CADFA visits to Palestine 2020

6).  Ramallah:  Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, and the Popular Arts Centre. From the museum we went to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, where we learned from a brilliant presentation about the work that Addameer does to try to mitigate the desperate plight of those Palestinians who are taken prisoner.  The Association was founded by lawyers in 1992 after the first intifada, and provides free legal aid to prisoners, since Israeli lawyer costs are very high.  They document violations of human rights.  There are many forms of detention but they are all arbitrary, done without a warrant, by the army, from check-points or from people’s homes, this usually in the night time at around 2.00 a.m., when the family are in bed, a practice designed to maximise the fear and humiliation inflicted, particularly the humiliation of parents in the household.  The first difficult job is to find where the person has bee...

12).  Hebron, cradle of extremist Zionism, nurtured by the State. On our final day together in Palestine as a group, we went to Hebron.  As on all the other minibus journeys, when we crossed a fixed checkpoint along the road it was deserted and we could drive straight through it - it is only manned during the rush hours earlier in the morning and in the evening, to disrupt and delay people getting to their work.   I noticed another pattern - where there was a settler-only road going to an Israeli settlement, or going direct to Jerusalem, the junction would be laid out in such a way that the mixed or mainly Palestinian traffic would have to wait, even though it was much heavier traffic than on the other road; the settlers could drive straight across the junction with priority, but the Palestinians had to form a queue and wait; this was another example of the imposition of dominating force to create a little ritual of humiliation in the mundane act of d...

11). Armed settlers patrolling the countryside. On the next day we went out into the countryside, with a group of young men from the orphanage in Abu Dis who acted as assistants, though apparently for some of them it was their first opportunity to visit the beautiful valley we walked down, even though it was only a few miles from their home, because of their lack of resources and because of the dangers of attacks by Israeli settlers or the army.  They needed our presence to provide safety from such attacks.  We saw this soon after we arrived at the valley where it was crossed by a road near to the Israeli settlement of Kvar Ademim.  After a week of rain the week before, the river in the valley was a fast-flowing stream, unusually at this time of year, and many families had come down to enjoy it, and some youths were shouting and laughing as they swam in a man-made pool.  Suddenly a police car appeared and a group of armed police got out of it and st...

10). Settler occupation and abuse in the Old City of Jerusalem. We emerged from Al Saraya Street for a tour of the old parts of the Old City.  Every week houses get confiscated and given to settlers, and the struggle to keep properties, especially in the Old City, has intensified in the past decade.  This is partly because the main owners of property are not the people who are living in a house, and there may be deficiencies in the documentation as to the rightful owner.  Settlers confiscate houses and then claim to have bought them, they just throw the inhabitants onto the street.  Then the homeless Palestinians have to go to the Israeli court to try to prove that they own the house, but often they can be found not to have quite the right papers, for example if there is a slight variation in the names cited in the deeds. In 1967 a lot of Palestinian homes were confiscated under the ‘Absentee Property Law’ if the owners lived or had fled to oth...

9).  Occupied East Jerusalem:  the Al Saraya Centre.  Collective resistance to domination as a preventative treatment for the self-damaging behaviour of the oppressed. On the next day we visited the Old City in East Jerusalem, and this involved first alighting from the minibus by a section of the Apartheid Wall, to go through a checkpoint which was for pedestrians to enter Jerusalem, after having their IDs checked.  This took us about half an hour, and the experience was in essence like going through any other border control, with the x-ray machine for your bags, someone to look at your passport and so on.  The difference was in the horrible revolving metal gates which opened at irregular intervals when a light would suddenly change to green, of which one had to go through three, the generally dismal and prison-like interior, and the insolent and hostile attitude of the two young women behind the I.D inspecting glass partition, one of whom was...

8).  Domination expressed as power over the fate of dead bodies, and resistance to it. When we got back to Abu Dis, alighting from the minibus, we met a group of three young girls; one of them, aged about nine, was the daughter of a man who had been shot and killed by an Israeli sniper during a demonstration against the Wall.  As often happens when someone is killed by the army, his body was seized and was kept by the Israelis for a long time, before being suddenly returned with about two hours notice with the instruction that it must be buried that same night, but it had been so deeply frozen that this was very difficult to do.   This awful story reminded me again of Shalboub-Kevorkian’s chapter on ‘Death and Colonialism’ in her 2015 book, in which she cites Foucault as defining sovereignty as the right to kill, even after death - the power over the dead body establishes the difference, and the inherent inferiority, of the person who is made ...

7).  The resistance of displaced Bedouin communities to further displacement. On the next day, we were taken to visit three different Bedouin villages near to Abu Dis.  The first one, Wadi Abu Hindi, has a population of some 33 families, or 350 people, though it varies throughout the year, originally from the Beersheba area, evicted in 1948 towards Hebron and then forced further north in the 1960s.  Here, behind a fence, was a small school made of metal cabins which get very hot in the summer, built with international funding, and with a lovely small garden.   This is on land owned by families from Abu Dis, but nevertheless the Israeli army have declared it to be on state land and demolished the school and the houses in 1997.   The school has been demolished and rebuilt three times. Every year $25,000 has to be raised to pay lawyers to try to obtain an order staying further demolition for another year.  On the side of the valley, overlooking th...