Apr 14, 2007 – Nablus
During a recent raid on the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) operating in the Sheikh Munis neighborhood surrounded a house and began demolishing it, though the man they had come to arrest was not present. Below the scene, on the main road from Huwarra Checkpoint toward Balata Refugee Camp, soldiers in armored vehicles patrolled in an effort to prevent residents and journalists from accessing the area. Soldiers fired tear gas, percussion grenades and rubber-coated ammunition as local youths responded to the incursion by throwing stones.
As a young man passed a military humvee, soldiers reached out and began attempting to pull him into the vehicle. The boy protested and was soon joined by second man who spoke with the soldiers in an effort to secure his release. Subsequently, both men were made to stand in front of the humvee to discourage the stone throwers. The incident was caught on tape by a human rights activist and has set off a fresh round of intense media scrutiny into the use of human shields by the Israeli Occupation Forces.
Sam Neil, of the Research Journalism Initiative, a human rights organization based in the West Bank, filmed the incident and was shocked by the international reaction.
“I’m surprised by the debate this footage has sparked,” said Neil. “The international community is treating this as if there is a chance the Israeli military might be using human shields. There is no doubt they use human shields, and have as a standard practice for a very long time.”
The use of human shields has long been forbidden by international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the practice was even banned by Israel’s own supreme court in an Oct, 2005 ruling. The decision forbids using civilians for military purposes even if they have agreed to do so, as the dramatic imbalance of power in such situations renders genuine consent impossible to obtain. In an affidavit presented by Adallah, an Arab Israeli human rights organization, an Israeli reservist admitted, "No civilian would refuse a 'request' presented to him at 0300 by a group of soldiers aiming their cocked rifles at him." Despite the clear requirements of the court rulings, Israeli forces have routinely violated human rights law and continue to employ civilians during military operations.
Often, the practice can be far subtler than firing over the shoulders of a captive. By confiscating Palestinians’ identity cards, Israeli soldiers are able to detain civilians at length during military incursions. Palestinians accosted by soldiers without ID are immediately arrested. Said Neil, “I’ve personally witnessed Israeli soldiers using human shields in various capacities nearly a dozen times since 2003. I’ve seen soldiers detain adults with their children for hours, forcing them to sit beside military vehicles for their IDs to be returned while soldiers conduct house searches and other operations.”
“One of the fundamental problems is the requirement for video proof of such activities. The West dismisses victims’ testimony immediately. The dismissal is racist and endemic.”
During Israel’s February 2007 invasion into Nablus, human rights organizations documented several incidents in which the IOF forced Palestinian civilians, including children, to serve as human shields during search operations. The Research Journalism Initiative submitted a filmed interview with eleven-year-old Jihan Tahdush to the Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem, in which she recounted how soldiers had kidnapped her and forced her to lead them into neighboring homes.
In her testimony to B’Tselem, Tahdush said, “I went down the steps leading to the neighborhood. The soldiers walked behind me. The soldier had his weapon aimed in front of him. He said to me, "Slowly, slowly, don't be scared, we're with you."
During the invasion, an Associated Press television crew managed to film Israeli soldiers forcing 24-year-old Sameh Amira to lead them into homes of suspected resistance fighters. The rare footage ignited widespread international outrage over the practice. The Israeli military says it has launched an inquiry, though without a thorough, independent investigation, such an inquiry is inadequate.
“The army launching its own investigation is equivalent to a company conducting its own IRS tax audit,” said Neil. “It is time that the international community hold Israel responsible for its disregard of human rights law.”
For its part, the IOF has released a statement that it will investigate the most recent incident, and that the commanding officer, whose name was not released, has been suspended from operational duties. Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti dismissed the announcement.
"They are treating it as an isolated incident," he said. "The problem is systematic and ... they (troops) continued the practice despite the (Supreme) Court order," he said.
Sam Neil is an activist with the Research Journalism Initiative in Nablus. He can be contacted at ripplescross@yahoo.com.
www.ResearchJournalismInitiative.net
Monday, April 16, 2007
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Throwing Stones on Google Earth
At this very moment, a corporate imaging satellite is circling Earth in Orwellian orbit, spying the surface and publishing our photos in the grandest of larceny. We fall from Sputnik onto our own roofs, spot our cars, twist our bodies and spread our arms to catch the wind like wounded birds, pull back on air and howl recklessly in screaming descent to the safety of swimming pool suburban splashdowns.
If I looked better in black, I’d vote anarchist. But I like the way Google Earth makes the world feel smaller. I plot fantastically on the White House, hunt nukes in North Korea and prowl African plains in successive instants, grip Sumatra with Mickey Mouse kid gloves, spin the globe East, sail back to Denver and hover over my girlfriend’s apartment. If I had money, an ill-fated illusion I’m only now coming to terms with, I’d upgrade my membership to this planetary community, low angle a live shot and peer through her window to see if my clothes still pile the floor. As a freeloader, though, the picture simply goes flat in an awkward reminder that intimacy comes only to those willing to pay the cost. For now, I’m contented to know that I’m as far from home as I can get, drinking a beer with my friend Faraj in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Unlike me, Faraj didn’t choose Balata Camp. He came with his family from their own camp in Jordan just as the Intifada broke out. At a rally against the newly erected and now infamous Huwarra checkpoint, he bought his residency with a bullet to the hip and the legitimacy that blood on the street affords the foreign. A year and a half later, he was in an Israeli prison for harboring wanted men. Now, desperate to return home to his family, he’s stranded, a secret evidence security risk. Out of one prison and into another.
His friends call him Urdani, (Jordanian) and though he’s Palestinian through and through, I call him Ajnabi. It means ‘foreigner,’ and though it’s not intrinsically derogatory, there remains something harmlessly disparaging to be consistently addressed as an outsider. I would know.
Like a lot of the foreign volunteers here, I find myself embroiled in ceaseless effort to fit in and shed my strangeness. I smoke local cigarettes in harsh quantities and burn successive pots of Arabic coffee, an acquired art for which I have an obvious learning disability. I like that Faraj tells me straight when I’ve blown another attempt. I appreciate his teasing and the look on his face that assures me that although I am still ajnabi, in his flat, that’s a good thing.
Technically, you’re never really alone in a West Bank refugee camp. Twenty-five thousand people share a single square kilometer of cinder block oblivion. Narrow alleys jag across each other, kids pause marbles to pelt strangers in playful trauma, clothes drip from Little Italy’s memory and garbage smolders in the blank spots. It’s an incongruous sort of loneliness to wander the crowd without your friends, your shows, your jokes.
My speech becomes a silly aberration of subconsciously broken grammar. It’s the next best thing to actual Arabic, but regression nonetheless. "I live here since before three months," and so forth, peppered with ‘yanis’ in place of the ums… and proven phrases like Esh Ekbeer! (What’s up big guy!) These make people laugh, but I don’t have to do that with Faraj; he gets it. He gets me. There’s a reason the foreigners find him. We make him happy. Maybe we remind each other of home. But we leave, as foreigners do, one by one, uncertain if we will be blessed Israel’s permission to return. “I become don’t care,” Faraj says. He’s grown used to being left behind by friends, many forever, one by one. Our friends from California look at him, puzzled, and I laugh because to me, he makes perfect sense.
When I start to sleep through the gunfight nights and my dreams turn to television and Chinese food, I turn to my good friend Google Earth. Faraj and I spin the planet and look for his mother’s home, buried in a camp four times Balata’s size, somewhere near the airport between Amman and Zarqa. After seven years, it takes a few minutes to find his way back. He missed his sister’s wedding. He missed a lot of things.
We sail together over the Atlantic, to Colorado, to my mother’s home in Highlands Ranch, where white flights flourish and transplanted trees struggle through foreign soil. Manicured streets wind snaking in successive half circles toward a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill. As we fall from heaven toward suburbia, I brace for gasping disbelief at the size of our house. A British girlfriend toured our mansion once, sickened by splendor and awed by a garage door that lifted in magical intuition upon our arrival. Faraj was strangely comfortable with its appearance.
“They’re all in a circle, man. Like big family.” I admitted that of the seven houses within earshot of my mother’s home, I new the name of only one person, Max, the black guy, our own ajnabi. “The houses are so close together,” he said.
“Faraj, you’re a Palestinian. You’re telling me our houses are too close together?” He laughed. “You know,” I said, “people that live in glass refugee camps shouldn’t throw stones.”
If I looked better in black, I’d vote anarchist. But I like the way Google Earth makes the world feel smaller. I plot fantastically on the White House, hunt nukes in North Korea and prowl African plains in successive instants, grip Sumatra with Mickey Mouse kid gloves, spin the globe East, sail back to Denver and hover over my girlfriend’s apartment. If I had money, an ill-fated illusion I’m only now coming to terms with, I’d upgrade my membership to this planetary community, low angle a live shot and peer through her window to see if my clothes still pile the floor. As a freeloader, though, the picture simply goes flat in an awkward reminder that intimacy comes only to those willing to pay the cost. For now, I’m contented to know that I’m as far from home as I can get, drinking a beer with my friend Faraj in a Palestinian refugee camp.
Unlike me, Faraj didn’t choose Balata Camp. He came with his family from their own camp in Jordan just as the Intifada broke out. At a rally against the newly erected and now infamous Huwarra checkpoint, he bought his residency with a bullet to the hip and the legitimacy that blood on the street affords the foreign. A year and a half later, he was in an Israeli prison for harboring wanted men. Now, desperate to return home to his family, he’s stranded, a secret evidence security risk. Out of one prison and into another.
His friends call him Urdani, (Jordanian) and though he’s Palestinian through and through, I call him Ajnabi. It means ‘foreigner,’ and though it’s not intrinsically derogatory, there remains something harmlessly disparaging to be consistently addressed as an outsider. I would know.
Like a lot of the foreign volunteers here, I find myself embroiled in ceaseless effort to fit in and shed my strangeness. I smoke local cigarettes in harsh quantities and burn successive pots of Arabic coffee, an acquired art for which I have an obvious learning disability. I like that Faraj tells me straight when I’ve blown another attempt. I appreciate his teasing and the look on his face that assures me that although I am still ajnabi, in his flat, that’s a good thing.
Technically, you’re never really alone in a West Bank refugee camp. Twenty-five thousand people share a single square kilometer of cinder block oblivion. Narrow alleys jag across each other, kids pause marbles to pelt strangers in playful trauma, clothes drip from Little Italy’s memory and garbage smolders in the blank spots. It’s an incongruous sort of loneliness to wander the crowd without your friends, your shows, your jokes.
My speech becomes a silly aberration of subconsciously broken grammar. It’s the next best thing to actual Arabic, but regression nonetheless. "I live here since before three months," and so forth, peppered with ‘yanis’ in place of the ums… and proven phrases like Esh Ekbeer! (What’s up big guy!) These make people laugh, but I don’t have to do that with Faraj; he gets it. He gets me. There’s a reason the foreigners find him. We make him happy. Maybe we remind each other of home. But we leave, as foreigners do, one by one, uncertain if we will be blessed Israel’s permission to return. “I become don’t care,” Faraj says. He’s grown used to being left behind by friends, many forever, one by one. Our friends from California look at him, puzzled, and I laugh because to me, he makes perfect sense.
When I start to sleep through the gunfight nights and my dreams turn to television and Chinese food, I turn to my good friend Google Earth. Faraj and I spin the planet and look for his mother’s home, buried in a camp four times Balata’s size, somewhere near the airport between Amman and Zarqa. After seven years, it takes a few minutes to find his way back. He missed his sister’s wedding. He missed a lot of things.
We sail together over the Atlantic, to Colorado, to my mother’s home in Highlands Ranch, where white flights flourish and transplanted trees struggle through foreign soil. Manicured streets wind snaking in successive half circles toward a cul-de-sac at the bottom of the hill. As we fall from heaven toward suburbia, I brace for gasping disbelief at the size of our house. A British girlfriend toured our mansion once, sickened by splendor and awed by a garage door that lifted in magical intuition upon our arrival. Faraj was strangely comfortable with its appearance.
“They’re all in a circle, man. Like big family.” I admitted that of the seven houses within earshot of my mother’s home, I new the name of only one person, Max, the black guy, our own ajnabi. “The houses are so close together,” he said.
“Faraj, you’re a Palestinian. You’re telling me our houses are too close together?” He laughed. “You know,” I said, “people that live in glass refugee camps shouldn’t throw stones.”
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