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Eyewitness in Palestine
A Summer OF International Solidarity

By Garrick Ruiz

n Qalqilya, in the northwest West Bank of the Occupied Territories of Palestine, all traffic into and out of the city is controlled by one Israeli checkpoint. When I arrived at the checkpoint one day last summer—I was there to observe with others from the International Solidarity Movement—an Israeli soldier began screaming at me in Arabic.

An ISM demonstration in the Occupied Territories, summer 2002. Garrick Ruiz.

He must have thought I was Palestinian. He grabbed me by the arm, shook me and slapped my chest with the back of his hand. But when I pulled out my U.S. passport, he turned and walked away.

I was in Palestine to participate in the Freedom Summer Campaign of the International Solidarity Movement, which brings people from North America, Europe, Japan and other areas around the world to work with Palestinians who are resisting the Israeli occupation. A two-year-old Palestinian-led group, the ISM is committed to nonviolence and focuses on direct action, although that is not the extent of its activities. The ISM’s Freedom Summer campaign ran for 54 days during the summer of 2002, each day representing a year since the event Palestinians call Al-Nakba, the catastrophe—the establishment of Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine, which made refugees of about a million Palestinians.

Like the work of groups such as Christian Peacemaker Teams (NVA, May-June 2002), the ISM campaigns use the presence of internationals to reduce the level of violence against Palestinians. Israel hasn’t had to face very much international pressure for killing Palestinians, but killing or injuring someone from another country—particularly the same country the Israelis’ guns come from—is a different story.

How the ISM Works
Twice-weekly trainings during the summer focused on how to deal with difficult situations, like as facing angry Israeli settlers or soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces. At the end of the training, participants were organized into affinity groups that then traveled to a city in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and met with Palestinians who would help to coordinate their efforts and point them to others in the area with whom they should be in contact. The affinity group is the basis for all the ISM’s work; each group is autonomous and free to determine the most useful actions in its area. The groups generally consist of six to 10 people, although when there is a need for more, two or more groups work together.

Freedom Summer actions included accompanying Palestinian repair workers to wells, sewage pipes and other infrastructure sites where Palestinians had been shot at in the past; riding through checkpoints with Red Crescent Society ambulances; staying in homes threatened with demolition; “checkpoint watches”—documenting what soldiers did at military checkpoints; working with Palestinians to remove roadblocks placed by the Israeli Defense Forces; participating in demonstrations and protests against the treatment at checkpoints and against the occupation itself and, sometimes, in acts of civil disobedience like violating curfews; and documenting breaches of international law and violations of human rights in other situations. In the course of the summer, I personally took part in demonstrations, ambulance ridealongs and checkpoint and other observations.

I rode with Red Crescent ambulances in Qalqilya and Tulkarem in the West Bank. Soldiers stopped the ambulances and pulled them over and searched and humiliated the medics. (According to reports, they have beaten medics when there were no internationals riding along.) On one trip, we had to go approximately five kilometers to pick up an appendicitis patient. We were stopped and searched five times, and the 10-kilometer round trip took more than an hour and a half. I took part in a demonstration in the Qalqilya district against the confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of land for a new wall the Israelis are building. Ostensibly the wall is being built around the West Bank, but the reality is that it is being built in the West Bank, sometimes as much as six kilometers inside the borders.I observed as Palestinians cleared four roadblocks that blocked about six kilometers of the road between Tulkarem and the village of Anabta; I saw hundreds of Palestinians from the Nurshams refugee camp break curfew and come out to take back control of their lives in one small way, by opening up a road.

I also observed human rights and international law violations. In the Al-Amari refugee camp last June 30, I and others from ISM saw the Israeli military arrest every man in the camp between 15 and 50. When we took pictures of the Palestinian men gathered in the field where they spent the entire day in the summer heat waiting to be interrogated one by one, the soldiers fired over our heads. None of the Palestinians was charged with a crime; the soldiers said they were following orders and fighting terrorism.

The Impact on the Observers
Even though most of the people who came to work with the ISM had a lot of background on Palestinian issues, being on the ground in occupied territory provided new insights into the situation. In the limited amount of time we were there, we could only get the barest taste of what Palestinian life is like. Yet it’s one thing to read about home demolitions, another thing to see a destroyed home. It’s one thing to hear about constant military attacks on people’s neighborhoods, it’s another thing to live through several nights of attacks. It’s one thing to read about a child being killed, but another thing entirely to sit and talk with that child’s mother.

I remember, for instance, the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, on the Egyptian border. I remember staying awake all night with my friend Ibrahim as the tanks moved around less than 100 meters away, listening to the machine guns, the tank shells exploding, the spy plane circling overhead, never really sure what was going to happen next. Will the soldiers pick this night to come into the house? Will this be the night that bullets spray through the walls? Will this be the night a military bulldozer destroys the house? I remember how Ibrahim couldn’t go to sleep because he had to be ready in case they did come so he could wake his two oldest sons and they could get away and decide if the rest of the family needed to move as well. (When the Israeli military goes house-to-house, the men are the ones who suffer the worst.)

That was one of the most important things that I took away from my time in Palestine: the knowledge that existing as a Palestinian under occupation means never knowing what is going to happen next. I felt that way even though I knew that I could leave and go home whenever I wanted—how much worse must it be for people who are existing that way in their own homes, without anywhere else to go!

I was also struck by the amazing amount of resistance to the Israeli occupation. It’s impossible to understand the meaning of the resistance to the Palestinians and the risks they take for it without seeing them firsthand. Over the last two years more than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed, yet they continue to defy the occupation even when it could mean death. I saw them continue to organize against it. I saw children armed only with rocks and the will to be free stand up to tanks with machine guns and cannons. I saw whole communities break the military-imposed curfew in order to come out to remove a military roadblock. I heard Palestinians of all ages accept all those risks with the common phrase, “This is our life.”

My visit has added strength to my activism back home. My stories and pictures from my time with ISM have been invaluable in doing educational events in my community, and the friends I made in Palestine energize me. Knowing that they could be the next target of the Israeli military makes it essential that I do all in my power to end the occupation now. That is what the Palestinians asked us over and over again to do: to return home and tell people the truth about what we saw in Palestine.

The Impact on the Crisis

It is unclear, however, how much of an impact a few hundred volunteers spread out over a summer can have on the occupation as a whole. There were times when it did feel as if we made some difference in the amount of violence soldiers used against Palestinians. In Qalqilya, people constantly thanked us for our daily presence at the military checkpoint and told us that what we witnessed there was nothing compared to what happened when we weren’t there. On the level of individual incidents and on individual soldiers, I’m sure that our presence had an impact.

But it did not seem as though our collective presence shifted the policies of the Israeli Defense Forces. In order to have an international force that truly makes a difference it would have to be on a much larger scale. With the United States consistently vetoing any movement within the United Nations toward this idea, the prospects seem dim.

The simple reality is that the Israeli occupation could not continue without the seemingly endless supply of military, economic and diplomatic support flowing from the United States. This is where efforts to end the occupation will have to focus: on cutting off that flow of U.S. support for Israeli occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Garrick Ruiz is a social justice organizer and activist in the Los Angeles area. He spent nearly three months in occupied Palestine in the summer of 2002.

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For more information about the International Solidarity Movement, see the ISM website, www.palsolidarity.org. For updates on the current situation in Palestine, see Palestine Indy Media, www.jerusalem.indymedia.org, or Electronic Intifada, www.electronicintifada.net. For information on U.S. activism, see SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Tax Aid to Israel Now!), www.sustaincampaign.org, and Al-Awda (the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition), www.al-awda.org. Finally, to read more of Garrick Ruiz’s firsthand stories from the Occupied Territories during the summer of 2002, see www.straybulletins.com/palestine.