Frozen in time and space, unable to leave their houses, the people of Palestine will be celebrating the Jewish New Year by suffering even greater oppression than usual. Anne Gwynne writes from Nablus about the horrors of "lockdown" At 8.30am yesterday, the newsreader on Pacifica Radio's morning show told us of the latest announcement by Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz: "Israel has locked down the West Bank and Gaza Strip until the Jewish holiday season ends in October, from fear of Palestinian attacks." So much for Palestinian violence. But what measures, I wondered, could be taken to prevent Israeli attacks? What about the very real fears of Palestinian people themselves? This brief news item left me gobsmacked. Unbelievable! Are we to infer that the news editor just accepts this state of affairs as though it were normal? There is nothing normal about imprisoning a whole nation and keeping from them every necessity of life. But it is certainly a novel way of celebrating one's own holy days! And it serves the Zionist purpose very well -- for it reinforces the Jewishness which has been imposed upon Palestine since 1947. For many people, Yom Kippur this year will be marked not by penance and devotion, but by this vicious reassertion of Jewish dominance. As a result of the ethnic cleansing of the Christian population by the Jewish colonisers since 1948, Palestine is now largely Muslim. And on Muslim holy days, Israel celebrates by unleashing the full might of its state terror, launching deadly military assaults upon the Palestinian people. Now, for the Jewish holy season, when Jews around the world will celebrate their New Year and Day of Atonement, an entire country, Palestine with its 3.5 million people, will be "hermetically sealed" by the Israeli military, placed under the kind of "lockdown" that has never been experienced anywhere else on earth. For the lockdown is a concept without equal or precedent, and it's impact is devastating on every tiny aspect of life. The United Nations has repeatedly asked Israel to implement the Geneva Conventions for the protection of the civilian population in the Occupied Territories (where, in any case, Israel has no legitimate authority) against the arbitrary actions of the occupying state. Yet it has never received a single positive response to its pleas. Israel has decided that it is outside the law. Lockdown, the latest extreme violation, is just a continuation of Israeli actions over more than 37 years, and grows from its policy of curfew and closure. Indeed, to be precise, it is an intensification of closure, which combines the horrors of closure with the terror of curfew. In the process, lockdown violates a whole series of human rights as they have come to be enshrined in a 100-year-long body of law and custom. CLOSURE: Closure is not easy to explain. It is a terrible thing; it is illegal, and yet it has been a fact of life for Palestinians for two generations. It has nothing to do with the pretext of "security" that is used to justify it, and it is not an action in response to resistance. It is a strategic instrument, whose purpose is to fragment Palestinian society. The intent is to dislocate people from their land, from their family and from their jobs. It separates children and students from their education, doctors and patients from their hospitals, and the devout from their mosques. Thus its purpose is to destroy all coherence -- social coherence, health coherence, political coherence and economic coherence. Since the beginning of the Madrid and Oslo "talks", and throughout the duplicitous prevarications of the Clinton regime, Israel has continued to create facts on the ground which, by now, have left the Palestinians with only 12 per cent of historic Palestine. In the process, it has continuously escalated and intensified its vicious tactic of "closure" to facilitate its ongoing land grab. The Israeli army controls all movement of people and goods, paralysing the economy with its restrictions. Nothing and no one may enter or leave a closed area except on the say-so of a teenage soldier. No ambulance carrying a dying child or a woman bleeding to death may move between population centres; workers cannot reach their jobs and are without earnings; doctors and nurses cannot reach their hospitals; teachers and students cannot reach schools and universities. Those who last month were lucky enough to receive a little water or electricity will now find themselves without either. Today some 754 roadblocks, trenches, earth mounds, sewage-filled moats, gun emplacements, walls and lengths of electrified razor wire isolate each of the 300 or so small enclaves into which Palestine has been divided (according to the latest UN count). This is a thoroughly evil concept. Israel maintains this iron grip on the pretext of "security". Yet as anyone can see, this is rubbish masquerading as truth. Visiting this kind of collective punishment upon an innocent population is absolutely illegal, with no exceptions under the law. After the Oklahoma bombing, the US army did not move to bomb Pendleton, New York, where Timothy McVeigh had been brought up, and reduce his parents' house to rubble; his family was not murdered; nor did they lay siege to the state of Michigan, were he had been residing just prior to his crime. Likewise, during the 33 years of "the Troubles", the UK did not launch helicopter gunships against Dublin or Belfast, nor did it carry out targeted assassinations of the families of IRA fighters, despite suffering more than 300 bombings on the mainland. THE RIGHT TO HEALTH: Denial of medical access is always illegal under all international law, and it violates the Standing Orders to soldiers which the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are supposed to observe. However, under the closures, every day one or more patients is denied the care he needs. Many people will die this week, to add to the 110 adults and 33 newborn babies who are known to have perished in this manner since the second Intifada began. Ordinary, treatable conditions -- heart attack, kidney failure needing dialysis, hypo-glycaemia, haemorrhage, or burst appendix -- are transmuted into a death sentence. Sometimes a brave medic with fluent Hebrew, such as Feras Al- Bakri, who for several months allowed me to ride in his ambulance to see the daily crimes for myself, can persuade the largely monoglot IOF soldiers to "allow" an injured or seriously sick patient access to the ambulance. Without appropriate transport, the transfer can involve carrying the injured or sick patient across one mile of rough ground from their home to reach the waiting ambulance. In the best case, the road to the hospital will then be smooth. In the worst, their ordeal will just have started. For these sadistic "soldiers" can then decide to keep the ambulance waiting for an hour or more whilst the patient's condition becomes critical, before "allowing" them to go. Or they may simply change their mind and send the patient home. Or they may break the legs or arms of the driver, or beat him up and trample him in the mud, or injure him with a bullet. (Feras himself has suffered all of these fates more than once.) Whenever Palestine is sealed off, the sadistic violence of the soldiers increases exponentially. More doctors and medical staff will be beaten and humiliated by being stripped of every stitch of clothing and then forced either to unload the ambulance before dozens of people, bark like dogs, insult Islam, sing songs glorifying Israel, or crawl through the checkpoint while the Israeli thugs laugh uproariously and dance around waving their guns above their heads. This is a professional army? This is security? No, all this is just one way of cruelly causing death and compromising health as part of a long- term plan of genocide. THE RIGHT TO FREE MOVEMENT: Under closure there is no movement, free or otherwise. You cannot visit a daughter in another village or help your aged parents in a nearby town. You cannot go to Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, or cross the bridge to Jordan for haj, the great pilgrimage. You cannot go to Jerusalem, 45 miles away, or shop in Ramallah for items not available in the village store. You cannot go to another village for your marriage ceremony, and neither can anyone outside the roadblock come to your wedding. As a result, several marriages have been solemnised at the Huwarra roadblock. On occasion, the soldiers are filled with so much hatred that they will separate a husband and wife if they are from neighbouring villages. You cannot attend the funeral of your parent or your child whom the IOF may have killed in another village, nor can you bring the body home for burial. You cannot go to a specialist hospital for treatment and you cannot receive a friend from another place. Even, or perhaps especially, the Palestinian Police are daily prevented from attending at their place of work by being refused passage at the roadblocks. Together with businessmen, lawyers and civil servants, they are obliged to stay in Nablus for up to a month at a time, missing their families terribly in the evenings. Farmers cannot take their world- famous and prized olive oil, or any other cash crop, to market, or their livestock to the butcher. Palestine is the only place on earth whose inhabitants are not permitted to drive anywhere they like in their own land. In my opinion, the worst thing is the very moment of closure itself, when you can find yourself trapped, unable to move forward to home or back to where you came from. You may be detained at the roadblock for hours or days, or be summarily ordered to go "back" to a town which you didn't come from and where you don't live. After 10 hours you may be ordered, "Go back to Jerusalem!", when you live in Nablus. And in any case, even after you have your orders, there is no transport to allow you to execute them, because we are under closure! Under the horrific lockdown which is now announced, many more mothers from the villages with a new-born baby on one arm and a bag on the other will have to walk home from the hospital only to be told at Beit Fouriq to "go back to Nablus". Farmers with panniers of Palestinian olive oil on their little donkeys will have to stand by helplessly and watch the precious, life- giving oil cascade down into the soil after an IOF soldier shoots holes in the bottles. Grandparents with small children and animals will be refused entry to their villages and find themselves stranded with nowhere to go at nightfall, with trigger-happy soldiers marauding around them. It is terrifying when you find yourself under lockdown, alone on a mountaintop or in a city street. The situation is almost too bizarre to comprehend. You will be told by the IOF, "Walk or I shoot you dead," or "No, you not go to Nablus," or "Go back, it is closed military zone" -- and yet you know you cannot do any of these things, because it is forbidden to move at all. You cannot go anywhere! All you can do is hope that the soldiers will be too busy terrorising the other people waiting in line for their attentions to take aim at you. The result is a quite unprecedented and barbaric brutality. And if you attempt to remonstrate with them against the utter illogicality of the whole thing, you can be shot or beaten. This whole process has only one purpose -- to destroy economic life in the territories, and wipe out any potential which might be able to support a future Palestinian state. THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION: Since October 2000, children and students have had their education severely disrupted by the endless sealing-off of buildings and institutions. Measures have included the surrounding of schools by lakes of sewage, as happened to Bir Zeit University, in addition to wholesale shelling and bombing, and endless orders to close. Palestine has lost more than one third of its schooldays so far, and now during the "Jewish holiday season" all schools, universities and colleges will probably be forced to close, while children will run the risk of being shot and killed or injured, arrested and imprisoned. Some 400 children are currently being held in Israeli gaols, and over 700 have been murdered since the outbreak of the second Intifida. Transfer your thoughts to the US or UK, and just imagine the outcry if some rampaging gunmen in Washington or London were targeting children and teachers and had already murdered 700, injuring over 10,000 in the process. In the UK, we would probably hear arguments that such gunmen were psychotic, with the subtext that they "couldn't help it and need treatment". But what is the excuse when these gunmen, who commit hundreds of thousands of crimes in Palestine, are soldiers belonging to the world's fourth-largest and most modern army, itself at the service of the self-styled "only democracy in the region"? The right to education will be denied to thousands more over the next weeks, and some of these young people will die. It is outrageous that a child can be shot through the little school bag on his back as he walks to school down a country lane or along a city street -- in his own land -- and no one, to use the current US jargon, will be "brought to book" for the crimes. Not only is no one ever charged, but the rest of the world simply stands by and does nothing. THE CURFEW: To enhance the cruelty of "closure", the Israelis add another of their horrors -- the curfew. I guess that to many readers, especially in the US, curfew doesn't sound too bad, does it? Isn't it a sort of "family thing", where parents who are "being cruel to be kind" put their children under some kind of restriction for a transgression -- a child might have to be in at, say, 9pm every night for a week? I wonder what the penalty is for non-compliance in such cases! I doubt it can match the Israeli one. Like all actions of the Israeli occupation, the curfew is not only brutal and sadistic, it is also illegal, and arbitrarily imposed, whether upon a street, a town, a village, a whole governorate or the whole of Occupied Palestine. Just try to understand what is being done here. Imagine your street, village or neighbourhood completely deserted, shops closed, no taxis or cars, no schools open, hospitals ringed by tanks and APCs so that there is no possibility of taking a desperately sick child to the doctor. You are all frozen at a moment in time, like a snapshot. Do not open a door, or look out of the window -- snipers travel with every Israeli platoon, scanning for prey, especially children. In the Old City in February, we watched helpless as a boy and his grandfather bled to death at their window where they had been shot. You are "frozen" and "forbidden" for as long as the Zionists say so. People will not be able to get food, unless the ambulance crews work all night bringing bread, flour, milk, baby formula and vital medicines. Even the drinking water will have been turned off, so the ambulances must bring that too. Under curfew, you will not be able to go to work even if you only have to go as far as the next street. You cannot open your shop or drive your taxi. There will be no income for anyone, as long as the curfew lasts. Not only can you not get medical attention, you will not be allowed to visit the bedside of a dying child in the hospital; worse, you will not be allowed to bury the little body. From the moment of its imposition, everything stops and you have to stay where you are at that moment. If you are between checkpoints, that's too bad; you cannot move back to where you came from, nor go on to your destination. Instead, you will spend the night in no man's land. In Palestine, curfew is a matter of life and death, especially for children, who don't carry a radio or mobile phone so they can receive news of what is happening. This is the penalty here: anyone seen by soldiers on the street during curfew will be shot. This has happened to dozens of children. In Bethlehem (Beit Lahim) at Christmas several children were murdered this way. One moment, you can be watching children running to safety, and the next they are lying there bleeding on the road. What is extraordinary is that the military can justify this murder on the grounds that there is curfew. A child is killed because he is on the street at a forbidden moment. Can anyone feel that this penalty is proportionate? The response from the soldiers to any protest at their actions is rote-learned -- a shrug, a sneer and a snarled, "Not my problem." Lockdown combines all the terrorism of closure and curfew into a new horror. Not only is every person hermetically sealed into the smallest unit within Palestine, the home, but the country itself is hermetically sealed off from the world. It means that no one from outside can enter the country for any reason. For example, no Palestinian who is normally resident in Palestine can return home. No one can enter from Jordan to visit a friend or a relative, no matter how urgent the cause. Nothing like this has ever been imposed before, on any people, anywhere. The 100-day nightmare which Nablus suffered this summer left people thin and very hungry, but the families emerged intact, affectionate and united, stronger than ever and without any sign of the violence which plagues our Western societies at the first sign of trouble. With no signs of hand- wringing, whingeing or wallowing in victimhood, but with dignity and determination, they are ready to face with continuing courage the worst that the Israelis can do. The beautiful land of Palestine is now a "ghost country", and most of its cities are "ghost towns". I remember sending a live broadcast to the Flashpoints radio show one evening after a terrible day of carnage, when we were under a protracted lockdown. I asked people just to listen to the sounds of life in this great city. There was nothing. There was not a sound in a city of 189,000 good people. I don't mean it was quiet, I mean there was not a sound. Nowhere else on earth does this kind of unbridled hatred and sadistic violence go unchecked and unpunished, carried out as it is not by rebels or terrorists, but on the orders and under the control of a government elected by 80 per cent of the voters. Most sinister of all, in my opinion, is the fact that nowhere else on earth would the UN allow it to happen. I hope that readers will now have some idea of what the Pacifica newsreader's casual words will actually mean for real people on the ground over these coming weeks -- people who have already suffered more than seems humanly possible under 57 years of sustained and relentless terror. Yet despite the high level of stress, people remain extraordinarily resilient in the face of the terror, and families face the deprivation with strength and mutual love. How do they do it? How can we account for this special courage which goes beyond the limits of human endurance? What is its wellspring? But there is also another series of questions to which I would like to have the answers. What kind of a people can announce that they will be celebrating their season of holy days by imposing misery, starvation and death on three and a half million people? And what kind of monster will those people see looking back at them when they gaze into their mirror? If you have understood something of the suffering I describe, then I beg you to call or email your government representative. Do not hesitate to contact the "Triumvirate of Terror" -- Bush/ Kerry, Blair and Sharon -- and/or write a short note to a newspaper or radio station, especially the BBC, NPR and Pacifica, protesting at the casual words which are used to report Israeli terror. Their reporting looks very much like complicity to and approval of "the man on the Clapham omnibus" -- the British legal phrase meaning any reasonable person. Anne Gwynne is a 65-year-old grandmother and retired bank manager from Wales. She has worked with the Palestinian Medical Relief Committees in Nablus, from where she has reported for Pacifica Radio's Flashpoints programme. Anne can be reached at [email protected].
