Executive Summary

The ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip has compounded several humanitarian and legal violations, particularly inrelation to the reproductive rights of Palestinian women. Since the launch of its military offensive in October 2023, Israelhas systematically targeted Palestinian women in ways that undermine their ability to survive, give birth, and raisechildren. More than 12,300 women have been killed, 4,700 women and children are missing, and approximately 800,000women have been forcibly displaced. An estimated one million women and girls now suffer from acute food insecurity.Israel’s actions constitute a deliberate attempt to impair the reproductive capacities of Palestinian women, aimed atdismantling the future of Palestinian society. Through the bombing of shelters, destruction of hospitals, blockading ofmedical and hygiene supplies, and attacks on fertility clinics and maternity wards, Israel’s policy of erasure is notincidental, it is intentional.

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Executive Summary

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is vital inproviding humanitarian aid, education, and health services to Palestinian refugees across Jordan, Lebanon,Syria, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Beyond its humanitarian role, UNRWA represents aninternational commitment to Palestinian refugees' right of return, as established in UN General AssemblyResolution 194 in 1948. However, Israel has long sought to undermine the agency through financial, political,and military means.Recent Israeli actions have escalated, with the Israeli Knesset passing legislation banning UNRWAoperations in areas under Israeli control, effectively revoking its legal status. Concurrently, Israel hasintensified military attacks on UNRWA facilities. In the Gaza Strip since October 2023, Israeli forces havetargeted 310 UNRWA sites, destroying schools and killing 273 UNRWA employees alongside hundreds ofcivilians sheltering in its facilities. Throughout the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military has been turningUNRWA facilities into military bases and detention centers, and has closed UNRWA’s headquarters in EastJerusalem. These actions violate multiple international legal agreements and aim to erase Palestinian refugeeidentity and their legal rights.

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The shocking human cost that occupation has taken on Palestinian women is laid bare in research published today. Combining research, extensive surveys, and first-hand testimonies from over 40 Palestinian women, Palestinian Women: The Disproportionate Impact of The Israeli Occupation provides new insight into the gendered experience of occupation, looking into four issues in particular:

• women refugees
• the impact of residency revocation on Palestinian women in Jerusalem
• the experience of women prisoners
• Gazans’ access to health

Co-authored by four Palestinian NGOs – the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH), Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development (PWWSD), the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC), and Women Media and Development (TAM), the report includes detailed findings that demonstrate how the oppression occupation has permeated women’s daily lives, and the particular impact is has had on women in Palestinian refugee camps, Palestinian women living in Jerusalem, women prisoners, and residents of Gaza who require health services.

The impact on refugee women

Researchers spoke to 500 Palestinian refugee women from 12 Palestinian camps (7 in the West Bank, 5 in Gaza). Their findings included the following:

• A third of women surveyed had been directly exposed to physical assault by Israeli Occupation Forces. 9% had been exposed to threats of being attacked by police dogs during Israeli night raids on their homes.
• Over a third (37%) of respondents had been exposed to detention or interrogation, while 38% said that they or members of their households had been exposed to verbal abuse during Israeli army raids, at checkpoints or while visiting religious places.
• Nearly a quarter (24%) were forced to live in shelters or with extended family. 22% were forced to live under unhealthy conditions. 13% stated that the female and male members of their families were separated as a result of having to live in shelters.
• More than one in five (21%) had been exposed to beatings or tear gas at Israeli checkpoints while they were pregnant. 4% reported that they aborted or gave birth at Israeli checkpoints.
• The majority (64%- 321 cases) had been unable to visit religious or recreational places because of Occupation restrictions.

Jerusalem: Residency Revocation and Family Reunification

According to official figures, 14,595 Palestinians from East Jerusalem had their residency status revoked between 1967 and the end of 2016.

Through residency revocations, Israel has separated husbands from wives, parents from children, and extended families from one another, causing traumatic complications for women attempting to remain with their families in both Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This leads to traumatic fears of separation from children for mothers and an entrenching of patriarchal practices across society. Palestinian women living in Jerusalem lose residency rights if they get divorced or their husbands remarry. Limiting their access to justice, female victims of domestic violence fear reporting abuse to authorities in case they are forcibly transferred away from their children.

Women prisoners

Since the beginning of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine in 1967, approximately 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained by Israeli military forces. According to the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs’ 2017 annual report, 1,467 children were arrested last year.

Our researchers spoke to prisoners who experienced physical and psychological torture at arrest and imprisonment, and traumatic, gendered treatment, including:

• Women denied access to menstrual products while detained
• A woman arrested while pregnant who gave birth while chained to a prison hospital bed
• Ex-prisoners who report being subjected to rape and death threats during interrogation, including a girl in of 15-years old threatened with rape
• Women who were subjected to frequent forced and violent strip searches
• A prisoner who reported toothache, only to have the wrong tooth removed

Access to Health in Gaza

Israel exercises strict control Gaza’s borders, a policy of ‘actual authority’, constituting continued occupation, despite the withdrawal of its permanent presence. This control in particular affects those who need medical treatment outside of Gaza’s struggling health system, who require permission to leave. The report shows that the rate of approval applications is falling year-by-year:

• 92.5% of applications were successful in 2012
• 88.7% in 2013
• 82.4% in 2014
• 77.5% in 2015
• 62.1% in 2016

Of the 26,282 permit applications submitted by patients aiming to exit through Erez in 2016, 8,242 (31.4%) were delayed. Many applicants received no response from border authorities, even after lawyers filed formal applications on their behalf. These delays regularly extend months and years beyond medical appointments, worsening already life-threatening diseases and in some cases resulting in death.

Read the full report here, or download it here:

Palestinian Women – The Disproportionate Impact of the Israeli Occupation

On January 26th 1976 the United Nations Security Council debated a resolution (S11940) introduced by Jordan, Syria and Egypt that included all the crucial wording of UNSC resolution 242. It accepted the right of all states in the region to exist within secure and recognized borders while re-emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. This resolution added for the first time, however, what was missing from 242: recognition of Palestinian national rights. The phrase "all states" was taken to include a new Palestinian state in the occupied territories.

Israel was, of course, invited to attend the session but refused, preferring instead to have a national tantrum that included bombing Lebanon the same day, killing about 50 people ­in all likelihood a typical "in your face" message to the UN and the world. Unsurprisingly the US vetoed the resolution causing the PLO, which was present at the session, to speak of the "tyranny of the veto." As with similar resolutions since this one, the overwhelming majority of the world's nations supported it. The two nations that have consistently opposed this and comparable resolutions were the United States and Israel thereby establishing the well-known pattern of rejectionism that persists to this day. As a result, resolutions such as S11940 have vanished from the historical record despite its significance in marking the first time a UN resolution explicitly recognized the inalienable national rights of the people of Palestine.

In the debate leading up to the vote on this resolution, one of the participants remarked that the problem of Palestine is at the heart of the Middle East conflict and must be resolved....We are sorry that Israel stayed away from the debate and has instead been [wreaking] havoc all over and hurling defiance against the alleged bias of the United Nations. In truth it is Israel which is maintaining, by the use of force, and [which] wishes to be left alone to continue, its occupation of the territories of its Arab neighbors. Persistence in this policy of tone and diktat can only breed more violence, engender further bitterness, and make ever more remote the prospect of the peace and cooperation which the Israeli government professes to be seeking and which all the peoples of the Middle East desire and need. (M. Akhund; representative of Pakistan; in transcript of debate following introduction of resolution. S/PV.1879 of 26 January 1976. UNISPAL home; See also: UN DPI multimedia: United Nations. Thirty-first year; 1879th meeting.)

Reading these words, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu and had to double check the source to certify that they were in fact spoken 31 years ago. Unfortunately, however, although the similarities with present day circumstances are remarkable, the situation that we face vis a vis the Palestinian issue today is far more serious.

Noam Chomsky's response to my upbeat description of last year's UN's Conference in Geneva on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was that if things did not soon improve on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories, the next such conference "would be a wake." It was a sobering reminder of just how dire the situation has become; how, in Chomsky's words we are currently witnessing an event almost unprecedented in the modern era: the systematic, deliberate and long-term destruction of an entire nation.

As activists and representatives of civil society NGOs concerned with what is happening in Israel-Palestine, we know the importance of maintaining a realistic level of optimism; of dogged persistence even in the face of what seem to be insurmountable obstacles. I have not given up that hope, nor ­I suspect-have any of you, which is why we are here today.

Nonetheless as important as solidarity work is for us and for the continuation of efforts to effect change in the circumstances facing millions of Palestinians in the territories and beyond, none of us is deluded enough to believe that a Just Peace is at hand. With every killing, every maiming, every act of state-sponsored terror, every home demolition, every arrest, every confiscation of property, resources and identity, every closure, checkpoint, permit, roadblock, or concrete slab put into place along the serpentine Wall that is devouring Palestinian land in its path, Palestine is rendered increasingly invisible, buried behind euphemisms and peace scams ­ a non-entity for non-persons whose continuation as one of the many nations populating the globe today is seriously threatened.

(1) In trying to assess how we can put a stop to this devastating dynamic I came up with three pre-conditions that are necessary before we can even begin a process leading to a just settlement. First and foremost is to demand an end to Israeli crimes. These include, most significantly today, its bloody and sadistic torture of Gaza, but also its continued territorial expansion which it has no intention of ending, an end to atrocities against the people of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, recognition of the right of Palestinians to have free elections ­meaning, in this case, the recognition of Hamas and the establishment of dialogue with it and all other Palestinian political factions regardless of whether or not we like them; the release of Palestinian Parliamentarians taken hostage beginning in the summer of 2006; the release of thousands of prisoners and illegal detainees whose only "crime" was resistance to an illegal occupation.

I should add here that on December 7th, 1987 the United Nations General Assembly passed UN resolution 42/159 which, among other things, authorized peoples living under occupation regimes the right to resist. This is yet another piece of the historical documentary record conveniently forgotten lest it be used to support Palestinian and other just causes.

To reiterate: it is crucial that all of Israel's ongoing crimes against the Palestinian nation cease; that we in civil society and in world organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union so allegedly concerned with the adherence to and principles of international law take it upon ourselves to enforce it or soon, with regard to Palestine, there will be nothing left to talk about.

(2) The second pre-condition is that the Quartet, which includes the United Nations and the European Union, publicly acknowledge the international consensus as it has existed since January 26th, 1976 and was broadened by the 2002 Arab League Summit in Beirut to include full normalization of relations, in return for Israel's compliance with international law. As mentioned, however, this consensus has been systematically and often hysterically rejected by the US and Israel whereas virtually all other concerned parties, including Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas, have ­contrary to what the American media would have us believe-explicitly accepted it.

(3) Finally, once the international consensus is acknowledged, civil society activists and organizations must pressure European Nations to have the courage to act independently of US policies, as they can do in many important ways, instead of ­as one activist put it-"toddling meekly behind the Boss and participating in his crimes"(Noam Chomsky; private correspondence). Actions taken by the UN and the EU among other world organizations to ostracize and isolate the United States and Israel rather than kowtow to them in servile obedience must serve as the beginning of constructive change; of sending a message to the world's only superpower and its principal client that they may, by sheer military force, continue to get their way, but that their actions will no longer be tolerated or ignored.

It is bad enough that the United States and Israel together behaves like neighborhood bullies dictating their whims to both friends and enemies alike; but when their pious appeals to freedom, democracy and justice are heard as tanks, heavy artillery and warplanes devastate the lands and decimate the civilian populations they have occupied it is long past the time to censure their record-breaking violations of international law and basic human morality.

With regard to Palestine, it is important to ask ourselves why Hamas, which won power in free, fair and transparent democratic elections has been deemed a criminal terrorist organization whose carefully planned demise depends on the calculated starvation and suffering deliberately imposed on the Gaza Strip, 50% of whose population is under age 25. We need to understand that brutal, authoritarian regimes such as those in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are upheld as "moderate" and "friendly" states by the US because their first priority is to the Master and his whims.

By understanding this we are forced to confront the sudden cynical embrace by both Israel and the US of Mahmoud Abbas and his disturbing acquiescence in this embrace. Abbas' illegal government-by-decree has agreed not only to avoid any dialogue or attempts at reconciliation with Hamas; it has also accepted ­ in Orwellian fashion-the US/Israeli designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization. Indeed Abbas himself while lauding the values of freedom and democracy announced on Israeli television that he would refuse to "conduct negotiations with murderers." Surely his Israeli and American backers have satisfied their immediate aims of making him an honorary Warrior on Terror. Thus, with help from his foreign backers, Abbas' Fatah faction has succeeded in splitting the Palestinian National Movement in half making it easier still for the Israelis to continue to destroy the economic, social, cultural and political fabric of Palestine. Who are these people that they would sacrifice on the altar of celebrity, power and corruption the historic struggle and soul of Palestine? The path on which this cynical triumvirate of power is moving leads inexorably to a fate none of us here would seriously like to contemplate.

Last November I had the pleasure of returning to Gaza to visit friends to whom I owe more than I can ever say. Yet the visit called up the usual mixture of emotions that fill one's heart with the beauty and anguish that is Gaza today. In the midst of a lovely family gathering, of laughter, warmth and an uncanny sense to me of belonging, the treacherous thundering guns of "Operation Autumn Clouds" commenced in the north, in Beit Hanoun. In the days that followed I visited the Shifa and Kamal Adwan hospitals ­the ICU wards full of badly wounded civilians- and the morgues on which the dead men, women and children lay silently on cold, silver freezer trays.

What was more troubling to me than anything else was not the absurdity and injustice of these deaths; the on-going brutality and barbarism that a state has adopted under a hideous veneer of "security needs." No, what bothered me most was the chilling familiarity of the scenes: Jenin, Rafah, Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Ramallah, Nablus, Beitunia, El-Bireh, Qalandia, Beit Sahour, Hebron I can no longer remember which place bore which of these unspeakable tragedies. All I know is that they show no sign of ending and that, my friends, is why our messages here at this conference must be urgently heeded.

Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the board of the Israeli Coalition against House Demolitions-USA branch, founder of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and a freelance journalist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net

This essay is extracted from a speech given at the UN's conference on Palestine this past Aug. 30th-31st.

A clear and warm November evening; sun sets in a violence of color to the west over the sea and a full luminescent moon on the rise over Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. As if on cue, the buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead begins as their nightly circling ritual gets underway. The taxi driver's hands grip the wheel of the car more intently as we speed along the winding road to Erez past the village huddled in the shadows a few hundred meters away to our right. At the Palestinian side, the driver gets out of the taxi, my passport in hand, and takes it into the shack of an office where a handful of scruffy, uniformed security figures are sitting. Darkness is creeping in from the East.

There is a problem, the driver explains to me in broken English. They won't let you through. On the other side of Erez where the gatekeepers sit in their park-rangers' office with the neon lights and the coffee-machine, my number isn't blinking approval on the computer. Or something like that. A furious volley of phone calls on my behalf commences ¬ between the driver, friends in Gaza, PA security and the masters in Israel. Sorry, not coordinated. Sorry, it will take a while; sorry, you can't leave. Sorry, no. An American citizen in the Gaza Strip will stay with the prisoners for now because the keepers are not ready to let her out of the cage. Revenge for your audacity, I think. Live with the others since you like it so well; eat their dust and shower in their sewers. You wanted to go to Gaza, no?

Darkness covers half the sky and the drones sound hungry. The driver shouts into the phone to my friend, Khamsa Daqa'iq! Khamsa Daqa'iq! (Five minutes! Five minutes!) He'll wait only 5 more minutes, he says, before returning me to Gaza City ¬ but I know better. He'll wait until his life is in danger trying to help me get out. And sure enough, it is 45 minutes later when he looks at me beseechingly and says we must return. The wardens are not cooperating. My number is not approved. Now it is night.

Drones can't tell a taxi from a car full of 'militants.' In the darkness on the road they won't know who we are-or at least it will make matters easier when the explanations for two dead civilians come in the next day, one of them an 'international'. It was dark, you see, and they were 'suspicious.' The suitcase might have been full of explosives. Therefore no investigation will be necessary. Therefore it was OK. Therefore it was our fault for being out. Therefore you should not go to Gaza. Is the message clear?

The trip back is a roller coaster ride with the wrong kind of thrills. Friends meet us on the curbside outside their home and we all tip the driver better than he'll ever get again in his lifetime. He is breathing again; an old man with white hair, looking apologetically into my eyes.

In the tall apartment building teeming with prisoner families of Gaza, friends call back and forth to Israel for me ¬ in their Hebrew and English. The ghosts of Kafka and Lewis Carroll are hovering about us bemused and mocking: prisoners of the Gaza Strip trying to arrange the release of an American citizen. They all have to give the Israeli authorities their names. I finally take the phone to speak to the boss and, for the first time in the history of my excursions to this god-forsaken land, an Israeli apologizes.

Sorry. Forgot to give your number to Security at Erez. You can leave in the morning.

What a blessing: Six-thirty in the morning I am ready again, suitcases in tow, just in time for the explosion down the street; just in time to view the melted mess of a once-automobile and four once-human beings smoldering in the middle of Gaza City, boys picking at the wreckage and ambulance sirens closing in. State-of-the-art incineration tactics: a gleaming helicopter gunship straight off the defense industry's spankingly efficient assembly line and loaded with glimmering precision-guided missiles. Tourist attractions are never-ending. If they'd only let more people in who would need Hollywood?

This time on the Gaza side of Erez I am free to go, pulling my wheeled suitcase behind, concrete walls on either side of a cavernous tunnel covered by a canvas roof. My steps echo, there is nothing in sight but the tunnel and the first row of steel bars that segment the crossing into sections. Security cameras hide in the corners and a Voice from nowhere directs:

Please push open the gate.

I'm past the first jail doors and clacking on toward the second set. Here, a steel-barred revolving door interrupts the even, steel-barred gates. The Voice sounds again.

Go through the turnstile.

Monotone, passionless Voice.

Put your bags on the belt.

Don't even think about disobeying.

Step into the glass x-ray machine with your arms outstretched and your legs apart.

The glass doors spin closed, high-tech sound like the elevators in the Mall of America. I am x-rayed along with my bags as they inch through the baggage tunnel.

Please step back.

Please step in again.

Please step forward.

Please take your bags.

Please walk forward.

What a polite Voice. It says "please".

Don't touch the glass.

The Voice sees everything I'm doing. It sees through my clothing and my leather back-pack.

You dropped something, the Voice tells me. Hint of humanoid at the other end. I pick it up.

Go on.

The next set of steel bars appears. The final tunnel chamber is divided into three corrals: one for the sub-humans from Gaza currently not allowed out at all; one for the pain-in-the-ass-visitors they haven't figured out how to dispense with altogether like me; one ¬wider than the other two- for the VIPs with diplomatic status who still have to be treated like guests. Anyone who has passed through Erez will find no hint of exaggeration in this description. Anyone who has ever raised a question about this sprawling, grotesque steel and concrete military-industrial guards' complex will have been told it is for their security that this must exist. Anyone who has set foot in the Gaza Strip will know at once what a revolting load of crap that is.

This monstrosity is not for your security. This neo-fascist, Stalinist, gulag Guantanamo is there to keep you out, to keep you from even trying, from even wanting, to go in. It is there so you will not see the torn up streets, and ruined land; the bombed-out buildings and poisoned soil; the bull-dozed houses and bullet-holed refugee camps; the back-up generators chugging away; the destroyed central power transformer, the wrecked factories and shops; the caved-in mosques and unfinished clinics; the pressure-less water pumps; the lots full of rubble and trash; the wretched horse and donkey-carts and beggar-children; the worn out mothers, the humiliated fathers, the unemployed young men; the young girls holding whole families together; the exhausted teachers, the pay-less civil servants, the street vendo rs with last week's produce; the heaps of rust and stench of rot, the overcrowded book-and-desk-deprived schools full of troubled youth, bed-wetters, ptsd children; the travesties-of-hospitals; the wards of the sick and wounded; the morgues full of the dead; the merciful, silver-trayed freezers in the morgues where rest finally takes you unaware. The prison compound of Gaza was built to push half a nation to the brink of death, to suck out its resistance, to squeeze out its breath. They want us to suffer, not to die. The words of the mayor of Rafah sound like a broken record in my head. And they are succeeding, he said without emotion.

Why? Because this blockade on human traffic into Gaza, this travesty of an experiment in collective human torture, is sanctioned, supported, condoned and blessed by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, the Arab League, the G-8, the corporate masters, the "international community"; by heads of states, presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, kings; by foreign ministers and their trusty delegations; by politicians and diplomats, executives and organizations, academies and institutes, think tanks and centers for the study ofs; by departments of foreign affairs, interior, education and finance; by media lords, newspapers, radios, television stations, journalists, analysts, commentators and publics who don't dare open their mouths, write out their shock, register their objections, express their disgust, squeak out their "no's" lest they suggest that Israel's apparatus of inhumanity is an abomination on the face of the earth.

Servility to power, obsequiousness, righteous barbarism, elitist racism, cowardice, complicity and denial fuel the engine of this dreadful machine, and those with the power to stop it at once refuse to utter a sound.

So outside at the end of the tunnel the soldiers greet me. Standard procedure. All in day's work. Normalcy. Take your bags over there. Yet another series of x-ray machines and tables. Every item from toothpaste tubes and contact lens cases to dirty socks and tee-shirts, from blue jeans and turtlenecks to embroidered shawls and purses, is dumped onto the table and sifted through with meticulous care as the backpack and suitcase, the handbag and plastic sacks are sent through x-ray machines again. Three and a half hours after my journey began, I am dismissed to the Erez rangers' terminal where my passport is examined for the 5th time. I have two hours to get to the Allenby Bridge before it closes at ! noon. Good thing I didn't leave Gaza at 8.

The beauty of the Jordan valley is stunning. The desert hills are white and yellow and amber, swept by winds, patterned and dancing, palm trees at the bottom near the Jordan River. The warm autumn sun bakes out sorrow. Finally, the last security check of the day ¬my presence delays a van-load of VIPs hoping to return to Jordan on the early side. Here we go again. I guess it's because I was at Erez, I say to the Israeli attendant looking at me quizzically when they take my passport away.

Where? She asks.

Erez.

A blank stare.

EREZ. The entrance of Gaza, I say.

She doesn't know what I'm talking about.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre.

Thousands of Lebanese, Palestinians and others made a kind of pilgrimage to Fatima’s gate in the summer of 2000 to celebrate the end of Israel’s 22 -year occupation of south Lebanon. ‘Fatima’s gate’ denoted a stretch of land on the Lebanon-Israel border newly controlled by Hizbullah after it pursued the retreating Israeli forces back into Israel. Yellow Hizbullah flags flew everywhere. The atmosphere was festive and light. People set up souvenir stands selling Hizbullah memorabilia – flags, key-rings, postcards, pens – to commemorate the historic event. Families strolled up and back along the road pa! rallel to the border, pointing out the Israeli towns in the distance. Friends strode along together talking politics and stopping to stare at the last wreckages of the event, the burned out jeeps and cars, the bullet holes and shrapnel wounds in the facades of the walls and buildings left behind by the retreating Israelis. Parents and children alike gazed at these remains; some took pictures posed next to them. Others passed by more solemnly, wary of disturbing the near-sanctity of these symbols of struggle and of the years of adversity they recalled.

Across a stretch of land demarcated by barbed wire and signposts stood a lone Israeli watch-tower. From Fatima’s gate one could just make out the shapes of helmeted soldiers within, behind a small rectangular window of bullet-proofed glass: the hapless targets of rocks hurled continually across the border by all who could manage to throw them and the cheering on-lookers applauding each lob.

The summer of 2000 has taken on the transient quality of a landscape brightened by a break in the clouds for an all too brief interlude.

That was the summer Lebanon began to awaken again; to bloom into a metropolis of culture and scandal, nightlife and slums, commerce and tourism, stretching, yawning and weeping with sorrow and relief. The stiflingly hot streets of Haret Hreik in the south suburbs were neighbors the of the Bourj al-Barajneh, Chatila and Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camps all full of the squalor and pulsing of life, the worlds within worlds of poverty, hope, despair and faith. There in the slums of the city a young, intelligent doctor from the camp hospital invited me to his home to meet his mother and sister and to explain why he, a Sunni Muslim and a Palestinian, had chosen to become a member of Hizbullah. Safwat was an anomaly then, or so I believed. But now, when I traverse the str! eets of Haret Hreik in my mind, the fruit and vegetable stands, the phone stores and electronics shops, the clothing stores, restaurants and cafes, the banks and Internet stops, the grocery and household supply marts where one could purchase all her daily necessities, it is clear that the seeds of a vast resistance had just begun to germinate. It was unclear to me then just how fully it would bloom; just how tenacious its roots would become. Today, the bustling streets of Haret Hreik are gone. Where families lived and thrived, struggled and laughed, is an emptiness of rubble –the bombed ruins of a greedy imperial war that stops at nothing. Today Lebanon stands behind Hizbullah. The Lebanese have become the bitter, cheering on-lookers of the resistance which lobs its out-dated missiles relentlessly across the border as the Israeli war machine refuels again and again. But US precision guided bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, unmanned aerial drones, drones to guide the bombs, helicopters armed with missiles, F-16s, gun ships and state-of-the-art armed and trained ground forces with night vision surveillance and combat goggles have succeeded in uniting far more than the Lebanese behind the daring defiance of Hassan Nasrallah.

Sixteen years of civil war, of murderous sectarian acrimony, of inter-ethnic killing, suspicion and paranoia and today –after 28 days of hell unleashed upon it by the arrogant racism of a militant and ideological Zionism— 89% of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims, 80% of its Christians, 80% of its Druze and 100% of its Shiite populations support Hizbullah’s resistance against Israel and the United States.

At least as telling are statistics showing that 97% of Palestinians support Hizbullah’s position toward Israel including 95% of Christian Palestinians. Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and Iran are not the only places where support for Hizbullah has increased dramatically in the last month. Among the populations of the American-backed Arab states, notably Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, there is also widespread support. Indeed, seizing ! upon the corruption and obsequiousness of these regimes and their tacit support of Israel, Nasrallah intoned in a recent address, “there will be no place for [you] if you abandon your moral and national responsibility. For the sake of your thrones I say to you gather [up your humanity] and act for one day in order to stop this aggression on Lebanon.” He understands, as do they, that their unwillingness to condemn the insouciant murder of more than a thousand people will cost them dearly. Suddenly these merciless, sell-out regimes are left scrambling to help author a ceasefire agreement less embarrassing than the Bolton-Gillerman diktat that left the Israeli military in place in south Lebanon while seeking to disarm Hizbullah.!

Are we really surprised by the vast, Hizbullah-led resistance? By the linkage it makes with people across the boundaries of national insult, defeat and humiliation? Are we really surprised that 40 years after Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and 6 years into its continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms in Lebanon that people are have had enough? Are we really surprised that 3 and a half years into the US occupation and devastation of Iraq, 5 years after the US invasion and destruction of Afghanistan and decades of killings, intrusions, violations, abductions, assassinations, meddling, economic sanctions, pilfering and exploitation of the people, lands and resources of the Middle East that the reckless, racist, power-drunk mercenaries of empire should finally be met with a legitimate popular resistance? –not an outgrowth of displaced fana! ticism, not an al-Qaeda gang of killers, but the beginnings of a grassroots pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movement seeking to heal the wounds of perpetual subjugation?

What message have the purveyors of state power brought with them that their listeners should wish to continue to bow in subservience? The conditions are not right for a ceasefire, say George Bush and Condoleeza Rice. First burn down the house and then we can discuss how to put out the flames. We are not just fighting Hizbullah, says Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, but Syria and Iran as well. Accept our vision of a Starbucked-MidEast; a Middle East with sanitized Muslims appointed by the corporate board of Ziocondriacs who break into hives at the words “Islam” and “Arab;” whose peace imposes fast food franchises; whose freedom is the right to purchase arms at the Great Mall of the Gulf States; whose riches are the oil w! ells mortgaged to Texas; and whose water resources run through the processing plants of the Ariel and Gush Etzion settlement blocs.

They tell you that a Jewish state is democratic but a Muslim state is evil; that Palestinians living in Palestine have no rights and no state but Jews living in the rest of the world can ‘return’ and live there as rights’-bearing citizens; that Jesus wants you in Palestine unless you are a Palestinian or a Muslim; that Washington, London and Tel Aviv can produce nuclear warheads but that Tehran is a global threat for daring to enrich uranium; that legitimate resistance is terrorism but state terrorism is “self-defense”; that the desert state of Syria is Nasrallah’s courier and puppeteer but that Washington is an honest broker and a partner for peace; that Iran is a rogue state for arming Hizbullah but that America is freedom-loving for arming Tel Aviv; that we cannot talk to Damascus or Tehran unless they ! renounce themselves out of existence first; that expansionism and regime change are necessary for American and Israeli national security but that the Arab and Muslim winners of free and fair democratic elections should be arrested in the middle of the night and imprisoned in secret police detention centers for attempting to rule.

They tell you that three soldiers captured by Hamas and Hizbullah are worth the collective destruction of Palestine and Lebanon but that civilians kidnapped by Israel are not worth the price of a printed page; that the tens of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and the hundreds of Afghanis, Pakistanis, Arabs and others at Guantanamo Bay are worth less than the abandoned pets of the residents of North Israel fleeing to the bomb shelters. They sing sanctimonious hymns to the glory of international law as they veto it into the oblivion of a million shell fragments.

Don’t count the blackened bodies of the peach farmers of Qaa laid out in the afternoon sun along the roadside. Don’t weep for the petrified, death-stolen children under the concrete rubble of Qana. Don’t suffer the incinerated of Marwaheen, the blasted of Srifa and Khiam and Tibnine. Don’t list the villages lost or the homes destroyed; don’t number the dead of Beirut and Tyre. Don’t listen to the wailing on the beaches of Gaza. Don’t mourn the lost lives of Khan Yunis or Beit Hanoun, people of the sand and the dust; of corrugated iron and uprooted orange groves. Don’t number the fallen in Nablus or Jenin: the old shepherds, the young rebels, the pregnant wives and weary husba! nds, the somber schoolgirls and the angry boys in the lost alleys of the camps. We will hear all of their voices again; see their likenesses in the shattered streets of the Levant. They will gather beneath the cedar and the minaret; carry with them the kuffiyeh and the Qur’an; they will speak the language of the resistance that we have breathed into them like fire.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre.

For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It has been doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state from emerging and will continue to do so as long as it can count on the complicity of its powerful friends and on abundant popular indifference. Under such circumstances, it is incumbent upon ourselves to ask why Hamas has therefore been ordered - by Israel and its same powerful friends --to accept "the two-state solution" especially when, unlike Israel, it has stated clearly and repeatedly that it would accept a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Indeed, all of its key spokespeople have said this:Zahar, Haniye, Meshal, and Yassin and Rantisi before they were murdered.

Judea and Samaria which are, or were, the northern and southern West Bank, have been subdivided and parceled out over decades to hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers for their houses and orchards and gardens. They have been crisscrossed and circled with Jewish-only roads that bind the land, the houses and orchards and gardens, to Israel. They have been manned with guards and gunmen and tanks and blue and white Israeli flags that defend, protect and assure the settlers, their houses and orchards and gardens, that they are in fact Israelis belonging to a single Jewish state.

The settled lands with their settler families, their houses and gardens, shops and schools, clubs and cafes and pools, have been mapped and assigned, seized and secured from the Arabs in the shabby clothes in the rundown! villages who live outside of, or have been forced to leave, the protected colonial zones. The projected frontiers, the future borders, depend on the disappearance of these Arabs, which is anxiously anticipated and actively encouraged. Most of the eastern perimeter of the current state is a concrete wall erasing from view that Other Side, which is unmentionable in polite company. The eastern perimeter wall will soon be the western perimeter wall because the acting Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has just announced that the rest of the unincorporated West Bank land will soon be annexed to Israel: The Jordan Valley, the West Bank's border with the state of Jordan, now to be Israel's eastern border with the state of Jordan, will also be secured by the wall and off-limits to "non-Israelis," meaning Palestinians, who will then be fully encircled in their stagnant reservations unable to access the outside world.

In the same breath as! he announces this latest unilateral declaration of confiscated lan d for a Jewish State, Olmert announces a sanctions regime against the Palestinians of the occupied territories for refusing to believe that this land transformation in which one society is strengthened and expanded and the other is dissolved into a thousand pieces is actually the two-state solution.

Israel allots to itself first use of the natural resources, especially water, from the territory it has appropriated or surrounded. An army of thieves and wreckers has turned the remainder-- the pot-holed roads, the untended groves, the homes, the schools, the mosques and churches, the hospitals, universities, shops and remaining civil institutions -- into a series of impassable mazes, a legal no-man's-land, where travel restrictions, permits, coded IDs, passes, random searches, incursions and arbitrary accusations reduce the inhabitants into suspicious beings without names, faces, addresses or rights; a collective villain to be de-educat! ed and de-nationalized and, one day perhaps, deported for the sake of the Israeli raison d'etre. It is becoming as difficult for travelers from abroad to visit the occupied territories as it is for the rightful inhabitants to move freely among them. It is therefore more difficult for outsiders to corroborate that the dangers they are warned against come directly from Israel, not the hapless people they have besieged. The daily threat to life and property is growing not abating.

For those who haven't noticed, there is no sign of this process coming to an end. Instead, in addition to the bizarre demand that Hamas accept the two-state solution that Israel has categorically rejected and each day renders even more geographically impossible, another two demands are added to it: Hamas must recognize Israel and it must renounce violence. In other words, it must recognize a state whose policies and whose leaders have worked tirelessly for decades to deny, undo, renounce, prevent and reject the existence both of Palestinians and of Palestine --not only in the present and future but also through erasing the past. Still, our media take it upon themselves to show the world a circus-mirror reality, grotesque in its distortions, in which a democratically elected government-without-a-state and its trampled, largely destitute people are made out to be holding hostage the hoodlums that are busy stomping them to death.

While they are being stomped, shot, beaten, demolished, assassinated, intimidated, robbed, despoiled, starved, uprooted, dispossessed, harassed, insulted and killed with bullets, missiles, armored bulldozers, tanks, helicopter gun-ships, cluster-bombs, fleshettes, fighter-bombers, semi-automatic submachine guns, sonic booms, tear gas, electrified fences, blockades, closures and walls, they must renounce violence so that the hoodlums won't get hurt. If they defend themselves they lose. If they complain, they are insincere; if they ask for something in return, they are untrustworthy; If they ask for a fair hearing, they are advancing an "agenda;" If they hit back randomly, they are an instrument of terro! r. So when the furies of the thousands of dead, tens of thousands of wounded and detained, and millions of bound and gagged rise up together in a whirlwind to protest, they will be pointed to as evidence of innate evil that must justifiably be contained, justifiably occupied, with justified indignation and bottomless financial aid.

Hamas' reward for coming to power just in time to provide all the aspiring Sharons the most perfect, served-up-on-a-silver-platter pretext for continuing their well-worn policies with a vengeance, has been for the Kadima party -- the party of the future-- to announce that it will put the Palestinians on a starvation diet for presuming to exercise their rights. Hamas' reward for verifying the smashing success of Israel's goal to destroy Fatah has been Israel's insistence that it abide by all the agreements, treaties and accords that Fatah, essentially the PA, signed but which Israel shredded page by p! age. With every new brick laid for the settlements, every new road pav ed to Ariel, Maale Adumim, Illit, Gush Etzion and beyond, with every permit denied for work, education, medical care and travel, every truck left waiting with rotting produce at Sufa and Karni, every tax and customs dollar stolen from a people interned on their own land, Israel parades its contempt for human decency and gets standing ovations in the US Congress and elsewhere.

When Osama Bin Laden opines that it is legitimate for al-Qaida to murder Americans because, as citizens in a democratic country, they are responsible for their government, "civilized" society erupts, appropriately, in indignation. When Dov Weisglass and his smug, sadistic associates advocate appalling varieties of collective punishment against Palestinians for having had the audacity to democratically replace the failed Fatah with Hamas, "civilized" society nods its head in sanctimonious approval.

For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solu! tion. It also opposes a one-state and a bi-national state, a federated secular state, and the zillion interim-state solutions that have been drawn up and debated and argued over the years. It opposes them because it opposes the presence of another people on land it has claimed as the exclusive patrimony of the Jews. This has to be the starting point for effective activism against the racist and hegemonic vision that Israel is implementing and the US guaranteeing, not faraway discussions on the most ideal solution. An effective opposition must not retreat into a slumbering or sidetracked lethal indifference.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a human rights activist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net