Post by Helen Pearson (you can read the first article here - 'Exile')

This is the second of a series of articles comparing Palestine/Israel and Guatemala written by GSN member, Helen Pearson, a Jewish activist from Leicester, UK, who has a long association with Guatemala and who visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories in April 2006. 

II : Punishment

Early one morning some five years ago in the town of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem a young man is getting ready to go to work.  He stands in front of the dressing table mirror combing his hair, his back to the window.  Suddenly he hears a crack and instinctively ducks, a second before the bullet smashes into the mirror exactly where his head has been only a moment before. 

This incident, which happened to her son, was the first thing that Mary (1) told me about when I arrived in her house.  As part of our trip (2) we had requested an overnight stay with families so we could meet Palestinians in a more informal setting, away from the main tour programme.  The house was right on the edge of town. As I walked into the large open space that was the family’s kitchen, dining room and lounge rolled into one, I was struck by the beautiful green hills and fields which could be seen from the back of the house.

I commented on the lovely view and Mary said, “but look, look”.  I couldn’t see what she was pointing at.  “They are watching us from that lookout all the time, the settlers”.  And then I made out a kind of dugout on the hillside opposite the house, which Mary explained to me was part of an illegal Israeli settlement.  Then she told me about her son being shot at soon after the second Intifada started.  She was still asking: “Why did they do that? What did he do to them?”  There is absolutely nothing between that dugout and Mary’s house, nothing to fire at but the silhouette of a young man combing his hair.  If the aim of the settler who fired the shot had been slightly truer, and the bullet hadn’t gone through the window frame first, Mary would be one son down. What she saw when she looked out the back of her house was not a beautiful view of hills and fields but a constant, threatening presence which targeted her and her family as a punishment, not for anything they had done personally to Israelis, but for Palestinian rebellion against the Occupation.

I found this a truly chilling introduction to Mary’s warm and welcoming home and I couldn’t stop wondering how that one act of violence had affected her son and the whole family, their sense of security shattered like the mirror, which still had the bullet embedded in it.

This one incident can be multiplied thousands of times over all across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  A phrase which came up time and time again when we talked to Palestinians was ‘collective punishment’.  By this the speakers meant retribution dealt out to the whole population, irrespective of involvement in any direct threat to Israel.  Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention covers the conduct of occupying powers and forbids collective punishment, stating that a person shall not be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. The Israeli state clearly feels no obligation to abide by Article 33, nor by numerous other stipulations of International Humanitarian Law and United Nations resolutions, which clearly establish the illegaility of the Occupation itself and the strategies used to maintain and extend it.

The purpose of collective punishment is to demoralise and humiliate, to devalue daily life, denigrate the culture of the population being punished and wear down resistance.  Blaming and then punishing the Palestinians for hindering the Zionist ideal of a state for the Jews has blinded Israel to its own ruthlessness and to the only solution possible:  that the land must be shared with full respect and equality accorded to all peoples who live there.

The questions, “Why us?” and “what did we do to deserve this?” were ones I heard over and over again from survivors of the violence in Guatemala, where during the early 1980s the infliction of collective punishment reached grotesque proportions.  The civilian population was directly targeted by the military as part of a strategy to eliminate the social base of the guerrilla movements which operated in rural areas inhabited by Mayan subsistence farmers.  Massacres, torture, rape, burning of villages and ‘scorching’ the earth with chemicals were perpetrated not because the people or communities at the receiving end were fighting the army, but because they might be sympathetic to the insurgents’ cause, and to provide an example of what would happen to people who did collaborate with the guerrillas. 

In the region where I worked in Guatemala during the mid-1990s, the Petén, I had heard plenty of stories of the atrocities committed by the army.  As part of my work supporting a grassroots Guatemalan refugee organisation, I accompanied several preparatory brigades to a piece of land on which a group of refugees were to return from Mexico to establish a new community.  The land was deep in isolated sub-tropical forests on the site of a former agricultural co-operative, called El Quetzal, which had been abandoned in 1981.  One day, as the work brigade set about clearing some of the undergrowth, a cry went up: “bomba!”  The men had come across an unexploded aerial bomb about a metre across which bore a label written in English.  “This is right where the village centre used to be”, said Gabriel, who had known the area before, and for a moment we were all thinking the same: “maybe beneath our feet are the charred bones and houses of the previous inhabitants of El Quetzal”.  UN specialists were called in to dismantle the device which turned out to be of US manufacture and a type used for blanket bombardment in Vietnam.

In Guatemala, collective punishment became a sophisticated strategy developed by the armed forces which drew on psychology, sociology and political analysis as well as military theory.  In Palestine, although collective punishment has not reached the barbarity it did in Guatemala, it is operated in a deliberate and systematic way.  As the Israeli human rights organisation, B’tselem, puts it: ‘Since the beginning of the occupation Israel has made extensive use of means that constitute collective punishment [….] Israel currently employs these means as an integral part of its policy in the Occupied Territories’.(3)

Jeff Halper, Co-ordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICADH), has coined a phrase, ‘the matrix of control’, to describe the complex web which is strangling the Palestinian population.  He says that this matrix ‘conceals behind a façade of seemingly innocuous administrative devices and ostensibly justified military and physical constraints a repressive regime intended to permanently deny the Palestinians self-determination, citizenship, and basic human and civil rights’.(4)

One key element of ‘the matrix of control’ is what Israel calls the ‘separation barrier’ but which is more generally known as the Wall.  The first time we passed through it in our minibus, going from Israel to Beit Sahour in the West Bank, I shivered at the ugly, towering concrete walls topped by barbed wire and flanked by watch towers, as we went from the smooth Israeli tarmac to the potholed Palestinian streets on the other side.  As foreigners we sailed through, but Palestinians can wait for hours at checkpoints, often enduring extensive questioning and intimidation, sometimes not being allowed through, even if they have the correct paperwork or a medical emergency.  So persistent is harassment and other human rights violations at checkpoints that Israeli women have set up an organisation, Checkpoint Watch, to monitor and report on abuses.(5)

The wall in turn is part of a wider policy of ‘closure’, started in 1993 and getting ever worse, which stops people travelling outside the areas where they live, effectively preventing or severely hampering family contact, employment, business operations, college attendance and numerous other activities.  A complicated system of permits exists which restricts where Palestinians can travel to, which roads they can use and how they can travel. [to be continued tomorrow]

1)  Not her real name: the names of some Palestinians in my articles have been changed.
2)  I travelled to the West Bank and Israel with Olive Co-operative – www.olivecoop.com
3)  www.btselem.org/english
4)  Obstacles to Peace: A Re-Framing of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Jeff Halper, Jerusalem 2005, 3rd Edition
5)  www.machsomwatch.org/eng