Pro-Palestinian group sees its struggle as ‘Vietnam of our day’
Activists of the International Solidarity Movement have been feeling a sense of victory of late, flush with volunteers keen on breaking Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Activists of the International Solidarity Movement have been feeling a sense of victory of late, flush with volunteers keen on breaking Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Members of the pro-Palestinian group first sailed to Gaza in summer 2008 to challenge the siege of the Hamas-ruled territory; an offshoot of the same group organized the Gaza-bound flotilla that led to Israel’s deadly May 31 raid that killed nine activists.
The fact that the international outcry prompted Israel to ease its 3-year-old blockade and let more goods into Gaza has the activists feeling that their movement is successful.
“Around the world, we motivated people who were frustrated but didn’t know what to do, said Huwaida Arraf,” 34, co-founder of the ISM and its naval spinoff, the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the May flotilla.
Since the movement’s ships began, other groups have joined them or imitated them with their own ships trying to reach Gaza’s shores – some of them successfully.
Israel is trying to crack down harder on ISM, and the group has also come under criticism for putting volunteers in danger.
Still, more people are volunteering.
Palestinian activist Hisham Jamjoum says the since the May flotilla, 10 recruits a week have attended his workshop, required for ISM volunteers – double the average.
The ISM was launched in 2001 for sympathetic foreigners to help Palestinians throw off Israeli rule. Its founders are a mix – Arraf, a Palestinian who is a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen; her husband, Adam Shapiro, an American Jew; Neta Golan, an Israeli, and Ghassan Andoni, a Palestinian from the West Bank.
Some 7,000 people – a third of them Jews – have participated since, mainly serving as peaceful, but provocative buffers between Palestinians and Israeli forces, mostly at protests. The group was first noticed in 2002 when its activists rushed past Israeli tanks to shield the besieged Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his West Bank headquarters.
The chance to participate in a compelling conflict is popular with college-age students on summer breaks. For many Jews, it’s a chance to understand the conflict from a radically pro-Palestinian perspective.
But while most activists read about Mideast politics, volunteers can be clueless about conservative Palestinian culture. That’s led to tensions, including sexual harassment. Some Palestinians assume female activists are permissive because they don’t behave like conservative Palestinian women.
During last week’s workshop, Jamjoum, 52, laid the rules out. He asked women to cover their arms and legs. For men: long pants only. Another volunteer explained how to dodge sexual harassment.
Jamjoum taught the volunteers Arabic phrases, including please, thank you, and I’m a vegetarian. Activists don’t realize they are offending Palestinian housewives when they don’t eat their chicken dishes, he explained.
Noting a Palestinian stereotype about unwashed hippie activists, Jamjoum told the girls makeup was OK. “Some people think to show solidarity with Palestinians, you have to wear ugly clothes. No. We like you nice and clean.”
Upon graduation, an ISM dispatcher sends activists to demonstrations in coordination with Palestinian protest leaders. They distribute footage of clashes on YouTube, blogs and Facebook.
One ISM veteran – a 23-year-old American calling herself Saegan – highlights an activist’s life. Like other volunteers, she would only identity herself with a pseudonym. During her 6 months with the group, she has been battered by tear gas alongside Palestinians, but also fended off a Palestinian man who tried to rape her while she slept in a West Bank village.
On a routine day, she joined a demonstration in the town of Beit Jala against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in June. The barrier protects Israel against militants – but also swallows chunks of Palestinian land.
Some 20 Palestinian youths and activists scrambled down an olive grove, where
Israeli soldiers guarded a crane clearing land for the barrier. Soldiers fired tear gas. Palestinian youths hurled rocks. Saegan stood close Israeli soldiers. “You are stealing Palestinian land,” she said.
To Israeli officials, the activists are misguided idealists and troublemakers.
This year, Israeli forces stormed ISM offices three times, seizing equipment and arresting activists. In March, military officials broadened the definition of who is an infiltrator, allowing them to speedily deport foreign activists.
The ISM takes its own measures: They don’t keep databases, and activists use pseudonyms. Hardcore activists legally change their names to dodge an Israeli blacklist of ISM volunteers.
Stepping into confrontations can be dangerous. In 2003, Rachel Corrie, 23, of Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to block it from demolishing a home in Gaza, while British activist was killed by an Israeli soldier in Gaza. A Palestinian ISM activist was killed by a Palestinian militant in the West Bank town of Jenin.
And the May flotilla went lethally wrong.
Israel says it responded with deadly force when activists on the ship – from a
Turkish group that joined the ISM’s flotilla – attacked commandos with iron bars. ISM activists weren’t involved in the violence, but Arraf told Israeli naval officials that everybody was unarmed.
They have become the useful idiots of Islamic extremists, said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.
Palestinians have mixed views about their foreign friends.
Bassam Tamimi, a protest leader, complained activists often pressured Palestinians to stop hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers. Another leader, Shady Faraghwa said volunteers boosted morale.
The volunteers say the Palestinian conflict is their emblematic issue – as explained by a 24-year old fromDenmark who calls himself Carl: “This is the Vietnam of our generation.”
This story is by:
The Associated Press
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Haaretz Thursday, July 22, 2010
MESS Report / Gaza war probes are changing Israel’s defiant ways
Israel’s approach to dealing with violations of the laws of war during Operation Cast Lead has shifted radically since the fighting ended a year and a half ago.
Israel’s policy on how to deal with violations of the laws of war during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip has undergone a radical change during the year and half since the fighting ended. In the meantime, it seems, Israel has paid the full price for its original position without managing to reap any significant profits from its turnabout.
Right after the fighting ended, the Israel Defense Forces’ approach was that everything done in Gaza was completely proper. Violations by individual soldiers, if they occurred at all, were very rare, and in any case, things like that happen in wartime.
The IDF’s internal probes were also begun with a feeling there was no need for haste. The message that trickled down from the top, even if never stated explicitly, was that it was better to keep the probes low profile and avoid legal action whenever possible. If we don’t say anything, the theory went, it will all blow over.
Testimony that contradicted the official line (such as that given by graduates of the Rabin premilitary academy and soldiers who spoke to the Breaking the Silence organization ) was publicly denounced as lies that aid the enemy. The United Nation’s Goldstone Commission – which Israelis, with considerable justice, suspected from the start of blatant bias in the Palestinians’ favor – received no official cooperation from Israel.
But international criticism of the Gaza operation just kept growing, reaching its crescendo with publication of the Goldstone report. In response, Israel changed its tune.
Many of the army’s operational probes, which had been completed in the interim, were followed by criminal legal proceedings or at least disciplinary action against officers and soldiers involved in problematic incidents. The Foreign Ministry and the IDF were also careful to send periodic reports to the UN that detailed the steps Israel had taken since the last report. The latest of these bulletins was sent off on Tuesday.
Now, the time has come for the next, predictable, episode of this saga. Just as happened during the first intifada (and, to a lesser degree, during the second as well ), officers are growing increasingly frustrated with the intensive legal scrutiny of their actions. The military prosecution and the military police are just doing their assigned job, but many field officers feel as if the job is being done with excessive diligence, with no concern for the toll it takes on them.
A few weeks ago, Army Radio reported some astonishing statistics: The Military Police have thus far questioned more than 500 officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza operation. Those questioned included almost every battalion commander involved in the fighting, and some of these commanders have been questioned around 10 times already. One division commander and one brigade commander have already been reprimanded, and another brigade commander is still under investigation for the accidental killing of 21 civilians in an aerial attack on Gaza City.
In conversations with battalion and brigade commanders in recent weeks, the following allegations have been heard repeatedly: Officers are being harassed by a plethora of interrogations that have no justification. Reports on the steps that have been taken, including indictments or the opening of investigations against senior officers, have been given to the UN and the media even before the army itself is informed. And the changes now being ordered in the IDF’s combat doctrine have not been sufficiently explained to the troops.
These are all serious allegations. The IDF’s high command must address them thoroughly if it wants to prevent a crisis of motivation among the troops on the front lines.
