Palestinians' lives invisible to Israelis
By EDWARD MAST
GUEST COLUMNIST
SEATTLE
POST-INTELLIGENCER October 18, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/336015_insivible19.html
On a visit to Tel Aviv last month, I asked some Israeli friends
what people in Israel were saying about the Palestinian situation. Not much,
they told me. Israelis are more concerned about the corruption charges against
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, coming on the heels of corruption charges against
previous governments. Palestinians and their issues, my friends told me, are
becoming more and more invisible to the Israeli people.
Palestinian lives are kept invisible in David Brumer's Oct. 10
guest column, "Despite concerns, Israel a vibrant country." Also
invisible are Israel's military occupation and the ongoing takeover of
Palestini an land. If Brumer had traveled to the other side of the wall, as I
did, he could have witnessed the many ways that the Israeli occupation crushes
people with poverty, violence and injustice.
Before visiting Tel Aviv, I spent two weeks working with a theater
in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank. During that short time,
the Israeli army killed at least 15 Palestinians in the occupied territories;
several killed were children. For Palestinians, these are regular occurrences.
Over the past seven years, the Israeli army has killed more than 4,000
Palestinians. The majority of these, even according to Israeli statistics, have
been unarmed civilians. Many thousands more have been wounded or kidnapped. The
severe underreporting of Palestinian casualties in the U.S. and Israel can
leave the impression that Palestinian lives have less value.
While I was there, Brian Avery came from the United States to
testify in Jerusalem against the Israeli army. Avery is a p eace activist who
was shot in the face by the Israeli army in 2003. At first the Israeli army
denied that the shooting took place, but has been forced to launch an
investigation now that Avery is bringing a suit.
In Ramallah, I learned that, though there is plenty of water near
the city, the several hundred thousand residents had spent the summer with
running water available only three or four days each week. That sort of fact
tends to be invisible to Israelis, along with the reasons.
Ramallah is near the cluster of West Bank aquifers, which are the
main sources of water for both the West Bank and Israel, but 80 percent of the
West Bank's water goes to Israel and Israeli settlements. For decades, Israel
has used its military occupation of the West Bank to build an illegal network of
settlements around the water sources. Palestinians have been beaten, killed and
driven away to make space for these settlements, and Israel has built a
continuous wall, not on the border o f Israel but inside Palestinian territory,
which effectively annexes the settlements and water resources into Israel.
Israelis are told the wall is for their security. Palestinians
call it the annexation wall, and it is difficult for them to believe Israel can
be a partner for peace while the Israeli government continues taking
Palestinian land for settlements, building the wall to annex them and
maintaining the system of checkpoints that paralyze movement and life in the
West Bank.
With some colleagues, I spent one day traveling from Ramallah to
Jerusalem. The eight-mile trip took 2 1/2 hours. In Ramallah, the wall is 25
feet high, and the Israeli checkpoint is like an airport security station. We
lined up for more than half an hour with Palestinians at a remote-controlled
8-foot turnstile where people had to crowd like cattle and wait for a green
light to get as many through as possible before the light turned red.
Once past X-ray security and more turnstiles, we boarded shared
taxis for what should have been a short ride to Jerusalem. However, the Israeli
military had set up an additional temporary "flying checkpoint" some
1,640 feet down the road, forcing several lanes of traffic down to a single
lane for stopping and searching. That took almost an hour.
Business in Ramallah is at a standstill. Poverty is everywhere;
jobs are not to be found. The people at the checkpoint said to us, "Take
pictures. Tell people what is happening here." Some Israelis, such as my
Tel Aviv friends, no longer accept the excuse that the virtual imprisonment and
killing of Palestinians are justified by the need for security.
The Israeli government has recently confiscated more Palestinian
land near Jerusalem to build a segregated road, literally underground, for
Palestinians. Israeli settlers will be able to commute back and forth from the
territories without having so mu ch as to see a Palestinian. Invisibility here
is no accident.
Edward Mast is a Seattle playwright who volunteers with the
Palestine Information Project; palestineinformation.org.
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Last updated 4:48 p.m. PT