Unsettling News

JamieSW — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 11:20:10 +0000

THE BRIGHTON-TUBAS DELEGATION REACHES OUT TO OCCUPIED PALESTINE

Brighton activists have spent the past fortnight in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. The group aims to highlight Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in the region, raise awareness about life under occupation and create practical solidarity links between grass roots organisations in Brighton and the Tubas region. In the process they’ve been shot at, arrested, and discovered that produce grown on stolen Palestinian land is for sale in yer local Tesco’s.

When you hear the word settlement, the image is of a small piece of “Israel” clinging to the hill tops, surrounded by Palestinian farms and villages. In the Jordan valley the reality could not be more different, as the Brighton delegation found out. Small Palestinian farms hold out in a sea of settlers against all odds. The Brighton group decided to find out more about the resistance to expanding settlements first hand by supporting a village fighting back against the expansion of the settlements.

Events rapidly came to a head when delegates went on a protest against Israeli settler annexation of Palestinian land. For years the villagers in Al Ma’zra have dealt with outright theft of their land. The demonstration was against the seizure of 500 Dunams (4 dunams= 1 acre) of land for “military purposes”. The land was the latest to be seized and incorporated into a collection of settlements known as Talmund B. In total 14,000 dunams of land have been stolen from the village.

GRAPE SHOT

On Friday last week, around 50 Palestinians accompanied by the Brighton delegation made their way to land stolen by the settlements. Lucy Collins, a Brighton activist told SchNEWS what happened next….

“We arrived with ten internationals to join the villagers coming out of their prayers. We walked over the hills passing olive trees that families are now too afraid to harvest. In the midday sun people were suffering – toiling up the hill. We reached the land where a barbed wire fence marked the boundary of stolen land. Approximately 40 young men and a few older men crossed the fence and started to remove the settler grape vines from the land. Also the pipes that take the stolen water were destroyed. As people were leaving the land shots rang out from the surrounding hillsides.

A group of children with us started to run, shouting to the internationals to “hurry, hurry”. We ran back under live fire for twenty minutes. Some of us ran ahead to try and get to the village to protect people if the army came into the village. The village think the only reason there were no deaths is the presence of internationals.”

Three internationals were seized by settlers after this act of defiance. A day later Israeli settlers entered the village. Lucy told us “On Saturday the settlers came back into the village. They uprooted and burnt olive trees, destroyed crops, attacked houses and broke windows. The settlers caught some of the villagers and beat them with sticks and bars. On Sunday the army came to the village and arrested the mayor and another member of the village council. They also arrested thirteen other people, four of whom were university students, two being children under fifteen. As we write we do not know what has happened to these people”. They also denied the village the right to harvest their olives as an act of collective punishment.

It is common for villages like Al Ma’zra to suffer collective punishments at the hands of Israeli military or settlers in retaliation for any form of protest at the theft of Palestinian land. This level of intimidation makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to tend and harvest their crops. As their fields lie fallow Israeli settlers simply steal it and attack any Palestinian who dares to complain. This phenomenon of confiscating so-called ‘uncultivated’ Palestinian land is widespread and often results in the annexation of the land by the illegal Israeli settlements. This process is sanctioned and encouraged by the Israeli state.

Meanwhile the three internationals who were seized by the settlers were undergoing their own ordeal – they were held for over thirty hours in the punishment block of Ramla women’s prison in Tel Aviv. Sarah Cobham, one of those imprisoned, told us “A settler pointed a gun at us and threatened to kill us and then we were taken away. During my time in Palestine I have seen the heartache on the faces of the families of many Palestinian ex-prisoners and the hollow looks in the eyes of those who have been incarcerated. Sitting in a cell, with no way of contacting the outside world, I began to grasp the enormity of what they had been telling me.” Although later released, they have been forbidden from returning to the occupied territories.

BLOOD ORANGES

Undeterred by the incident – the Brighton activists continued to build links with the locals, exposing the everyday indignities, violence and economic exploitation which characterize life under Israeli occupation in the Tubas region. The Brighton group first made contact with the region in 2005 through campaigning against Carmel-Agrexco, Israel’s major exporter of fruit to the EU (see SchNEWS 585). Seven British activists were taken to court for blockading Agrexco’s UK depot. They argued that the company was complicit in crimes committed by Israel and called witnesses from the Tubas region.

On this trip activists managed to infiltrate one plantation run by Carmel Agrexco. “Once inside, the evidence was there for all to see: line upon line of conveyor belts: box upon box of dates. All labelled “Made in Israel”, but grown on stolen Palestinian land. Packed by Palestinians, sold in British supermarkets, (Goods on this occasion were destined for Tesco’s and labelled ‘Produce of Israel’) – lining the pockets of settlers that illegally occupy the Jordan Valley. For these Palestinian workers there is little choice. Long hours, bad pay, poor conditions and no job security. Forced to work as modern day slaves, picking and packing produce grown on what is their land. What other choice to they have? They have no land of their own. Their message: “Don’t support the occupation: Boycott Israeli Apartheid goods!” Children as young as twelve were seen working in the factory.

How can a small group of UK citizens make sense of what they have experienced in the occupied territories? “At a school in Tubas the children asked us if we had an occupation in London, whether there was a wall in Brighton and why we (the UK) exported arms to Israel.” Such questions, and bearing witness to the myriad of daily brutalities, brings the need for real solidarity action into sharp focus”. On their return the group will be giving talks on their experiences and “the many ways that we can use our privilege to struggle in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

For complete details on the delegation, including personal blogs check out www.brightonpalestine.org

settlements | ukwatch.net

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