Palestine/Israel: Do You Know Your ABCs?

By Tzaporah Ryter

I am a Jewish woman with family who lived in Haifa from 10 generations ago, prior to the Zionist project. I just returned from living in Ramallah, the West Bank, Occupied Palestine for eight months. I was involved there in nonviolent demonstrations and acts of grassroots international intervention and solidarity. In the nonviolent demonstrations in which I participated—such as dismantling with our bare hands the roadblocks that prevent thousands of people from accessing vocation, trade, basic services and even emergency medical treatment—I cannot tell you how many people I saw shot, wounded and killed. I lost count.

After the first murder I witnessed of the man standing in front of me, I grew numb. Then it was just a stream of bodies—the guy with his head blown off, the little boys so small you don’t even need a stretcher for them, and old women—carried off into ambulances which every single time were shot at by the Israelis directly on the driver’s side of the windshield. Ambulances turned back at checkpoints.

Throughout this intifada/Israeli siege, what I witnessed was an overwhelmingly nonviolent struggle within civil society for justice. Every one of the endless demonstrations I attended began as marches with signs, banners and chants. The Israelis shot first every single time, before any rocks were thrown. Rocks—thrown at armored jeeps—that seldom hit fenders. Stones that are a symbolic way of saying, “We will resist our oppression, even if you have a tank and I have a rock.”

In fact, the Israeli soldiers even shot at some of our demonstrations when we were singing “we shall overcome” and no stones were thrown—even after the Israeli soldiers began and continued to shoot us! Every night I went to sleep to the sound of shells falling on the nearby school for blind children. I walked to do my shopping past 10-year-old boys with patches over their eyes. How come all of them in the eye? Accident? That’s quite a sharp-shooting accident.

The death toll for the Israelis is about 100, the death toll for the Palestinians about 600. Numbers cannot reflect the losses. The Palestinians also have about 20,000 wounded civilians, some in critical condition and many permanently disabled while hospitals are being attacked and medical clinics destroyed. I had to walk through streets of crippled people, through the human traffic of funerals, which become demonstrations, which become more funerals, just to get a can of soda.

And that’s just Area A.

Area A is like a vacation. Don’t know what that is? Learn your ABCs. I’ll be happy to help you. Then maybe we can have a conversation. In Areas B and C—where the majority of people live in villages completely surrounded by clusters of Israeli settlements such as Ariel, which even within Barak’s “generous offer” were set to remain permanently, in order to maintain permanent military bases—life is much worse. The children cannot breathe. The tear gas day and night being thrown at their windows has damaged their respiratory systems, maybe irrevocably at this point. I have even tried to scream at the soldiers, pleading, “The children are being taken to the hospital.” But then they shot at me, so I ran back inside the house I was visiting.

Night and day there are settlers attacking, backed up by soldiers, shooting into the villages and screaming “Death to the Arabs,” burning down property, even marching into schools in broad daylight and shooting the kids. The soldiers shot my friend in the middle of the day while he was standing outside his house bringing the kids inside as the troops stomped through the village. They threw a stun grenade into his brother’s face and then pointed an M-16 at his head and threatened to shoot anyone who would try to bring my friend to an emergency medical vehicle. It took 30 minutes before he was permitted to be taken to a hospital. Now he is paralyzed.

This is only a partial list of what I have witnessed in the past eight months. What is happening is called ethnic cleansing. The death toll in baseball terms may be 100 to 600, but this isn’t baseball. The figures do not describe the conditions of life the Palestinians are living under, which is a fabric torn from the seams of hell that you cannot imagine without knowing it firsthand.

One side goes out dancing in nightclubs when it gets dark (a nightclub right next to the Russian compound, where Palestinian detainees are being interrogated and tortured while listening to people laughing and drinking and dancing). The other side sits in fear inside their homes or is under forced curfew. I have lived on both sides and I am not sure they are in the same universe.

This is an army—one of the most powerful in the world—against a civilian population. This Israeli army has an intact infrastructure and state and a government capable to give orders to kill—or not to kill. The Palestinians do not have an intact infrastructure, state or government capable of telling anyone anything in particular.

I will let you in on a little secret. Not even Chairman Yasser Arafat can stop suicide bombers. Only justice can.

And no, Mr. Baehr [to whose letter this is a reply], of course it is not the collaborators who are killing the Israelis. (Although, as far as shots at night go toward the settlements and collaborators/Israelis doing it, I can tell you only one inside scoop: The Israeli settlers recently chartered several buses and brought children to stand on the roof of Gilo settlement to watch the shelling. The point is, they had to schedule the occurrence and charter the buses, get it? And if it was so dangerous to the Israelis, why were they standing on the roof at the time eating treats?)

People who have come to understand that violence is the only language the Israelis reward are killing the Israelis. Thus far they are absolutely correct. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called the cease-fire after the suicide bomber at the mall. The Israelis are rewarding violence. Otherwise, why do they renew negotiations only after their own death toll is on the rise and why do they shoot nonviolent protesters?

Violence is less of a threat to Israel’s existence in its present racist and fascist form than nonviolent public demonstrations and freedom of expression and the struggle for the exposure of truth, liberation and democracy and the end to Zionist apartheid. Violence should not be rewarded. But unfortunately it is—and it will be that way indefinitely until the international community takes a stand and insists upon international protection for the Palestinian people. Then, with the protection of the innocent, with freedom of expression, with the complete and total withdrawal from the occupied territories, can a discussion toward justice—toward what justice even means—begin.

I will let you in on another secret: the occupation is violence. There can be no negotiations under violence. When and if we finally reach it, it will be a long discussion—even prior to any successful or worthwhile negotiations—since currently even Israeli researchers are censored and taken to court for daring to publish their findings concerning what really did occur in the Palestinian massacres of 1947 and 1948. There is a lot to talk about before signing any deals or even bringing them to the table.

I hope that those who become defensive of Israel and upset can take a deep breath and consider, have they ever visited or lived in the West Bank or Gaza? Jennifer Gulbrandson [author of “Just Another Day Under Israeli Occupation”] has. I have. Rather than condemning Gulbrandson, we should all thank her for bringing back the truth and taking the effort to inform us and encourage us to think about it.

I am sorry if this hurts some of those who feel for the Jewish people and for their difficult history. They are my people, too. My journey to the truth was very painful. But my people have no right to kill the Palestinians, steal their land, destroy their communities and culture and leave them refugees from their homeland. My people have no right to disregard international law and U.N. resolutions. Our history is not the fault of the Palestinians.

But the Palestinian history of recent generations is the fault of my people. After nearly 6,000 years of experience and survival, I think that my people can find more creative and ultimately sustainable ways to survive than by becoming murderers and war criminals or by choosing to be those who defend or support them.

This article first appeared as a letter to the editor of the (Minneapolis) Pulse of the Twin Cities on June 27, 2001. Reprinted with permision.