[GushShalomBillboard] NB: NOON SUNDAY Court Hearing & more

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

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[This billboard contains an alert - to attend or otherwise support the detained  
international observers in their legal struggle against deportation order. There is also an 
telephone interview witth Annie Higgins, member of another such group right now in 
Jenin. In the end some listserver news.]

[1] NOON SUNDAY Court Hearing in Jerusalem 
     -re deportation of internationals -
[2] Annie Higgins and Caoimhe Butterley report from Jenin
     -recorded by Adam Keller-
[3] Confirmation from the other side 
[4] Two Souls - Avnery's Ma'ariv article

(PS) The Gush Shalom addressbook moved to another host
 
[1] NOON SUNDAY Court Hearing in Jerusalem 
     -re deportation of internationals -

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Sat, 08 Jun 2002 21:10:21 +0200
From:           	Elana Wesley <elanaw at post.tau.ac.il>

There will be a hearing at 12 noon on Sunday June 9 in the District
Court on Salah-a-din Street in East Jerusalem near (or just opposite?)
the Ministry of Justice to decide the fate of the three internationals,
Darlene Wallach, US citizen; Josie Sandercock, UK citizen; and Makoto
Hibino, Japanese citizen.  

These three were part of the group of eight internationals arrested on
Saturday evening May 31 in the Balata Refugee Camp where they were
serving as observers and human shields and were accompanying
Palestinians to the clinic and to the hospital.  They were also entering
Palestinian homes to try to moderate the behavior of Israeli troops who
were moving from house to house by blasting holes in the walls.  They
offered to walk in front of the soldiers so that instead of going
through the walls, they could go through the doors.  Their presence
served as an important moderating influence.

They had been encountering Israeli soldiers and officers throughout the
day of Saturday May 31 and had been told by one officer that they were
in Balata on their own responsibility.  No one said anything about their
presence being illegal there let alone tried to make them leave or
arrested them.  However, at around 5:30pm they encountered a group of
eight soldiers at the end of a narrow alleyway.  The soldiers beckoned
them to approach, which they did waving their passports on high to show
the soldiers that they were internationals.  After conversing with the
soldiers for about half an hour, trying to convince the soldiers to
allow the group to pass, the soldiers became more aggressive.  Three
soldiers came and closed them off from behind and began forcing them
forward to the end of the alleyway where an army truck was waiting.  The
army is not allowed to arrest internationals - only the police are. 
Nevertheless, they were forced into the truck and taken to the Ariel
police station where they were held overnight.  Eventually, they were
brought to the Nevei Tirza Women's Prison and the Ma'asiyahu Prison for
Men, both in Ramle.  There, pressure was applied on them to let
themselves be deported.  Those who agreed were or will be sent back
home, supposedly without any limitations being put on their possibly
returning at some later date to Israel and the territories.  

Three of the eight, those mentioned above, have chosen to fight their
case in the District Court.  Both Darlene and Josie have been on a
hunger strike since being brought to the Ramleh prison one week ago.  It
should be noted that they have not been charged with any illegal actions
so far.  They had met and conversed with Israeli soldiers and officers
throughout the day in Balata and had never been asked to leave the
area.  One of their meetings with an officer is recorded on a video,
with someone prepared to testify as to its authenticity, in which an
Israeli officer tells them that they are in Balata on their own
responsibility.  He too did not tell them they had to leave.  

A Palestinian attorney, Mahmoud Jabarin, who works for LAW (the
Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the
Environment) will be defending them along with Gaby Lasky, an Israeli
attorney who works for the Public Committee Against Torture in
Israel.

YOUR PRESENCE IN THE COURTROOM WILL MEAN A LOT TO THOSE THREE
INTERNATIONALS AND TO ALL WHO CARE ABOUT THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN
RIGHTS.  IF YOU CAN POSSIBLY COME, THE COURTROOM WHERE THE 
HEARING WILL BE HELD IS ON THE THIRD FLOOR, THE FIRST COURTROOM 
YOU REACH. 
UNFORTUNATELY, WE DON'T HAVE THE NAME OF THE PRESIDING JUDGE, 
ONLY THE LOCATION OF THE COURTROOM.

Again, the location is the Jerusalem District Court on Salah-a-Din
Street next to (or opposite) the Ministry of Justice.  The time of the
hearing is 12 noon tomorrow on Sunday June 9.

[2] Annie Higgins and Caoimhe Butterley report from Jenin
     -recorded by Adam Keller-

[Last night we talked with two members of the International Solidarity group who 
managed to enter Jenin a few hours after the army invaded it last Wednesday - 
Annie Higgins, an American from Chicago, and Caoimhe Butterley of Ireland. 
You can call them at 972-(0)51-589761.]

"(...) The main thing we can do is to help keep some basic medical services going. 
The army is halting ambulances for thorough searches even when we are present, but 
still it seems to make a difference when they encounter a person from a Western 
country.
Just when the army got into the city center we were in the hospital and heard of a car 
being shot at by a tank, and the driver being wounded. I [Caoimhe] went with the 
ambulance. When we got near the scene, the ambulance itself came under fire. I got 
out, with my hands raised high in the air, and approached the soldiers, walking slowly. 
I tried neither to provoke them not to appear frightened or intimidated. I talked in a 
matter of fact manner and tried to reason with them. They said that the driver had not 
been wounded but had gotten away from the car. After some discussion 
they allowed me to come near the place. It seems they were telling the truth, 
the car was empty and there were no signs of blood. Later we found that the 
driver had found refuge in a nearby house. (...) Making contact with soldiers 
definitely helped later, when the ambulance went to pick up an elderly man from 
one of the villages, who had trouble with the pacemaker in his heart. Our 
presence and our urging the soldiers about the danger to the man's life  helped 
to make searches shorter, and we got him to the hospital in time. 

But it does not always work. There were the four men who were shot at by a helicopter 
gunship and severely wounded while they were travelling in a car at Jaba 
village, a few kilometres utside Jenin. We are still not sure if they were 
specifically targeted or just had the worst of bad luck. Anyway in this case 
the soldiers were very suspicous and made long searches, with the result that 
one of the wounded died who might have been saved if we had got him to the 
hospital in time. The other three were afterwards arrested by the army and 
taken away(...)  
I had been spent some time in Jenin in March, and got to know some people quite 
well. I had not been here in April, when the big horrors happened. At that time 
I had been in Ramallah, besieged inside Arafat's compound. I am not sure it had 
been the right decision to concentrate all the internationals there. When I got 
back here in May I found that two of my friends had been killed, they both bled 
to death. I am haunted by the thought that if I had been here at the time, 
going with the ambulances as I am doing now, I might have saved them. (...) 
The behaviour of the army seems rather erratic. They go out of the city and in 
again, there does not seem to be any clear pattern. So far they did not carry 
out large-scale arrests, though the inhabitants are expecting it to happen soon 
and of course it makes the people very nervous and insecure.  Sometimes the 
tanks are in one neighborhood, then in the next. Sometimes they enforce the 
curfew, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they shoot at people which they find in 
the street without announcing a curfew first. The people just never know what 
to expect. 
The people in the refugee camp observe the curfew less than those in Jenin 
proper, perhaps because they had been through so many terrible hardships 
already that they became totally fatalistic, perhaps just because despite the 
widespread destruction there are still in the refugee camp many narrow alleys 
which provide people some shelter from the tanks. (...) There is very much 
random shooting going on. The other day, I passed two tanks which were just 
shooting into the empty streets. Nobody was shooting at them and they did not 
seem to aim at anything in particular, just a few shots here and a few there 
completely at random. I managed to ask one of the soldiers why they were doing 
this. He said 'We are shooting at buildings, not at people'. When I remarked 
that there were people inside the buildings who could be hurt, he just said 
'You can be sure that we know what we are doing', and refused to talk further."

[3] Confirmation from the other side 

[Jenin again: the same situation described from another angle - in the commentary of 
Roni Shaked in yesterday's (June 7) Yediot Aharonot, which he attributes to unnamed 
"military sources".]

"(...) Operation Defensive Shield in April has created a feeling of shock and 
paralysis among the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority's sovereignty was 
suspended and the army can now enter, at its commanders' sole discretion, into 
any area, town, village, neighborhood or refugee camp, without encountering 
significant resistance on the ground and without being restricted by 
international protests or pressures. 
On the other hand, the Palestinian suicide bombers are still able to move with 
intolerable ease from the West Bank into Israel. Such attacks as the one at 
Meggido Junction, in which 17 Israelis were killed, cannot pass without a 
proper retaliation. The army's present mission is to undertake a larger 
operation aimed at restoring the feeling of shock on the Palestinian side. Once 
that is achieved, smaller 'pinpoint operations' would be sufficiant, aimed at 
apprehending specific persons whose whereabouts become known to the security 
services. 
The problem is that the army does not have many many military options left. It 
has no means capable of really intimidating the Palestinian population. What 
can still be done miltarily in Jenin which was not yet tried in 18 months of 
fighting? F-16 fighters had been used already, as were helicopter gunships, 
tanks, howitzers, missiles, bulldozers, special units, whole infantry brigades -
and terrorism had not been subdued. On the contrary, the motivation to go on 
fighting, to kill, to perpetrate suicide bombings only increased. A growing 
number of inhabitants posses the knowledge of how to make explosives out of 
simple materials available in any pharmacy or agriculatural warehouse. The 
border with Israel is still wide open for the passage of bombers. 
The most which the army can do is stay a bit longer inside the Palestinian 
cities and increase the pace of its pinpoint raids - and this can achieve no 
more than to buy some more time.(...) 
											

[4] Two Souls - Avnery's Ma'ariv article  
                                       
[Hebrew to appear soon on http://www.avnery-news.co.il/ ]

     One has to pity this man, Bush.
     When he was elected, almost by accident, he was a local politician without any 
international experience. He would have been hard put to locate half the world's states 
on the map.
     Since then he has been sleepwalking around the world, pushed hither and thither, 
sometimes listening to one of his handlers, sometimes to the other. He moves in 
circles, zigzags, forwards and backwards. 
     He tells Sharon to withdraw immediately - "I repeat, immediately!" - and when 
Sharon laughs in his face he declares that Sharon is a Man of Peace. He calls for an 
international conference and kills it before it is born. He fantasizes about the "vision" of 
a Palestinian state and humiliates the leader of the Palestinians every day. He brings 
himself and his office into disrepute.
     What's happening here?
     Well, Bush is torn between two mighty forces that are pulling him in opposite 
directions.
     On the one side, there is the domestic political pressure. The Jewish lobby is, of 
course, one of the strongest in the United States. The Jewish community is highly 
organized on rigid, authoritarian lines. Its electoral and financial power casts a long 
shadow over both houses of the Congress. Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen 
were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the 
Jewish lobby is political suicide. If AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten 
Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby 
frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel.
     But nowadays, even the power of this mighty lobby does not match the influence of 
the Christian fundamentalist lobby, dominated by the evangelist preachers. It puts the 
fear of God into the leaders of the Republican Party. George Bush Jr. remembers well 
that his father was forsaken by this lobby, when he failed to obey it.  
     This fanatical religious lobby appears to be extremely pro-Zionist. "Appears", 
because there is a darker side to it. According to its theological beliefs, the Jews must 
congregate in Palestine and establish a Jewish state on all its territory, so as to make 
the Second Coming of Jesus Christ possible. The evangelists don't like to dwell openly 
on what's comes next: before the Coming, the Jews must convert to Christianity. 
Those who don't will perish in a gigantic holocaust in the battle of Armageddon. This is 
basically an anti-Semitic teaching, but who cares, as long as they support Israel.
     The combined might of the two lobbies is being brought to bear on Bush every time 
he tends in the direction of the Arabs. There other powerful factors are at work: the 
Arab governments and the Arab oil. The kings, presidents, Emirs and Sheikhs are 
subservient to the United States, but they are afraid that the suffering of the 
Palestinians will push their people into rebellion. They infect the Bush family with their 
fears. The Bushes, of course, are heavily involved with oil.
     In Washington, as in Jerusalem, all problems are translated into personal 
struggles. The pro-Sharon faction is headed by the extremist Secretary of Defense, 
Rumsfeld, and his even more extreme deputy, Wolfowitz. They have Vice President 
Cheney on their side, and also, so it seems, the National Security Advisor 
Condoleezza Rice, whose legs aroused the vocal admiration of Sharon. Opposing 
them, almost alone, is the Secretary of State, Powell, supported by the experts of his 
department. Every time Rumsfeld and Co. convince Bush that he has to satisfy the 
Jewish-Christian lobby in order to win elections, along comes Powell and convinces 
him at the last moment that the national interests of the United States demand the 
opposite.
     This week Bush received Mubarak. Sharon at once invited himself to the Oval 
Office, obviously believing that Bush is so weak-minded that he is always influenced 
by the last person he has listened to. 
     That is the struggle that meets the eye. Underneath, perhaps, a more profound 
struggle lies hidden. My friend Afif Safieh, the PLO delegate in London, believes that 
two souls have dwelt in the American nation from birth. 
     The one is that of the original settlers, the destroyers of the Native Americans, the 
slavers, a soul that adores brute force and cherishes the myth of the Wild West, that 
supports tyrants around the world. This soul identifies itself automatically with the 
Zionist settlers and the expulsion of the Arabs. Sharon is their man.
     The other one is the soul of Thomas Jefferson (in spite of the fact that he was a 
slave-owner, too, of course) and the framers of the constitution; of Lincoln, the 
emancipator of the slaves; of Wilson, whose 14 Points proclaimed the right of self-
determination; of Roosevelt, who helped to save the world from Hitler; an idealist, 
liberal and freedom-loving soul. This one tends nowadays towards the Palestinians.
     The first soul occupies Bush's heart, the other one knocks on the doors of his 
mind. It will be interesting to see which one wins.   
(Uri Avnery, 8.6.02)

(PS) The Gush Shalom addressbook moved to another host

Apart from a small number of not yet registered new addresses which we do by hand,  
everyone receives this message via the new listserver. 
 
- We expect the problem of doubles to be reduced. 
If you still sometimes get things twice it should be easier than before to repair. The 
reason can be that you appear on the Israeli as well as the international list, or on a 
specific press list as well as on a list for general information. 

- You will be able to adjust the way you receive Gush Shalom mail via the web or by 
sending a specific email;  it will also be easy to unsubscribe or untemporarily disable 
your subscription.

- Last but not least: there will be no advertizing anymore, and a guarantee that the 
addresses on the list cannot be kidnapped for commercial spamming.
                           
NB: The campaign to free Marwan Barghouti is getting organized - go to
http://www.freebarghouti.org/

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