invasion in ramallah

People’s Weekly World Newspaper, 01/26/02 00:00

RAMALLAH, Palestine – Since the assassination of Raid Karmi in Tull Karem four days ago I got that creeping feeling again – the one I get when it obvious that the already hellish situation here in Palestine is going to escalate. The feeling I get when I see that once again Israeli policy under Sharon’s right-wing government doing everything to set this land ablaze.

“Sharon wants a bombing before Zinni returns,” we told each other, and sure enough he got it. There is a line from a Hebrew song I love – “Things that you see from there you can’t see from here” I know that outside of Palestine the thought that Israel’s policy makers knowingly provoke suicide operations must seem ludicrous. From here it is an undeniable fact.

Ariel Sharon is a master at provocation. He knows how to hit exactly where it hurts and more accurately, he knows how to humiliate a people to the point of suicidal recklessness.

Raid Karmi’s assassination, the home demolitions in Rafah and then in occupied east Jerusalem on the one hand, and pressuring President Arafat to arrest the head of the second biggest political faction in the PLO, thus losing his legitimacy as a leader of all Palestinians did the trick. The horrendous Bat-Mitzvah killing has now legitimized renewing the military offensive against the Palestinian people. Prime-Minster Sharon is back on his home turf.

I have been spending the last few days in lower Rammalah. Earlier today I met my friend Haki in the street. He lives on Al Arsal Street, which was occupied two days ago. He carried a plastic bag with his pajamas in it. He was coming to stay with us in Lower Ramallah. I was going to the Internet cafe and would see him later. Or so I thought.

With nightfall Israeli tanks entered lower Ramallha and advanced until they where five minutes from the city center. I was at the cafe, which hurriedly closed when we began to hear the shooting from the street. My friends and I found a brave taxi driver that agreed to take us home. Well, he almost took us home.

As soon as we got out of the taxi we saw that their was shooting- red balls flying across the night sky – right above our house. Immediately we where called in by the neighbors, who served us tea as their little girl huddled closer to her mother with every explosion we heard from outside.

Israeli forces are currently occupying four neighborhoods one on each side of Ramallah – Lower Ramallah, Al Irsal street and Um el-Shirayat and Al-Bireh. The Palestinian Authority has issued an order that no one should shoot at the tanks, nonetheless we hear some gunfire, which is responded to with rounds of heavy artillery from the tanks.

I collected my courage and after wishing our hosts and new found friends goodbye we held hands and walked back towards the city center. We walked close to the walls hoping to avoid sniper fire. We found an open Internet café in the city center – the owner lives in one of the occupied neighborhoods and can’t go home. Here we checked out BBC, CNN, Haaretz – someone must be mentioning this somewhere, but we found nothing. Has the reinvasion of area “A” also become non-news like the siege and the killings of unarmed youth? Now that I’ve written this report we will again venture into the streets to sleep at another friend’s house. The night has just begun …

Neta Golan posted this report on the Gush Shalom Internet bulletin board.

jan 26 2002
RAMALLAH, Palestine – Since the assassination of Raid Karmi in Tull Karem four days ago I got that creeping feeling again – the one I get when it obvious that the already hellish situation here in Palestine is going to escalate. The feeling I get when I see that once again Israeli policy under Sharon’s right-wing government doing everything to set this land ablaze.

“Sharon wants a bombing before Zinni returns,” we told each other, and sure enough he got it. There is a line from a Hebrew song I love – “Things that you see from there you can’t see from here” I know that outside of Palestine the thought that Israel’s policy makers knowingly provoke suicide operations must seem ludicrous. From here it is an undeniable fact.

Ariel Sharon is a master at provocation. He knows how to hit exactly where it hurts and more accurately, he knows how to humiliate a people to the point of suicidal recklessness.

Raid Karmi’s assassination, the home demolitions in Rafah and then in occupied east Jerusalem on the one hand, and pressuring President Arafat to arrest the head of the second biggest political faction in the PLO, thus losing his legitimacy as a leader of all Palestinians did the trick. The horrendous Bat-Mitzvah killing has now legitimized renewing the military offensive against the Palestinian people. Prime-Minster Sharon is back on his home turf.

I have been spending the last few days in lower Rammalah. Earlier today I met my friend Haki in the street. He lives on Al Arsal Street, which was occupied two days ago. He carried a plastic bag with his pajamas in it. He was coming to stay with us in Lower Ramallah. I was going to the Internet cafe and would see him later. Or so I thought.

With nightfall Israeli tanks entered lower Ramallha and advanced until they where five minutes from the city center. I was at the cafe, which hurriedly closed when we began to hear the shooting from the street. My friends and I found a brave taxi driver that agreed to take us home. Well, he almost took us home.

As soon as we got out of the taxi we saw that their was shooting- red balls flying across the night sky – right above our house. Immediately we where called in by the neighbors, who served us tea as their little girl huddled closer to her mother with every explosion we heard from outside.

Israeli forces are currently occupying four neighborhoods one on each side of Ramallah – Lower Ramallah, Al Irsal street and Um el-Shirayat and Al-Bireh. The Palestinian Authority has issued an order that no one should shoot at the tanks, nonetheless we hear some gunfire, which is responded to with rounds of heavy artillery from the tanks.

I collected my courage and after wishing our hosts and new found friends goodbye we held hands and walked back towards the city center. We walked close to the walls hoping to avoid sniper fire. We found an open Internet café in the city center – the owner lives in one of the occupied neighborhoods and can’t go home. Here we checked out BBC, CNN, Haaretz – someone must be mentioning this somewhere, but we found nothing. Has the reinvasion of area “A” also become non-news like the siege and the killings of unarmed youth? Now that I’ve written this report we will again venture into the streets to sleep at another friend’s house. The night has just begun …

Neta Golan posted this report on the Gush Shalom Internet bulletin board.

1.Simply. Not. News.

1.Simply. Not. News.
March 4th, 2006
By Neta Golan

I work in the ISM media office. On February 19th 2006 the Israeli milit1ary once again invaded Balata Refugee Camp. I remember the first invasion that Sharon orchestrated into the camps during this intifada, in February 2002. I remember that I could not believe it was happening. Never in my worst nightmares would I believe, had someone told me, that four years later such horror would become
‘normal.’

IWPS and ISM volunteers called me in the office as they accompanied Palestinian medics in their efforts to give medical treatment to the wounded and sick in the camp. They called me when the Israeli military shot towards ambulances and denied them access to Balata. They called me when they witnessed unarmed 22-year-old Mohammad Subkhi Abu Hanade being shot in the chest by a sniper through his bedroom window. I wrote a press release, emailed and faxed it and then called the news agencies and journalists.

No one wrote about it. Not even the Arabic press which is always more responsive. The next morning I looked everywhere for news of the invasion and found none.

That day Sixteen year old Kamal Khalili was shot and was clinically dead by the time he made it to the hospital. The woman that answered the phone at Agency France Press said ‘call us back when he dies’ and hung up.

The volunteers called me when soldiers refused to let them treat ill people in families whose homes had been occupied. They called me when people in the camp ran out of food and baby formula. They called me when the youth of the camp who defended their homes with stones and makeshift barricades were shot at wounded and killed. They gave me the names and the ages of children shot at with live ammunition.
I wrote it all down even though I knew that the mainstream media did not want to know.

I wrote it down knowing that wounded, hungry and imprisoned Palestinian civilians are simply. Not. News.

____________________

global uprising

eccerpts from global uprisingAn Israeli Activist in Palestine

Neta Golan

Neta Golan Hares is a beautiful West Bank village that has become my home for the last month. Ancient olive trees – more than 1,500 of them – have been cut down or uprooted in the past two months by the Israeli army. Now Israeli settlers surround the village. As with many other Palestinian villages, Hares has been under siege from the beginning of the Intifada. Its inhabitants have been denied the right to move in or out, to go to work, to receive medical treat ment, or to study.

Nablus to Tel Aviv

posted on mothersforpeace

Nablus to Tel Aviv
Neta Golan – Israeli
June 24, 2003

My father passed away last week.

I took Nawal my two month old daughter and attempted to go to Telaviv to attend the funeral and grieve with my family. Nablus, the city I live in was besieged and completely sealed off. This has been the case for most of the last two years. Israeli soldiers threatened to shoot anyone approaching the checkpoint.
I had a letter from the hospital regarding a checkup that Nawal needed to do in Ramallah so we arrived at the Hawara check point in an ambulance. The ambulance stopped at the designated place. The soldiers did not shoot, thank god but they also did not approach us. After about half an hour the driver decided to try to speak to them. He stepped out of the ambulance. Guns were pointed in his direction. He stepped back in. All we could do was wait. All the while settler buses headed for the settlements that surround Nablus whisked past unchecked. Swallowing my outrage I thanked god that my baby was not suffering , that no one in the ambulance was in critical condition. The soldiers had no way of knowing that. But had they known it is likely it would have made no difference.

A year ago I was accompanying an ambulance through a checkpoint in Jenin. A young man with a bullet in his head was sprawled at the back of the ambulance, a doctor was pushing air into his lungs with a manual respirator. I sat next to the driver and said nothing while we waited and watched the patient’s condition deteriorate. I know that being confrontational with
soldiers can often aggravate a situation. I could not risk that happening. I calmed myself and waited for an opening. I offered the solider a cigarette. He accepted. I gave him another one for the other soldier, and then I ventured:

-“Is it really necessary that we wait so long? This guy is dying.”
The soldier looked embarrassed
-“We have to make sure he is not wanted ”
-” If you find out he’s wanted you can come and pick
him up from the hospital. He’s not going to run away.
He has a bullet in his head.”
-“I’ll see what I can do.”

That day we spent on hour and a half at the checkpoint. Time that assured that the young man’s brain damage was irreversible. The soldier, a young man himself, was just doing his job. On the day of my father’s funeral we were “only” delayed for an hour. It was the third time Nawal made this journey since her birth. Despite the risk involved in getting in and out I came often because I knew my father was dying. I needed him to see his first grand child, to tell him I loved him, to say good by. After the funeral we spent a week with our Israeli family.

My husband who is Palestinian is forbidden to enter Israel\ Palestine that was occupied in 1948. It was hard that he could not be with me. But I knew that I was privileged to
be able to grieve with my family. I kept thinking of my friend Amal, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. With huge hazel eyes and dark black hair. Her family was forced to leave Palestine for Jordan before she was born. Her husband, Abed, is from the west bank. They have two beautiful children. If she leaves the west bank to see her family in Jordan, she will not be allowed back. Her parents have only seen their grandchildren in pictures. Her father was old and Ill and she could not see him. He died and she could not be at his
burial or comfort her mother. Today she refuses to accept that her father is dead. It is not death that she can’t deal with. For people living under occupation must live with death every day. It is that fact that she was forced to choose her husband and children over her parents that she can not live with. Her hair has suddenly began going white.

The policy of denying spouses of Palestinians residency is one of the many forms that ethnic
cleansing takes here. It is a policy as old as the state of Israel but Sharon takes special pride in it. In his election campaign he boasted that he had stopped Palestinians from entering Israel (greater) by stopping family reunification completely. Amal will never see her father
again. Many thousands of Palestinians share her fate.

Back home in Nablus Nawal and myself came back to our Palestinian family and to the routine of waking up every night from the explosion of homes being destroyed or tanks thundering through the streets and shooting. In the meantime Nawal has learned to smile and when she smiles she shines like the sun.