Israeli left rails against Barak’s firepower

Independent, The (London),  Nov 18, 2000  by Phil Reeves in Hares on the West Bank

WITH PRECIOUS little evidence, Israel has justified the army’s daily shooting of young Arab rioters, including children, by accusing Palestinians of using them as human shields. Now, at last, the Palestinians do have such a shield. And she is Israeli and Jewish.

For the past four nights, Neta Golan, 29, has been sleeping in Hares, one of scores of Palestinian villages on the West Bank which are under an Israeli military blockade as collective punishment for the violence of the last seven weeks.

Armed with a loud-hailer, Ms Golan, a therapist and political activist from Tel Aviv, is trying to stop Israeli troops and Jewish settlers from firing into the village in what she sees as a calculated attempt to drive its residents off the land.

Her larger aim is to galvanise the Israeli left-wing, and the outside world, into acting to stop the excessive force used by the Israeli army over the past seven weeks. More than 200 people have been killed – including four more yesterday, most of them Palestinians shot by Israeli soldiers. The latest violence flared even as the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, called for restraint from his own side. Ms Golan said: “I am concerned about the world’s silence and co-operation with this massacre. Maybe if people at grassroots act, governments will follow.”

Ms Golan, and the villagers, say that men from a cluster of nearby settlements, built on occupied territory, gather after dark on the edge of Hares in their cars, and fire weapons into the village. She has shouted at them through her megaphone when they shot at her.

“They come at around 8pm, stand at the village’s entrance, up to 60 of them from settlements all around, and honk their horns, swear, throw stones and shoot. It is not just the settlers. It is the army, too.”

Hares is an unremarkable Arab village, half-built, half- collapsing homes in a scrubby rolling landscape of olive trees, interrupted by an occasional minaret. Seven weeks ago, before the troubles began, Hares enjoyed a per capita income of about pounds 600 a month, largely because its men work as cleaners, builders, farm workers, and factory hands in nearby Israel itself or the Jewish settlements.That income has now disappeared.

But Hares’ location is more precarious than many similar villages in the occupied territories. The village sits on the edge of a finger of Israeli-controlled land that delves into the northern part of the West Bank, south of Nablus. Jewish settlements have been steadily growing along it in the past decade, helped by heavy subsidies and tax breaks from the Israeli government. The signs suggest that this is territory that the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, intends to annex if he can wrest a peace deal out of Mr Arafat. Villagers are convinced that the settlers want to push them off the land before annexation, repeating in miniature the Arab exodus of 1948.

The village’s water has regularly been cut off since the intifada began – not by the Israeli water company that provides it, but by Jewish settlers at night, said the mayor, Hossam Daoud.

It is the olive picking season, when scores of villagers collect a harvest to turn it into oil, partly for their own use, partly for sale. But the Israeli soldiers blockading the village’s entrances will not allow the pickers out; the olives have been drying on the trees. The villagers were able to get to their trees for the first time yesterday after dozens of left-wing Israeli pro-peace activists arrived to assist them, accompanied by television cameras

Villagers say the conflict is worse than the first intifada, By the time that ended in 1993, 10 people from Hares had been injured; 22 have been wounded in the past seven weeks alone, said the mayor’s office. One, Raid Daoud, 14, was shot dead.

Mr Daoud is one of a minority of Palestinians who believes that peace talks can resume, but not if Arab villages remain under blockade or attack. “It won’t work,” he said, “We would rather die than leave our land. We are not going to be humiliated. If the Israeli terror continues, so will the intifada.”

CNN transcrip

aired November 25 2000

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MIKE HANNA, CNN JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): A Palestinian mother tells of the Israeli attack that paralyzed her husband.

“I saw my father with a missile in his leg,” says her seven-year- old son. “The glass of the window hit me in the face, and the stones fell on me, and I began to cry.”

An Israeli woman weeps as she listens.

GOLAN: Yes, the Israeli army is responsible. Yes, Barak is responsible. But we are all responsible for this. And if people don’t believe, you know, us, you know, then people should come here and see for themselves, you know, how these people are living.

balata

_by gush shalom________________________________________
A – I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
http://www.ainfos.ca/
________________________________________________

We just got a call from Neta Golan, who is at Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp,
right now
invaded – once again.

Jew risks bullets to help Palestinians

posted in the times 

EDITOR EVELYN HOCKSTEIN Neta Golan, a Jewish peace activist who has been
working with Palestinians in Hares to harvest their olive crop

another telephone report by Neta Golan from invaded Balata Refugee Camp, Nablus.

posted by Gush Shalom Billboard Saturday, June 1, 2002, 4.00 PM Israeli time – another telephone report by Neta Golan from invaded Balata Refugee Camp, Nablus.

Peace Warrior in the West Bank: An Interview with Neta Golan [excerpt]

PJnews posted Peace Warrior in the West Bank: An Interview with Neta Golan [excerpt form tricycle ]
interview]At a time when Americans are just beginning to grapple with the ethics of a
military response to terrorism, a young Israeli student of Thich Nhat Hanh's
has made the precept of nonkilling a daily practice. Neta Golan, a
thirty-year-old Israeli peace activist and Buddhist, lives with her Palestinian
husband in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Last year she cofounded the
International Solidarity Movement, an organization committed to nonviolent
resistance to Israel's occupation of lands captured during the 1967
Arab/Israeli war. On several occasions, from mid-February through early April,
Tricycle spoke to Golan by telephone. 

Israeli activist bridges worlds

Israeli activist bridges worlds By Laila El-Haddad in Gaza

posted in Al Jazeera.net

“You can’t just come storming in here,” barks Neta Golan to foreign activists who walk casually into her kitchen during their lunch break. Neta Golan seen here with late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat   “This is someone’s house you know – there’s a kitchen in the other apartment,” she tells them. “They don’t understand it’s rude to just barge into someone’s home here – they have a lot to learn,” says Golan about the internationals who have come to help support Palestinians in non-violent resistance. Just another day in cultural training for Golan and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), during which the 34-year-old Israeli activist explains to foreign volunteers when they can snap pictures, how to behave in people’s homes and how to respect local Palestinians. Golan – activist, mother of two and dedicated wife – shatters every stereotype an Arab may have about an Israeli Jew: She fights for Palestinian rights, she lives in Ram Allah, and she is married to a Palestinian from Nablus, with whom she has two children (Nawal, 2, and Shaden, 14 months). Four years ago, shortly after the start of the second intifada, or uprising, she co-founded the ISM, a non-violent movement she describes as Palestinian-led and foreign-assisted, in which volunteers help to raise awareness of the Palestinian plight and to end the Israeli occupation. Jewish volunteers More than 4000 volunteers from around the world have participated with the ISM. About 20% of these volunteers have been Jewish.  Things weren’t always so for Golan, who grew up in Tel Aviv, unaware until she was 15 that Palestinians were living on the same land or, worse, that they were victims of occupation. Palestinians and ISM activists try to bring down West Bank’s wall “We went on some kind of school trip, and there was a woman talking about people who weren’t allowed to organise politically, arrests without charges, homes being demolished, and I said, wait a second – you’re talking about a South American country or something, right?” recalled Golan, who was born to an ultra-orthodox Jewish mother and a Zionist father. “To me it was world-shattering. I couldn’t believe this was happening in Israel. Growing up, I was always fed that we were the victims, that we had never harmed anyone,” Golan said. During the Oslo period, Golan began to dialogue with Palestinians and met her future husband. False dawn For Neta and many others, Oslo brought the promise of peace – a promise that would soon prove false, she says. “I and many others naively thought things were going towards some kind of solution. For Israelis, the problem was solved. … So to hear from Palestinians that there was not even a peace process, that things weren’t fine, to hear them say, ‘We’re waiting for things to better,’ then after a few years, ‘We don’t care, it’s got to change, it’s unbearable,’ was shocking,” says Golan. ISM activists in a cage they built to represent Palestinian captivity “The message that we were hearing was that it was going to explode.” According to Golan, nobody wanted to hear that message, not even political tourists that she and her then-fiancé Nizar Kammal showed around the West Bank. “They would say, ‘Give it time’. You have time when your kids have a future, when you have hope. You have time when your life is bearable, and hope for yourself and your children, but in Palestine that didn’t exist,” recounts Golan.  That’s when the second intifada started, and with it, the idea for the ISM. “I thought the international community would be outraged at the systemic killing of unarmed [Palestinian] youths. I didn’t believe they, or the Israeli community, would accept it. And we thought if we demonstrate, it could be stopped,” said Golan.  “I don’t think in my worst nightmare that here we are five years later, and it’s become normal, that unarmed civilians are routinely shot dead.” Starting with vigils Golan started by organising vigils in front of the prime minister’s office, under the threat of attack by Jewish settlers. Then the Israeli army began bombing the villages of Beit Sahur and Beit Jalla adjacent to Bethlehem, which later became a target itself. Briton Tom Hurndall was shot by Israeli forces in 2003 Golan connected with a friend, Luisa Morgantini, from the European parliament, and put out a call on the internet for people to come join a series of actions supporting Palestinians. “And what materialised from that was a march, the people of Beit Sahur with internationals, to the Israeli military base there that was bombing the area.  We went armed with a letter to soldiers telling them to dismantle the base,” Golan said. Golan began to organise more protests and interventions, and one incident deepened her sense of responsibility to the movement. A confrontation broke out between Israelis soldiers and Palestinian villagers who were trying to pass an Israeli checkpoint. “Another Israeli and I stood in middle – between the Palestinians and the soldiers and settlers – and I believe it’s because we were there that the soldiers didn’t shoot, and the villagers were able to open the roadblock.” Child killed The next day clashes broke out again, but this time Golan was not there. She later learned that a child from the village, one that she had seen and protected the day before, was killed by Israeli troops.  In December 2000, Golan joined forces with a Palestinian-American, Huweida Arraf, who was organising protests of her own, and Ghassan Andoni, professor of physics at Bir Zeit University and founder of IMEMC.org (International Middle East Media Centre). More than 4000 volunteers have worked with the ISM Together, they chose the name International Solidarity Movement for their group and started the website www.Palsolidarity.org. “If it wasn’t the mutual dream of many people, [ISM] wouldn’t have happened,” Golan said. Golan’s activism has not come without costs. In April 2001, she was arrested for chaining herself to Palestinian olive trees targeted by Israeli bulldozers. She spent three days in prison. Golan has also had to contend with questioning and a trial because of her illegal presence in the West Bank. Israelis are forbidden to enter the Oslo-designated Area A, theoretically Palestinian-controlled, without permission from the Israeli army. The fact that her husband is a Nablus resident does not exempt her from the prohibition. Likewise, Palestinians are forbidden from entering Israeli-controlled areas without a permit. New role “I always joke that we are illegal as a unit.  There’s nowhere we can reside legally. He can’t be in Israel and I can’t be in Area A. I have to sneak into Nablus and Ram Allah,” says Golan. After she gave birth to her children, Golan moved from participating in protests to media and legal support and cultural training with the ISM office.  The ISM is foreign-assisted and Palestinian-led, says Golan During the training, newcomers are taught tactics of non-violent resistance. “We teach them how not to get shot, for example,” she says. In some cases, participation in the ISM has cost the lives of the activists. Two volunteers, Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, who were stationed in Rafah in the southern end of the Gaza Strip, were killed by Israeli forces despite clear markers indicating their civilian status in April 2003. Corrie, whom Golan trained, was crushed by an armoured Israeli bulldozer, and Hurndall was shot by an Israeli sniper in the back of his head as he was protecting Palestinian children who were under fire in Rafah. The soldier who shot Hurndall was convicted of manslaughter in a rare military court ruling and faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in August. Activists barred One other volunteer, Brian Avery, was critically wounded by Israeli machine-gun fire the same year. He has taken his case to the Israeli High Court of Justice, demanding that the Israeli military investigate his shooting. Shortly after the deaths, Israel decided to bar pro-Palestinian activists from entering the country and has tried to expel many of those present. “It makes coming here a lot more difficult and costly. They claim we are ‘terrorist tourists’, even that we are funded by the Palestinian Authority or the CIA” Neta Golan More than 80 ISM activists have been arrested, and hundreds have been denied entry. The deportation was a problem that they could deal with, says Golan, but denial of entry as was another matter, involving “serious intelligence work”. Anyone known to be coming to the occupied territories for any kind of solidarity or human rights work was a target. “It makes coming here a lot more difficult and costly. They claim we are ‘terrorist tourists’, even that we are funded by the Palestinian Authority or the CIA,” Golan says. Harvest campaign But Golan says that won’t stop them. The ISM is planning Freedom Summer 2005, a 57-day campaign (one for every year of displacement and dispossession since 1948) against the Israeli occupation. The ISM plans to help Palestinian villagers harvest olive crops After that, an olive harvest campaign is planned in which foreign activists help Palestinian villagers safely harvest their crops. The group continues to support non-violent anti-wall protests in the villages of Bilin, Beit Surik and Salfit as well as help protect Palestinian communities suffering from settler and military violence in the Hebron enclave of Qawawis. “A lot of people in the world are not comfortable with the equation that your blood may be worth more than someone else’s,” Golan says. “But that is the reality. And to me, that is definitely the new anti-Semitism: anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment.”

toronto talk

excerpt form Talk in Toronto posted on Znet  

Neta Golan:

My name is Neta Golan.  I was born in Tel Aviv.  My childhood was scary, and simple.  There were good guys and bad guys.  We were the good guys.  The bad guys… could be anyone, but they were mostly Arabs.  Now I’m a 3rd generation Israeli: my grandmother was born in what was still called Palestine.  My mother was born in 1948.  And yet, I grew up in the shadow of the holocaust.  It was always my reference point, for everything.

As a child, I met Palestinians.  They were there, working in construction or sanitation.  But there was never a chance to meet as equals.  Instead there were fears, being fed by the media, by what we learned in school.  I learned always that we were defending ourselves from people who wanted to kill us. 

It wasn’t until I was 15 years old that I learned of the occupation.  It was during the first intifada, because before the first intifada Palestinians, the occupation, simply didn’t exist to us.  The first intifada made it impossible for Israelis to ignore Palestinians.  But I was raised on Jewish history, a history of oppression, dispossession, suffering ethnic cleansing, of being forced out of community after community.  Could we really be doing these things to another people?

I couldn’t believe it because I was a part of the consensus opinion in Israel, that we are morally superior.  They are violent.  We have purity of arms.  If we do kill a civilian or an innocent, it’s by mistake.  Even if these mistakes happen every single day.  I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.  I refused to believe that a soldier would open fire on an innocent child, but I saw it.  Unfortunately in Nablus where I live, I see it too often.  When I would hear about a child being killed by a soldier, I would think-no, he must have thrown a stone, he must have been doing something that endangered the soldier and forced the soldier to shoot back.  I wanted to believe that the children were throwing stones.  But when you are in the West Bank, and you see a child throw a stone at a tank, you understand that if that child is killed, that is murder.  And very recently, 5 internationals were with Baha, one of the children who we knew well, and soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier picked him out from among the internationals, shot him twice in the chest, and killed him.

As a child I wouldn’t have been able to believe this.  I would say-the proof of their violence is suicide bombing!  We would never do something like that.  One of my classmates asked me: what’s the difference between a suicide bombing and a Phantom jet bombing a refugee camp?  I said-we don’t bomb refugee camps.  I couldn’t believe the only difference between us and them was that we had better weapons.  But I went home and asked my father.

“Is it true that we bomb refugee camps with Phantom Jets?”
“Yes.  The terrorists think they can hide in the refugee camps, so we prove that they cannot” he told me. 

But that wasn’t even enough to change me, because the conditioning runs very deep.  So deep that when I first went to the West Bank, during Oslo, I would have anxiety attacks.  Once a week I would go, and every trip I would be filled with anxiety, filled with fear, thinking: “they all want to kill me!”  And it took at least fifteen minutes of seeing people going about their business, talking to each other, working, doing almost anything other than thinking about how much they wanted to kill me, before I calmed down.  Seeing their openness, their willingness to accept me, their generosity, that has been the greatest gift of overcoming my fear-the chance to discover the wisdom, the beauty of the Palestinian people.  Israelis who can’t overcome their fear are much poorer for not having the chance to do that.

After a year and a half of this anxiety, it mostly went away.  But as soon as things changed, when the political situation would become worse, I would fall back on that conditioning and become afraid again.  In 2000, when the second intifada broke out, I was afraid.  I was in Nablus and asked my fiancé, am I being paranoid because I’m afraid?  He said: “yes!” 

I am still shocked, sometimes, to discover what my government does, and to discover who the Palestinians really are and what they are really like. 

During the Oslo peace process, I thought, along with most Israelis: “this is wonderful!”  Because in Israel, there was peace.  But when I heard from the Palestinians, I learned that there was not peace.  There were, instead, settlements, losses in freedom of movement.  Overnight in 1991 Palestinians lost the right to go to East Jerusalem without a permit.  East Jerusalem is the capital-the heart-of Palestine in every way: politically, culturally, spiritually, economically.  Overnight they lost the chance to go there and in 1993 with the peace process, they waited to get their chance back.  The resistance to occupation basically stopped.  But peace never came.  What came instead were the bypass roads, settler roads that surrounded all the communities, with the checkpoints and roadblocks.

Thanks to the bypass roads and checkpoints, it isn’t just difficult to travel between cities in the West Bank: it’s illegal.  This wasn’t the case even during the first intifada.  Today the West Bank has been under siege, under curfew, for months and months.  It’s possible for the army to besiege the West Bank in this way because of the infrastructure of the bypass roads that was built during the ‘peace process’. 

People saw that the peace process was a smokescreen and that on the ground, the occupation was expanding.  Palestinians would tell me, first, ‘nothing has changed, but we’re waiting for things to get better.’  Next, they would say ‘things aren’t changing, and we can’t stand this.’  For years I tried to tell Israelis that there was no peace process.  Most Israelis didn’t want to hear it.  They would say-these things take time.  And when you have a job, a home, freedom, you have time.  But when you have none of these things, for 7 years, as Palestinians didn’t have, you don’t feel like you have time.

I remember in 1997, Prime Minister Netanyahu made the decision to build a settlement around occupied East Jerusalem, Har Homa.  East Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, but it had been surrounded by Israeli settlements.  Har Homa was the final link in a chain that would totally surround East Jerusalem with settlements.   For the Palestinians, this was read as proof that the peace process was over.  There were nonviolent protests.  Palestinians and Israelis joined in.  Feisal Husseini and others were there.  The mountain that was to become Har Homa was squatted by activists.

Netanyahu gave the order to storm the mountain, kick the demonstrators off it, and bulldoze all the trees on the mountain to make room for the settlement.

The night that happened I was devastated.  Again I talked to my father, who supported the decision.

“We can’t allow them to tell us where we can and can’t build,” he said.

I’m not a prophet, but I knew hopelessness, desperation, when I saw it.  And I saw it then.

“But what if there’s another suicide bomber?”  There hadn’t been one in some time, by that time.

He told me that it was a “calculated risk.” 

Hours later there was a suicide bombing.  “Do you still think it was the right decision?”  I asked him.  “Yes, it was a calculated risk.”  I couldn’t believe it, but I thought “he’s upset, as I am, shocked by the bombing, he doesn’t mean that.” 

Hours after that, our phone rang.  My father answered the phone and when he hung up he was pale.  My cousin had been killed in the bombing. 

My father took back what he said about the calculated risk-I shouldn’t have said that, he told me.  “But the only person responsible is the bastard who did it.”

The only person responsible.  The “calculated risk” had disappeared.  The context had disappeared.  Just the bomber was responsible.

And the bomber was responsible.  But so was Netanyahu’s settlement policy.  And the Israeli government, who are willing to pay the price– even in Israeli blood, my cousin’s blood– for maintaining and expanding the occupation.

And the international community, as well, for not reacting.  In Israel, I was shocked at the international community’s non-reaction.  We kept thinking-there’s no way the international community is going to put up with this.  But they did.  And they do, still.

The Palestinian nonviolent movement today faces an unprecedented situation, a level of violence that is unimaginable.  The Israelis don’t see it.  I want to show you a day of siege in Jenin, basically a ‘non-news’ item, where tanks roll around, shooting in the streets to announce curfew as people run in fear.  This happens every single day and it’s not news because most journalists don’t leave Jerusalem except occasionally to go to Ramallah or Bethlehem.

In an environment like this, people won’t join a nonviolent movement.  That’s why we need internationals.  We need people to join, to bring the attention of the international community to the situation.  The intifada started with children throwing stones.  They were answered with snipers.  Some Palestinians reacted to this violence by shooting attacks on soldiers and settlers.  They were systematically assassinated, starting in Beit Sahour, and nearly every assassination killed innocent bystanders as well. 

I’m often in Balata refugee camp, and I want to believe that Israel believes that its actions  are going to stop resistance but they have to know that they are making the situation so intolerable that non-resistance is a non-option.  There were no suicide bombers from Balata until May of this year.  In May there were assassinations of two young men who were Palestinian fighters, members of the armed resistance.  For the people in these camps, these fighters were heroes who were defending their people.  It was 4 days after these assassinations that a wave of 7 suicide bombers came from Balata. 

The oldest of these bombers was eighteen.

The operations were poorly organized.  Many of them blew up on the way, failed in their missions.  They were obviously acts of pure desperation.  The Israeli Army knows they can’t stop attacks like these.  Arafat certainly can’t stop them. 

But there is one thing that can stop them.  Hope.

In the first intifada, tens of thousands of Palestinians marched for an end to occupation.  There were some bombings-but Palestinians stopped them.  When Prime Minister Barak wanted to have elections in an atmosphere of quiet, he got his quiet by lifting the siege and opening up a few roadblocks.  That was all it took.  There were no bombings because there was hope.

By your joining us, you can help bring back hope. 

Thank you.