The Comment Factory

Tom Hurndall, ISM activist killed by the IDF in 2003

I have just spent two weeks volunteering in Palestine and what I saw over there pressed home to me how important it is concerned citizens make the journey to the Occupied Territories to make their presence felt. During the December-January Israeli attack on Gaza the sickness many people felt about the massacre was compounded by a feeling of helplessness. But there is a way to help out and attenuate the crimes of the occupation – what you realize in Palestine is that just having a foreign passport instantly civilizes the IDF when they are in your presence.

I was working with the International Solidarity Movement, which was set up in 2002 by Huwaida Arraf and her boyfriend Adam Shapiro to bring internationals sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to witness and combat Israeli repression during the Second Intifada. Since then it has achieved a fair degree of infamy – like any organization which tries to protect Palestinians it has been traduced as terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic and all the rest.

There are even a couple of organizations online set-up exclusively to libel and destroy the ISM – Stoptheism.com tries to expose its activists and says the ISM represents “Hamas, and other terrorists under Yassir Arafat”. And the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Eeast Reporting in America states that “ISM encourages members to place themselves in dangerous situations to protect terrorists or their homes.”

But after spending about an hour with the ISM in the West Bank you realize all these calumnies are basless propaganda. From the start of my time there I was impressed by the integrity and professionalism of the organization. The ISM run a two-day training weekend in London, which instills in prospective volunteers the ethos of non-violence and the Palestinian-led modus operandi (i.e. everything we do has to be ratified by a Palestinian council). When you arrive in Palestine you have another two days of training which take your through the history of non-violent resistance in Palestine and the specifics of how to deal with violence from the IDF.

When I was there I met inspirational activists from Scotland and the Czech Republic who had spent months living with families in East Jerusalem who were being illegally evicted by an Israeli settler company. This was not glamorous stuff; it was staying up all night and sleeping on a thin mattress in a single room together day after day, month after month. I met activists from Sweden who were manning checkpoints to make sure that no Palestinians were physically abused. I had my own experience of this on the way out of Nil’in, for the Friday demonstration against the annexation wall. I saw an IDF soldier kicking a Palestinian man at a checkpoint at the edge of this Palestinian village. I got the taxi to stop and got out and just watched. I don’t know what effect it had, but you could see a change in the eyes of the soldiers when they saw my camera pointing their way.

There was a group of activists from Italy who lived in Hebron, which is a particularly disturbing example of the occupation in the West Bank because settlers have occupied the downtown market which is now closed down because of the harassment the settlers gave the Palestinians living there. When you walk down the now defunct market there is grating overhead and caught in are all sorts of projectiles, bricks and debris. The settlers in Hebron are famous for their extremism. They celebrate the anniversary of the 1994 Hebron massacre by Baruch Goldstein, and the presence of the 500 of them in Hebron makes downtown a militarized zone. In Hebron, ISM volunteers escort Palestinian kids to school, to protect them from the settlers who have been known to shoot at them wildly from their rooftops.

The courageous 22-year-old ISM activist Tom Hurndall was killed doing work like this in Gaza in April 2003. He was moving Palestinian children out of the line of fire of IDF snipers and was shot in the head, despite having international signs. Hurndall’s death shone the media spotlight on the conduct of the IDF in the Occupied Territories only because he was British – Palestinians are shot with appalling regularity. And that is why the ISM activists are so brave: they are putting their lives on the line solely because they know they know are worth more in the eyes of the IDF. It is also why the Israeli authorities try to keep out the ISM – by blacklisting anyone they suspect of being involved. Many ISMers have been slapped with a 10-year ban from entering Israel even though the ISM is a completely legal organization in Israel.

I went to the non-violent Friday demonstrations in Bil’in and the nearby Nil’in on alternate weeks. Again the local villagers say that even though their ranks have been killed at an alarming rate in the past year – two in Bil’in, five in Nil’in including a 10-year-old with a live shot to the head – it would be much worse if the internationals didn’t turn up. Recently US-citizen and ISM activist Tristan Anderson was made a vegetable by a high velocity tear-gas canister. When I was in Nil’in the IDF were aiming right for us as we stood on the side of the verge. The only thing the IDF are up against at these demonstrations is stones in slingshots, more a symbolic act than anything else. On Friday, a Palestinian man was killed with a live round. “We always ask internationals to please come because they are even more brutal when it is just us Palestinians,” said the leader of the demonstration.

There are definitely dangers to volunteering in occupied Palestine, but it is a highly effective way of helping the Palestinians resist oppression, and because of our passports those risks are a smidgen of those faced by any Palestinian who raises so much as a finger of resistance. My stay was short and I did nothing compared to the brilliant and inspirational activists – who range from teenagers to pensioners – who have spent far longer and risked far more. But it is clear that through the solidarity of internationals, Israelis and Palestinians the occupation can be fought. There are more losses than gains, and ISM and Palestinian activists will continue to be lost, but as George Orwell concluded in his Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, where he had fought against General Franco’s fascists, “I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting.”