Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, pages 62-63

New York City and Tri-State News

Muslim World League Makes Goodwill Visit to New York as Part of U.S. Tour

By Jane Adas

The Muslim World League, headquartered in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is an organization committed to promoting peace and understanding between Islam and other faiths, cultures, and civilizations. This summer the League sent a delegation of distinguished jurists, academics, and clerics from the Arab world, Africa, India, Europe, and North America on a Good Will Visit to the United States. On June 26 the delegation, headed by its secretary-general, Dr. Abdullah al-Turki, held a press conference at its first stop in New York, at the Inter-Church Center.

Dr. al-Turki confirmed that Islam condemns the killing of innocents, stating, “Islam considers murdering a single person tantamount to murdering all of mankind.” Islam further prohibits the taking of one’s own life. Therefore, he explained, the Muslim World League condemns the terrorist operations that occurred on Sept. 11. Dr. al-Turki defined a Muslim as one with whose tongue and hands (words and deeds) others feel safe.

Dr. Ahmad Kamal Abulmagd, professor of law at Cairo University, is the Arab League commissioner for Dialogue Among Civilizations, a United Nations program initiated by Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami in response to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.” The commission met throughout 2001 to address such questions as whether nations need enemies, whether global ethics are possible, what constitutes genuine dialogue, and what the role should be of the United Nations, which Dr. Abulmagd described as now almost collapsing.

The commission concluded, Dr. Abulmagd said, that, most of all, dialogue requires polite listening. Two barriers to understanding one another, he told those gathered, are preaching in order to convert the listener and a false sense of superiority. The commission members agreed to avoid the two words “co-existence” and “tolerance,” because they reflect an assumption of superiority. No civilization, he said, is so high that it has nothing to learn and no civilization so low that it has nothing to teach.

The commission completed its work, entitled “Crossing the Divide,” five weeks before Sept. 11, which Dr. Abulmagd characterized as an earthquake for the whole world that opens the door to unknown dangers. Even now, however, Dr. Abulmagd said, because humans have volition, we can reject the clash of cultures, which is based on hatred, discrimination, and violence, and instead choose to cooperate with one another in order to make the planet a safer and more joyful place for all to live.

Report from Palestine

“Report from Palestine: a Discussion with Recently Returned Solidarity Activists” took place July 18 at the Brecht Forum. The evening, co-sponsored by Direct Action Palestine, began with laughter and ended with tears.

The speakers were introduced by Maysoon, a young Palestinian-American comic. Maysoon described the problems she encounters at Ben-Gurion airport returning from visiting family members in Palestine. Because she has cerebral palsy, she explained, she trembles—“like Arafat.” Airport security personnel, seeing a shaking Palestinian, assume she’s guilty. When they notice her father, whom she described as a dead ringer for Saddam Hussain, they’re convinced. To make the lengthy interrogation that inevitably follows more interesting, Maysoon plays games, such as “Jeopardy.” To the question, “What is your name?” she answers, “Ding, is my name Maysoon?”

Manar Farraj, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem’s Dheisheh refugee camp who is one of the two girls featured in Mai Masri’s video “Frontiers of Hopes and Fears,” described life under assault and curfew. Stuck in their homes without enough food and water, families pray that soldiers will not come in the night and that no one becomes sick, because they are not allowed to go to the hospital even in an emergency. Last April, when her family had completely run out of food, Manar’s grandfather, saying that soldiers “will not hurt an old man like me,” went out to look for bread. He was shot 36 times from three tanks. “He was my teacher, my friend,” Manar said. “He took care of me when my father was in jail. He took me to our village [in present-day Israel] and he hoped to be buried there.”

Manar said the hope in her heart is to live in freedom in her village. Instead Israel is building a fence and attacking Palestinian homes and clinics with U.S. weapons. Israel, she said, controls “our money, our water, our decisions.” However, she declared, “Israel and Sharon can destroy many things, but not our love for Palestine and our freedom.”

Ending the occupation is only half the struggle, Manar concluded: “We will then have to work to build the society we want.”

The final four speakers recently had returned from a two-week stint in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. ISM’s aim is to encourage the presence of international volunteers in support of Palestinian human rights and to provide the sort of international protection for Palestinians called for by the United Nations but vetoed in the Security Council by the United States. All four stressed that, as Americans, and two of them as Jews, to stand by and do nothing is an act of complicity. Each was sent to a different place and described various facets of the occupation and siege.

Amy Laura Cahn spent 10 days in the Gaza Strip, where water is a major problem. Much of the available water, she said, is pumped to Israel, then sold back to the Palestinians. Of the two wells serving the 200,000 people living in the center of the Strip, one has been inoperable for 15 months. Every time Palestinian workers tried to fix it, she said, Israeli soldiers shot at them. On July 11, 20 internationals escorted workers to inspect the damaged well, located 400 meters from the Netzarim settlement and in full view of military posts. They found the road leading to the well destroyed. They returned July 14 with a bulldozer to repair the road, a welder to fix the tank, and petrol to run the pump at the well. They found that the grapevines that had been there four days earlier had all been bulldozed. Still, they celebrated that they had been able to use their bulldozer for a positive purpose. When they returned the following day, however, both road and well had again been destroyed.

Eden Coughlin described the variety of roadblocks leading into Hebron: deep trenches between mounds of rubble, bulldozed cars piled high. She spent several days at a hospital in Hebron that had been regularly fired on by the Israeli army. Doctors in the cardiac unit told her that 20-year-olds were having heart attacks because of the stress of occupation. Three children in the hospital had all been shot in the left eye by snipers, the result, Coughlin concluded, of target practice.

Israeli settlers are a particular problem in the Hebron area, she said, comparing the situation to moving members of the Ku Klux Klan into Harlem, then having the U.S. army called in to protect them. On the outskirts of Hebron, settlers frequently attack Palestinians in their fields. The volunteers attempted, but failed, to accompany Palestinian farmers, who had received Israeli army permission to work their own land, to their fields to harvest their crops. Israeli soldiers declared the area where they gathered under instant, localized curfew.

Gail Miller, a 61-year-old social worker, was in Al Am’ari refugee camp near Ramallah when the Israeli army was conducting house-to-house searches and rounding up all the men and boys. From behind their windows, women and children kept directing the volunteers to go “this way,” until the volunteers arrived at a field where the “prisoners” had been collected. The volunteers called the media, who did not respond. The soldiers then ordered the volunteers to leave the area. When Miller was apparently not moving fast enough, an Israeli soldier fired a gun right next to her head. Miller said that 18-year-olds with tanks and machine guns are scary, but that young people on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides will be damaged by the situation.

Rick Rowley, a filmmaker for Big Noise Films, was in Jenin on June 21, when Israeli tanks left after three days of curfew. He filmed the departing tanks, the fruit that had rotted in the market, and everyone out on the streets cleaning up the mess left by the Israeli army and trying to get food. After three hours, without warning, the tanks returned and the soldiers were shooting. The Israeli army killed five people that day, including a 5-year-old girl shot in the head and two young brothers. Rowley filmed it all: the grieving parents, ambulances transporting the wounded, the chaos at the hospital emergency room, and the funerals. His short video ended with Palestinian boys throwing rocks at tanks only yards away and flashing the victory sign. Merely to survive in Jenin, Rowley said, is an act of resistance.

For more information about the International Solidarity Movement’s experiences in Palestine, visit their Web site at <www.directactionpalestine.com>.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York metropolitan area.