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Your Help Is Making a Difference in Palestine

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Your Help Is Making a Difference in Palestine LIVETESTimONIES FROM FROM THE NONVI- OLENT REsisTANCE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITYP MOVEMENTalestine NORTHERN CALIFORNIA SUPPORT GROUP V OLU M E 3 N O . 2 D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 Your Help Is Making a ference between going or not going, or staying an extra month. We are proud to have subsidized four- Difference in Palestine teen volunteers this year alone. The generous contributions that we received By Paul Larudee during the recent speaking tour of Ayed Morrar and Jonathan Pollak were very timely, but we are s I began to write this, four ISM volunteers still $5,000 short of our year-end commitment to were arrested in the With international and A Tel Rumeida district of Israeli support, the people Hebron in the Israeli-occupied of Bil’in hold their 50th Palestinian West Bank. Their demonstration to protest crime? To accompany Palestin- the construction of the Wall ians to school, shopping, work, or which will isolate more than friends’ homes. 60% of the village’s land. ISM volunteers document Photo: Lisa Nessan the harassment of Palestinians, their delays at checkpoints and the denial of access to their own property. They film Israeli settlers who shout insults, throw bottles and other objects, and even beat Palestinians while soldiers stand idly by. The good news is that the presence of volunteers with cam- eras is often enough to reduce these crimes. The bad news is that filming is itself ISM-Palestine. The ISM media office has also asked often considered a crime. us to send a new laptop, video camera and 500 giga- Unfortunately, ISM volunteers are fewer than byte hard drive within the next month. Please use CONTENTS ever, even though more Palestinian communities the donation envelope in this issue to help us make request them to support non-violent actions and our goal and give us a healthy start in 2006. “Settling” the provide protection against military and settler vio- The four volunteers were released, thanks to our Jerusalem Question lence. Equally important, volunteers help to inform lawyer, Gaby Lasky, and our supporters around the their home communities about the non-violent world who answered her request to call the Israeli If it’s Friday, it must movement in Palestine, which is almost never men- police and Interior Ministry. Unfortunately, Gaby be a demo in Bil’in tioned in the mainstream media. still has thousands of dollars in unpaid services on We need your donations to make our work pos- our behalf. Interview with sible. Your donations support volunteers with Some donations lessen the suffering. We try to Ayed Morrar and partial airfares, training, equipment, salaries for stop the cause. Please support nonviolent resis- Jonathan Pollack Palestinian coordinators and legal expenses. For tance to the Israeli occupation. ■ Qawawis: Settlers each of the last two years, the Northern California threaten an age-old ISM chapter has pledged $10,000 to ISM in Palestine Paul Larudee is a piano technician who lived and way of life for operating expenses and $5000 for the legal fund. worked in Arab countries for fourteen years as a We have also pledged another $10,000 for volunteers teacher and government advisor. He has been an traveling to Palestine. A mere $500 can be the dif- ISM volunteer in Palestine four times since 2002. LIVE FROM PALESTINE 1 Sharon Moves to “Settle” the tional law, Israel then annexed this entire area; the U.N. Security Council (including the U.S.) declared Jerusalem Question this annexation “invalid,” and to this day few By Henry Norr nations recognize it. Those borders weren’t big enough for Sharon, though. In defining the route of the Wall, he has cre- o anyone passing through East Jerusalem or ated an even larger entity the Israelis call the “Jerusa- nearby sections of the West Bank in recent lem envelope,” which combines the post-1967 munici- Tmonths, it’s been painfully obvious that big pality with the large settlement blocks of Giv’at Ze’ev changes are under way—changes that could, if not to the north, Gush Etzion to the south (west of Beth- soon reversed, all but extinguish the lehem), and Ma’ale Adumim to the east. prospects for peace in the region. The eastern extension is especially notable. Ma’ale It’s not just the Wall, growing from Adumim itself, a settlement-city that looks like it day to day in all its concrete ugliness, as belongs in the San Fernando Valley, is the largest it snakes through the Palestinian towns Jewish colony in the West Bank, with a fast-rising and villages north, east, and south of population already totaling more than 30,000. But the city. It’s also the elaborate interna- the wall surrounding it will also take in the nearby tional-border-style “terminals” Israel is industrial park of Mishor Adumim and the currently building to replace the once-ramshackle undeveloped zone known as E-1, where Israel plans facilities at the major checkpoints at to build a giant police headquarters and a whole new Qalandia, on the road north to Ramal- town. Altogether, it will add another 60 square kilo- lah, and on the Hebron Road leading meters of Palestinian land to the “envelope.” south to Bethlehem. And the construc- What makes the Ma’ale Adumim salient significant tion cranes you see everywhere in the is not just its size, but also its location: extending hills to the east of the city, as settlements almost halfway from Jerusalem to the Jordanian bor- like Ma’ale Adumim and Har Homa der—at the point where the West Bank was already expand and giant new developments at its narrowest. In effect, it divides the West Bank like Nof Zion take shape. All in all, as the in two, making it easy for Israel to block movement head of the Israeli organization Settle- between Bethlehem and Hebron in the south and ment Watch put it recently, the Israelis Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin to the north. (Actually, are “building like maniacs” around there will soon be three parts, because the northern Jerusalem. section will soon be cut in half again when Israel In one sense, this is nothing new— finishes extending the Wall around the settlement of Israel has been building on Palestinian Ariel and completes a huge new checkpoint under lands around Jerusalem ever since its construction at Zaatara/Tappuah, between Ramallah soldiers seized the area 38 years ago. and Nablus.) Regardless of who’s in power—Labor or Likud in Surprisingly at first glance, the Wall’s route A reduced West Bank Israel, Republican or Democrat in Washington— leaves a few small pieces of post-1967 Jerusalem on after the Apartheid Wall and no matter what’s happening in the so-called the Palestinian side. Why? Apparently it’s because is completed: the black “peace process,” the Zionists have been busy estab- Israel’s goal is never just to maximize the amount line represents the sec­ lishing what they call “facts on the ground.” of Palestinian land it can steal; it’s also to minimize tions of the Wall already But if you put all the pieces together, you begin the number of Palestinians left within its boundar- constructed and approved to sense what’s different: Ariel Sharon evidently ies. In a few places, such as the densely populated for construction. The white thinks he has a unique opportunity, thanks to the Shu’afat refugee camp north of the city, the Israeli areas represent land within unstinting support of the U.S.A. and the illusions planners evidently decided they’d rather give up the the West Bank that Israel he created in some circles by pulling his settlers land than take its residents. has confiscated for settle­ out of Gaza, to impose a unilateral and irreversible In all, at least 55,000 Palestinians who now hold ments and agriculture. For solution—a final solution, you might say—to the Jerusalem ID cards will find themselves walled out more detailed maps, please question of Jerusalem, one of the most contentious of the city, while some 196,000 will be left on the see www.stopthewall.org issues between his country and the Palestinians. Israeli side. Shortly after occupying the Palestinian territo- This is a tragedy for both groups. Those who live ries in 1967, Israel redrew Jerusalem’s municipal on the Palestinian side will lose access to Jerusa- boundaries: to the 38 square kilometers of the city lem’s religious sites, schools, hospitals, jobs, and Israel had controlled since 1948 were added not markets, on which they’ve depended for decades; only Arab East Jerusalem (6.4 square kilometers) many will be cut off from friends and relatives. but also 64 square kilometers belonging to villages (Israel promises that it will build gates and create north, east, and south of the city. Defying interna- a system of permits to alleviate such problems, but INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT NORTHERN CALIFORNIA Palestinians living near sections of the Wall already Adumim—are obstacles to “revitalizing built know how hollow such promises prove to be.) the peace process.” Meanwhile, the Palestinian Jerusalemites left on Shortly thereafter, the British press the Israeli side will be isolated from the rest of the reported that the European Union’s West Bank - not just by the Wall, but by the Jewish Council of Ministers was considering a settlements growing into a tight ring around them. confidential memorandum prepared by Their neighborhoods will no doubt face the same the British Foreign Office accusing Israel treatment they’ve been getting since 1968: grossly of attempting a de facto annexation of the inferior municipal services, denial of permits for whole Jerusalem area.
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