From znet:

Ramallah Revelations
by Judy Rebick
Macleans
July 26, 2002

"My favourite movie is Life is Beautiful," Refaat Sabbah tells me. "I love
the way the hero protects his son from the experience of the concentration
camp. I try to protect my children from the horrors around us too," he
adds with a gentle smile. "I notice my daughter doesn't draw guns and
tanks."

We are sitting in a covered porch in his modest home in a downtown
Ramallah neighbourhood. The night before, Israeli troops nearly destroyed
Yasser Arafat's compound nearby. Refaat and his wife Soreida were up all
night. The shelling began at 2 a.m. and continued until 6 a.m. The
children -- a girl, nine, and a boy, four, slept through it. Not so the
little girl next door, who has been crying ever since.

This is life in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian
territories. Refaat is the founder and head of the Teacher Creativity
Center here, and Soreida works with women's groups. They are intelligent,
charming, and passionate about life. Like many activists I meet here, they
are remarkably without hatred or bitterness. Sabbah tells me that he tries
to avoid crossing the checkpoints that surround Ramallah so that he won't
get too angry with the Israelis.

I am in Palestine. Even the term makes me a little uncomfortable -- I am
Jewish, born and bred. I went to Hebrew school. My first battle for
equality was to insist on having a bat mitzvah in my 13th year: in those
days, only boys had the coming-of-age ceremony. My father was a major
fundraiser for the United Jewish Appeal, with most of the money going to
Israel. Israel is supposed to be my homeland.

I went to the Palestinian territories recently as part of a fact-finding
trip organized by Alternatives, a Montreal-based organization with a
history of 20 years of work with groups in Israel and Palestine. I
accepted the invitation because I had become increasingly disturbed by the
Israeli occupation of the territories, and the uncritical support for
Israel by Canada's organized Jewish community.

What I saw was both deeply disturbing and strangely inspiring. The
inspiration came from people I met on both sides of the
Israeli-Palestinian divide. I was already aware of the brave people of the
Israeli peace movement who stand up against the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian land, land that Israel agreed to withdraw from under the Oslo
accords. What I didn't know was that there is a strong, growing movement
of activists in the Palestinian territories who call themselves the
democratic opposition. Most work through the non-governmental
organizations that provide what is left of social services in the
Palestinian territories. Like Refaat and Soreida, these are compassionate
people with a strong commitment to democracy, equality and peace. As one
told me, "I only wish the Israelis realized that their best hope of
security is a strong Palestinian state. The rest of the Arab world hates
them, we don't -- we know them, they are our neighbours."

While the outside media rarely mentions the democratic opposition, their
popularity in Palestine is growing, and some plan to run for office in the
coming elections early in the new year. The most prominent figure among
the democratic opposition is Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, president of the
Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees. "What we are witnessing,"
he argues, "is an annexation of the West Bank -- the same process as in
1948 when the state of Israel was founded on previously Palestinian land.
This is a war of settlements, and the ultimate goal is to annex the West
Bank. The current struggle," he added, "will decide if there will be two
independent states -- Israel and Palestine -- or one apartheid state of
Israel."

Barghouthi's words have echoed in my head since my return to Canada, as
the Israeli aggression has stepped up. While there, I saw the series of
checkpoints as a new Berlin Wall in the making. Now, they're building the
wall.

Visiting the West Bank is a frustrating experience because of the
checkpoints, while living there seems almost impossible. On the first day
that we visited Ramallah, the checkpoint on the road linking the city with
Jerusalem closed at about 4 p.m. The scene we observed while waiting for
the bus to take us back to Jerusalem was not unusual. Palestinians working
in Jerusalem and living in Ramallah couldn't get home, so frustration grew
as the afternoon wore on. A few walked forward to speak with the guards,
and no one would leave, despite orders to do so from the soldiers. Then,
the soldiers fired tear gas to disperse them.

A few boys, whom I had seen earlier gathering rocks, started throwing them
at the soldiers. That's when the soldiers started shooting. People ran in
all directions. "Come, come," one man yelled. He waved at us to take
refuge behind a car parked nearby. We weren't frightened because it seemed
impossible that they were using live ammunition -- but they were.

As extraordinary as the experience was for us, it is a daily ritual here.
According to Barghouthi, these checkpoint dramas are simply a method of
harassing Palestinians, like the thousands of students at Birzeit
University living in Ramallah who must cross a checkpoint twice -- there
and back -- to get to school, walking more than a kilometre each way. The
checkpoints divide the West Bank into 120 different areas. If you want to
go from one area to the next, you cross a checkpoint. You never know if it
will be open, and it's impossible to know how long you will wait. If
you're sick, old or pregnant, you still wait. If you want to visit your
aging parents in the next village, you need permission from the Israelis.
"We cannot breathe," one woman said, jammed against us in the crowd at a
checkpoint. "We cannot work, or take care of our families. They have taken
away our lives."

In Canada, we hear much more about the horror of suicide bombings than
about the killing of Palestinian civilians. According to the Palestinian
Red Crescent Society, 1,599 Palestinians -- 85 percent of them civilians
-- have been killed and 19,452 injured since September, 2000, when the
second intifada began. In the same period, 563 Israelis have been killed
and 3,545 injured, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The suicide bombings, as terrible as they are, are not the reason for
Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories. The real reason is to
protect ever-expanding Israeli settlements. But the bombings do provide a
moral and political justification for the occupation. The Israeli peace
movement that was so powerful only a few years ago is now isolated, with
70 per cent of Israelis supporting the aggressive policies of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon.

Adam Keller is a Jewish activist from the peace group Gush Shalom. "It is
very difficult," he told us. "Like all Israelis, I am afraid of the
suicide bombers. Every day we live this fear, never knowing if our
families or we will be victims. But what makes me different is that while
I believe they are wrong, I understand that this is the only way
Palestinians feel they can fight back against the terrible injustice being
inflicted on them by my government."

The checkpoints, 24-hour curfews, mass arrests of adult males, rotating
invasions, strafing and bulldozing of houses, occupations of cities and
refugee camps, and refusal to allow Palestinians to work in or trade with
Israel, are all justified by the attempt to stop suicide bombings. Now,
they're building a wall around the West Bank. What next?

My experience convinced me that Israeli aggression simply plants the seeds
for more suicide bombings. Everywhere we went were posters of "martyrs,"
both suicide bombers and young men posing with machine guns who were
killed resisting the Israeli invasion last April. In one refugee camp,
young boys wore photos of the "martyrs" in pendants around their necks --
like saints' medals. "I am not afraid of the Israelis," Refaat Sabbah told
me. "I am afraid that violence is becoming a positive moral value in our
society. And from that we will never recover."

All the activists we met oppose the suicide bombings, both morally and
politically. But they are frustrated that no one in the outside world asks
why so many young people are desperate enough to blow themselves up. The
week after our visit, a large number of Palestinian intellectuals and
activists made a public statement condemning suicide bombing and calling
on extremist Palestinian groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to stop
recruiting young people for these acts of terror.

The state of Israel is not in danger. The Palestinians have no army, and
other Arab countries are not leaping to their defence. Only Israel has the
power to stop the escalating violence. Surely memory is not so short --
and Israelis can remember when they were a people without their own land
or an army to defend them, and with a strong, proud identity and history
of resisting persecution. What struck me most in my visit was how similar
are the Palestinians and the Jews. One man in East Jerusalem asked me: "If
you are Jewish, why don't you support the Israelis?" I responded that I
couldn't accept that my people, who suffered for so many centuries, could
turn around and persecute another people. There is no justice in that --
and where there is no justice, there will be no peace.