No writing for a couple of months - after Palestine, a kind of emotional exhaustion. The first week or two back in Oxford was dissociative: I felt radically detached from everybody and everything around me; and when people asked, “What was it like?”, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to put it in a few words, and wasn’t sure if people wanted to hear the long version. In fact I was in a kind of shock, and found it difficult to talk much at all. Continue Reading »
In Nablus they are not too used to foreigners. During the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005, Nablus came under particularly heavy attack from the Israeli army. In this five-year period, army air strikes and incursions killed an average of one person in Nablus every three days. Curfews were also especially harsh here: in a three-month period in 2002, there were 70 days on which citizens of Nablus were not allowed out of their houses at all, and on the other days they were only allowed out for a couple of hours each day.
The signs are still here: bullet-holes, damaged buildings, martyr posters adorning the walls. And Nablus has its own ambience: it feels out-of-the-way, unvisited, unattended-to. Continue Reading »
Bil’in is the longest-running and the best known of the Palestinian protests against the Annexation Wall. The Wall cuts right through their village land, and although even the Israeli Supreme court ruled that this imposes unacceptably on the village’s livelihood, the wall still stands.
The Bil’in protest has become famous enough that there is even a small emergent tourist infrastructure here: people sell Free-Palestine trinkets; the “International House” provides a place where visitors can stay; and on protest days a felafel shop opens across the road from the International House, even though this is Friday, the day on which most villages are all closed up.
Continue Reading »
This makes me happy and sad, in no particular order.
Dear Mr Smith and Mr Burt,
Thanks to both of you for responding to my email in which I raised my concerns about human rights violations by the Israeli forces occupying Palestine.
Thankyou Mr Smith, especially, for highlighting “the need for aid to reach those who need it [in Gaza]”, and for your commitment to “end the military occupation and the withdrawal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank”. These are sentiments with which I whole-heartedly agree.
Mr Burt, I am very thankful that you also took the time to answer my letter, in your capacity as Minister responsible for the Middle East. However, your letter did not actually address the issue of human and civil rights for Palestinians who are living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. This was the main issue that I raised in my original email to Andrew Smith. Continue Reading »
Dear Andrew,
Thank you for your letter of 25 June to the Foreign Secretary on behalf of your constituent John Mansfield, about Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I am replying as Minister responsible for the Middle East.
We believe there is a need to make urgent progress on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before the window to such a solution closes. Continue Reading »
Dear Mr Mansfield
Thank you for your email of 21st July expressing concern about the human rights of the Palestinian people, a concern I share. I have raised this many times in Parliament and with the British Government, particularly most recently in the context of Gaza with the need for aid to rech those who need it, and justice where war crimes are alleged. Continue Reading »
Andrew Smith
MP (Labour) for East Oxford
[Sent using WriteToThem]
Dear Andrew Smith,
I’ve been concerned for years about the human and civil rights situation in Palestine; it bothers me a lot more than other such situations around the world, because the British government that claims to represent me is an ally of Israel.
I believe that the Israeli policies on Palestine constitute gross violations of human and civil rights. I am right now spending a month as a volunteer in the West Bank, working with a team that documents
abuses and creates an international presence in situations where Palestinians are most at risk. Continue Reading »
Islam, Youth Against Settlements activist, Hebron, 25 June 2010
“I was a little boy when the First Intifada broke out. My brother was old enough that he got involved in the stone-throwing against Israeli soldiers; one day he had been out throwing stones, and then he came home holding a sponge to his face. He was injured, but he didn’t want to go to hospital, for fear of being arrested there. I thought this was very good, I thought my brother was a hero.
“But then there was crying in the next room; my grandmother was screaming and my mother just fell down on the floor. My brother had been shot in the eye. Continue Reading »
Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. But there is a house in Sheikh Jarrah, in Uthman Ben Affan Street, that is divided in two: the Al-Kurds, a Palestinian family, still live there, but they are confined to the back part of the house. In the front part a group of Zionist settlers moved in by force, assisted by Israeli army and police. There is some kind of internal wall or divider separating the back from the front.
Other houses have been lost altogether. On the other side of Uthman Ben Affan, two large house have been completely occupied by settlers - as many as 50 perhaps, living in just two houses. They are very enthusiastic, these settlers, and Sheikh Jarrah is a key target in their program of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem. Continue Reading »