[1683] in peace2
[fwd] [pjnews] World Bank to West Bank
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark H. Weaver)
Mon Apr 22 15:19:47 2002
From: "Mark H. Weaver" <mhw@netris.org>
To: peace-announce@mit.edu
Message-Id: <E16zjDP-0000Qh-00@strings>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 15:11:07 -0400
After reading this, I'm seriously considering dropping everything and
travelling to the occupied territories. To me, it seems the most
effective and reliable way to stop the killing, but it remains to be
seen if I have enough courage.
Friends: Please give this serious consideration. If some of you
wanted to join me, it would greatly strengthen my resolve.
Mark
"Everyone else is demanding that somebody should do something about the
conflict in the Middle East. The peace campaigners are doing it."
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 21:59:41 -0700
To: peace-justice-news@lists.riseup.net
From: parallax@riseup.net
List-Owner: <mailto:peace-justice-news-request@lists.riseup.net>
Subject: [pjnews] World Bank to West Bank
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This seems appropriate after yesterday's gathering of 40-50,000 at the
protests in DC...
Published on Tuesday, April 9, 2002 in the Guardian of London
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0409-02.htm
World Bank to West Bank: The Movement Written Off After September 11
is Demonstrating Its Worth in Palestine
by George Monbiot
Two sets of human shields are in use in the West Bank. The first is
less than willing. The Israeli army, like some of the terrorist groups
it has fought, has been taking hostages. Its soldiers have been
propelling Palestinian civilians through the doors of suspect
buildings, so that the gunmen they might harbor have to kill them
first if they want to fight back.
The second set of human shields has deliberately placed itself in the
line of fire. Since the army's offensive in the West Bank began,
hundreds of Israeli peace campaigners and foreign activists have been
seeking to put themselves in its way. At great personal risk, members
of the International Solidarity Movement have sought to protect
civilians by making hostages of themselves. It is a display of
extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice. It is also the latest
incarnation of a movement which just months ago was left for dead.
The movement to which many of the peace activists risking their lives
in Ramallah and Bethlehem belong has no name. Some people have called
it an anti-globalization or anti-corporate or anti-capitalist
campaign. Others prefer to emphasize its positive agenda, calling it a
democracy or internationalist movement. But, because they have always
put practice first and theory second, its members have proved
impossible to categorize. Whenever it appears to have assumed an
identity outsiders believe they can grasp, it morphs into something
else. It is driven by a new, responsive politics, informed not by
ideology but by need.
After September 11, this nameless thing appeared to vanish as swiftly
as it had emerged. The huge demonstrations planned for the end of
September against the World Bank and IMF in Washington became a small
and rather timorous march for peace. Most US activists, cowed by the
new McCarthyism which has dominated American discourse since the
attack on New York, kept their heads down. Commentators dismissed the
movement as a passing fad which had rippled through the world's youth,
as widespread and as insubstantial as Diet Coke or the Nike swoosh.
But those who dismissed it had failed to grasp either the seriousness
of its intent or the breadth of its support. The television cameras
always focused on a few hundred young men dressed in black and running
riot, intercut occasionally with the wider carnival of protest. But
they seldom permitted its participants to explain the sense of purpose
which propelled them. So most outsiders failed to see that the
commitment of many of the people involved in these protests is
non-negotiable. The movement is no more likely to go away than the
governments and corporations it confronts. Its survival is assured by
its ability to become whatever it needs to be.
Last month 250,000 protesters travelled to Barcelona to contest the
assault on employment laws and the public sector being led by Tony
Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar. This month some of them
moved to Palestine. Among those in the British contingent are people
who have helped to run campaigns against corporate power, genetic
engineering and climate change. They were joined this week by members
of the Italian organization Ya Basta, which helped to coordinate the
protests in Genoa. For the movement which came of age in Seattle, the
World Bank and the West Bank belong to the same political territory.
If the protesters simply shifted as a mob from one location to
another, their efforts would be worse than useless. But one of the key
lessons this rapidly maturing movement has learned is that protest is
effective only if it builds on the efforts of specialists. Like most
of the Earth's people, the foreigners on the West Bank became visible
when they began to bleed (five British campaigners were injured last
week by the Israeli army's illegal fragmentation bullets), but some
outsiders have been working there for decades. New arrivals join
long-established networks and do what they are told. Among the bullets
and the bulldozers, the movement is discovering a courage long
suspected but seldom tried.
Protesters have moved into the homes of people threatened with
bombardment by the Israeli army, ensuring that the soldiers cannot
attack Palestinians without attacking foreigners too. They have been
sitting in the ambulances taking sick or injured people to hospital,
in the hope of speeding their passage through Israeli checkpoints and
preventing the soldiers from beating up the occupants. They have been
trying to run convoys of food and medicine into neighborhoods deprived
of supplies; and seeking to encourage both sides to lay down their
arms in favor of non-violent solutions. They are becoming, in other
words, a sort of grassroots United Nations, trying with their puny
resources to keep the promises their governments have broken.
Perhaps most importantly, the peace campaigners are the only foreign
witnesses in some places to the atrocities being committed. Using
alternative news networks such zas Indymedia and Allsorts, they have
been able to draw attention to events most journalists have missed.
They have seen how Palestinians, told by the Israeli army that the
curfew had been lifted, have been either shot dead when they stepped
outside or seized and used as human shields. They have witnessed the
sacking of homes and the deliberate destruction of people's food
supplies. They have seen ambulances and aid trucks being stopped and
crushed. On March 28 one peace protester watched Israeli soldiers in
jeeps hunting women and children who were fleeing across the fields on
the outskirts of Ramallah, trying to shoot them down in cold
blood. And, by becoming the story themselves, as they are beaten and
shot, the foreigners have brought it home to people who were
dismissive of the murder and maiming of indigenous civilians.
The movement's arrival on the West Bank is an organic development of
its activities elsewhere. For years it has been contesting the
destructive foreign policies of the world's most powerful governments,
and the corresponding failures of the multilateral institutions to
contain them. Rather than echo the thunderous but effete demand of
commentators on both sides of the Atlantic that Yasser Arafat (a man
currently unable to use a flushing toilet) should stamp out the terror
in the Middle East, the campaigners are, as ever, addressing those who
wield real power: Israel and the governments who supply the money and
weaponry which permit it to occupy the West Bank. The movement has
always been a pragmatic one, as ready to protest against Burma's
treatment of its tribal people or China's dispossession of the
Tibetans as the IMF's handling of Argentina. In Palestine, as
elsewhere, it is seeking to place itself between power and those whom
power afflicts.
Everyone else is demanding that somebody should do something about the
conflict in the Middle East. The peace campaigners are doing it.
http://www.monbiot.com
============================================================================
International Protection Force: Volunteers and Funding Needed
Please respond directly to Thom Saffold <tsaffold@provide.net>.
Dear People of Conscience,
Israel's Prime Minister Sharon seems intent on dealing with suicide
bombers by putting all Palestinians under a massive military thumb and
utterly repressing them, not matter how many Palestinians die. As you
know, he justifies this as "defense" of Israeli citizens, yet such
utter repression will only motivate more and more people to devote
their lives to revenge.
Part of Sharon's plan is to force foreigners and journalists to leave
the major cities. High on his list of foreigners to eject,
undoubtedly, are members of the International Solidarity Movement
(ISM). These brave citizens of Europe, America, Canada, Australia,
and other nations have committed the ultimate sin in the minds of
people like Sharon- they have protected Palestinians from his wrath
and focused media attention on the true nature of the Occupation.
I helped organize the first ISM campaign in August. Since then, the
ISM has challenged the military occupation and American media silence
by using the militant, nonviolent direct action methods of Martin
Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and other strategists of human rights
campaigns. We have worked with Palestinians and Israelis who share
our commitment to achieving peace with peaceful means, and justice by
speaking truth to power with our lives.
On Monday, Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition at a peaceful
demonstration led by ISM volunteers in Beit Jala. There was no
provocation, and seven people, including two journalists, were
wounded.
Since then, I have spent hours responding to over 50 Americans and
several other people who are VOLUNTEERING TO REINFORCE THE ISM by
traveling to Palestine NOW or in the near future. Jews and Gentiles,
nurses and students and doctors and accountants, young and
not-so-young, people are saying "I saw the ISM at work on news
broadcasts and am inspired by their dedication to the best of human
ideals. I've never done anything like this before, but I am
determined to join them."
I am writing this to you to appeal for two things:
1. Perhaps you or someone you know would be willing to become an ISM
volunteer. It is dangerous work, and according to Adam Shapiro,
the Israelis are trying to block people from entering the West
Bank. However, the ISM has strategies to deal with this. If you
are interested, please reply to this e-mail, or call me at
734-668-1549.
2. We are in DESPERATE need of money. We can send more people if we
have money to subsidize them, and, as in the days of the Civil
Rights Movement, we need money for legal fees for our members who
are arrested. PLEASE send a generous donation to:
The Center for Creative Democracy 2084 Pauline Blvd. #2-B Ann Arbor,
MI 48103
This campaign began in the spirit of the great Selma Campaign of 1965,
and of Dr. King who urged Northerners to stand in solidarity with
thousands of people standing up to injustice. The Palestinian people
are no less worthy of attaining their rights than were African
Americans. The circumstances of their oppression are different than
under Southern Jim Crow society, but the tools for achieving justice
are the same: Standing up to violence with nonviolence, challenging
lies with truth, meeting murderous hatred and racism with love and a
willingness to die that all people might be free.
Please respond.
Thom Saffold <tsaffold@provide.net>
Ann Arbor, MI
734-668-1549
