"Gila Svirsky On the Pope's Visit to Israel"

"Rabbis for Human Rights (in Israel) offer an informative addition to your Pesach (Passover) Haggadah"

"Urgent Appeal for messages of hope and support for Middle East peaceworkers who feel alone"

"ISRAELI PEACEMAKERS SEND YOM KIPPUR PRAYERS AND INFORMATION"

MIDEASTWEB/PEACE VIEWPOINTS
by Ami Isseroff

Conscientious Objection in Israel

Amos Oz and Others on Intifada II

"On Helicopter Gunships & Jewish Moral Responsibility" by Marc Ellis

To IPPEN (Israeli-Palestinian Peace Education Network)




IPF Friday: M.J. Rosenberg's Weekly Opinion Column
Washington, D.C., February 11, 2005, Issue #213
www.israelipolicyforum.org

Hebron Horrors

The Sharm el-Sheikh summit was a success by almost any reckoning. But let's not get carried away.

Even the complete end to terrorism and reprisals would not signify an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It would only free the two sides to start negotiating over the issues which produced the violence in the first place.

This reality was brought home to me during my stint as an official US observer of the January 9th Palestinian election. Our eighty-person National Democratic Institute group was broken into forty teams and then dispatched throughout the West Bank and Gaza. My partner and I were assigned to a dozen polling places in Hebron, the second largest city in the West Bank.

Hebron is a city considered holy by both Jews and Muslims because of the presence there of the Cave of Machpela, traditionally thought to be the burial place of Abraham, the patriarch of both Judaism and Islam. Predominantly Arab, Jews also lived in the city, adjacent to the tomb, until 1929 when a pogrom launched by Arab fanatics resulted in the murder of 69 Jews and the end of the Jewish presence in the city.

In 1967, following the Six Day War -- with Israel now in control of the West Bank, including Hebron -- ultra-religious Jewish nationalists pressured the Israeli government to permit Jewish settlers to reclaim, and move into, properties that had belonged to the Jewish community prior to 1929.

The government refused. It arranged for Jewish worship inside the tomb but not for civilian settlement inside the city, which it considered to be both impractical and provocative. Only a tiny group of extremists (many from outside Israel) had any interest in living inside Hebron and - in the midst of a city of 160,000 Palestinians - they would need to be defended by hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers.

The settlers moved in anyway, establishing illegal outposts in the heart of Hebron, which have been tolerated by successive Israeli governments for 36 years. Following the Oslo agreements, the Israeli army withdrew from all Palestinian cities except Hebron, where troops remained to defend the settlers. In 1997, the Israeli army withdrew from 80% of Hebron, remaining only in an area labeled H-2 which includes the Cave of Machpela, the Casbah (Arab market) and the Jewish settlements.

Some 400 settlers live in H-2 in the midst of 30,000 Palestinians.

Last month, I visited H-2 despite being told by an Israeli friend that it is "the worst place in the West Bank." How so? "The settlers there are religious fanatics and dedicate their lives to terrorizing the Palestinians with the goal of driving them all out. The Palestinians can't fight back because the army won't let them. On top of all that, the settlers hate the soldiers almost as much as they hate the Palestinians because the soldiers try to curb their activities. These soldiers are in a situation where they have to defend fanatics who routinely refer to them as Nazis."

But, he added, "so long as the settlers are there, the soldiers must remain as well. Snipers, shooting from the hills, have killed Jews [including a two year old, Shalhevet Pass] and, so the soldiers need to be there, no matter how much they hate it."

I walked into the heart of H-2 following a short inquisition by an IDF soldier. My first stop was the Ibrahami Mosque, which encompasses the Tomb of the Patriarchs. As I walked down the steps toward the mosque, a young Palestinian made the point of informing me that I was following the same route Jewish zealot Baruch Goldstein took when, in February 1994, he burst into the mosque and shot dead 29 Muslims at prayer.

Goldstein is a hero to the Hebron settlers. His burial place (in a tourist park named after Meir Kahane) was turned into a shrine where settlers annually celebrate Goldstein's murder spree with parties and games. (In 2004, police arrested some of them for holding an illegal celebration of both the Goldstein murders and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin). For Palestinians, of course, the Goldstein massacre is a symbol of the ultimate threat.

I left the mosque and walked through the mostly deserted Casbah toward the settlers' neighborhood. There wasn't much to see, just settlers strutting around with rifles and a few Arabs trying to sell their wares in what was once a thriving market and is now mostly abandoned. And there is the graffiti in English and Hebrew promising death to all Palestinians.

But the most striking thing is the steel mesh screens (see photo) that the Arabs have installed just above the heads of pedestrians to protect them from the garbage and excrement routinely dumped by the settlers from their second floor windows. The screens catch all sorts of disgusting stuff and lethal objects like cinder blocks, although liquid debris does make its way to the ground or on the heads of anyone below.

It's an appalling sight. Imagine looking up and seeing and smelling the foulest debris just above your head, stopped only by mesh. But then everything about H-2 is appalling, including the fact that Israeli soldiers are forced to serve there.

Last summer a group of 70 soldiers who had served in Hebron created a photographic and video exhibit at a Tel Aviv college about their experiences there called, "Breaking Silence." The exhibit, which was a huge success, described from the soldiers' point of view, the dehumanizing experience that serving there had on them. Many spoke of the fear they had ’Äì not only of the Arabs or of the Jews - but of being terribly transformed as human beings by the experience.

One soldier spoke of being frightened by the "rush" he felt from giving Arabs orders. "I was ashamed of myself the day I realized that I simply enjoy the feeling of power...Forget for a moment that I think that all these Jews are nuts and that I believe we should leave the territories. But how dare [a Palestinian] say 'no' to me? I am the Law! I am the Law here!

"Once I was at a checkpoint, a so-called strangulation checkpoint, blocking the entrance to a village. On one side a line of cars wanting to get out, and on the other side a line of cars wanting to get in. I stood there, gesturing 'you to do this,' 'you do that.' You start playing with them, like a computer game. 'You come here, you go there.' You barely move, you make them obey the tip of your finger. It's a mighty feeling."

A second soldier wrote: "The thing that...affected me emotionally...was when we had just arrived in Hebron. I was on guard duty, when suddenly, from one of the small streets, a settler girl shows up and shouts at me very urgently: 'Soldier, soldier, come quickly, there's an Arab here who's attacking a girl.' I got very alarmed and advanced with my weapon cocked. The scene that unfolded was of an Arab with his two children. He's trying to protect them from another settler girl who's throwing stones at them. I blow my fuse and start screaming at her...She's screaming back that they are Arabs and should be killed...and the father, poor guy, says, with helpless eyes, 'We're used to it, we've been here a long time now, it's alright.'"

A third soldier spoke of the day a group from abroad came to visit Hebron for the Jewish holidays. "One morning, a fairly big group arrived, around 15 Jews from France. They were all religious Jews. They were in a good mood, really having a great time, and I spent my entire shift following this gang of Jews around and trying to keep them from destroying the town. They just wandered around, picked up every stone they saw, and started throwing them at Arabs' windows, and overturning whatever they came across.

"There's no horror story here: they didn't catch some Arab and kill him or anything like that, but what bothered me is that maybe someone told them that this is one place in the world where a Jew can take all of his rage out on Arab people, and simply do anything. Come to this Palestinian town, and do whatever they want, and the soldiers will always be there to back them up. Because that was my job, to protect them and make sure that nothing happened to them."

Note that this soldier said that he had no "horror story" to tell, just an ordinary day for soldiers, not to mention Palestinians, in Hebron. And that is, of course, the greatest horror.

That is why Hebron is significant. In one neighborhood, in one city, on any given day, anyone can experience the occupation at its worst -- terrible for the Palestinians and terrible for the Israelis too.

The Sharm el-Sheikh summit was a start toward a full ceasefire and the end of the Intifada. But it won't change much in Hebron or in the rest of the West Bank either. As for Gaza, Ariel Sharon is getting out. That is if extremists in the Knesset, and settlers very much like their brethren in Hebron, let him. But a start is certainly better than the status quo.

If anyone tells you that the status quo is tolerable, just tell them about Hebron.

MJ Rosenberg (email:mj847@aol.com), Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, is a long time Capitol Hill staffer and former editor of AIPAC's Near East Report. If you have colleagues or friends who would appreciate receiving this weekly letter, send an e-mail to ipfdc@ipforumdc.org.

The views expressed in IPF Friday are those of MJ Rosenberg and not necessarily of Israel Policy Forum.

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A summer with potential for non-violence
In a compelling turning point, a group launches peaceful campaign to protest the Israeli barrier

By Gary Fields, professor in the department of communication at the University of California, San Diego
Published July 25, 2004

Among the questions raised in the aftermath of the International Court of Justice opinion on the Israeli barrier--one that remains hidden but is no less critical for understanding the next phase of the conflict--is the impact of the decision on the Palestinian resistance movement against the barrier.

The fact that Palestinians have organized non-violent protests against the barrier is rarely covered by the American media preoccupied with Palestinian violence and corruption. Yet Palestinian resistance against the barrier is already embedded in a landscape of non-violent protest operating in the shadow of the barrier that promises to change the nature of the conflict this summer.

For the past 18 months, non-violent demonstrations have proliferated in West Bank localities where the barrier threatens to isolate residents from their land and undermine their livelihood.

This period also has witnessed the growth of a fledgling political movement operating outside the Palestinian Authority and the various Islamic parties. Spearheaded by prominent Palestinians such as human-rights activist Mustafa Barghouti, the movement known as the Palestinian National Initiative seeks to forge a secular, democratic resistance to occupation. Together, local organizers of non-violence against the barrier along with many other Palestinian organizations and the Palestinian Initiative are planning an ambitious campaign of non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation with a focus on the most poignant metaphor of occupation, the barrier.

Dubbed Freedom Summer to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the celebrated events of the American civil rights movement, this campaign represents a compelling political turning point in Palestinian efforts to end Israeli military rule. Organizers of Freedom Summer are contemplating nationally coordinated non-violent actions at selected sites in the West Bank, along with a mass march from Jenin in the north to Hebron along the route of the wall.

As a new and largely untested political force, however, the Palestinian Freedom Summer campaign confronts two critical issues: whether Palestinians will respond in numbers sufficient to make the non-violent campaign successful and whether Israelis will respond to the campaign of non-violent resistance with lethal force.

Mass action needed

Ghassan Andoni, director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and a central organizer of Freedom Summer, acknowledges the importance of a large Palestinian base for the campaign. Mass action is needed, he said, to overcome the limitations of circumscribed demonstrations in individual localities. For this reason organizers are aiming their efforts more broadly, modeling the non-violent campaign this summer on the historic events in Mississippi.

As to how Israeli army and police units will respond to the events planned for the Palestinian Freedom Summer, perhaps the best indication was given June 26 during a demonstration against the wall in the West Bank town of A-Ram near Jerusalem. When on that day Israeli army and police units fired an initial volley of concussion grenades at A-Ram demonstrators, they were clearly sending more than a warning to the 3,000 peacefully protesting the expansion of the separation wall.

Indeed, the explosions that cracked through the afternoon air, and the violent onslaught unleashed against the marchers by Israeli forces over the next two hours were intended as an unambiguous message. Peaceful protest against the wall in the territories occupied by Israel, whatever the outcome of the World Court decision, will not be tolerated.

Much like the actions coordinated by Palestinians against the barrier in other localities, the march in A-Ram was organized as a peaceful protest against what has come to be the most overt symbol of Israeli control over Palestinian society. That event, however, had three distinguishing elements.

First, A-Ram marked the initial day of activity against occupation and the wall associated with Freedom Summer. Second, organizers aimed at numbers not in the hundreds typical of recent demonstrations against the wall, but in the thousands. Finally, this march was to have a larger presence of Israelis and internationals joining with Palestinians against the barrier.

I came to the demonstration in A-Ram with five busloads of Israelis and internationals who would link up with a contingent of about 2,000 Palestinians. A Palestinian bagpipe band of 50 musicians accompanied Arabic and Hebrew chants that filled the afternoon air.

The march had been going 15 minutes when Israeli soldiers, without provocation, charged toward protesters and unloaded the initial volley of stun grenades at the crowd. In the next instant they fired the first of hundreds of tear gas canisters. Peaceful protest gave way to the sounds and smell of violence.

I had been photographing the demonstration near the Israeli barrage and became engulfed in the initial volleys of tear gas. I ran into a shocked bagpipe player from the march and cannot forget the bewildered and dispirited image he presented, his bagpipe still in hand. I also heard all around me what sounded like rocks hitting the nearby buildings. They were bullets. Israeli army and police units were firing live ammunition at peaceful demonstrators!

I watched Israeli forces pummel the crowd for the next two hours with tear gas, concussion grenades and live fire. I witnessed Israeli special forces move alongside Israeli army and police personnel, seeking out demonstrators to beat and arrest. I captured on film the beating and arrest of Mohammed Mansour, one of the lead organizers of the non-violent resistance campaign against the wall in the town of Biddu. After the arrest of Mansour and injuries to 50 demonstrators, the Israelis finally ended the siege.

Response to force in question

Based on the day's activities and the aims of Palestinian organizers, it promises to be an intriguing summer. Whether Palestinians will heed the call by organizers of Freedom Summer to engage in non-violent resistance in sufficient numbers when confronted by Israeli force to make the campaign a political success is in question.

Palestinians have a difficult task ahead. They confront an occupying power with one of the world's most formidable military arsenals, backed by the world's lone superpower, the U.S. There is hardly a more classic case of David and Goliath.

On the other hand, the World Court opinion creates an enormous opening for Palestinians to build a mass non-violent resistance movement to the wall and occupation. The opinion unambiguously states that the wall is illegal and calls on the international community to enforce the decision.

As it confronts this new reality, however, Palestinian society hovers in a pattern of political uncertainty, poised between on the one side a Palestinian Authority in disarray and on the other side the various Islamic parties. Barghouti insists, nevertheless, that between these poles is a huge constituency for a third political force.

How the leadership of this new movement can use the opening created by the World Court to galvanize a Palestinian public trampled on for the past four years by Israeli occupiers, and mobilize this public for a campaign of non-violent protest will be something to watch closely in the weeks ahead.

----------

Gary Fields, author of "Territories of Profit" is a professor in the department of communication at the University of California, San Diego. He recently returned from Israel and the West Bank as part of a delegation sponsored by Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

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Toma Sik 1939-2004

Today we heard that Toma Sik is dead - overrun by a tractor during a nightly walk home through the fields to his newly-bought old farm somewhere in a forgotten part of Hungary which should have fulfilled his dream of establishing a commune of organic-humanist (and vegan) "new peasants".

He was a pioneer of the Israeli-Palestinian search for peace, a forerunner of the present day pacifist-refusniks and actively involved in many struggles. For decades his friendly bearded face was to be seen at any demonstration. Arriving on his bicycle he would take down bundles of leaflets, written in his inimitable style and which he produced on his old stencil machine.

Nobody could fulfill all the criteria which he set, not even himself - as he would gladly admit with a sense of humour rare among heavily principled people. His being anarchist, vegan, pacifist, world-citizen and the rest of it didn't prevent him from giving his all to organizations with less universal goals such as Gush Shalom, where he played a central role until he left Israel in the late 1990s and ultimately settled down again in his country of birth.

For those who remember him and for those who don't we decided to publish what he himself wrote some years ago.

PUZZLES OF A LIFETIME by Jesa'ajahu Toma Sik (Schuck Tamas)

1997 It is now the fourth year that the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Government of the State of Israel are negotiating and - extremely slowly - implementing the agreements in the so called Peace Process.

Just today, 4th March, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Nethanyahu has stated he is going on with the erecting of a new zionist settlement on the outskirts of Palestinian Arab East-Jerusalem. This, in spite of the agreement not to change situations before the stage of negotiations on the final arrange-ments takes place; in spite of the Palestinian National Authority's President Yasir Arafat being wellcome today by U.S.A. President Bill Clinton, who has condemned the Israeli act; in spite of international, including the European Union's objection.

The Palestinians have swallowed so far every frog in order to have a little bit of dry land, the water of which has been pumped away by the zionists. Still, the Palestinians are being continuously and constantly harrassed, humiliated, expelled and expropriated by those with whom they are peacefully negotiating for a resolution of the historical conflict. They are reconciling, the zionist continue to harm them and demanding that "the Palestinians should prove themselves"... and the world is afraid to say loudly and firmly anything against the (un)Jewish State, the least to apply any sanctions against it. Because of "anti-semitism", because of the Nazi afflicted Holocaust. But anti-semitism has been taking place for 100 years in Palestine, against the Palestinian Arab semites, by European Jewish colonialists. A mini-holocaust. And apparently not everything is yet known or will be known ever. How can it be stopped? Is it, that the World is afraid of the Simson Syndrome that now involves the World's sixth nuclear power?!

This year I'm going to be 58 years old. My birthdays always have been great events, at least those which I recall. And every event brought up a puzzle, anew a puzzle.

My first birthday, the very day when I was born, happened on August 17th, 1939. Exactly two weeks before the outburst of WWII. I was born in O(ld)buda, a semi-village quarter of Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish Hungarian family where my mother Ilus(h) and her mother, my granny, two housewives, spoke Austrian German between themselves.

I didn't know my grandfather S(h)andor Wilhelm, but mother told me he was a head of a workers-group in the clay-bricks factory on the outskirts of its workers-quarter we used to live. When my mother was born, they were living in the Hungarian region of Slovakia. My father, Endre/Nathan Schuck was a printer apprentice. My grandfather Schuck Mor/Moshe, was a rabbi in Karcag, a township in North-Eastern Hungary. In addition to his rabbinical studies, he had also a doctorate from Munchen University, Germany, from where he also brought his wife, my other granny. My mother used repeatedly to tell me with pride, that grandpa was an "elected rabbi". I never had seen any of them in their and my life. Also I didn't know all these data but years later. Actually I had only the opportunity to eat this granny's bake of giant loafs of country bread that she used to send by parcel-post to me and my mother, after the War.

PUZZLE No.1: a. Was WWII a birthday present to me or did I bring it to the World as a surprise gift?

b. And why was I born as an almost surely candidate to be killed very soon? Or was it my later salvage from the horrors, my real birthday present?

My first clear memoirs of childhood are concerned with military:

The first memoir:

A German language "leader" or song: "Wann die Soldaten durich die Stadt maschiren, ofnen die Maetchen Fenstern und die Turen; warum? darum, nur weigen tchin da drassa bum bum bum" ("when the soldiers are marching along in town, the maids are opening the windows and the doors; why? because of the.... [brass and drums band sounds]").

The second memoir:

It could be my 4th birthday. For a period of time preceding it, the central issue of my life was "the officer's suit". My aunt Irma took measures of me and I was promised I was going to have it: "the officer's suit"! Time passed and I was thinking much of the "officer's suit", but it failed to arrive. Finally it was made and I had the opportunity to wear it, on my birthday. Look at the picture. My memory of concern and interest, as I recall it, doesn't correspond with the expression that I can see on my face of that photoed child. I wonder what had happened to "the officer's suit" when we were compelled to move into Budapest ghetto. Never I have seen it or heard about it anymore, only my memory recalls it from time to time, or the photo.

PUZZLE No.2: Were the song and the "officer's suit", a pacifist education of a Jewish Hungarian kid?

The third memoir:

It could be late 1943 or early 1944. My most valuable uncle, Jeno, was seen in a picture mailed by him to us earlier, photoed somewhere "on the front" in a Hungarian soldier's uniform: trouser, shirt and a simplest soldier's hat that looked like an upside down boat, without an emblem... He was neither a sailor nor a battle soldier. He was a compulsory field worker, digger of tranches at most dangerous sites in the war, for the Hungarian army on the side of the Germans against the Soviets. Because he was a Jew, he was untrustable to hold weapons and was fit only for hard work and for grave dangers. Although he was a talented lawyer. (He was highly trusted by all concerned, when he made the arrangements for my parents' divorce a year earlier, when I was three years old. My mother, with whom, it was decided, I was to remain, always spoke with admiration of him.) Now he was dead. The first of my family who died in WWII. He died both because he was in uniform and because he was a Jew. Was he? I never had had the chance to ask him...

The fourth memoir:

1944!!! I was standing in the middle of the two-way high street, Vorosvary Ut, on which we were living. I just had bought some new-old stamps: small size, bearing the faces of historical leaders of the Hungarian nation, from the times of the conquest and Hungarian settlement of Pannonia (Latin) or the Karpat Medence or Basine, some less than thousands of years earlier. This was the old part of the stamps. The new part was, that they were overprinted: "Temesvar hazater!" or "Kolozsvar hazater!", meaning: "Timisuara Returns Home!" or "Cluj Returns Home!" or "liberated" - from Roumania. (The first are Hungarian, the latter Roumanian names of the same.) I didn't know then anything about history, politics, even not about the war that was taking place, I even didn't understand the situation in which all this was taking place, that the Germans "granted" these towns to the Hungarians "for their good services", not for justice, at the expense of the Roumanians...; or that historically these were places of Hungarians or not, or that people were living together, side by side or mixed, in different cultures... *)

The fifth memoir:

Same year, one day, the street became noisy. I went out to the pedestrians walk, finding there crowds lining up along the road, on both sides of it. The Nazi-German troops were marching into Budapest on this highway from Vienna. In front of me, a small and thin woman with long hair was moving jumpingly; she also wanted to see the marchers. As she was moving jumpingly, she didn't stop shouting: "Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!" But she couldn't see anything, because she was small. "Wann die Soldaten durich die Stadt maschieren"...

Later, I was already a "big boy" then, 5 years old, I don't recall whether my birthday took place before, after or in the course of all these events, that went on speedily: Jews were compelled to wear yellow stars on their clothes (aunt Hermine and I would sit at the window and count the yellow-stared people passing by on the street... like after the War with uncle Armin, who was also in the War a compulsory worker but survived like his wife and daughter who were hidden by some good Christians - we counted buses driven through in front of his flat); being forbidden to go to cinema or theatre (but my mother took the yellow stars off her and my clothes and we had a journey into the city - I remember only the fearful journey, not the show that we saw...); to live in "Jewish houses" signalled with yellow stars; and lastly to be concentrated in Budapest ghetto that was setup in the VIII. Quarter which was the urban center of Jews with the main synagogue of the city in it.

Footnote:

*) Recently, in 1996, the Hungarians and the Roumanians, now free from both National-Socialist, Fascist-German occupation and State-Capitalist, Soviet-Communist occupation, came to a peaceful and peace-promising agreement about Transylvania where these towns are with a majority of Hungarians that will not demand annexation to Hungary but will be granted cultural rights. Actually, Hungary has many national minorities all over its territory, and Hungarians are living as national minorities in all the surrounding countries.*

The first Jewish House where we lived shortly was that of my uncle Viktor Kornfeld and aunt Irma. Many interesting things happened in this house with many friendly neighbours and many children, boys and girls. There was also a boy there who in order to join us, always had to run away from his home that neighboured our courtyard. His mother used to shout after him: "Don't go to play with those stinking Jews!" But he did and enjoyed our company, although we harrassed him a bit because he was fat. However, what left a strong impression on me was the event that followed a playing on the street.

Kiscelli utca (street) is one that climbs onto the hill to a former aristocratic castle by the same name. Towards the end of it is a school that later was that where I had my first three elementary grades. Almost opposite to it was a Jesuite monastery just before the hill started to be steep. As I was playing outside, I noticed a crowding mob about the monastery and something made me afraid, so I went into our courtyard. Some minutes later, a goodlooking, serious man with a loving and caring face looked in to us through the gate and told: "Brothers, danger is approaching, lock the gate firmly!" So it was done with bars and locks and cabinets staged to back the gate, and that saved us from the attacking mob. People in the house said that the warning man who was formerly a Jew, was a humanist. I still love this man very much although I don't know what and who he was and whatever happened to him.

Some time before the ghettoization, we were already in the third Jewish House: my mother, granny, my aunt Hermine (her husband, Basch Mor, my beloved agricultural uncle who worked with horses and lived in a Christian family's farm in the middle of our quarter, and I loved riding with him in the cart - was then already deported to Auschwitz from where he didn't return, like later aunt Irma) and my seven years older brother Frici/Frigyes/Shlomoh. One early morning, maybe at 3-4 o'clock, rude knocking on the door woke us up. Three Hungarian fascists in leather coats came to take away my mother. She was 40 years old. I cried and screemed very much. The chief fascist showed a nice face and told me: "Don't cry child, your mummy will come back in the afternoon!" It became apparently a very long and dark day, that lasted until the end of the War, maybe half a year or more. Then came back my mother, in such a shape, that I was afraid to sleep in the same room with her, for two months...

PUZZLE No.3: Maybe, this last anecdote is the reason for my utmost love for truth and utmost hatred of lie and deceit? The reason for which I'm terribly deeply hurt whenever facing untruthfulness?

Then had come the time to enter to the ghetto. Many Jews were pushed into it brutally. My cousin Annus(h) Feher's husband, Mihaly, had a non-Jewish acquaintence with whom he had friendly commercial rela-tionship. That man was a fascist-party member, apparently not an enthusiastic but a compelled one. That man carried us gently into the ghetto, even pulling the hand-cart loaded with our few remaining belongings. He also had hidden my cousin's family until the war ended, then they had a partnership in a conditory where I used to eat a lot of mixed sweet fallouts of the portioned cakes.

Ghetto, war, air-raids, hunger. Amazingly, I know there was hunger but I don't recall anything concerning that. On the contrary: once my aunt Hermine took me out from the shelter, we went along to the street corner in danger. Outside there was a steaming great pot. We were given a bit of a red-like deluted liquid in a small dish, I tasted it on the spot, spit it out because its dull and odd taste, we spilled the liquid and went back to the shelter. I even don't recall disappointment!...

My brother was, at the age of 12, a messanger for the Juden Raat, the Jewish Council, that administered the ghetto for the fascists. Whether it was collaboration or self-help in very hard times - no one may or can judge now accurately, and the debate is still going on. What relates to me is, that the Juden Raat had made some arrangement for children in the ghetto to have better living conditions. They concentrated them in the school-building. My aunt Hermine didn't let me out from her hands: "His mother deposited him to me, I'm responsible for him" - she said. So I stayed with her. When the Soviets attacked the town, their pilots were looking for big, factory-like buildings. So the children were bombarded there. Not I, thanks to my beloved aunt Hermine.

Many years later, in 1984, there was published information about a 1944 Swedish attempt to save children from Nazi occupied countries, mainly from Hungary. The zionist were requested to cooperate. David Ben Gurion, the political forefather and architect of the "state-on-the-way" and later of the State of Israel - refused to cooperate, because the Swedish wanted the children to be taken to Sweden and he wanted them in Palestine... Somehow, in my psychology, there is an opposite correlation between aunt Hermine and Ben-Gurion.

Was it on my birthday or not, one morning a group of soldiers in gray long coats entered our crowded shelter, in the middle of which a woman was laying with a wounded abdomen. The soldiers ordered everyone to get up from their seats and themselves set down instead. Maybe a quarter of an hour they sat than left. That was liberation, because those were Soviet-Russian soldiers. A kind of a birthday.

Somehow we returned to our original flat after my mother returned too. It was occupied by a Christian Hungarian family with some young women in it. We got one room and they kept one. Every night the Russian army visited the flat; the other room...

One day, again the crowds were on the pavements. Again an army was marching, this time the Russian/Soviet Communist Red Army. As I came out of our courtyard, I recall it sharply - I saw the same little woman moving jumpingly, wishing to see, but she couldn't because she was too small... "Kogda soldati vdolyy gorod marshas..."

Liberation from the ghetto and from the Nazi occupation was also celebrated by my birthday some time later and then by entering to elementary First Grade and becoming a pupil. Three consecutive years I spent in the same school with different boys and girls of my age. I was happy and advancing. There were extra Jewish religious classes and I was singing in the synagogue's choir, not with much enthu-siasm. All of a sudden, the small Jewish community that remained and obviously became an even smaller minority than it was before the War, decided they wanted to renew the Jewish school. So they did, when I entered 4th Grade. The "whole school", we were in one classroom, some 4-5 grades, each bench a different grade. The teacher was symoultaneously "teaching" each bench, moving between them. I hated this. Luckily enough, 5th Grade was a Secondary School and I moved back with all the children of the neighbourhood. And I quit the synagogue quite quickly, deciding about it by myself, with my mother consenting without any trouble.

I hardly remember any birthday present that I ever received. I do remember that I was lusting for an electric train set. It was very costly and it remained a dream until I was paid my first honorarium as a youth- journalist. For that minimal sum I bought a set of electric model train. But that was in the 1950s in Israel/Palestine. What happened in Obuda some 10 years earlier was, that I had a schoolmate, a neighbour boy, who did have an electric train. But his mother was not very willing to let us play with it. So, what we did was like this: we walked over to the nearby bricks factory, where my grandfather used to work, much earlier, and we had stolen from the shelves some drying clay bricks before they were burned in the kilns. We re-wetted them, kneeded them and made of them long narrow plates. Into these, we carved "tracks" in which we rolled a wooden reel of tread that had run out. That was our "tram". I enjoyed this game very much in all its stages, the creative and productive and the operational. Nevertheless, the lust remained and trains became an important factor in my life. @)

With this background, in 1950, at the age of 11, I spent my birthday on a ship floating from Venezia, Italy, to Haifa, Israel/Palestine. Before that, I still had two reminders of my uncle Jeno: on the train from Budapest to Vienna I was wearing my hat from the commu-nist children's movement, a blue turned-over-boat hat... We were sitted in the cabin with a Jewish couple. The man permitted himself to grab my hat and threw it out through the window with a gesticula-tion: "You won't need it there anymore!" - he shouted with a self-appointed authority and pride. I was terribly hurt by this act of him. I wished I could stop the train and go looking for my hat, that was of course impossible. Later, I met that man at the port of Haifa, when we went to pick up our belongings. He was involved in some smuggling affair... the big enthusiast!...

The other reminder happened at the borderpost before stepping out, or rather rolling out to Austria. Hungarian border police checked our luggage. My mother kept with her that same picture of her late beloved brother Jeno, in Hungarian military uniform of WWII, without an emblem... the picture was confiscated! It could be used as a sample to sew fake Hungarian - now Communist - soldier's uniform and "harm the people's republic". Could it? My uncle Jeno's, who was not let even be a soldier but only a tranch digger?...

Footnote:

@) When the first time I made a journey from Israel to Europe, in 1973, as an adult, I made it by boat and train. The train took from Greece to England through Yugoslavia, Austria, then... Germany. At the moment the train passed the border to Germany, the monotonic knocks of the wheels on the tracks started to "play" to me: "..where are the tracks leading... where are the tracks leading..." Then I had written a little poem: "In Germany I'm Jewish, In Palestine a Palestinian Arab, In America an Indian, In Vietnam a Vietnamese..."

Before our departure from Budapest, my mother had known for months that I was objecting to leaving Hungary, that I was a "Hungarian Communist patriot". She also knew that she was not a zionist who wanted to settle Palestine with Jews. It was her longing for my elder brother that made her decide to emmigrate to Israel.

My brother, on the other hand, was an innocent survivor of Budapest ghetto, 13 years old in 1945, when a zionist youth movement grabbed him and took him to Palestine. It took him 3 years to arrive there, following a "journey" in Europe, reaching out to Belgium, spending some time also in Cyprus in a British camp. He arrived in Palestine at the age of 16, just to join the establishing of a new zionist boarding school at a kibbutz, and after a few months of "schooling" - he went to fight for the zionist statehood, against the miserable Palestinian Arabs who were living anyway under foreign occupation for some 500 years...

He and many other survivors from the horrors of Nazism, Holocaust and war, at different ages, involved themselves in afflicting similar fates on themselves again and mainly on people whose only fault was that they happened to live as indigenous people of the Biblical "Holy Land", that the zionists designated as the site for a Jewish state, while apparently a part of the Palestinians are genuine discendents of ancient Israelites and Judeaites and other Cana'anites. A persecuted minority in Europe became a persecu-ting minority of a foreign country's innocent and anyway suffering majority, turning it to a minority in its homeland and itself to a majority but remaining a minority in the wider, regional sense - too much complicated? Look at the map of Israel/Palestine, and the Middle East, at the historical and up-to-date statistical data - you'll understand it better.

I didn't know all this at that time. Although I was a "Communist", so- called, of course I was only an 11 years old child. Though emotionally quite sensitive, apparently loaded with an accumulated experience of horrors and observations, I was totally unaware of the political and social situation in Israel/Palestine called by us simply Palestina. When still in Budapest in the late 1940s, I recall, I happened to look at a weekly picturious magazine - A Figyelo - The Observer - in which there was a report about some Jewish underground's military operation. What I recall is, that it was some clash between Jewish groups. The term Arabs was not in my consciousness, nor conscience.

We arrived in Israel/Palestine on 21st August 1950. Nobody knew of were my brother's kibbutz Mavqi'im was. We had only a post-office-box address in Tel-Aviv for it. After sleeping overnight in a bus at the Central Bus Station, next morning we found the bus to Mavqi'im. Two hours of slow and hot journey with endless stops. The bus drove through a number of empty clay-hut villages; others could be seen at some distance from the road on the plain and on hillsides. Empty, no one in them. I wasn't bothered. My concern was to find finally a reasonable place to stay at, until I'll be able some how to get back to "my homeland". Finally we arrived. I had plenty of days to look around. The kibbutz was on a hill overlooking around a beautiful fruit-jungle. There were grapes of several different sorts, almonds, olives, apricots, plums, sicamores, cactis. The grapes were creaping on the sand and up the sicamore trees or the cactis. Most of this jungle was unirrigated. Actually, I know that part of it was irrigated only because I saw the water-pump near the highway and heard its characteristical monotonic but melodical sound when the gasolene pump- engine was operating. I'm still able to hear it in my imagination as a kind of liric music of childhood.

My brother with his wife Tamar - an Austrian Jewish girl who fled from the Nazis to England and was educated there - were living in a tent. Once, when I was deeply furious about my imposed staying faraway from "my homeland", I set fire to their tent. Fortunately, it was saved before it was burnt down. I was angry and tensed, although I liked very much the fruit and the sight around.

On weekends, there were football games taking place on a plain ground... surrounded with empty clay-huts.**) Apparently, it was the central square of the Palestinian clay-hut village, now empty: Barbara. I wondered, where the inhabitants were, but I didn't ask anything. Also, near the highway, opposite to the pump-house, there was a long block building. It served as an electric carpentry shop using electricity from a local generator nearby. I wondered: how was that, that my brother was living in a tent like other kibbutz members, the first - Swedish - wooden houses were just in the process of being erected, and the carpentry shop was in a block building?! And I asked. The answer I got was, that the block building was a former school!.... I was tought in "indoctrinative" Communist Hungary, that the work of children, pupils, is to learn. Where were the pupils? - I asked myself. Nobody answered my question. I must have had become quite emotional about this then, because this school- building and the village of Barbara became my conscious "second birth- place". In the course of years, the clay-huts diminished slowly, then bulldozed, only the mosque was still standing and a cowshed was erected near to it. Later the mosque disappeared too. Now only a eucaliptus wood indicates to the educated, were Barbara was standing. But the school- building still exists. It's now neither a school nor a carpentry-shop anymore; it's a halfway-house, mini-market and restaurant. The pump-house and the generator-hut also disappeared, due to the new system has set a new infra-structure. Even the old dirt road on the northern side of it was replaced with an asphalt road on the south.

Once or twice a week, the kibbutz members decided to have a ride to Al- Majdal (the name of the Palestinian town world-famous for it's canvas also called "Gaza"; now the town is called Ashqelon and Al-Majdal is "its" "old city"...), to eat Polish ice-cream and to see a film. The narrow main street of Al-Majdal was full of Jewish visitors from the surrounding new kibbutzim and moshavim established just a year or so earlier. We used to walk to the end of the street where the ice-cream shop was, and there the way was blocked. Also it was impossible to go out to side streets. I wondered why, but there was no answer.

Then we went to the cinema. Already at the first time I noticed: it was a former school, the walls between the classrooms being knocked down.

Footnote:

**) Clayhuts are not built by bricks but are made of clay-mud mixed with small stones and hay built up like a sculpture. Also in Hungary there were such earlier.Now ecologistic architectures say that't the healthiest building material. In Yemen there are beautiful palaces built of clay.

Years later, when living in a boarding school some hundred and fifty kilometers norther from there, a brother in law of a schoolmate of mine visited him. We spent some time together. The man was living in Al-Majdal in a one room flat of former Arab residents, where I later visited him. It was in the former Arab ghetto, some tens of meters from the ice-cream shop... He told us, how in 1950 he was running on the roofs of the houses in Al-Majdal with his Uzzi sub-machine gun in his hand, guarding the ghettoized Palestinians. These were simple peasants from the surrounding villages. According to the UN Resolution 181 on the Partition of Palestine, the whole area was supposed to be a part of the Arab State in Palestine. In the war of 1947-49, Israel, the Jewish State in Palestine, occupied this area and made its Palestinian residents into "equal rights citizens". However, later I got informed by a pacifist friend who visited Al-Majdal on 8th October 1950 - less than 2 months after my arrival there... - and through an old newspaper clipping from the Jerusalem Post, dated 25th October 1950 --- that every two weeks Palestinians were evacuated to the Gaza Strip refugee camps eversince the Armistice Agreements were signed in 1949. The last evacuation took place on 24th October 1950, ten days after I was confronted with another imposition: life in a boarding school without my beloved and caring mother, where I was supposed to be indoctrinated to become a "good citizen of Israel Jewish State".

I had my birthplace in O(ld)Buda in Hungary, I was attached emotionally to empty Barbara in Palestine and I was to be "re-born" at Aloney-Yitzhaq Youth Village. I refused but had no powers, only 11 years old. Nevertheless, in December I ran away together with another friend, who was from Hungarian Transylvania in Roumania. He had another set of reasons for his act. The whole Israel Police in the region was on the alert looking for us. They were in panic, although we took the most reasonable and simple way: an official bus ride. No one looked for us on the once-in-a-day bus line to Mavqi'im! They were concerned with "murderous infiltrators" in the area, those expelled miserable Palestinian peasants who came back to fetch something from their forcibly abandoned property in the empty clay-hut villages. Only later, when the historical facts were disclosed to me, I understood why they paniced about us and why they didn't think logically and straightly when looking for us: "The hat on a thief's head is burning!...

PUZZLE No.4: What is clay for?

PUZZLE No.5: What is Minority and what is Majority?

I was returned to the boarding school. In spite of my actively rejectionist behaviour, quite quickly I learnt the Hebrew language, but I didn't become again a good pupil as I was before in Budapest. I contacted the Legation Office of Hungary in Tel-Aviv and for my 13th birthday I got a permit to return to Hungary. My mother didn't sign up for her affirmation to this. But later, in 1988, I was informed by my cousin Annus(h) that my mother wanted us to return "because of me", maybe also because of her own misery and loneli-ness. However, my cousin could take to hers only me. To this my mother could consent neither. So, I was compelled to continue my stay in the boarding school which for me was like a - partly pleasant - refugee camp.

I was constantly conscious of my situation: being a Hungarian but being unable to implement this; not being a Jew - actually, I refused to the ritual of Bar Mitzwah, the Confirmation; not willing to become an Israeli. What was I then? - rised the question of identification. Definitely I was identifying with my current, local environment: I developed quite an enjoyable way of life, being active in the youth's social/organizational life. We played school-democracy and I was a central figure in that: a good and responsible worker, minimal but clever pupil, editor, council-member, prosecutor, protector, what not, even a rebel. I was still lusting strongly for Budapest, I was in tremendous emotional and physical tension that were expressed in great sensitivity and headaches. And I wondered constantly: What was I!?

Another basic question rised out of this complex situation: Am I fair? I'm not a Jew neither an Israeli, and never I'll be; but the Jewish Agency is feeding, maintaining and educating me at the boarding school. It was imposed on me, but still was a fact. However, I never will be paying this back to them in the way they expect it. I found it unfair. So I decided I should develop a way of life in which I'll not live at the expense of others.

Thus, towards my 16th birthday, in 1955, I decided I was to become an intentional, conscientious and practical vegetarian, pacifist, world citizen: I didn't want to kill other animals anymore and live at their expense (I didn't know then, that by that I will not be harmed but will benefit from it to my health...); if I was not prepared to take the lives of other animals how could I kill humans as a soldier? But how could I avoid being a soldier if being a part of a nation, a state? So I became a world citizen. I was neither Hungarian or an Israeli anymore, just a human being, that now has another definition too: a secular humanist rationalist with a strong flavour of anarchist. But the three "birth- places" - basically all being impositions... - remained a part of me, like everything that is told in this story, and much more.

I refused military service and councelled conscientious objectors for 30 years in militaristic Israel; I have been an active secular humanist struggler for human and civil rights for both Arabs and Hebrews of any religious denomination; an active anarchist world-citizen denying the right of any and all states to impose themselves on all humans who are all world citizens; a Reichian oriented egalitarian seeking to live in a sustainable agricultural commune - all with a great inherent active sympathy and identification with those who are suffering; because those who cause don't need it: they are self-righteous.

PUZZLE No.6: THE GREATEST PUZZLE OF MY LIFE: How has it happened, that so many Jewish kids, including my brother, and adults, who went through the same horrors, suffering, deaths and what not in the Holocaust, had become immediately after it - nationalist, chovinist, militarist, racist, murderous combatant zionist; while I, with the same background and experience - became an internationalist mondian universalist anarchist, antimilitarist and pacifist, anti-racist anti-zionist and even vegan vegetarian.

My conclusion from my 5 years old child's experience in ghetto Budapest has been, that I didn't wish to aflict such a fate on any 5 years old, younger or older person. Other people concluded: never more to our children; and they have raised children and have sent them to the armies to kill and to be killed...

PUZZLE No.7: How is that, that every human usually has one birth-place, but mostly they call it "homeland","fatherland" or "motherland" (although mostly they never even have visited at all, all that land); and I have three "birth-places" - Obuda, Barbara and Aloney-Yitzhaq - but no "homeland", as for me home is any place where I meet with friendly people who share their thoughts and feelings with me; and land is any spot where I may and can put a foothold, without pushing away anyone else.

Now I am out of Israel/Palestine for more than a year, with no intention to go back there. Also the Palestinian National Authority has disappointed me with their state-entity identical with their oppressors'. It was just clear and expectable what would have take place, nevertheless it's a disappointment for me personally. Still, the issue of the Palestinian people's plight is bothering me. I wish I could do something real for it. The same for the Israelis, who are in a greater trap: they feel like the riders on the horses, but they overlook the danger of falling down and that is well there.

NOW I HAVE ANOTHER PUZZLE, MAYBE THE FINAL ONE: WHAT WILL BE THE NEXT "RE- BIRTH" ON THIS COMING BIRTHDAY OF 58 in August 1997?

And many more details I haven't told you yet...

P.S. Why the real and full-length Orient-Express train - London-Cairo - cannot run, and Israel's railway system consists of one single line, disconnected from the Euro-Asian Train Network?

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Non-Violent Demonstration in Qalqilya

Over 1200 members of The People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy gathered today in Qalqilya in support of the Destination Map Initiative, also known as the Nusseibeh-Ayalon Document.

The demonstration, which took place at Qalqilya's Al-Sharqa School, marked the largest demonstration in Qalqilya since violence erupted in September 2000. Demonstrators held signs calling for a peace agreement based on the Destination Map's two-state solution, a halt to violence on both sides, and a call to build bridges of peace instead of walls of separation and expansion. Graffiti was sprayed on the streets surrounding the demonstration's location in favor of the Destination Map Initiative.

Professor Sari Nusseibeh, the leader of the People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy, wore a t-shirt which read "Smarter without Violence," a motto which immediately became the slogan of the demonstration.

Israeli Occupation Forces blocked the entrance to Qalqilya and set up an additional eight checkpoints on the roads leading to Qalqilya, preventing at least seven buses and an undetermined number of private cars, carrying members of The People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy, from entering Qalqilya and participating in the non-violent demonstration.

Opposite the demonstration, on the western side of the Separation Wall, over 400 members of the Mifkad HaLeumi campaign assembled in support of The People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy.

The Destination Map Initiative was signed by Mifkad HaLeumi's leader, Former Shin Bet Director, Mr. Ami Ayalon and Professor Sari Nusseibeh over a year ago. Since the document's signing over 140,000 Palestinians and 200,000 Israelis have endorsed the Initiative thus far.

The People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy is considered the first non-violent, grassroots, Palestinian peace movement with a clear vision for a two-state solution, as stated in the Destination Map. The Campaign will hold its Second National Congress Session on Monday, July 19th at 10:00 AM at the Badran Hall in the Um-Sharayet neighborhood near Ramallah, in order to ratify The People's Campaign for Peace and Democracy's Constitution.

For more information please contact Dimitri Diliani at 052 608877 or visit HASHD's website at www.hashd.org.

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The USA & Israel: Caught in Two Traps
By Murray Polner

Did American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq and Israeli soldiers killed and maimed in Gaza and the West Bank die for nothing? Americans are dying now because of ideologues and zealots. Israeli soldiers are dying for settlements and unattainable goals. Both are trapped.

Take the U.S. for example, bogged down in a war and occupation that should never have happened. The Bush administration and its amateurish, rigidly ideological neoconservatives and Christian Right, have recklessly dug a dark, apparently inescapable pit. The astute military analyst of the Center for Strategy and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, in his oral testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in mid-May, put it perfectly when he condemned the "illusions" of the influential and incompetent neoconservative living room warriors who listened to no one but themselves. And much as the arrogant neoliberals of the sixties brought us Vietnam and all those war dead and wounded in body and mind, ardently pro-Likud neoconservatives have now gotten us into a lethal and unwinnable situation.

Armed with scads of money from ultra-rightwing billionaires, neocons believe they alone possessed the absolute truth. Long before 9/11 they urged an invasion of Iraq, spread fabrications about Saddam's possession of WMDs and his alleged connection to Al Qaeda rather than looking soberly at the true source of terror, namely 0sama's fanatics. So sure of themselves, without so much as a fleeting doubt, neocons famously believed the pending invasion and subsequent occupation would be a "cakewalk" and invading troops as sure to be greeted with cheers and flowers. Dissenters were denounced as virtual traitors and un-American. The unreflecting Bush bought their line and his father's conservative skeptics like Brent Scowcroft were shown the door. No one paid attention to warnings that the war and its attendant resentments and hatreds might create a thousand more clones of Bin Laden.

The Israel -Palestine conflict is, however, quite another thing. Despite Israel's intimate ties with the White House and neoconservatives, their war remains a mutual tragedy of disastrous proportions since whole populations are endangered. Its legacy will fuel and sustain Palestinian hatred of Israel and Jews for generations.

Israel's vaunted military is as frustrated and stymied as America's, trapped in a cycle of tit for tat violence with no end. Its politicians as impotent as America's. Indeed, the recent savagery in Gaza may be among the worst. "Pointless destruction," a Ha'aretz editorial said when news of the brutalizing of the people of the Rafeh refugee camp arrived. Children were killed and wounded in the assault, innocent people saw their homes smashed and then left homeless, and even the tiny Gaza zoo, once a haven for kids, was wrecked, because of weapons supposedly being shipped through tunnels and the suddenly discovered need to widen the Philadelphi Route dividing Palestine Gaza from Egypt. Meanwhile, the murders go on.

"Death and destruction and more death and destruction," rightly says the Israeli Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information. "Palestinians kill Israelis and Israelis kill Palestinians and no end in sight."

Shouldn't we ask Israelis if there are no limits to cruelty against the innocent even when you say you are defending yourself? The same question needs to be asked of Arafat and Hamas, both seeking revenge rather than justice or a solution.

Both sides assert a claim of moral legitimacy but only on their own terms. Neither deals with the carnage brought about by their actions. Asserting the right of self-defense and liberation, each is blind to the other. This mutual madness goes on, resisted, thankfully, by Israel's best-- resisting reservists and pilots, high school students, conscientious objectors, and the more than 150,000 Israelis who recently turned out in Tel Aviv to cry out, "Enough."

0f course, it would be wonderful if more Palestinians also said "Enough," but the fourth most powerful military state in the world is the occupying power, with its conscript army, sophisticated weaponry, and store of nuclear arms. Genuflecting mainstream American Jewish organizational bureaucrats are mute, fearful of offending Bush's Washington or having its wealthy donors snubbed by whoever is in power in Jerusalem. And opportunistic and pusillanimous American politicians, who rarely fail to flaunt their everlasting and profound "love" for Israel, are afraid to speak publicly about the latest outrage against Palestinian innocents. Heaven forbid there should ever be a searching, even heated public debate about the U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the Congress and White House without organized Jewry charging critics with anti-Semitism.

Since both sides are ensnared in their mutual fear and loathing, there is no way out but painful compromise. And that will never happen unless the United States - despite its failures in Iraq -- under a new, more realistic presidential administration, begins playing the central role as a trusted, impartial neutral, shepherding a reasonably fair agreement favoring neither side. Of course it won't be easy. It may even be impossible. But the alternative is to maintain the status quo and continue endlessly with killing and revenge killing. Tit for tat.

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He lost his daughter to a suicide bomber, yet chooses peace
FOR Interfaith Peace-Builders

Report 7, Final Report

Thursday, April 1

This is our last night in Israel and Palestine.¬ÝWe've visited with some 35 groups and individuals, visited sites of historical significance, as well as built a small, committed, and very mobile community.

Our final meeting tonight with Rami Elhanan brought a powerful closure to our total experience on this delegation. Rami, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite who served in the Israeli Army during the War over theSuez Canal, lost his 13 year-old daughter, Smadar, to a Palestinian suicide bomber in September 1997.¬ÝDuring the traditional seven days of mourning, his family received thousands of supporters and well wishers.¬ÝOn the eighth day, in eerie loneliness, he asked: "What will I do with the rest of my life?"¬ÝAfter some time, he decided to choose the more difficult of two paths - instead of allowing himself to be overcome by anger and revenge he felt "chosen," and sought to be part of those people who find peace beyond hate and violence.

Rami spoke to us with heartfelt honesty, and elicited within each of us the most emotion we have felt for the last two weeks.¬ÝNearly all of us were brought to tears hearing Smadar's story and how Rami chose to move forward for peace.¬ÝHis strength and courage is an amazing example for all of us.

However, we began our day with a very different experience. For some of us, waking at 4:15 a.m. in Bethlehem was the result of machine-gun fire and rocket attacks between Israeli assault helicopters and Palestinian combatants.¬ÝWe were told that after 45 minutes of fighting, some 14 prisoners were taken from a mental hospital in which they were hiding.¬ÝThis news was received with a strange sense of resignation on the part of the families we were staying with, while we in the delegation felt dismay, hurt, and sadness at the violence.

Our first engagement of the day was arranged only the day before by David Albert, one of our delegation members.¬ÝWe visited theHope Flowers School, a school entirely based on nonviolence, integrated within all subjects in the classroom.¬ÝThe picture of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Gandhi quite we saw as we entered the school affirmed this mission.¬ÝThe school also teaches three mandatory languages to the children, starting in First Grade: English, Hebrew, and Arabic.¬ÝFrench is also taught as an option.

The school's proximity to the Efrat settlement and the closed city ofBethlehem makes students' attendance erratic. Traveling to school, which might only require 25 minutes in normal times, now takes up to five hours because of closures and blockades. As a result, student enrollment, nearly 500 at its peak, now stands at only 127. This is particularly dismaying since the many Israeli children who used to attend the school were among the first to discontinue. Would settlers from Efrat be open to sending their children to this school?¬ÝFurther, would those settlers agree to restrain the growth of Efrat that threatens the school, or help prevent the demolition of the school's cafeteria?

On our way back toJerusalem, we interviewed the director of research at B'tselem, a Hebrew word for "In the image of God."¬ÝB'tselem's mandate is to analyze and predict consequences of Israeli military action in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.¬ÝB'tselem puts a high premium on objectivity and thoroughness in information gathering and dissemination within Israeli government institutions and the public at large.

At Sabeel, an ecumenical Palestinian liberation theology center and a late addition to our busy itinerary, many among us were greatly delighted at the opportunity to attend mass and enjoy lunch, followed by discussion with its director, Naim Ateek.¬ÝNaim offered a clear and articulate vision for a faith- and human rights-based approach to the reconciliation of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

Turning again to our final speaker Rami Elhanan: In wrapping up his discussion, Rami offered the following: "There is a wall in all of us of fear and hatred.¬Ý"We hate them because we fear them - and we fear them because we do not know them."¬ÝIn the end it will be with courage that we learn to love one another as we love ourselves."¬ÝOne of us posed the following question as we debriefed later this night: "If the son of a Holocaust survivor, veteran of the Israeli Army, father of a daughter lost to a suicide attack, can find the courage and hope to live beyond fear and hatred and to seek a peaceful solution to this conflict, how can we not rise to the challenge of the convictions and purposes that we avow as members of this delegation?"

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Palestinian Arrives With Non-Violence Message For All
by Andra Jackson

March 15, 2004

It is a word Palestinian Saif Abukeshek has heard often from Israeli soldiers, but it has taken a visit to Australia for him to learn its meaning.

The 22-year-old activist took the opportunity yesterday when he met Sol Salbe, of the Australian-Jewish Democratic Society, to ask the meaning of "sa'a", the Hebrew word that had perplexed him.

Mr Salbe, told him: "It means literally 'drive off'. It can't be applicable to anything except a vehicle."

Mr Abukeshek had thought "it was an order that a shepherd would give sheep".

The two met at Melbourne airport yesterday when Mr Abukeshek, a co-ordinator of the non-violent Palestinian International Solidarity Movement, arrived to address public meetings tonight and tomorrow on "the non-violent Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation".

After sorting out the misunderstanding, Mr Salbe, who made an oriental Jewish cake for Mr Abukeshek, said of the value of the dialogue: "It is learning about each other, and it has to be two-way."

Mr Abukeshek, a youth worker in the Nablus refugee camps, is also speaking to Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian and Arabic groups.

As someone who has never known life outside a refugee camp, he also wants to be "a kind of live witness" for what daily life is like for Palestinians who have been refugees since 1948.

His family was from Jaffa but he was born in the Askar refugee camp at Nablus, where 13,000 people "live on the same piece of land" given to 500 in 1956.

There is no privacy or space for children to play. Sanitation is a problem, a curfew operates, and 70 civilians, including a 10-year-old child standing in the street, have been killed in the present Infitada.

A total of 3000 Palestinians civilians have been killed in the past three years, and 350 Palestinian children are held in Israeli detention centres and jails, Mr Abukeshek said.

He bears a scar on his chin, a wound from an Israeli bullet in May 2002 when he attended an anniversary protest where 10 were killed.

The International Solidarity Movement was formed to support Palestinian non-violent resistance, which has existed for some time, he said.

"In the second Intifada, we realised the military occupation was targeting civilians, targeting each protest, so there was a need for a third body which can try and provide a space for the Palestinians to practise their rights."

Mr Abukeshek maintains Palestinians also have a right to armed resistance "against the military occupation".

Two ISM peace workers, American Rachel Corrie and Briton Tom Hurndall, were killed in 2003 by the Israeli military.

The organisation's philosophy is: "If we are attacked verbally by the soldiers of the colonisers, or physically, we don't act in the same way."

Mr Abukeshek said a group inside Israel called Ta'ayosh was trying to establish a dialogue with Palestinians. Israeli anti-occupation activists were prepared to risk arrest to enter the West Bank and Gaza to meet Palestinians, he said.

Mr Abukeshek speaks tonight at Newport library, Mason Street, Newport, at 7pm, and tomorrow at the Trades Hall, Carlton, at 7.30pm.

This article was originally posted at The Age of Australia

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The Hollow Echo of Silence
by Gershon Baskin

March 8, 2004

Today, Palestinian news sources report that 27 Palestinians, including four children, have been killed in Gaza in less than one week. Brigadier General Gadi Shamni, the outgoing commander of the IDF in the Gaza Strip said to Haaretz newspaper "We are winning in this conflict. In the military arena we are winning every day, several times." Palestinian political leaders from various camps such as the Al Aqsa Brigades state that they "vowed to retaliate violently to the Zionist entity's massacre in the Gaza refugee camps of Breij and Nusseirat". Hamas statements also promised: "that Zionist terrorist premier Ariel Sharon would pay dearly for his crimes in the Gaza Strip. Hamas officials asked all Palestinian military wings to escalate resistance raids against occupation targets in all areas of occupied Palestine."

Are we winning, as Gadi Shamni assures the Israeli public? In my view the answer is firmly: NO! The war against terror, I say to my Israeli friends, colleagues and leaders - will not be won on the military front. This past week's actions in Gaza will not decrease the will of Palestinians of all ages to hateIsraeland to fight Israelwith every last drop of blood in their bodies. Palestinian and Arab television stations throughout the Arab world broadcasted in very vivid red colors the blood dripping from the head of the young Palestinian child who was killed yesterday in the gun battle between Israeli forces and Palestinian forces. Even moderate voices in Palestine could not hold back the burning desire for revenge while viewing the shocking pictures.

Since the beginning of this intifada in September 2000, I have stated over and over again that you cannot win a war against a people who are fighting for liberation and freedom against an occupying power. We should know that from our own history and experience better than most other nations and peoples. It is clear that the Palestinians will in the end be free and the Israeli occupation will end. It is mainly a question of time and at what price. The day-to-day battle of killing is nothing more than futile.

There are those who would say: What do you want us to do, lay down our arms and let the enemy kill us? To those I would say: we need to change disks in order to act differently. In the current paradigm of Israeli-Palestinian relations the only logic is the one of mutual destruction. That logic is voiced clearly in the kinds of statements that are made everyday by people on both sides:

We cannot lay down our arms because they will not lay down theirs.

We must fight against terrorism because you cannot compromise with terrorism.

We must continue to fight the occupation because the only language they understand is the language of force.

We must fight against terrorism because force is the only language they understand.

If we declare ceasefire they will understand that we are weak.

There can be no victories for terrorism because that will increase terrorism.

Withdrawal is a victory for terror.

They are all terrorists from birth; they drink the hatred with their mother's milk.

Anyway, there is no one to talk to on the other side.

They don't want peace, they only want to destroy us.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

It doesn't matter who says it. In a conflict where there is so much asymmetry it is amazing how much symmetry there is in the rhetoric. The very same things that we think about them, they think about us. And the circle continues over and over, round and round. And with each day more death, more blood, more destruction. And the entire resources of two peoples, human capital, financial capital and the land that we both love is being thrown into the garbage bin of the logic of military, security, weapons, and defense futility.

In the past I have been attacked by Israelis who would stay that I and those like me are quislings and self hating Jews for even stating that there is an occupation. But now even Prime Minster Sharon himself has spoken about occupation "I think the ideathat it is possible to continuekeeping 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation - yes it is occupation, you might not like the word, but what is happening is occupation - is bad for Israel, andbad for the Palestinians, and bad for the Israeli economy. Controlling 3.5 million Palestinians cannot go on forever. You want to remain in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem?" (May 26, 2003) Sharon is planning for unilateral disengagement. I am fully behind the idea of Israel ending the occupation in Gaza and I support any move that will prepare the people of Israel for the eventuality that we must withdraw from every centimeter of Gaza including all of the settlements, and the sooner the better. But this will not bring peace. It should be clear to everyone, especially to Sharon himself, this will not put an end to the killing.

In a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza,Israel will not be leaving Gaza for the last time. Israel will return, IDF troops will re-enter, Apache helicopters will continue to launch missiles against Palestinians in the streets of Gaza. Law and order will not reign in Gaza. The one constant variable that we can all be sure about under this scenario of unilateralism is that hatred against Israel will continue to grow. And Israelis will respond with equal levels of hatred against Palestinians.

Palestinians are not born terrorists and there is nothing about their genetic makeup that turns them towards terrorism. Israelis too are not born hating Palestinians and they too are not terrorists from birth. These are learned behaviors. The main stay of learning these behaviors is fear. The spread of fear is the fuel of generals and military minds and politicians who were in their pasts from the same mind set - Israelis and Palestinians alike. There is firm reliance on the spread of fear for constant demands for increased military budgets or for continued smuggling of weapons and paying the salaries of "freedom fighters" with badly needed scarce resources that should be used to build, not to destroy. And fear has taken hold. Only we are all too proud to say that we are afraid. Only cowards are afraid. But I am not a coward and I am afraid. I am afraid that the killing and destruction will go on and on, and the well known wish that maybe my children won't have to fight will be heard over and over again, generation after generation, and all of our children will have to fight. And the publics are taken hostage and their voices are silent.

Where are the voices who say enough killing? Where are those who know in their hearts and in their minds that there is no way to break the will of the other side? I am burning with anger. I am angry at my compatriots and I am angry at Palestinians - why do we remain silent? I have no hopes that our leaders, or their leaders, or the leaders of the world will save us from our own demise. I am not angrier at the leaders than I am at ourselves. I no longer have expectations from our leaders. They will continue to do what they know to do best - and we all will continue to pay the price with more and more casualties - Israeli and Palestinian. How many dead bodies will it take before common Israelis and Palestinians take to the streets and say: ENOUGH!? 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 100,000? Each new casualty is lost for nothing. They are not heroes, they are suckers as we all are, and if we will be honest with ourselves, we will recognize, Israelis and Palestinians, that they were killed in vain.

Don't believe the myths. We are fighting for nothing - all of us - Israelis and Palestinians. This war will bring about no achievements. There are no victories and there are no victors. There are only losses and losers. We are all losing and we are all losers. Israelis and Palestinians alike will continue this futile foolishness and recklessness until we, the people, Israelis and Palestinians, stand up with courage and go against the tide. As it continues and as more and more people lose their lives, on both sides, we are all responsible and we must all take the blame.

I speak with Israelis and Palestinians everyday - from all walks of life. I know that there are people to talk with on the other side. I know that it is possible to reach agreements and to arrive at solutions that would guarantee life with dignity and freedom. I have been doing this work for too long to give into fear and despair. We must demonstrate our compassion for their suffering and for our own. There is hope and there must be hope. There are enough reasonable Israelis and Palestinians who, like me, are fed up. It is now up to us, we must make the difference.

Dr. Gershon Baskin is the Israeli-Co-Director of IPCRI - the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information
http://www.ipcri.org

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Los Angeles Times Book Review

October 5, 2003

Lessons unlearned in the Middle East

• Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East; John Keay; W.W. Norton: 506 pp., $28.95
• The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine; Arthur Hertzberg; Harper San Francisco: 208 pp., $19.95
• The Case for Israel; Alan Dershowitz; John Wiley & Sons: 264 pp., $19.95
• Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars; Yaacov Lozowick; Doubleday; 336 pp., $26.00
• The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land; Donna Rosenthal; Free Press: 480 pp., $28.00