Op Ed: Rafah's Human Face

by Starhawk

Thursday, May 20, 2004

Just over a year ago, I held Nehad's six year old, curly haired charmer of a daughter on my lap and scooped eggs from a plate shared by her five other children as bullets thudded into the walls of her home in the border zone of Rafah. With shy pride, Nehad told me the eggs were from her own chickens, the oranges from the few trees that remained undamaged in her garden. The kids watched cartoons on TV, inured to the rat-a-tat-tat of constant fire until the bullets grew so loud that even they dived to the floor.

Each time I'd stay at Abu Akhmed's house, he would tease me about being Jewish, then try to determine which of his friends might make me a good husband, so that I could stay in Rafah. A farmer, 45 of his trees had already been bulldozed. In the evenings, old men would gather around a small fire in a tin can, brew tea and talk while tanks cruised past the gates and the occasional shot crashed into the walls.

I was there with the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. I had come down to Rafah to support the teams that were with Rachel Corrie, the young ISM member who was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to prevent a home demolition, and Tom Hurndall, who was shot by an Israeli sniper while trying to rescue children who were under fire.

These are the homes that are being crushed in Rafah: the old farmhouses of the original families of the area, the crowded apartment blocks of the refugees, the stacked flats of extended families, the fabric of a community that kept its ties strong in the face of enormous oppression. Nehad's orange trees are gone, her family's olive groves razed, her children homeless. And much more than walls and toys and family pictures have been destroyed. A child's sense of security and trust in the world, an old woman's simple dignity, a family's roots, a gardener's easy generosity have all fallen before the assault.

For the last year, members of the ISM and other human rights groups have been kept out of Rafah and the Gaza strip by the military. But we have supported the growing nonviolent resistance in the West Bank, where the villages in the path of the Israeli "security" wall have resisted the confiscation of their lands and the destruction of their communities with almost daily demonstrations that have been met with sound bombs, rubber bullets, tear gas, horses, clubs, and real bullets. The unmentioned trade-off for Sharon's "disengagement" from Gaza has been Bush's legitimization of this wall, which eats deep into Palestinian territory, annexes the illegal settlements which have pushed far into the West Bank, turns the West Bank cities into open-air prison enclaves, and destroys the viability of any future Palestinian state, effectually ending the possibility of a two-state solution.

The wall and the settlements are part of a long-planned strategy by the religious right to annex the West Bank, which is the historic land of biblical Judea and Samaria, where Abraham walked and where the prophets raised their outcries against injustice.

There was no great outcry when Israeli soldiers shot dead nonviolent demonstrators in the village of Biddu, five of whom have been killed in the last six months in peaceful demonstrations. There was no massive condemnation of the beating of women by soldiers on horseback at demonstrations in April where Israeli supporters were brutalized along with Palestinians. These acts were precursors of the extreme violence which has characterized the last few days in Rafah, and which has finally awakened the voice of the international community.

War crimes and brutalization cannot bring peace. Murdering children is no way to stop suicide bombers from murdering children.

Security can only be attained through a political solution that recognizes the rights of both peoples, that values Palestinian lives and children as well as Israeli lives.

It is time for all of us who care for human rights to join those prophets and to join with Palestinians and those Jews and Israelis who cry out against injustice, who refuse to accept "security" as justification for crimes against humanity. We must name war crimes for what they are and demand an end to the Occupation, in Rafah, in Gaza, and in the West Bank: an end to targeted assassinations, a moratorium on the wall's construction, an end to US funding for Sharon's criminal policies, and a beginning of true, good faith negotiations toward a just peace. If we remain silent, we are complicit in those crimes. If we want peace in that torn and bleeding land, we must first bring about justice.

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