Breaking the Chains
Denver group wants more participation in non-violence in Palastine.
by Brian Hull
March, 2002
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) comes from a distinguished lineage of social activism. Though less than a year old, the organization is rooted in the same tradition of non-violent civil disobedience that made men like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King household names. Yet on MLK day (the day of our interview), Mark Schneider, ISM member and practitioner of King’s style of social activism, was denied the right to speak by the MLK parade organizers in Denver because he was “too political and controversial,” an irony that didn’t escape him.
Schneider and cohort Val Phillips of ISM recently returned home after 26 days spent in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There, they met with hundreds of other international activists who all share a common vision of bringing the world’s attention to the plight of the Palestinian people. The gathering’s results proved so dramatic that Palestinians themselves say they will never forget what they saw.
On December 29, members of ISM joined ranks with another non-governmental organization, Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People (GIPP), to attempt the most ambitious act of defiance yet attempted by either group. The plan was to take over an Israeli military checkpoint and subsequently keep the main road open between the two Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bir Zeit.
Despite being assaulted by a deluge of tear gas, sound grenades and rubber bullets, the combined force of over 300 internationals proved determined enough to keep the road open for Palestinian commuters for several hours. As international media left the scene and many of the activists abandoned the struggle, the remaining diehards were faced with a rather dramatic head-to-head confrontation with Israeli soldiers.
“I was scared for a number of reasons,” Schneider says. “This had never been done in Palestine as far as I know. And I’ll tell you, when I had AP and Reuters and Al Jazeera cameramen standing next to me, it provided some relief. At least they were documenting what was happening and making the soldiers think twice.”
Earlier in the day the activists stood side-by-side, locking arms across the entire road in order to stop military vehicles. But with diminished numbers and an armed personnel carrier heading toward them, stopping this particular vehicle meant laying down head-to-toe and hoping for the best.
The vehicle did stop but only when it was a scant three feet away from the activists’ heads. Their conviction—that as internationals they would be able to confront the Israeli military without being killed—was being put to the ultimate test. The Israelis commenced to threaten, beat and drag the activists across the road. In one case, a soldier jabbed an ISM activist with his M-16 rifle, Schneider says.
“If Palestinians would have taken over the same checkpoint they would have been shot, just outright shot,” Schneider says. “And we had Palestinians involved, but had they done that solely, they wouldn’t have just been tear gassed and sound bombed. It’s not speculation. It has repeatedly happened.”
Given these dire consequences, many Palestinians have been unwilling to carry out non-violent protests, but Phillips hopes that their actions could help reopen the space for non-violent Palestinian participation. Very few Palestinians are coming out in the street and demonstrating during this intifada and ultimately, Phillips says, it’s because the cost is simply too high. “When a fifteen-year-old boy goes out to demonstrate with his friends, he gets shot in the head and killed,” he adds. “Close to a thousand Palestinians have been killed in this intifada so far.”
In addition to its inherent risks, doubts about the historical effectiveness of protest have also diminished Palestinian enthusiasm, Schneider says. Non-violent resistance typified the first intifada. Its eventual reward was the passing of the Oslo Accords, a seemingly historic treatise that promised to end further Israeli land seizures and settlement construction. Ironically, however, settlements have increased dramatically in violation of Oslo provisions, and many Palestinians are now skeptical of what non-violent protest can achieve.
With the mainstream media often downplaying Palestinian woes, ISM strives to fulfill a watchdog role that, from their perspective, is sorely missing. The Surda Checkpoint that they took over on December 29 is a case in point. It is part of area “A,” an area that, according to the Oslo Accords, is supposedly under total Palestinian Authority control. Since its occupation violates Oslo, they consider the checkpoint illegal.
“For years the Palestinians have been calling for at least a U.N. monitoring force, not a peacekeeping force, but just a monitoring force to go in and report about what’s going on,” Schneider says. “The U.S. has vetoed that, and so it’s up to U.S. citizens like us to go in and do it ourselves.”
Schneider also fulfills this watchdog role by maintaining the Colorado Campaign for Peace in the Middle East website (www.cmep.org). The website not only documents ISM activities but also provides commentary and links to viewpoints not often available through the mainstream media.
For Phillips, seeking out these different perspectives is crucial to balance what she describes as an “overwhelming misinformation campaign. The fact that approximately two Palestinians per day have been killed in the last sixteen months by Israeli military forces or settlers does not get reported,” Phillips says. “[Israel], the most powerful army in the Middle East, is putting tanks and F-16 aircraft against a people armed with rocks and kalishnikovs, and we [as America] see these people [Palestinians] as the victim here.”
Though Phillips lived in Ramallah from 1992 to 1994, she wasn’t prepared for what she encountered while on this trip. “This was far worse than anything I experienced when I lived there. The intensification of Israeli army presence and the stranglehold on the Palestinian people is much greater. People actually had much more freedom of movement prior to the Oslo Accords,” Phillips says.
The descriptions Schneider and Phillips gave of today’s Palestine are inevitably filled with the tedious monotony of checkpoints. Palestinians, most often young men, are stopped by Israeli soldiers regularly without pretext and asked to wait, sometimes for twenty minutes, other times for three hours. The standard Israeli position is that these detainments are carried out for reasons of security, but having observed the checkpoints firsthand, Schneider has a different take on their significance.
“It’s not like they’re using a computer to check identification. They’re just arbitrarily told to wait. It’s totally random and meant to humiliate, degrade and I think primarily to incite people,” Schneider says.
Not only are Palestinians restricted in their movement within their own villages, they have also been effectively banned from entering Israel. Since Israel closed the border fifteen months ago, 257,000 Palestinians, who previously traveled daily from the occupied territories to Israel for work, have lost their jobs.
The results of these restrictions on the Palestinian people have been devastating on both economic and spiritual levels.
People are not allowed to worship at El Aqsa Mosque, the third most important spiritual center for Muslims in the world. Similarly, Christians can’t go to East Jerusalem on Christmas day. Unemployment has risen in the West Bank to 31.5 percent and in Gaza to a staggering 48 percent.
“For the first time ever I saw Palestinians begging. As hard hit as
Palestinians, and even refugees, have been, I have never seen them begging
because their extended kinship networks are so strong that normally whoever
has a job helps whoever doesn’t,” Phillips says. “But now, nobody has a job.”