Voices of conscience spark hope in Israel

Catholic New Times, Feb 9, 2003 by Michael McAteer

It's my last day in Jerusalem and I'm standing in one of the Old City's narrow streets watching four armed, young Israeli soldiers search and interrogate two young Palestinians.

One of the soldiers turns and glares at me.

"Yes?" he barks, his tone hostile, his body language menacing. I tell him I'm just standing, watching.

"Well, can I help you?" he asks curtly.

No, I'm just standing, watching.

"Well, move!" he says.

Anger smothers fear and I stand my ground. For a few tense moments our eyes lock before he turns away. The Palestinians are released and I move on.

What if I had been a Palestinian?

In his book, My Enemy, My Self, Yoram Binur, a former member of Israel's elite parachutists's unit, recounts how he dressed and lived as a Palestinian to find out what it was like to be a Palestinian in an occupied land.

He concluded with the following: "A continuation of Israel's military presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip threatens to change Israel into a place which some people, myself included, will find unlivable. Most simply put, I am tired of having to witness the disastrous results of the occupation every, day, as well as being frightened of the possibility that many people, on both sides, may be doomed to stiffer bloodshed and destruction."

Binur's book was published in 1989. Almost 14 years later, the occupation continues and the prospect of a just settlement to the bloody conflict dims with every suicide bomb attack and heavily armed Israeli retaliation.

Bob Holmes, a Toronto Roman Catholic priest, returns this month to the West Bank City of Hebron to rejoin a small Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) group working to defuse the violence. Before he left Toronto, I asked him if he saw any signs of hope.

"I see glimpses of what peace could--and does--look like when I see Israelis, Palestinians and internationalists all working together to end the occupation," he said. "I see Jews and Muslims and Christians all standing together to blockade the bulldozers that are destroying the orchards of the Palestinian people. I can give you a dozen examples. That's one of them."

Noa Ben Shalom of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is one of the several Jews we met working for human and civil rights in the occupied territories. A 25-year-old documentary photographer, she was raised in a Tel Aviv suburb before locating in Jerusalem five years ago. Her grandmother lost all of her brothers and sisters in the Holocaust.

Standing on a Jerusalem hill, Ben Shalom sweeps her arm in a wide arc pointing out the Jewish settlements that ring the city. These Jewish areas were built on what was once Palestinian land and, we are told, residents don't consider themselves settlers, unlike the ideologically motivated settlers elsewhere in the West Bank.

Many are immigrants from lower economic levels who have found affordable; government-subsidized housing. What do they know about Palestinian rights?

"There are no checkpoints, nothing to remind you that you are sitting on someone else's land," Ben Shalom says. "Once we control enough territory, we control everything. It's the matrix of power. It makes apartheid look like a Sunday picnic."

Later, we meet Rachel Greenspahn in the Jerusalem offices of B'Tselem, where she works as the development officer for the Israeli information centre for human rights in the occupied territories. Established in 1989 by a group of public figures, lawyers, academics, journalists and Knesset members, it is one of Israel's most prominent and respected human-rights organizations.

The daughter of Jewish parents who live in Denver, Colo., she was raised to "support Israel." Greenspahn became an Israeli citizen four years ago and works to create "a society we can be proud of with an equality and justice record we can be proud of."

She says that Israelis, terrified by terrorist attacks, view human rights as a luxury and human and civil rights as undermining Israel's security. "But security can't justify everything," she says. "Even in war there are rules. The Geneva Convention was drawn up for war."

As I walk through the eerie silence of Hebron's Old City, I hear the sound of children at play in a small apartment above a Palestinian shop, shuttered and daubed with graffiti and the Star of David. The sound will haunt me for a long time.

Located about 45 km south of Jerusalem, Hebron has been under tight military curfew since a nearby ambush by Islamic militants killed 12 security personnel in mid-November, 2002. Since then, Palestinians have been confined to their homes and only allowed out at irregular, short periods at the discretion of the military.

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of the Israel-based Rabbis for Human Rights, says he can hardly think of an area that comes close to Hebron in terms of Jewish settler violence and fanaticism.

Believing that God gave all of the biblical land to the Jews, settlers view the native Palestinians who vastly outnumber them as interlopers, although they have been on the land for generations. "Sharon is a Traitor" and "Death to the Arabs" were among the signs at a recent Jerusalem demonstration against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, addressed by the leader of the Hebron settler movement.