Part 1 of 6: The Little Town of Bethlehem: Occupied Territory

On my third trip to Israel and Palestine, I was one of over fifty internationals who gathered on the evening of March 11, 2006 in the second floor conference room at the Bethlehem Hotel. We had come together for Sabeel’s [Arabic for The Way] 5th International Conference and Reality Tour through the West Bank.

Sabeel is a Jerusalem based ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians. Inspired by the NONVIOLENT life and teaching of Jesus Christ, Sabeel strives to develop a spirituality based on love, justice, peace, nonviolence, liberation and reconciliation for the different national and faith communities.
http://www.sabeel.org/

"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control.

"It is apartheid and Bush and Hillary are both willing collaborators."-Jeff Halper, American Israeli, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a Noble Peace Prize Nominee for 2006.[1]

"An apartheid society is much more than just a ‘settler colony’. It involves specific forms of oppression that actively strip the original inhabitants of any rights at all, whereas civilian members of the invader caste are given all kinds of sumptuous privileges." [1]

Last night I received a phone call from a Palestinian Christian now living in Australia who informed me, "I can phone America for a penny a minute. I can call Israel for two cents a minute, but when I phone my family in Bethlehem, I am charged $.71 per minute."

Yesterday, Amira Hass, Israeli journalist for Ha'aretz who writes of life in OPT, explained why:

Jimmy Carter was asked which of the current presidential candidates he thinks most likely to move towards negotiating peace in the Middle East. He still has hopes for Barack Obama, but won't decide who to vote for until he has a chance to speak to each of them privately, "I won't even decide who to support privately until I assess their attitude toward the Middle East. That's the number one issue for me." [1]

Tony Blair has been credited with stating that 70% of the worlds problems with terrorists can be traced back to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

"On March 10, 1948, in Tel Aviv, eleven men had a meeting in the Red House headed by Ben Gurion. The eleven decided to expel one million Palestinians from historical Palestine. No minutes were taken, but many memoirs were written about that fateful meeting. A systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and within seven months the Zionists managed to expel one half of all the Palestinian people from their villages and towns."-

Dr. Ilan Pappe to this reporter Nov. 8, 2006. [2]

"We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."-Ariel Sharon to Winston Churchill III, 1971.

"The crisis facing Palestinians nowadays has been created by no other than some European philanthropists in concert with policy makers in Washington and Tel Aviv. But aside from the political and financial boycott mounted against the democratically elected Palestinian government, Israel has not shown readiness to go to a full truce in all of the Occupied Territories similarly to the truce that was holding in the Gaza Strip prior to this latest barrage of Qassam rockets and Israeli military retributions.

"Palestinians are in support of a full truce that would encompass both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank...

"While Palestinians are ready to be realistic they are not ready to surrender their rights.

"Our struggle is to end Israeli occupation once and for all and to secure the inalienable rights of our people."- Dr. Bernard Sabella, Christian member of Palestinian Legislative Council Representing Jerusalem, in an email received May 28, 2007.

Ten score and eighteen years ago, a few deep thinking, wealthy white landowners penned the United States Constitution. Its first three words – "We the People" -affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens.

Article I affirms that all legislative powers "shall be vested in a Congress" who ideally would represent "we the people" and not corporate interests.

"...Peace in the Middle East is not going to be achieved at gunpoint. It is going to be achieved by negotiations, by people working together; and that process may be ugly, dirty and slow, but it is the only process that will work. To create additional hardship and suffering for the Palestinians is simply going to guarantee more desperate, angry men who are fully determined that they will go forth to kill Israelis or Americans or anybody else...

On May 25, 2007, UK's THE INDEPENDENT Magazine reported:

A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel after the Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the first time, that he still believes that he was right.

The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser at the time and today one of the world's leading international jurists, is a serious blow to Israel's persistent argument that the settlements do not violate international law, particularly as Israel prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war in June 1967.

"It's obvious to me that the fact that settlements were established and the pace of the establishment of the settlements made peacemaking much more difficult." -Judge Meron, a holocaust survivor.

Mohammad Omer, international independent reporter and correspondent for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, spoke from Gaza with Arab Talk Radio in San Francisco as events unfolded in the Gaza Strip on May 25, 2007:

"I don't know who are these militants. I'm not sure if they are Hamas. I'm not sure if they are Fatah. Because who would shoot Palestinians?...I think that those people are not Hamas and they are not Fatah then they are working for whom? The question remains, for who are those people working and whose benefit from killing Palestinians and targeting civilians in the Gaza Strip?"

Oprah is going to Israel for a solidarity visit.

Will she go to the Little Town of Bethlehem: Occupied Territory and bear witness to what the INDIGENOUS people of The Holy Land have suffered after 40 years of OCCUPATION?

Will she visit The Wall, which devours 1.5 MILLION USA TAX DOLLARS PER MILE to construct 30 foot high slabs of abominable concrete and electricfied razor wire that the International Court of Justice has deemed ILLEGAL and must come down.

Will she stand in solidarity with the NONVIOLENT resisters of the now 40 years of OCCUPATION?

The American Bi-Centennial in 1976 was a watershed year for the religious right. While mainline churches declined evangelical fundamentalist churches became the fastest growing sector of American Christianity. TIME magazine named 1976 as The Year of The Evangelical and suddenly they became a legitimate political and religious force.

The conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs/JINSA Reports:

In February 2005, the Administration named Lt. Gen. William Ward, USA, "American security coordinator" in the Palestinian Authority territories and tasked him with consolidating and improving Palestinian "security forces." The mission, in our view, was flawed and the result of American intervention was simply better trained terrorists.

Palestinian Minister of Information Dr Mustafa Barghouthi stated:

Israel has given itself the right to kill and destroy everything and target every Palestinian regardless of whether he is a man, a woman or a child. Israel has reached an unprecedented degree of arrogance when its Army announced that they killed only 3 Palestinian civilians in the raid on Gaza on Sunday.  This implies that 3 innocent civilians are not important but this is by itself a recognition by the Israeli Army that they have committed the crime of killing the innocent Palestinians."

"I don't know if we as a state of the Jewish people will be able to survive either. Our hatred, our fears, our extremism and our arrogance have helped us to arrive at a place and a time when the possibility of liberating ourselves from the occupation of the Palestinian people may be too late. I, for one, am at a total loss of what happens then. Once the possibility of creating a Palestinian state next to Israel is no longer real, it seems to me that the dream of a democratic state of the Jewish people comes to an end. Israel can and will continue to exist but it will no longer be able to claim its commitment to democracy or to prophetic values of our Biblical teachings."- Gershon Baskin

Gershon Baskin is the Co-Director of IPCRI, the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information and one of the visionaries of the Global June 5th Initiative. He also comprehends:

Senator Clinton to AIPAC Feb. 1, 2007:

"Both Israelis and Americans know so well, a democracy is far more than just holding elections. Democracy has to spring from an active and open citizenry dedicated to tolerance, to respect for differences, to the rule of law, to policies that lift us up not tear us down as fellow human beings, and to the value of human life."-[1]

Jeff Halper, American Israeli, a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions to this reporter November 2006:

"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in control."-[2]

.

I never got the name of the justice and peace, anarchist, socialist who was the first person I heard say:

"Fuck peace! We want justice! Justice first, peace will follow."

It was Jeff Halper's latest critique on the "THE LIVNI-RICE PLAN: TOWARDS A JUST PEACE OR APARTHEID?"

That reminded me of that insight.

It was Mordechai Vanunu who inspired me to remember my childhood dream and begin to imagine becoming Brenda Starr, the red-headed ace investigative journalist and star correspondent of the Sunday comics.

But, it was a comment made by Jeff Halper, Founder and Coordinator of ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, in December 2005, during Holy Land Trust's Celebrating Nonviolent Resistance Conference in Bethlehem, that I first actually thought:

"I AM Brenda Starr!"

Jeff said:

As an active member of The New Fourth Estate, I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territories four times since June 2005.

One of my contacts, Sami Awad, Director of Holy Land Trust; a non-profit in Bethlehem, dedicated to NON-VIOLENT resistance against the Israeli Occupation and I have marched together against the Occupation of Palestine, which is now in it's 40th year. Sami emailed me yesterday's report on the Nonviolent Action in Southern Bethlehem.

Mohammed Omer, a Palestinian journalist from Rafah and also the winner of NEW AMERICA MEDIA'S BEST YOUTH VOICE Award, emailed me regarding his experience of being threatened at a Gaza roadblock:

The Day after Mother's Day, 2007, the USA Government and Military blocked our sons, daughters, brothers, husbands and wives on base access to:

Myspace, Youtube, MTV, Blackplanet , photobucket, live365, hi5.com, pandora.com, 1.fm, and others, claiming "SECURITY" and denying FREEDOM of SPEECH.

Our sons, daughters, brothers, husbands and wives, have ALL put their ass on the line for Big Brother and Corporate Interests as they guard Iraqi oil bases and are NOT allowed off-base for months at a time.

And Big Brother rewarded our sons, daughters, brothers, husbands and wives, the day after Mother's Day 2007, by denying them access to FREEDOM OF SPEECH!

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."- Article 19 UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

The Arabyia Home/Peace Center is at the cornerstone of the Anata and the Shuafat refugee camp, in the very area where the prophet Jeremiah in the 6th century B.C.E. critiqued the violent conflicts in the Mid East, which were already old news: "I hear violence and destruction in the city, sickness and wounds are all I see." (Jeremiah 6:7)

"I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it. What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues. Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel. After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. It is a moral issue that the churches must address."-Mohammad Alatar, film producer of The Iron Wall at the Beit Arabiya Peace Home, November 2006.