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Life Under Occupation: What Would You Do?

By Ella Minnow, June 2007

Did you know that YOUR tax dollars are helping to deny basic human rights to 3.5 million people? Take a minute to imagine what life would be like for you and your family in such a place.

■ Soldiers calling YOUR great-great-great-grandparents’ lands a “military zone” control every aspect of your life: whether and where you can travel, work, or attend school on any given day.

■ YOU and YOUR children face daily humiliation, beatings and shootings at an ever-growing maze of blockades, tunnels, and trenches.

■ YOUR land is further crisscrossed by highways that only your oppressors can travel on—while you have to leave your car and walk on rocks and dirt to reach your destination.

■ YOU are separated from your work, your school, your neighbors, by a 32-foot-high wall. Its prison-like towers house heavily armed 19-year-old soldiers watching your every move.

■ To keep your family alive, YOU must work to build this wall for your oppressors.

■ When you do manage against all odds to harvest a crop for export, YOUR truck is detained at a blockade for weeks—until the crop rots.

■ YOU live every day with the threat of your home being demolished by huge, armed bulldozers on the grounds that it is not “permitted.”

■ YOUR ancestors’ ancient olive groves are uprooted and replanted in the oppressors’ new, deluxe housing developments.

■ YOU are forced to pay high prices for inadequate amounts of trucked-in water, while nearby you see your oppressors’ green lawns and hear their children splashing in swimming pools.

■ YOUR son, brother or neighbor is hauled away to prison.

■ Soldiers enter YOUR house, shout orders in their foreign language, stick their rifles in YOUR children’s faces, lock you all in one room, and rip apart the house.

THIS IS LIFE IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES TODAY

Ask yourself: What would YOU do? Do you think YOU might be called a “terrorist” for resisting the occupation? Who would YOU think were the real “terrorists? ”

As Americans, we understand justice and fair play, and we know unfairness when we see it. All children—Palestinian, Israeli, and every child on Earth—deserve a safe, wholesome homeland in which to grow and learn. Yet our country gives $13 million every week to support this genocidal system. It’s not anti-Semitism to speak out against the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza , and East Jerusalem. Many Jewish Israelis (and Jewish Americans) acknowledge that the land Israel took in 1967 should, legally and morally, be returned to the Palestinian people. Educate yourself and others about the real situation. Forty years is too long.
For more information on the impact of the Israeli Occupation, please see http://www.ifamericansknew.org /

Ella is an active member of the NorCal ISM Support Group.

Palestinians in the West Bank village of Abu Dis, many of whom hold
Jerusalem residency cards, must apply for permits and wait at gates or checkpoints to reach East Jerusalem. Others, like those here, find a place to cross through one of the holes in Israel’s separation wall.

Photo: Lisa Nessan