Newsletter Home Page

Your Help is Making a Difference in Palestine

By Paul Larudee

As I began to write this, four ISM volunteers were arrested in the Tel Rumeida district of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. Their crime? To accompany Palestinians to school, shopping, work, or friends’ homes.

ISM volunteers document the harassment of Palestinians, their delays at checkpoints and the denial of access to their own property. They film Israeli settlers who shout insults, throw bottles and other objects, and even beat Palestinians while soldiers stand idly by. The good news is that the presence of volunteers with cameras is often enough to reduce these crimes. The bad news is that filming is itself often considered a crime.

Unfortunately, ISM volunteers are fewer than ever, even though more Palestinian communities request them to support non-violent actions and provide protection against military and settler violence. Equally important, volunteers help to inform their home communities about the non-violent movement in Palestine, which is almost never mentioned in the mainstream media.

We need your donations to make our work possible. Your donations support volunteers with partial airfares, training, equipment, salaries for Palestinian coordinators and legal expenses. For each of the last two years, the Northern California ISM chapter has pledged $10,000 to ISM in Palestine for operating expenses and $5000 for the legal fund. We have also pledged another $10,000 for volunteers traveling to Palestine. A mere $500 can be the difference between going or not going, or staying an extra month. We are proud to have subsidized fourteen volunteers this year alone.

The generous contributions that we received during the recent speaking tour of Ayed Morrar and Jonathan Pollak were very timely, but we are still $5,000 short of our year-end commitment to ISM-Palestine. The ISM media office has also asked us to send a new laptop, video camera and 500 gigabyte hard drive within the next month. Please use the donation envelope in this issue to help us make our goal and give us a healthy start in 2006.

The four volunteers were released, thanks to our lawyer, Gaby Lasky, and our supporters around the world who answered her request to call the Israeli police and Interior Ministry. Unfortunately, Gaby still has thousands of dollars in unpaid services on our behalf.

Some donations lessen the suffering. We try to stop the cause. Please support nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Paul Larudee is a piano technician who lived and
worked in Arab countries for fourteen years as a
teacher and government advisor. He has been an
ISM volunteer in Palestine four times since 2002.