over his fat hands and further sterilizing his fingers with cigarette smoke. I couldn't get hit of course as I was from elsewhere, I didn't throw any stones, I was just observing and anyhow a coward. A bullet hit a wall and a small piece of the wall hit my trouser leg. Time to move away. Today, according to Sayid, a pleasant young guy who repeatedly told me with a smile to "be careful", 3 solders were 'shot' with stones: a military ambulance was seen taking one of them away apparently. One international volunteer expressed his 'happiness', for want of a better word, at this news. I felt otherwise. Violence is violence whatever the flavor: the tear gassing, firing rubber bullets at or beating of innocent civilians, throwing stones back at soldiers or firing live ammunition at stone throwers - even though you could perhaps call them (geologically or prehistorically) armed combatants. This routine open-air theatre will stop once the separation barrier is completed or once the route is changed through the courts. Sadly it seems the former will be the case.

More craziness in Nil'in, Palestine

More craziness in Ni'lin. I spent quite a bit of time there last summer. The story is quite simple. Nil'in is a small village who land has been annexed previously for a nearby settlement and now more land is being lost for a section of the 'security barrier' (The Wall). The route of the wall / security barrier is in the hands of the army and has little to do with green lines or previously agreed borders, only security. In this case, the fence / road / ditch etc will leave a large buffer between it and the settlement. Good bye olive trees. Anyhow, the villagers are rightly protesting this. I can't remember all the details of court cases and subsequent appeals but whatever happened the construction goes on relentlessly. An average protest aims to walk from the village square to the current point of construction activity and peacefully stop the work there. Rarely does it get that far. Sometimes its gets close to the construction but then the tear gas flies and everybody runs. Sometimes the protest is stopped in the village itself. Sometimes a 'shit gun' is used on the crowd. Basically something that smells like very raw sewerage is sprayed on to people. It makes you want to wretch to smell it and it is ver hard to get rid of. Later in the protest rubber bullets, or rubber coated steel bullets to be precise, are used. If you're very unlucky, live ammunition will be used. I have been in this situation and it is terrifying. While I was there, two were killed. One a 10 year old boy (Ahmed Mousa) was shot in the head by a military policeman (or was it border police) from quite a distance (maybe 100m from route of the barrier) while playing with friends in the early evening. Another was killed by a rubber (coated steel) bullet shot to the head. Anyway, enough. It is a shocking way to deal with legitimate protest. As Groucho Marx said: Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. To get a feel for how it is, you can see a trailer from a documentary that never was: "Closed Military Zone" by Eran Vered and Rick Berman. Back to the recent issue. See the release below:

13th Friday 2009, Ni’lin Village: An American citizen has been critically injured in the village of Ni’lin after Israeli forces shot him in the head with a tear-gas canister.

Tristan Anderson from California USA, 37 years old, has been taken to Israeli hospital Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. Anderson is unconscious and has been bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth. He sustained a large hole in his forehead where he was struck by the canister. He is currently being operated on.

Tristan was shot by the new tear-gas canisters that can be shot up to 500m. I ran over as I saw someone had been shot, while the Israeli forces continued to fire tear-gas at us. When an ambulance came, the Israeli soldiers refused to allow the ambulance through the checkpoint just outside the village. After 5 minutes of arguing with the soldiers, the ambulance passed. – Teah Lunqvist (Sweden) - International Solidarity Movement

The Israeli army began using to use a high velocity tear gas canister in December 2008. The black canister, labeled in Hebrew as “40mm bullet special/long range,” can shoot over 400 meters. The gas canister does not make a noise when fired or emit a smoke tail. A combination of the canister’s high velocity and silence is extremely dangerous and has caused numerous injuries, including a Palestinian male whose leg was broken in January 2009.

Apparently the guy is doing much better but still in a serious state. Good luck to him. For more information: http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324 and for balance, through don't spend too much time reading the comments as they might make you feel physically sick: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1236764180001

Can you smell the death?

"Can you smell the death?", asked Abdullah as we passed by the apartment on the first floor. My first reaction was slight fear that you can have in moments when your brain hasn't quite grasped what is going on but is concerned that it could be bad. It was dark as the lights were not working in the stairwell of these so-called student dorms, and we continued to the second floor, apartment 203. We'd just come to stay with Ammar as the room in Abdullah's house was just to hot due to the combination of weather and the sesame seed roasting business downstairs below Abdullah's family's house. "We'll go and take a look tomorrow, you can take some pictures". So this was the location of the most recent IDF assassination in Nablus which I'd heard about a few weeks ago ('2 militants killed in Nablus') and it turns out I am watching TV, sleeping, dreaming, waking up, brushing my teeth, sitting on the toilet in the apartment above it. Details are vague but it goes something like this. The guy in apartment 101 was a member of a threatening organization. He is high enough up in the organization, perhaps the top, to be on a hit list. An operation was then mounted by a unit of the Israeli army to liquidate him and the evidence of this was plain to see in the apartment below. Although how it actually happened is anyone's guess: there is the 1m diameter hole in the external wall made to avoid doors and thus booby traps; the strange blast lines on a wall from a grenade or small bomb which is used to stun or kill humans (and bend ceiling fan blades) through the powerful pressure wave created on explosion; and then the follow up gun shots evidenced by the numerous holes in the bathroom and bedroom walls. Probably about 30 seconds work all in all. So that was one of the two. Equally guessable was the fate of the second assasinee. According to Abdullah he was a regular, non-political student, much like Ammar, living in his own apartment but which shared the same front door as the first. He must have woken up to see what on earth was going on as his door was kicked in. His body was found in the doorway of his bedroom, shot in the chest, blood spattered up the wall. Ammar casually showed me a dark and blurry picture of his body taken on his mobile phone camera.

Lost passport

Last week I lost my passport somewhere and it seems not yet to have turned up. And it probably never will. It is going to cost 833 shekels to get a new one (150 euro). I mentioned this to my friend in Nablus. For him to loose such a thing is a disaster. First he has to put and advertisement in the press giving notice of the loss and to see if anyone has found it. Then go to court and swear on something other than a bible that he has genuinely lost it. Then the paperwork and admnistrative processing. The cost can come close to 1000 usd all together and X weeks.

Protester shot in Bil'in

Shocking - apparently live rounds were used as opposed to rubber bullets. http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=XF1ibN40FJE