|
 Sam
Bahour, co-editor with Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd of “Homeland: Oral
Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (Olive Branch Press, Paperback,
1994), is a successful consultant and businessman in Al-Bireh/Ramallah,
Palestine. The U.S.-born Palestinian is also a noted spokesperson for
Palestinian rights. His website on the Palestinian situation is:
http://www.epalestine.com
Joe interviewed Mr. Bahour at his home in Al-Bireh/
Ramallah on Dec. 20, 2007, asking him to summarize some of the main
issues and grievances in the book and to give an update on the
situation.
SAM: Our book consists of oral histories of Palestinians. It is
important to understand the context of when the book came out. My
friends Staughton and Alice Lynd and I were working in Youngstown, Ohio
in the peace movement against the first Gulf War when the U.S. attacked
Iraq. At that time we became friends and had many, many discussions not
only about the war in Iraq but also about what I was presenting as the
core issue in the Middle East – the continuation of the Palestinian
catastrophe (their being kicked out of their  own
homeland).
After the war ended, Staughton and Alice said they
would like to learn more about the Palestinian issue and proposed doing
an oral history, in which they are experts. At the time I had no idea
how intense and how complex such an effort really is. I agreed, and we
ended up taking two trips to Palestine and doing interviews in the U.S.
as well.
This resulted in our book, which not only consists of
accounts of people talking about their reality but was also tremendously
footnoted mainly by Alice Lynd. She was able to corroborate the accounts
with third-party reports. So I encourage not only people who want to
read oral histories to read the book but also people who would like to
have a kind of reference guide to all the international doctrines which
can be used to support the case made in the interviews. This is
important, because in the world of sound bytes one sometimes forgets the
importance of being able to justify the things that are said.
In the book, for example, we cover the period from
before the 1948 creation of the state of Israel through the first
Intifada (1987-1989)[1].
We classified the accounts of that period in different ways. One
category, for instance, has to do with refugees, and we tried to find
elderly people with a long memory. In several accounts people spoke
about the relationship between the Palestinian community in Palestine
and the Jewish immigrants who were here before the creation of the state
of Israel. Many Western readers may be surprised to know that that
relationship was rather cordial. Someone mentioned that during the
Jewish sabbath they would rely on Palestinian neighbors to turn on the
electricity or turn on the water pot, because during the Jewish sabbath
the Jews are not allowed to work with anything mechanical.
We also heard how the Jewish community would be very
supportive during the religious holidays of Muslims and Christians. I
learned something very important: that relationship was much less
political and much more based on human interaction than the politicians
today would like us to believe.
We also presented accounts of women and of prisoners
who were jailed before or during the first Intifada. These talked about
the torture they faced in prison. Then Alice would dig deep into various
documents and find corroborative information from the Red Cross, Amnesty
International, and several other international organizations and would
footnote the accounts. When someone said he was tortured with water,
Alice would research that, using lots of references from Israeli
human-rights organizations, which we think carry even more weight for
convincing a foreign audience that what we are talking about is not
propaganda but real war crimes that are happening on the ground and that
need to stop. When Israelis are speaking of them as such, we feel that
this contributes to people’s understanding.
The book was published in 1994. More recently, during the last seven
years, i.e., during the second Intifada, we have been facing another
bitter chapter of our history – probably the most bitter chapter in all
our history as Palestinians. The Israeli battering of our society during
this time has created not only another wave of internal refugees
(internally displaced people), but it has also created an environment in
which our community is moving much more toward extremism because of the
economic despair and the social breakdown that has happened.
This is troubling. And if anyone thought we were
saying this just for propaganda purposes he or she needs only to look at
some of the real issues on the ground: such as, that Hamas, an Islamist
movement, was elected in 2006, when anyone who knows anything about
Palestinian society knows that we are a very secular society; this move
toward more religious extremism should have been an indicator to the
powers that be that something was really wrong on the ground.
What is really wrong on the ground is that this
Israeli occupation has been able to sustain itself for forty years
mainly by U.S. support and political cover for it. We were hoping that
many people abroad would come to their senses after seeing such an
earth-shaking political development as the election of Hamas. If that
didn’t do it, we hoped that the Hamas overrun of Gaza in 2007 would have
been yet another, even more dramatic, indication that something is
wrong.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is more lip service
by the U.S. to peace, once again, and on the ground not doing what is
required to hold Israel accountable for its actions. As Palestinians we
don’t expect the occupation to end overnight; we understand that it is a
very complex and complicated phenomenon to deal with. But what we do
expect is that the international community hold Israel accountable under
international law.
In this conflict all of us, whether individuals or states, need to make
a choice. We have to apply international law, and this law in relation
to an occupation means the Fourth Geneva Convention, which is the law of
occupation. Or we pick the law of the jungle. And what Israel has
created is an environment in which the law of the jungle rules and the
strongest survive. Under the law of the jungle, Israel can justify what
they call “targeted assassinations” or house demolitions or an F-16
bombing a residential neighborhood, killing not only the person they
were targeting (and rightly so, probably) but also the neighbors. That
passes in the news as a sad event, but the news moves on. They kill
so-called militants without any due process.
But the Israelis and Americans need to understand
that in the law of the jungle suicide bombings are also justified, and
in the law of the jungle killing civilians is also justified. I as Sam
Bahour, and I think I represent the political consciousness of a lot of
our people, do not justify those acts. That is why we continually say,
even though the U.S. brushes this aside, that international law must
apply and must apply to both sides.
So killing civilians is not right, and suicide
bombings are not right, just as F-16s bombing residential neighborhoods
in Gaza is not right, or demolishing Palestinian homes is not right. So
we must choose international law over the law of the jungle. That
requires the powers that be to be bold enough and strong enough to be
able to stop Israel and hold them accountable. When war crimes happen,
there are mechanisms created by the international community to deal with
them. We must make sure that Israel faces due process and that the
rights of the occupied people, the Palestinians, are safeguarded –not
because we are a special people or a chosen people, but rather because
we are a people under occupation, and people under occupation are
protected under international law.
It is not only Israel that must take actions in line with international
law; but every country that has signed the Fourth Geneva Convention,
including the U.S., has an obligation in that treaty to hold the
occupiers anywhere in the world accountable for the violations of
international law that they commit. So, when the U.S. is silent, and not
only silent but proactively supporting Israel in its violation of law
here, the U.S. itself is putting itself in jeopardy, because it is an
obligation, not a luxury, for the signatories of the Fourth Geneva
Convention to take action. We as citizens in the States need to bring
this issue home to our elected officials – that they cannot deal with
this conflict or the conflict in Iraq as something that is outside the
realm of international law. We as Americans are not above the law; the
U.S. president is not above international law. Every day we allow that
to happen, we allow the law of the jungle, whether it is here or in
Baghdad or in Lebanon, to prevail.
In such an environment all of us who are trying to
bring peace closer do not know how to operate. We can only operate if we
have a base line that is known and understandable and that we can be
held accountable for.
JOE: Could you speak about the effects of the occupation on economic
development and on church ministries, i.e., on the freedom of the church
to carry out its mission?
SAM: This military occupation, which has lasted now for over forty
years, has reached the point where it has become unbelievably
sophisticated and polished – to the point where I would call what is
happening today sterile ethnic cleansing. I use my words very
accurately. Ethnic cleansing as we know it in history is a very bloody
issue, as we saw in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in several places in Eastern
Europe. The world is shocked into taking action.
What the Israelis have been able to do in the last
forty years, and with U.S. cover – political and financial support -- to
do it unhindered, is to create an environment very slowly and very
methodically where they are able to control every aspect of Palestinian
life in a way that does not shock the world into action but has the same
effect as any other ethnic cleansing. This is why I call it a sterile
ethnic cleansing.
Consider my own case, for instance. I am a Palestinian-American born in
the U.S. I married a Palestinian woman and have two Palestinian
children. I am in Palestine today only because the Israelis view me as
an American citizen, and I can be here for only three months at a time.
Every three months I must leave the country and renew my visa, and every
time I leave there is the possibility that the Israelis will not allow
me to come back to the occupied territory.
Not only is this my own situation, but it is the case
also of my father, who was born in this house we are sitting in. He too
does not have a Palestinian I.D., which the Israelis issued after the
occupation. The first thing they did in 1967 after they had occupied the
Palestinian territory was a census: anyone who was in the country
received an Israeli-issued Palestinian I.D. If you don’t have that I.D.,
as far as the Israelis are concerned you are not Palestinian. This is an
unheard of kind of procedure in the world.
At the time my father was in the States. He had heard
that there money grows on trees, so he was looking for that tree. Thus
in 1967, when the occupation took place, he was out of the country. So
by a swipe of a pen the Israeli occupation made him a non-Palestinian.
Thus he can come back here only as an American citizen after he was
naturalized in the States. He can visit his home and children and
grandchildren for only three months at a time. That has been the case
ever since the occupation started.
In 2006, after the Palestinians held elections and
Hamas was elected, one of the elements that Israel looked at was how to
turn the screws just one more notch on the Palestinian community. One
way they did that was to stop providing automatic renewals of our visas.
Many people like myself and my Dad, who either come and go on a regular
basis or are living here like me and leave the country so we don’t
violate our visa, found that Israel started to deny entry to them.
(Israel is the only entity that is allowed to give visas here; they
control all our borders.)
Hundreds and thousands of people have been denied
entry – people coming to marry, or families coming back to visit for the
summer, or caretakers coming back to care for their elderly parents, or
people like myself in mid-career coming back to try to create a
different kind of reality here. This is one way the Israelis are able to
empty Palestine of the Palestinians. Every person they turn away at the
border is a person who will probably take their family out of the
country and follow them out.
That’s why I call it sterile. There are no pictures
at the border; CNN is not at the border; there is no blood in this. It
is an administrative operation. For example, I was married in 1993. In
1994 I applied for family unification – a request to the Israelis asking
for permanent residency so I can stay with my wife and children. That
application is still pending today.
They refuse to allow Palestinians to remain here
permanently. If I would leave the country today and were denied entry to
come back, I would be stuck in Jordan or somewhere; and it would be only
a matter of time before my wife and children followed me.
There are over 200,000 people like myself who hold
foreign national passports who are requesting family unification, to
stay with their families in the Palestinian territory. If Israel turns
back those 200,000 people, as they are doing now, ten or a hundred at a
time, they will be emptying Palestine of over half a million people,
because each one of those individuals would in time take their families
out of the country. This is ethnic cleansing in a very sophisticated,
non-bloody way. But the result of it is the same: it is a war crime that
Israel must be held accountable for.
We request that the U.S. administration, the sole
superpower in the world, take on not only its legal but also its moral
responsibility to stop this policy in its tracks.
JOE: Was your wife born here in Palestine?
SAM: Yes. But I cannot get residency here because the Israelis are fully
in control of what they call the population registry. They define who is
a Palestinian and who is not. Never in the history of military
occupations does the occupier go to the level of actually defining who
is the occupied people. International law requires that the occupier
respect how the people under occupation view themselves, but Israelis
don’t do that.
Here we are not talking about the refugees, who are
in a different category. We recognize that refugees are a political
issue which is being negotiated. What I am talking about are people who
are not originally from Israel proper but from Al Bireh, Ramallah,
Bethlehem, Nablus – people who are coming back to their homes in the
West Bank. We have no intention to live in Tel Aviv. I intend to live
here, and my father has no desire to live in Ashdod but rather in Al
Bireh in the home he was born in. But he is not allowed to do so.
In addition we have other restrictions. The mega-restriction here is the
access and movement restriction, which is a whole series of
restrictions. The Israelis have not only built this illegal apartheid
barrier between the West Bank and Israel – and they built it on
Palestinian land – but this barrier has been accompanied by over 540
military checkpoints that Israel has placed throughout the West Bank.
So for me to go from my headquarters in Al Bireh to,
for example, Nablus, which is one of the largest Palestinian cities, I
need to go through multiple checkpoints to get there. And at every
checkpoint the soldier in the street has the power to turn me back. This
denial of movement inside the West Bank, let alone outside the country,
has brought our economy basically to a standstill.
 The
Wall has created an environment where even children are separated from
their schools by what I call the Apartheid Wall, and so a trip which
used to take a kid three minutes now may take him 45 minutes to go
around the Wall. Not only that, but as the child is on the other side of
the Wall and the parents are on the West Bank side, in a situation that
is so unstable, can you imagine a mother wondering if something is going
to happen today that would result in the Wall being closed with her
child caught on the other side of it?
This is unheard of. It is unheard of. The amount of restrictions here
that have no relation whatsoever to Israel’s security is tremendous.
That is why I continue to call for the Israelis and the international
community to start unbundling the occupation. It’s unheard of that
Israel should say – and they state this publicly, not hiding their
actions, which is even worse – that we are holding every aspect of
Palestinian society basically hostage to a final status agreement that
is yet to be seen.
If every single checkpoint, and every single visa,
and every single water supply, and every single street is going to be
held hostag e,
then what the Israelis are doing is creating a Gordian knot that will
never be able to be opened to allow a true peace process to result in a
final status.
There is no reason today, for example, why 540
checkpoints exist inside the West Bank. The vast majority, if not all of
them, can be removed tomorrow morning, and it would have no effect on
Israeli security. In addition, they would be creating an environment
with a little more confidence that the Israelis really do have a notion
that they want us to live a different kind of reality.
Here is another example. I have a client who happens to be the second
mobile telecommunications operator who wants to open up a telecom
company. They are here, it’s a regional company, and they are ready to
hire 500 Palestinians to be able to compete against a current monopoly
telecommunications operator. The reason they can’t start is that the
Israelis control, like everything else, the frequencies. Not only is our
land, our water, and our people under occupation, but also our airwaves.
My client has been waiting for one year now, making requests at the
highest level possible, for the Israelis to release the control of the
needed frequencies in order to provide a cellular service.
Five hundred people being employed here would be like
a mini-GM. It would make a tremendous change in people’s opportunities
to work. When Israel does not allow businesses to operate, when it
separates us from our water supply, when it controls all of our
utilities, all of these constraints create conditions which force people
to leave the area.
A recent poll shows that, for the first time in our
history, 44% of Palestinians want to emigrate voluntarily out of
Palestine. These are shocking numbers. Israel is creating the conditions
that are emptying Palestine of Palestinians. It’s ethnic cleansing,
sterile, polished, with a lot of PR spin, and with U.S. support. It must
stop. It must stop.
Otherwise the events in Gaza and the election of
Hamas are going to continue down that very, very dark path until we
become not only a political problem to the world, not only a
humanitarian problem, but the world will become involved here in what is
basically quicksand we are sitting in.
JOE: Are there also restrictions on the Church because of the
occupation?
SAM: Not only is the business community being affected by the
restrictions. We just had a meeting with Church leaders, and I was
shocked to hear of the extent to which the Israelis are putting
restrictions on the Church community. During Christmas many Church
leaders come to Palestine, but the Israelis are creating almost
insurmountable administrative restrictions in terms of how priests,
nuns, and people coming to study religion get visas. We heard stories of
priests who have had to go through an application process of one year
before they were able to enter the country to serve in their Church.
This is an important issue because the Church community is by nature an
element of constructive creation of a new reality, and yet it is not
allowed to have access to the area. This to me would be the easiest
place Israel could show some flexibility.
Many of the churches view this region not with the
political boundaries we see on the map. For most of the churches,
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel is one community. So, many
of the Churches appoint leaders to serve in this region as a whole. But
if you are appointed in Jordan and you want to reach Jerusalem or
Nazareth, the Israelis don’t allow you to operate within the area of
your own Church. This is catastrophic.
I believe that in the upcoming Christmas message the
Churches, now so frustrated with the Israeli bureaucracy, are going to
state that Israel is denying access by the religious community to the
Holy Land. Where are the Israelis? Why don’t they see the damage being
done not only to relations with the Palestinians but to relations with
the entire global Church community? We hear of the Vatican
representative here having to go through hoops to move his car from one
place to another. Where is the outcry? Is there no outcry only because
Israel is the nation doing this?
JOE: There are so many forms of oppression that you have to live under.
SAM: But we are here, and one thing the world needs to understand is
that we Palestinians may not have learned yet how to win, to shed off
this Israeli occupation, but I can guarantee you for a fact that we have
definitely learned how not to lose. This community is so steadfast and
has so much resilience and is so human at its core that we have been
able to sustain a society, to sustain community, without a central
government, without a judicial system that is operating properly, under
a tremendous amount of Israeli military pressure, and we still wake up
in the morning and worry about our neighbor. This kind of environment is
not easy to find anywhere else in the world, and I think we have become
better because of our struggle. But we also need to end this occupation
so we can move forward.
JOE: A very crucial issue, one which is getting all kinds of publicity,
has to do with the settlers. What can you tell us about this issue?
SAM: The Israelis have done something which is in
blatant violation of international law: they have moved their own
population, Israeli citizens, or have permitted them to move, into the
occupied territory. These Israeli-only Jewish settlements are scattered
on all of the mountaintops throughout the West Bank and previously also
in Gaza before the disengagement.
These settlements are basically plots of land that
either have been confiscated from private citizens or were public lands
under Jordanian rule. They are enclosed communities of very modern-style
homes where Israelis have been able to come and live, often promoted by
the Israeli government which gives them incentives such as better
mortgage deals and so forth, trying to move the population into the West
Bank. It is very clear in international law that this cannot happen.
These barricaded settlements are not only the plots
of land they are built on, but under Ariel Sharon they actually built an
entire network of roads connecting these settlements. And another
network of roads connects the settlements to Israel proper. This has
resulted in the confiscation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,
of dunums[2]
of land, because when the Israelis confiscate that mountaintop for the
settlement they also go around the settlement and draw a circle 100 or
200 meters beyond the settlement, making that a closed military area as
well. Then the road connecting the settlement to the network of settler
roads is not only a road that is confiscated but it also includes 50 to
70 meters on both sides of the road which is also confiscated.
 Then
they issued a military order that we as Palestinians are not allowed to
build within 500 meters, I think, of the area designated as a security
zone.
This is just another way that the Israelis have
created a situation in which it is impossible for us to develop. Around
every single Palestinian metropolitan city, Bethlehem being the first of
them, there are settlements encircling the city. Since they are on the
mountaintops, they can capture a lot of the rainfall before it gets to
the valleys where the Palestinians live. Thus they also disrupt our own
natural water supply as well.
These settlements, under international law, are
illegal. The Israelis have tried to create a lingo, a lexicon of the
occupation, to make it sound like they are OK. We hear of “legal”
settlements and of “illegal” settlements; we hear of outposts, which are
the beginning of settlements, and “illegal” outposts. This is all a
façade to try to justify illegal action. Every settlement is illegal,
including the settlements in the middle of East Jerusalem which have
been there since the early 1970s and which started under the leadership
of Shimon Peres, the Labor leader who is now the president of Israel.
This was a policy of creating physical structures
within the West Bank, within the occupied territory, to try to change
the topography, to make it look as if the Israelis are an integral part
of the area since they have been here for so long.
Over and over again the Israelis have tried to buy
time by creating a reality on the ground that can’t be changed. One
litmus test for Oslo, and why Oslo failed, was that these settlements,
which are clearly illegal under international law, and which
historically have been deemed illegal even by the U.S. administration
and seen by the whole world as an obstacle to peace, doubled in
Palestine during the ten years after Oslo. Rather than stopping the
damage and entering a peace process in which they would try to reverse
the damage they had created, Israel used the Oslo peace process as a
cover to be able to continue rushing to build more and more settlements,
to create more facts on the ground to be able to say that now the
settlements are too large to move.[3]
Unfortunately, in 2004 in a letter to Israeli prime
minister Ariel Sharon, Bush gave Israel a document which said that facts
on the ground are overwhelming and that basically some of the large
settlement blocs may have to be annexed to Israel.[4]
By the swipe of a pen, Bush played judge, jury, and the sheriff all at
the same time. But he has no right to do that, and that cannot happen.
The settlements must be removed because they are
illegal. Having said that, we are not blind to the fact that millions of
dollars have been invested in the settlements, nor are we blind to the
fact that there are people living in those settlements. Recent reports
say that, if Israel will give the same kind of economic incentives to
leave the West Bank that they gave the settlers to come into the West
Bank, then 30 to 50 percent of the settlers would leave voluntarily.
So what is Israel waiting for before they give
incentives to people to leave the settlements, instead of giving
incentives even today for people to move into this occupied territory
and create more obstacles to peace? They made a strategic mistake, and I
think they know it, in creating the settlement enterprise. They can
correct that mistake starting today by giving incentives for settlers to
move voluntarily back into Israel.
No one is telling the settlers that they should be
pushed into the sea. We are telling them to leave the occupied territory
because they are the crystallization of the military boot of occupation
that is on the Palestinians’ neck.
In the future peace treaty, if these settlers accept
to live under Palestinian rule, I personally have no problem having an
Israeli, a Jewish person, living in a Palestinian state. I come from the
U.S., a place where one can have his religion separate from the state.
However, if Israel wants to continue to dictate reality by forcing their
population, in violation of international law, to take more land, water,
and resources and restrict our own development as Palestinian society,
this is unsustainable. I fear for the days to come if the international
community does not hold Israel accountable.
JOE: Doesn’t the Wall, which Israel calls a security barrier, cut into
Palestinian territory precisely in order to protect the Israeli
settlements?
SAM: Absolutely. The Wall is built on Palestinian land, not on the 1967
border. An analogy would be this: if you and I were neighbors in
Michigan, and I decided I wanted to build a fence around my house so no
one could enter my land, but I built that fence through your kitchen and
said it is only a fence but in reality it is a concrete wall – would you
sit there and accept it? The Palestinians did not sit there and accept
it but rather are engaged in serious nonviolent resistance against the
Wall. The Bil’in village has been at the forefront of this nonviolent
resistance. [5]
 But
we didn’t stop there. The Palestinians took the Wall to the
International Court of Justice and after a serious debate within the
Court actually won an advisory opinion which basically stated not only
that the Wall itself is illegal but that the occupation embodied by the
Wall is illegal.
What are the Palestinians to do? They are
nonviolently resisting on the ground; they are facing a tremendous
amount of economic and social hardship because of the Wall; they have
taken the Wall to the highest levels of diplomacy and justice in in the
world. Where else do we go? That is why we are begging the international
community to wake up, because if all of these continue to fail, the
Palestinians will have no option but to revert to a more extremist role
in trying to end this occupation -- something that would not be good for
my family or for the families of Israeli soldiers who would be sent here
to repress that kind of resistance.
We have been trying nonviolent resistance for decades. Only recently has
this conflict become militarized, only recently.  Palestinians
have lived under occupation since 1967; only in 2000, with the second
Intifada, in the West Bank and Gaza strip was a military or armed kind
of role introduced.
People have tried everything they can try. We have
been deported, imprisoned; we have had our houses demolished; we have
seen settlers take our land; we have been stopped from having movement
and access. What else is expected from us? I can tell you for a fact
that if a third of what has happened to the Palestinians would happen to
the population where I’m from, Youngstown, Ohio, I can guarantee you
that there would not be nonviolent resistance to it. It would be very
violent resistance.
So I applaud the Palestinian people for being able to
contain violence for so long. But we are people at the end of the day;
and when you put people into a corner, with no hope, you can expect many
bad things to come out of it. The international community has an
obligation to this country to make sure that we get out of this
occupation to be able to start the process of rehabilitation.
We have neighbors called Israelis that we need to
rehabilitate with to be able to live with peacefully. The sooner we can
start that, the easier the path will be, just as white South Africa and
black South Africa ended the oppression and started a rehabilitation
process that is going on even to today.
JOE: You mentioned “house demolitions.” Israel supposedly targets the
house of someone they have a case against?
SAM: There is no “case” required. The Israelis are able to use the
security mantra for anything they want to do, especially when the world
is just turning a blind eye.
The Israelis refuse to provide permits. Remember that they are in charge
of every aspect of our livelihood. When you want to build, for example,
in East Jerusalem, you apply for a permit. They refuse that permit, or
sometimes they do not refuse outright but make the costs of the permit
so complicated, so expensive, that you are not able to obtain it. Again,
a very polished way to be oppressive.
When the Palestinians defy that by building without a
permit, they can have their house demolished. Interestingly enough, when
the Israelis issue a demolition order, it is active immediately and has
no ending. So, if your house is deemed for demolition, that demolition
could happen one hour from now or 20 years from now. You will live under
the threat of your house being demolished every second. Can you imagine
living under such a threat?
Also, if your house becomes too close to a settlement
that they just decided to build, your house can be deemed a target for
demolition. When you demolish a house, you are not only making a family
homeless, but in the Palestinian culture you are going further, because
our home is a very deep-seated element in our mindset. The home is not
only parents and their children but also an extended family living in
the home; so a single home may house 12 or 14 persons. Thus the impact
of demolishing a home is tremendous.
It’s just like the impact of imprisonment. They have imprisoned since
1967 over 650,000 people. We are a very small community: under
occupation there are less than 4 million people. Six hundred and fifty
thousand of them have gone through the Israeli prison system. Currently
11,000 sit in prison. When you put someone through a prison system, you
are basically putting that person through an education system of how to
resist against you. You are also taking out of the community
breadwinners. These 11,000 prisoners have families at home who have lost
their breadwinner.
The impact is catastrophic. The issues we have discussed in this
interview are only part of the restrictions we have. When you add them
all together, you can reflect on the amount of despair and frustration
that is in this community. Again, any community in the U.S. would not be
able to withstand a third of what we are facing.
I will give you one last statistic that came out
recently. A senior official in the World Bank stated the other day that
what is happening to the Palestinian economy is worse than what happened
to the U.S. in the Great Depression. A forty percent drop in our GDP
since 2000 is worse than what happened during the Great Depression in
the U.S. And we still wake up every day and we try to call on the
international community to take action.
If mobility of the population is not permitted, there
can be no development. This is stated repeatedly by the World Bank and
other international institutions. World organizations also confirm that
Israel can remove many of these restrictions without jeopardizing its
security, which is a just concern. Why don’t they? Why aren’t they
starting to unbundle this conflict so Palestinians can try to forge a
path of hope? They refuse to do that. Instead, they prefer to hold every
aspect of our life hostage to some as yet unforeseen final status
negotiations.
JOE: Thank you very much, Sam Bahour, for this clear and moving analysis
and presentation. I hope people will consult your website --
http://www.epalestine.com/
-- and get on your mailing list.
|
