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As Bill said, Iım going to describe our two weeks in the West Bank. This will probably be the emotional half of this presentation.
Briefly, we flew in from Amman to Tel Aviv, which is an unusual way to get there, and then drove to Jerusalem. We met, as Bill said, with Yasir Arafat and Hanan Ashrawi, and also with Jeff Halper, an Israeli peace activist who founded an organization to protest Israeli house demolitions. We saw Jenin, we saw Nablus, we saw Gaza-too briefly-we passed through countless checkpoints. We really just scratched the surface, but for a couple of people who are usually desk-bound, we saw an awful lot.
The principal message we took away from all of this-the inescapable message-is that Israel, with the help of the United States, is making a concerted effort to, destroy the Palestinian people, destroy the Palestinian identity.
We drew this conclusion from our plane ride in. We flew in from Amman across the middle of the West Bank, just north of the Dead Sea. This was a small commuter plane operated by Royal Jordanian Airlines; it was a beautiful, clear day, and we flew at 8,000 feet, so we had a perfect birdıs-eye view of how Israeli settlements encircle and dominate Palestinian towns; theyıre located on almost every hilltop, looking down on Palestinian villages on the hillsides and in the valleys. We could see how roads-roads that are accessible only to Israelis-cut off Palestinian towns from each other and cut through devastated olive groves and agricultural lands, and prevent any Palestinian expansion. It was clear from what we saw from the air, and from what you can see on the ground, that Israel has confined the Palestinians to ghettos in the West Bank, completely surrounded by Israeli settlers, despite the fact that in the West Bank Palestinians outnumber Israelis by about ten to one.
We received the same message about the Israeli effort to destroy the Palestinian people explicitly from Hanan Ashrawi, who said that Ariel Sharonıs principal aim is "not just dismantling the Palestinian infrastructure, the structures of Palestinian statehood, but dismantling an identity: not just preventing formation of a viable Palestinian state, but eliminating a nation and a people." Israel is trying, she said, to render the Palestinians docile and compliant: all resistance of any type is put down and delegitimized. Israel is, as she said, "sending the message to Palestinians that you are totally at our mercy, we've robbed you of any independence, youıre broken."
I would add to what Ashrawi said that this destructive Israeli effort is more than obvious from Israel's actions, during last year's siege of the West Bank, in destroying not only Palestinian security headquarters but civilian ministries, for such things as education and culture, and in destroying such things as Palestinian census records and land registry records-all of which can only be interpreted as an effort to destroy the Palestinian identity.
We received the same message from our meeting with Yasir Arafat. The whole setting in which we met Arafat-his destroyed headquarters, every building except one in the entire headquarters complex totally destroyed (and I mean one floor after another just pancaked onto each other) the fact that he's trapped there unable to go out, powerless and unrecognized and really much diminished-is symbolic of how much the Palestinians are, as Hanan Ashrawi said, at Israel's mercy and of how Israel is trying to dismantle the Palestinians' identity.
We also met with Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper, who said essentially the same things. In fact, he had a very harsh assessment of Israelis and what they're attempting to do. We got to talking with him about Israel and its self-image, and he said that Zionism, although a very compelling narrative for Jews, is a totally self-contained, self-absorbed bubble in which Israelis separate themselves from everyone else. We suggested that this resulted from fear, because of the Holocaust, because of the Jews' history, but Halper said it's not fear that causes this; it's basically that Israelis, as he put it, "just don't give a damn" about anyone else. They see themselves as the victim and as such don't need to take any responsibility for any of their actions. Anything goes if you're the victim. And if you feel like a victim and are absolutely convinced that you're right and have great power, the combination is lethal, he says.
The way this plays out with Palestinians, Halper said, is that Israelis feel that Palestinians need to be put in their place: Israelis believe that all of Palestine is their country, that Palestinians have no rights there. They should go live with other Arabs, but if theyıre docile, they can live with us-i.e., with Israelis. Here you have the need for docility again, just as Hanan Ashrawi said.
We heard and saw many, many stories of oppression that show the concerted effort to render the Palestinians docile. We talked to one man who watches every morning out his bedroom window as Israel builds a new settlement on land confiscated from his family. We sat in one woman's apartment living room in Ramallah and looked out at Jerusalem about a 10-minute drive away, but she can't go there because Israel doesn't allow West Bankers to enter Jerusalem without a permit and gives out hardly any permits. This woman sleeps every night in her clothes because she fears that Israeli soldiers will enter her apartment building and order all the residents out on the street. This has happened before, so it's not a fantasy or paranoia. She describes the new homebound activities sheıs taken up-like knitting, trying new recipes, things like that, to fill the hours when Israel imposes a 24-hour curfew, and she cries when she talks about fighting depression. She just moved back to Ramallah from having spent years living in Jordan, because Ramallah is where her roots are, where she spent her childhood, and now she feels the Palestinians are losing their grip on that land.
The destruction that we saw everywhere-in East Jerusalem, throughout the West Bank, in Gaza-is truly appalling. Destroyed houses and buildings are everywhere; every Palestinian government and security headquarters in the West Bank and Gaza has been bombed and reduced to total rubble; demolished houses line every street; city streets are torn up by tank treads, piles of debris and concrete walls block city streets, and there is no law and order because the police and security forces have been destroyed; Israeli settlements (over 200 of them) and Israeli-only roads (three or four hundred miles of them, taking up 17% of the land area of the West Bank) are built on land confiscated from Palestinians and on Palestinian olive groves that have been bulldozed and destroyed; poverty is rampant % of Palestinians, according to a poll published while we were there, live on less than two dollars a day) medical care is denied (we met with the head of the principal medical relief organization, and he told us that 46% of cancer patients in the occupied territories cannot get to the hospitals where they could receive treatment, and 42% of kidney dialysis patients cannot get treatment).
Israel is building a wall or separation fence, as it's sometimes called, to separate Israelis from Palestinians, but this is being built on Palestinian land, well on the Palestinian side of the borderline between Israel and the West Bank, again on confiscated Palestinian land. It's a massive structure, a few hundred meters wide and hundreds of miles long, so it too destroys a massive amount of Palestinian land. While we were there, it was reported that Israel now wants to include even larger expanses of land on the Israeli side of the wall. Also while we were there, it came clear that Israel was digging trenches around many of the villages near Nablus, to encircle and cut off the villages, and that sewage lines have been cut in the process, so that sewage has poured into the trenches and in order to get in or out of their towns, villagers somehow have to cross these sewage-filled moats.
The physical destruction, the psychological destruction throughout the territories is appalling, so much so that it's difficult to describe it in words so that it'll have an impact on people who havenıt seen it. Just coincidentally, I recently read a review of a new book on war and war atrocities by Susan Sontag. The reviewer-whoıs a poet and is supposed to have a way with words-was at a loss for words himself. He wrote that "The images of war atrocities may seem like a subject about which there'd be plenty to say, but somehow it turns out not to be the case. As with other all-powerful visual experiences, there's a chasm between what one sees and what one can articulate."
We encountered this chasm. We went to Jenin, where the entire central area of the refugee camp there was destroyed in April last year during Israelıs siege of the West Bank, almost exactly a year ago. Here's an area, unlike so many other places in the West Bank, where you donıt see any rubble, you just see emptiness. The rubble has been bulldozed under and all that's left is a huge empty plaza-the size of one or two Manhattan-size city blocks-where once numerous apartment buildings stood and several thousand people lived. This is truly indescribable; it takes your breath away. My personal reaction, as we rounded the corner and came into this vast empty area, was just to sob. It was like being punched in the stomach.
We have both struggled, and are still struggling with how to describe it, but we've only been able to come up with descriptions of how it cannot be described: words like incomprehensible, unspeakable, unbelievable, indescribable. In fact, what Jenin is in many ways is absence: there is simply nothing there anymore.
Iıd like to read a little from some of the email journals we kept while we were on our trip.
In Ramallah a few days ago, we met with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, director of the principal Palestinian medical relief organization in the West Bank and Gaza. When we told him our purpose was to describe the Palestinian plight for Americans, he told us that we should emphasize most strongly how vulnerable and unprotected Palestinians are. This is the obvious and dominant impression that we had already gained wherever we have traveled in the West Bank.
At checkpoints, Palestinians are clearly at the mercy of 19- and 20-year-old Israeli soldiers, who can stop all traffic or let it through as the whim strikes them. Palestinian pedestrians stand patiently in lines, often for hours in the cold rain or the hot sun, waiting for a soldier half their age to signal them to come forward, examine their papers, and say yea or nay. Palestinian trucks are occasionally allowed through, but they wait for hours, sometimes days, in interminable lines, until some young Israeli in a uniform decides he'll pay attention to them. Produce rots in the meantime; Palestinians inside waiting for whatever the trucks carry go without. These Israeli checkpoints exist outside every Palestinian town, impeding movement between the towns and every place else on the West Bank, where Israelis think of all the land as theirs.
There are myriad other signs of powerlessness. Dr. Barghouti tells us that Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on March 16 while trying to stop a house demolition through peaceful protest, died of suffocation when the bulldozer piled sand on top of her. Barghouti interprets this act, and the United States' feeble protest, as an indication of the impunity with which the Israelis can act anywhere, anytime, against the Palestinians and their friends. Suffocation is what is happening to the Palestinians while they wait helplessly. Rachel Corrie's fate is an indication to us of what would happen to the Palestinians if they adopted a strategy of non-violence. Israel doesn't seem to care what the nature of the protest; it simply won't stand for protest of any sort. Rachel Corrie was using non-violent tactics, but she's now dead, suffocated because non-violence has no impact on Israel.
Like Rachel Corrie, the Palestinians are totally vulnerable and without protection. This is what vulnerability means: it is the hotel worker in Jerusalem who lives in an outlying village but can't find work there, who works now in Jerusalem because this is the only way he can earn enough money to feed his family, even though Israel says it's illegal for any West Banker to be in the city, who can only get home to visit his wife and children every few weeks. Vulnerability is the 73-year-old owner of a metalworks shop in Nablus whose shop and second-story apartment were demolished by Israeli tanks a few months ago, no reason given, leaving him with no place to live and no place to work, and not enough years to start over again.
Virtually every Palestinian village has seen a settlement grow up across the next valley or on the nearby hilltop, and every Palestinian talks about the contrasts: the fine housing, neat gardens, and nice shops built for Israelis on land confiscated from Palestinians, while Palestinians, who also pay taxes, live with checkpoints, erratic electricity, curfews, water shortages, and few services. Every Palestinian knows that the Israeli settlements ringing his town are deliberately placed to prevent Palestinian expansion.Vulnerability is the virtually total economic collapse that has followed on the Israeli siege: the closed businesses, the destroyed buildingsthe malnutrition, the chronic hunger.Vulnerability is giving birth at a checkpoint or even dying at a checkpoint because the Israeli soldiers don't believe or don't care that the patient must get out in order to seek medical assistance. Vulnerability is having no security because every cityıs police and security forces have been destroyed. Vulnerability is 90 Palestinians killed by Israel in the first 20 days of March.
Iıd just like to finish by reading you something else. About a week ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz ran a long article on Rachel Corrie. There was an interview with her parents and a lot on Rachel and her goals. (I give Ha'aretz a lot of credit for this, by the way-I don't think weıve seen this kind of coverage in the U.S. press.) At the end of the article, they reprinted several email messages that Rachel had sent to her mother, and I'd like to read you one. This was written to her mother on February 27, just a little over two weeks before she was killed. "I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again-a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. I just want to write to my mom and tell her that I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don't think it's an extremist thing to do anymore."
Mapof Israeli settlements in the Palestinian areas.
