Madison Rafah Journal

A reminder that you only have a few more weeks to check out this new original play based on real stories from Palestine and the American southwest. “The Birds That Are Your Hands” is continuing through April 19 at Broom Street Theater. This is an extremely powerful and moving performance by a talented group of local actors, accompanied by striking multi-media images and sound. Broom Street Theater truly is living up to its philosophy that “no subject will ever be off limits” by producing this play, and they deserve your support. — Barb O.

Phil Haslanger, Capital Times, March 25, 2009

Last year at this time, Sol Kelley-Jones was living in the West Bank, using theater to help Palestinian children envision a future for themselves in the midst of occupation.

Now Kelley-Jones is back in Madison, helping those who attend her new play envision the reality in some of the world’s tensest places.

The drama — “The Birds That Are Your Hands” — is playing through April 19 at the Broom Street Theater. It juxtaposes scenes from the West Bank with scenes from the Arizona-Mexico border, where Kelley-Jones spent last summer. (Read on …)

Laura Gordon, March 22, 2009

Abu Jameel was waiting in a white pickup truck by the side of the road with the same beard he grew in Ramadan 2003. He was glowing and listening indulgently, waiting for my cab driver to run out of steam with how he’d driven me an extra three or four blocks and all I’d given him was three extra shekels. He kissed me on both cheeks and put me in the truck with three little smiling girls in the front seat and the cab backed out of the dirt road and Abu Jameel drove forward. I asked him whose girls they were and he said they were his. Nancy and Bassant and Haneen. Aseel was at preschool and Fatima the baby was with Nura at home and Jameel was with his grandmother. It was one of those moments of five years passing. Last time I’d seen them, Nancy had been a tiny hairless two-year-old and Bassant in a baby chair and Haneen and Aseel hadn’t been born. I did one of those extended family double-takes. Here were these little babies, all grown up overnight, laughing and talking with braided ponytails, and here I was telling them how last time I saw them they were this big, and they were loving being told how small they had been. He parked the car and we walked through a courtyard with trees and there was Nura, holding a blond, blue-eyed baby and looking exactly the same, wearing mismatching headscarf and a bright, comfortable dress for hanging out inside the house and being a mom surrounded by little girls.

In all the reuniting, there have been a number of bittersweet encounters with people whose lives have dead-ended or people who have settled for something less than they wanted in life and you really feel the five years. One friend got married, moved into her husband’s beautiful but isolated house with her two kids in a city where she knows no one and never goes out. Her husband, pleasant but boring, lost his government job when Hamas took over, and like the other government employees in the same situation collects a salary from the rival government in Ramallah to sit around at home and do nothing. Another friend’s brother’s house was destroyed and keeps getting his visa to the UK rejected and wants to know why I haven’t been in touch.

With Nura and Abu Jameel and the girls it was different, simple and direct, like we’d just seen each other yesterday. Life has been hard for them, too, harder than for many of my old friends, but they’re just that kind of people who absorb people easily, without pretense. It was a perfect sunny morning. We sat in the living room around a tray of bread and cream cheese and tea, eating breakfast.

My Arabic is still broken, but it’s much better than it was in 2003, and one of the joys in coming back is being able to talk a little easier with people. I had heard from mutual friends that the home they built on their farm had been destroyed a week after the bombing was over but I hadn’t heard the whole story. They had been living in different houses, Abu Jameel with his sister and Nura and the girls with her family, for two months while they looked for a new place to live. It’s not easy to find places to live anymore in Gaza. Since so many people have lost their houses, there’s been a huge housing crisis. They finally found this new place and have been living there for less than a week. It’s a beautiful one-story surrounded by a courtyard with fruit trees.

I always use their story as the quintessential Gaza housing story. They are the first family I ever stayed with when I came to Gaza, and a big part of the reason I decided to live here – just because they were such lovely people and living in great danger. Abu Jameel had worked in Tel Aviv for 18 years, developed close relationships to Israelis and a taste for cranberry ice cream and the Tel Aviv beach. He drove a fiat and wore sunglasses and Italian suits. He built up several blocks of stores and cafes with his two cousins that extended from his first home in Salah ad-Deen to the Egyptian border. Half their stores were demolished in the first Intifada and the rest in the second. From then on, their house was one of those front line houses, facing the border and the 12-meter wall and the Salah ad-Deen tower that shot down their street almost every night. Abu Jameel’s Israeli work permit was one of the thousands taken away at the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and although he kept up a warm phone relationship with his Israeli boss, his boss was never able to get him another permit. (Read on …)

Human Rights Watch report claims Israel committed war crimes in its use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem, guardian.co.uk, 25 March 2009

Palestinian civilians and medics run to safety during an Israeli strike using phosphorus shells at a UN school. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP

Israel‘s military fired white phosphorus over crowded areas of Gaza repeatedly and indiscriminately in its three-week war, killing and injuring civilians and committing war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

In a 71-page report, the rights group said the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental, but revealed “a pattern or policy of conduct”. (Read on …)

Lora Gordon, March 19, 2009

It’s not immediately obvious that Gaza has tilted on its axis. The scenery is basically the same. Piles of exploded concrete and flattened farms, aggressive taxi drivers, families sitting in the rubble of their homes offering foreigners like us cups of tea, then stretches where all the buildings are disconcertingly whole and you can forget where you are, or at least the media cliche of where you are.

I live in one of those areas where you forget Gaza was bombed to hell a month ago. Rimall is the Gaza City neighborhood where Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights rented me an apartment, a little studio that opens onto an enormous white tile patio lined with trees. When I walk outside in a t-shirt no one looks at me funny. When I turn left, then right, then left, walk one block and bump onto one of those piles of concrete – the Ministry of the Interior – and an intersection whose traffic lights don’t work and whose street signs were blown out of their frames, but the frames are still intact, like empty glasses frames, and the free-for-all traffic pattern does not yield tons of traffic accidents, which is totally unsurprising in the Middle East – when I get to the bombed out ministry I know I’ve come to Omar al-Mukhtar Street, the main shopping drag in Gaza City.

When I lived in Rafah in 2003 and wanted to feel posh, I would take a servees to Gaza and walk around go to Omar al-Mukhtar Street. Now I live a five-minute walk away and kinda feel like I’ve hit the big time. The Pizza Inn on Omar al-Mukhtar, where I first ate pineapple pizza, paid for by PA people who were trying to either spy on us, control us, or hang out with the foreigners instead of sitting around at their boring day jobs, now serves all kinds of Arabic food as well as pizza. The park next to what was formerly the Pizza Inn is still there, with the same manicured trrees and red flowers.

Another minute down the street and I’m at Gaza City’s Palestine Bank ATM, withdrawing money. Six years ago in Rafah I tried to cash a check and it took a whole morning of negotiations at the Palestine Bank’s Rafah branch, and was only possible in the end because one of Mohammed’s relatives worked there. I’m pretty sure you still have to go to Gaza City to find an ATM here, but in Gaza City they’re everywhere, reminders of ease/normal life/nothing at all.

A lot was different in 2003. I was in Rafah, without ATM access, and the Al-Aqsa Intifada hadn’t quite begun to die down. In the afternoons there were home demolitions, in the evenings calls to resistance from the Al-Aqsa Mosque loudspeaker, and at night gunfire at the border, and maybe an invasion and few deaths. (Read on …)

An American woman’s experience in Gaza

Monday, April 6
Wednesday, April 8
Thursday, April 9
6:00 to 8:30 PM
Summers Auditorium
James R. Connor University Center
UW-Whitewater

A theatrical production that is world renowned.

A permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and wanton destruction of property

ETHAN BRONNER, The New York Times, March 20, 2009

JERUSALEM — In the two months since Israel ended its military assault on Gaza, Palestinians and international rights groups have accused it of excessive force and wanton killing in that operation, but the Israeli military has said it followed high ethical standards and took great care to avoid civilian casualties.

Now testimony is emerging from within the ranks of soldiers and officers alleging a permissive attitude toward the killing of civilians and wanton destruction of property that is sure to inflame the domestic and international debate about the army’s conduct in Gaza. On Thursday, the military’s chief advocate general ordered an investigation into a soldier’s account of a sniper killing a woman and her two children who walked too close to a designated no-go area by mistake, and another account of a sharpshooter who killed an elderly woman who came within 100 yards of a commandeered house.

When asked why that elderly woman was killed, a squad commander was quoted as saying: “What’s great about Gaza — you see a person on a path, he doesn’t have to be armed, you can simply shoot him. In our case it was an old woman on whom I did not see any weapon when I looked. The order was to take down the person, this woman, the minute you see her. There are always warnings, there is always the saying, ‘Maybe he’s a terrorist.’ What I felt was, there was a lot of thirst for blood.”

The testimonies by soldiers, leaked to the newspapers Maariv and Haaretz, appeared in a journal published by a military preparatory course at the Oranim Academic College in the northern town of Tivon. The newspapers promised to release more such anecdotal accounts on Friday, without saying how many.

The academy’s director, Dany Zamir, told Israel Radio, “Those were very harsh testimonies about unjustified shooting of civilians and destruction of property that conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians.” (Read on …)

International Solidarity Movement, March 13, 2009

Friday, 13 March 2009, Ni’lin Village: An American citizen has been critically injured in the village of Ni’lin after Israeli forces shot him in the head with a tear-gas canister.

Tristan Anderson from California USA, 37 years old, has been taken to Israeli hospital Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. Anderson was unconscious and bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth. He sustained a large hole in the right part of his forehead where he was struck by a tear gas canister. The heavy impact from the tear gas canister being shot directly at him, from about 60 meters, also caused severe damage to his right eye, which he may lose. Tristan underwent brain surgery in which part of his right frontal lobe and shattered bone fragments were removed.

(Read on …)

Israel-Palestine from Bush to Obama: Health, Human Rights and Foreign Policy

The University of Wisconsin – Madison Middle East Studies Program April Lecture Series

This joint educational series sponsored by community and university organizations will feature three experts in health, human rights, and foreign policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

1) Sunday, 5 April 2009
Rita Giacaman; Bir Zeit University, Ramallah, West Bank
“Health Conditions & Medical Services under Siege, 2006-2009”
First Unitarian Society of Madison; 900 University Bay Drive; 1:30-3:30pm

Dr. Rita Giacaman is a professor of public health at the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine. She and Dr. Watt have contributed to recent issues of The Lancet on health and humanitarian conditions in Palestine.

2) Monday, 6 April 2009
Graham Watt; University of Glasgow, Scotland
“Human Rights, Dignity & Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP)”
Room 206, Ingraham Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison
1155 Observatory Drive; 3:30-5:30pm (Read on …)