Palestinians'
Lives Invisible To Israelis
By Edward Mast
22 October, 2007
Seattle
Post Intelligencer
On
a visit to Tel Aviv last month, I asked some Israeli friends what people
in Israel were saying about the Palestinian situation. Not much, they
told me. Israelis are more concerned about the corruption charges against
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, coming on the heels of corruption charges
against previous governments. Palestinians and their issues, my friends
told me, are becoming more and more invisible to the Israeli people.
Palestinian lives are kept
invisible in David Brumer's Oct. 10 guest column, "Despite concerns,
Israel a vibrant country." Also invisible are Israel's military
occupation and the ongoing takeover of Palestinian land. If Brumer had
traveled to the other side of the wall, as I did, he could have witnessed
the many ways that the Israeli occupation crushes people with poverty,
violence and injustice.
Before visiting Tel Aviv,
I spent two weeks working with a theater in the Palestinian city of
Ramallah in the West Bank. During that short time, the Israeli army
killed at least 15 Palestinians in the occupied territories; several
killed were children. For Palestinians, these are regular occurrences.
Over the past seven years, the Israeli army has killed more than 4,000
Palestinians. The majority of these, even according to Israeli statistics,
have been unarmed civilians. Many thousands more have been wounded or
kidnapped. The severe underreporting of Palestinian casualties in the
U.S. and Israel can leave the impression that Palestinian lives have
less value.
While I was there, Brian
Avery came from the United States to testify in Jerusalem against the
Israeli army. Avery is a peace activist who was shot in the face by
the Israeli army in 2003. At first the Israeli army denied that the
shooting took place, but has been forced to launch an investigation
now that Avery is bringing a suit.
In Ramallah, I learned that,
though there is plenty of water near the city, the several hundred thousand
residents had spent the summer with running water available only three
or four days each week. That sort of fact tends to be invisible to Israelis,
along with the reasons.
Ramallah is near the cluster
of West Bank aquifers, which are the main sources of water for both
the West Bank and Israel, but 80 percent of the West Bank's water goes
to Israel and Israeli settlements. For decades, Israel has used its
military occupation of the West Bank to build an illegal network of
settlements around the water sources. Palestinians have been beaten,
killed and driven away to make space for these settlements, and Israel
has built a continuous wall, not on the border of Israel but inside
Palestinian territory, which effectively annexes the settlements and
water resources into Israel.
Israelis are told the wall
is for their security. Palestinians call it the annexation wall, and
it is difficult for them to believe Israel can be a partner for peace
while the Israeli government continues taking Palestinian land for settlements,
building the wall to annex them and maintaining the system of checkpoints
that paralyze movement and life in the West Bank.
With some colleagues, I spent
one day traveling from Ramallah to Jerusalem. The eight-mile trip took
2 1/2 hours. In Ramallah, the wall is 25 feet high, and the Israeli
checkpoint is like an airport security station. We lined up for more
than half an hour with Palestinians at a remote-controlled 8-foot turnstile
where people had to crowd like cattle and wait for a green light to
get as many through as possible before the light turned red.
Once past X-ray security
and more turnstiles, we boarded shared taxis for what should have been
a short ride to Jerusalem. However, the Israeli military had set up
an additional temporary "flying checkpoint" some 1,640 feet
down the road, forcing several lanes of traffic down to a single lane
for stopping and searching. That took almost an hour.
Business in Ramallah is at
a standstill. Poverty is everywhere; jobs are not to be found. The people
at the checkpoint said to us, "Take pictures. Tell people what
is happening here."
Some Israelis, such as my
Tel Aviv friends, no longer accept the excuse that the virtual imprisonment
and killing of Palestinians are justified by the need for security.
The Israeli government has
recently confiscated more Palestinian land near Jerusalem to build a
segregated road, literally underground, for Palestinians. Israeli settlers
will be able to commute back and forth from the territories without
having so much as to see a Palestinian. Invisibility here is no accident.
Edward Mast
is a Seattle playwright who volunteers with the Palestine Information
Project; palestineinformation.org.
©1996-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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