Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

Citizen Paul and Yahav on balcony over-looking Israeli settlement

During our trip, we met Yahav Zohar, an Israeli who has worked as a journalist and translator but also commits at least one day a week to volunteering his time to work toward a just peace –– to end the Israeli occupation. Yahav was the official guide for the antidemolition group The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD), an organization that
opposes the demolition of Palestinian homes and unjust tactics taken by the military and housing authority for demolishing homes and granting permits.
 

On the day we met, we had attended a presentation by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Palestinian Territory. We were briefed on the humanitarian crisis and consequences that need to be addressed:

The United Nations deserves the World’s Support –– it has had little help and has had many obstructions from Israel!

• Lack of protection for civilians and continuing violence
• Closure, movement restrictions and lack of access
• Political geographical and institutional fragmentation
• High Food Insecurity
• Continuous Decline in the Economy and Socio-Economic Conditions
• Agricultural Livelihoods Threatened
• Health-Care Quality Deteriorating; Mental-Health-Disorder Symptoms on Rise
• Access to Quality Water and Sanitation Problematic
• Basic education standards Deteriorating
• Palestinian Civilians at Risk and in Need of Protection
• Children Exposed to Violence and Rights Violations on a Daily Basis
• Increased Humanitarian Coordination Needed
• Gender-Based Impact of the Crisis

Following the meeting, Zohar took us to some key areas where Israelis have demolished Palestinian homes and expropriated land to build new Jewish-only settlements. Despite announced agreements otherwise, this practice continues to make the prospect of a two-state solution less possible.

The UN holds the West Bank and Gaza Strip together –– almost Single-Handedly!

A Young Israeli Who Refuses to Be Silent and Insists She Must Personally Help Palestinians

Among the many wonderful young Israelis I met during my trip to Israel and occupied Palestine, Gali Agnon stands out as a bright spot on many levels. After serving in the Israeli army, this 20-year-old Israeli felt it her obligation to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian people and to do what she could to help them.

A dedicated peace activist committed to forging a solution in her conflicted part of the world, she takes a multi-faceted approach to her mission – bringing people together for cooperative assistance and support on farms, building awareness for the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank, and organizing meetings and gatherings that bring Israelis and Palestinians together in common purpose.

Clearly one of the most tangible contributions she
makes is in her role in helping Palestinian farmers take their produce to market. The Israeli Government does not allow Palestinians to come into Israel to sell their produce, so she has devised a system, where she creates a market for them – offering their vegetables and fruits for sale to the people in Israel, and then transferring the money from her sales to the Palestinian farmers.

In fact, the extensive Israeli military roadblocks and restrictions that I saw for myself make it next to impossible to effectively get from one place to another.

Gali and Citizen Paul at Israeli settlement

Palestinians are prisoners in their own land, facing constant threats and interrogations at every turn — apartheid revisited.*

On Saturday, June 21, Gali asked some of her Israeli and Palestinian friends to spend that Sabbath day helping those Palestinians whose homes were being demolished by the Israeli Government.

Just 10 days later – July 2, a Palestinian worker went on what has been called a killing rampage in Jerusalem. Not affiliated with any Palestinian organization and acting completely on his own, this 30-year old Palestinian, who fathered a child with a Jewish Israeli woman, and drove the tractor he normally used for his job constructing Israeli projects, to kill Israeli Jews – A PERPETUATING TRAGEDY THAT SPRINGS FROM HOPELESSNESS AND DESPERATION.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

(Text from Gali’s Invitation Below)

What would you do if you found a note posted on your door that
Within the next ten days your house will be destroyed?
To build and expand a house, it is required to have a building permit.
These permits are virtually never granted to Palestinians on the basis of various pretexts.
The result is that most Palestinian homes are illegally built, and have standing
Demolition orders against them.

Abed Raba from Wallaje is one of these thousands of people who have received
An order stating that the house he is living in is illegal, and he must present himself
Before the Office of Interior in order to explain why he has built illegally.
Otherwise, judicial and/or administrative measures will be taken against him –
Read: they will demolish his house. The cave where he lives is hundreds of years
Older and is located on his own lands in Wallaje, above the checkpoint near Ein Yal.

The place is a beautiful orchard of fruit trees, also used as
A meeting point for Israeli and Palestinians who have resolved
to meet in spite of racist and segregationist policies.

Obviously, this place does serve the political and economical interest of Israel –
Lands in Jewish hands – and so they are exploiting legal measures as if desiring
to build a neighborhood in order to force him out.

Shaul is the founder, and now the Executive Director, of the organization known as “Breaking the Silence.” This organization is comprised of more than 200 former Israeli soldiers who believe that the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians in the occupied territories is unconscionable and needs to be exposed and ended. “Breaking the Silence” describes itself this way:

BREAKING THE SILENCE

Breaking the Silence is an organization of [over 200] veteran Israeli Soldiers that collects testimonies during the Second Intifadah. Soldiers who serve in the Territories are witness to and participate in military actions, which change them immensely. Cases of abuse towards Palestinians, looting and destruction of property have been the norm for years, but are still excused as military necessities, or explained as extreme and unique cases.

Our testimonies portray a different and grim picture of questionable orders in many areas regarding Palestinian civilians. These demonstrate the depth of corruption, which is spreading in the Israeli military. While this reality, which is known to Israeli soldiers and commanders, exists in Israel’s back yard – Israeli society continues to turn a blind eye and to deny that which happens in its name.

Discharged soldiers who return to civilian life discover the gap between the reality encountered in the Territories, and the silence they encounter at home. In order to become a civilian again, soldiers are forced to ignore their past experiences.

Breaking the Silence has interviewed hundreds of soldiers who served in territories and continues interviewing new soldiers daily. These interviews are published on this website, in testimonial booklets, through different media outlets, and also through lecture and tours in Hebron. The testimonies are published with minimal editing and with complete confidentiality, in order to protect the soldiers and to encourage them to speak.

Breaking the Silence says: “We demand accountability regarding Israel’s military actions in the occupied territories perpetrated by us and in our name.”

EXCERPTS FROM “BREAKING THE SILENCE” SOLDIER TESTIMONIES:

A detained Palestinian youth with soldiers in background.

Rank: First Sergeant
Place of Incident: Ramallah
August 2002

We entered Ramallah and we were told to take up positions in a building opposite the Muquatah. A day earlier, a group of soldiers from the Duchifat unit had taken the building. The Palestinian Minister of Communications used the building and it was full of photographs, tape recordings, etc. When we entered the building we noticed that all six floors had been ransacked. There were ripped up pictures and mashed television sets with shit inside them and the window of the recording room was broken.

Rank: First Sergeant (res.)
Unit: Battalion 50, Nahal Brigade
Place of incident: Hebron

Three weeks after the beginning of Homat Magen [Operation Defensive Shield]

Battalion 50 took over the city of Hebron about four months before “Homat Magen” (Operation Defensive Shield). At this time it was to be replaced by Nachal Battalion 932. The changeover started in stages and my company of March 2001 was the first to leave the front. We were replaced by the parallel unit. We went out on regular leave during which time we were called back to participate in Operation Defensive Shield. The rest of the Battalion stayed on in Hebron and that is how we found ourselves with unit 932 while the rest of our company with 932 remained in Hebron.

After three weeks we exchanged in order to reserve our original organization. Two or three days after we had returned, I went up to the “pharmacy” post, (it was near a pharmacy…hence called the pharmacy post) that was next to the Bus parking lot beside the open lot beside the tomb of the Patriarchs.

As part of the procedures, we would go up to the roof of the building in order to watch over the roads coming into the crossroad. While going up to the watch, I noticed that one door was broken into and I remembered that it hadn’t been like that when we had left…We opened the door and viewed a horrific sight…the place was a doctor’s clinic and what we saw were wooden doors that had been completely smashed and glass showcases had been destroyed. Syringes scattered all about along with documents, drawers that had been upended and smashed, and the worst was the used toilet paper scattered all about the two piles of shit smothered on the floor.

Rank: First Sergeant
Unit: Battalion 50, Nahal Brigade
Place of Incident: Ramallah, Bitonia
April 2002

During Operation “Omat Magen” [Defensive Shield], our unit ended up going through and staying in various houses of Palestinians who had been temporarily removed to another place. In just about every place we entered, we did so with good intentions of not taking advantage or destroying, but over the course of a couple or three days, soldiers found themselves resting on the sofas watching television, the furniture was broken. People would wipe their asses with towels from the bathroom, making use of personal computers in the house. It is impossible to point out only one house because this happened to everyone in every house.

To learn more about Breaking the Silence, visit www.breakingthesilenceexhibit.org.

Click Here to see read about last week’s Champion, Hagit Orfran.

During his visit to the Middle East, Citizen Paul had the opportunity to meet and speak with many young dedicated Israelis that are determined to correct the errors of their Government.

In the following weeks, we will feature each of these individuals for you, in addition to wonderful Palestinian citizens, who are all dedicating their best efforts to bring peace and hope to their homelands.

Listen to an Introduction from Citizen Paul

OUR CHAMPION OF THE WEEK:

HAGIT OFRAN – Settlement Watch

Despite damning details of Israel’s ever-expanding Israeli settlements, this valiant young woman brings us Hope for the Future.

Hagit Ofran is a young Israeli who feels it is vital to expose what the Israelis are really doing to the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank.

Hagit’s work is a kind of mission she has set for herself. Even as she realizes that the “Two State Solution” may be dissolving from possibility because of the Israeli “facts on the ground,” she nevertheless continually works to expose the facts and offer an alternative future.

She always carefully documents her case: “Israel has tragically continued to break agreement after agreement building more and more Israeli settlements, taking more and more Palestinian lands and resources, perpetrating more and more repression and violence – and now there is the damning nearly 800-kilometer-long ‘Wall’ snaking everywhere unlike anything anywhere else in the world.”

At this point in time, Hagit is in essence a one-woman “Settlement Watch” truth-squad. Her association is with the Israeli group known as Peace Now; but often times it’s clear that she is far out front and pretty much on her own. She provides Israelis and people throughout the world truthful information about how the Israeli Government continues unrelentingly – despite repeated promises otherwise – to expand Israeli settlements, to confiscate more and more Palestinian lands, and to apparently work toward creating “facts on the ground” that may soon make the “Two State Settlement” no longer viable.

At the time I met Hagit, I wasn’t aware of this important cover article that appeared in the National Journal about her in March 2008. Here are some of the telling excerpts – as Hagit puts it:

“The de facto policy of Israel is a quiet transfer of land to settlers and the expulsion of Palestinians. They don’t accomplish that by force, nor do they roll up with trucks to take Palestinians away. 

“The central problem is you cannot really reconcile occupation with the rule of law. If we were serious about obeying the law, we wouldn’t lay so much as a brick in this land. So we go through all these linguistic acrobatics to avoid an unpopular truth.”

Asked why she braves the shouting soldiers, the irate settlers, and the suspicious Palestinians to bring back to Israel news that the public would just as soon not know, Ofran considers the question. Then she answers with a world-weariness heard in the voices of many Israelis: 

Fathi Abdel Majid al-Rajabi holds a demolition order from the Jerusalem Municipality for his home in East Jerusalem.

 
“I was born into occupation in 1975, so it is the only reality I know,” Ofran says. 

“At that point, I might have to find a better place in the world to be a Jew, because it would mean we lost the state of Israel.*

The central problem is you cannot really reconcile occupation with the rule of law. If we were serious about obeying the law, we wouldn’t lay so much as a brick in this land. So we go through all these linguistic acrobats to avoid an unpopular truth.

Find more Hagit Ofran content below:

• Her telling article, “Hope out of Despair”
• An in-depth interview with Ofran about the efforts and project of Peace Now
• Video of Ofran as a featured speaker at the New America Foundation
• An Audio Interview from Peace Now, detailing a trip she took to the Gaza Trip to educate Israelis on the spiraling settlement activity.