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Ramallah turned its back on the Secretary
of State when she arrived for her exclusive meeting with the
President of Palestine. A meeting that totally excluded the government
of this struggling people.
When we first dared the early morning heat we were surprised
at the locked shop-doors and the empty streets and were a little
angry. Why should these people lose a days work and income (small
enough as it is) because this woman with no womanly feelings
has decided to streak through the city in a bullet-proof windowless
car?
But then on thinking a little
deeper it became clear that the closed shops and the empty streets
were the only means by which the people of Ramallah could say
they did not want to acknowledge the presence of the Secretary,
or allow her in any way to participate in the life of the city.
It was their way of turning their backs on American policy in
this region, too closely allied with Israel's. The people of
Ramallah have precious little except the vibrancy of their always
lively streets, and in protest that vibrancy was put behind locked
doors to preserve it from the woman of America who had come smiling
to gloat over their poverty.
I am sure that Condoleezza
Rice, (called Kundara by many people here, which is Arabic for
shoes) has no need for the pulsing life of Ramallah but I was
glad all the same that she would only see it at its most depressing.
When the new front of Israel's war opened two weeks ago there
was a strange mixture of relief and sadness in the West Bank,
outweighed most noticeably by total sympathy for the people of
Lebanon who were about to be bombed out of their homes and villages
and cities. The relief was two fold for the people of Ramallah.
Relief that the people of Gaza were not totally alone in their
desperate need to fight a military regime so much stronger than
them, and relief that the Israelis, occupying their land and
interfering so much in their daily lives, were not totally untouchable.
There were just a few hours of thanksgiving.
Of course no one doubted there would be reprisals, but the action
of Hezbollah in capturing two Israeli soldiers was an act directed
specifically against a military target and it was against the
military regime which has caused so much bloodshed in Gaza and
so much of it here in the West Bank as well. For a few brief
hours the people of Palestine were grateful.
The second reason for relief
was far more specific and short-lived: the Atara checkpoint leading
in and out of Ramallah has caused hours of delay everyday for
all Palestinians who need to enter Ramallah, whether to work
or study or stock-up on supplies that are sorely lacking in the
villages. This checkpoint has been constantly manned for the
past 6 months and was unmanned for ten hours on the day that
Hezbollah attacked the military outpost on the northern border
of Israel.
By the time I passed through
it at 9 pm on my way to a village for the weekend, it was manned
again; and by very angry soldiers. But it was impossible to ignore
the relief in the village that evening when Atara was talked
about; how services had passed straight through to Ramallah and
how the younger men from the village did not have to get out
and be searched and interrogated at will and maybe sent back
home.
For ten brief hours the people
in the Ramallah region of the West Bank could travel unstopped
between their homes and the city in which they worked or studied.
But it is heartbreaking to
realize at what cost these few hours of relief for the people
of the West Bank came.
A cartoon has started circulating again in Palestine.
A poignant and tragic reminder
of how much these two countries have suffered in like at the
hands of a U.S backed Israel.
It shows Hamoodi, that strange
little symbol of Palestinian resistance offering a flower to
a maiden who is gazing down at Hamoodi through a gaping hole
in a wall, caused by an exploding shell.
''Good Morning Beirut'' little
Hamoodi says to the maiden.
''Welcome to our struggle.we weep with you we, we suffer with
you, we know how brutal your enemy can be.
We too are suffering.
Our sisters and brothers
in Gaza are being buried every day.
Buried beneath the rubble
of collapsing buildings, and beneath the sands blown by the desert
winds in anger against the failure of the World leaders to act.
We have been waiting here
for a long time.
We greet you and offer you
a flower. The ruins left by the inhuman military machine has
devastated your people as it has ours. And now all we in Palestine
have to offer you is a flower.
We have nothing else.
I have not faced the world
for a long time, because the world does not want to know what
I have to say. Nor could it bare to see the scars on my face.
But you, sweet maiden, can see my face because you are suffering
like us''
The soldiers of Israel are suffering too.
I can scarcely bear to see
them loading their weapons into their tanks and jeeps and airplanes,
and having to live out in reality, the action-movie unreality
of war.
These poor men who we see,
rushing to evacuate wounded friends and press -- reporting their
successes against the ''terrorists'' they have been conditioned
to hate, are inadvertently being forced to serve a cause that
is bent on destroying the very basis of justice and equality
and humanity.
''We blow up their tunnels if we can, but we know that we will
have to enter as well, at some time, and in the dark tunnel come
face to face with a terrorist,'' some soldier reported to BBC.
It is frightening to witness how the education of these young
Israeli soldiers has dehumanized their neighbors into a term:
one single word they use to describe a whole people. A word that
justifies killing and maiming and terrorizing.
Used to justify in the eyes of the common soldier as surely as
in the eyes of the International world of Diplomats who have
to sit and listen to Condoleezza Rice as she uses this word to
justify calling for a cease-fire that is not immediate.
How can a cease-fire not be
immediate?
Next week, next month there
will need to be a cease-fire. After a week, a month of useless
bloodshed and horror. It is like some horrible nightmare that
two weeks of the onslaught in Lebanon has passed and one month
of the killing in Gaza has passed and the leaders of the US and
Britain have not enough humanity to say enough is enough.
And the leaders of the EU have
not enough clout to be heard, and the leaders of the UN have
been targeted because they were too vocal.
(The UN personnel based in
south Lebanon were in the process of investigating claims by
Lebanese doctors that the Israelis were using phosphorous in
their air-attacks when their building was hit and four UN personnel
were killed. Will the UN continue this investigation?)
Let there be a cease-fire and
allow a channel of assistance to reach the unreached civilians
in this tragedy and then see what to do next!
Sometimes the priority of being a human being ought to override
the desperation of being the toughest and most powerful regime
in the area.
Of course the Lebanese and the Palestinians are not the only
ones suffering at the moment. The citizens of Israel are suffering
too. But still the World Leaders allow Kundara to speak only
about a cease-fire that is not immediate.
The word Terrorist has been strategically placed alongside the
names of Hezbollah and Syria and Iran and, up until last week,
Hamas as well. But a knew strategy has emerged this week which
sees Hamas no longer being named with the other members of the
''Axis of Evil''. This is cause for concern.
It is as if, by mentioning
Hamas, people might get a vague pang of conscience or sadness
about that devastated strip of land they had forgotten since
the Lebanese crisis. Maybe the World Leaders don't like to deal
with the conscience of the International Community on too many
issues at once. And Gaza is an easy place to forget.
This frightens us in the West Bank. And people are growing angry
too, as Gazans continue to die.
There is precious little safety
routes for the people of Lebanon to take, bombed out of their
homes and off the roads if they attempt to escape, but there
is even less possibility for the people of Gaza.
As foreign nationals are rescued
from the bloodshed on the northern front of this war, there are
all but no foreign nationals in Gaza to be focused on. No rescue
ships will drop their anchors off the blood-stained beaches of
Gaza. There is no road to Damascus for these terrorized people.
Yesterday 23 more people were killed in Gaza and shocking pictures
are being aired on Aljazeera of the continual violence. Today
a medical Relief team has been denied entry into that war-zone
whose only wish is to provide assistance to the population who
are being killed.
Our call from the West Bank is that Gaza be not forgotten. It
is hard to focus on too many horrors at once but we are obliged
to do this.
The morality of the western world is at stake; while the leaders
and heads of state and secretaries continue to neglect the human
aspect of this conflict, the rest of the community has to work
harder to focus on it.
Unfortunately at this time I have little of good-cheer to report
on. The people of the West Bank are in daily mourning for the
deaths in Gaza and Lebanon and are waiting to see where Israel
will turn next. Maybe Syria and maybe here.
As I finish writing the drone
of a reconnaissance plane is keeping me company. It has been
circling and circling for hours overhead. It has no lights and
its grey bulk in the midnight sky is a little unnerving.
Some friends have left for
the mountains an hour since saying that the assassinations of
people from Nablus and Ramallah will begin again. A local policeman
just called to say that the men in the station up the road might
take to the park for the night
The streets are often quiet
now and there is far less bravado around And this too is saddening.
The war machine seems to be grinding away at the very fabric
of human life. Here, in Lebanon, in Gaza and in all countries
where indifference has started to take hold
Hamoodi wants to show you his face, but for the moment as the
flower of sympathy is offered to the people of Lebanon by those
of Palestine, the face of Hamoodi remains hidden.
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