The Shepherd's Granddaughter, a Young Adult novel about At-Tuwani?

I'm dying to check out The Shepherd's Granddaughter. Based on this interview, I'm betting the author spent some time in At-Tuwani. Any one of you been able to read it?

One simple thing that you can do:

Here's an action alert I just got. You know you want to participate.

Dear Friend,

Israel is about to be admitted to an exclusive economic club, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Despite the Government of Israel's failure to comply with OECD demands and standards, the organization announced in January 2010 that it will "complete" Israel's membership by 2010 (expected in May). However, the OECD needs consensus to admit a new member state into the organization, so it only takes ONE country's dissent to stop Israel from joining until it has met international human rights standards. The Israeli Government has yet to comply with the Goldstone Recommendations and until it does, admission to the OECD should be withheld.

We are gathering signatures to be delivered before the OECD Council meeting on May 11, 2010 and then more signatures before the Ministerial meeting on May 28-29.

Please sign the petition and
forward to your friends and colleagues.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) appeals to peoples and governments of OECD member states to defer Israel's OECD accession until it respects international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people and shows commitment to the fundamental values shared by OECD members. You can read more about the appeal here.

WHY SHOULD WE STOP ISRAEL?

1. Membership in the prestigious OECD club of nations will reward Israel for its war crimes and breaches of international law. Membership is expected to bring financial stability to Israel's economy, attract investment and reduce the country's risk premium, in direct contraction with the 2005 BDS call.
2. OECD admitted that Israel breached a key requirement of membership by including the settlements in its economic report. By accepting Israel, OECD will give the official approval to Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territories. "The OECD is treating Israel as though it has seven million citizens when, in reality, it has 11 million subjects, of whom four million are Palestinians living under occupation," said Israeli economist Shir Hever.
3. Only pluralistic democracies can be accepted as OECD members. Israel is an ethnocracy, with about 30 laws specifically privileging Jews over non-Jews who make up 20% of Israel's citizens. OECD will be violating it's own foundation principles in this way.

Pressure works! The European Union reversed a decision to upgrade relations with Israel last year following similar concerted action. Send this action alert to your contacts list. Be sure to look for photos here.

Keep up the pressure to lift the siege of Gaza,
GFM Team

Harvest in At-Tuwani, 2010: The Same Old Beauty

(I know it's been a while, but I'm back in Palestine! More to come over the next few days.)

Harvesting barley is a lot harder than harvesting olives. To harvest barley you have to bend over at the waist, pull up handfuls of dry stalks, and then beat the dirt off of the roots. I’m not embarrassed by my olive picking ability, but I harvest barley only slightly better than your average four-year-old Palestinian kid. After my first couple of hours harvesting barley with the A. family, my hands and arms were red with scratches, but I was smiling.

A couple of years ago, a teammate of mine described how tiring the spring harvest can be. “But it’s a holy sort of exhaustion,” I remember him saying. That’s certainly how I’ve been feeling lately. It’s a simply a joy to harvest barley and wheat with my neighbors. While we work, we laugh and share the latest village gossip. Sometimes, I get to listen to my neighbors sing. Harvesting is good work. I can’t help but feel whole and happy.

“Bring the camera over here,” my neighbor N. said. He pointed to a burned patch in the middle of the field. The patch was about two feet across and three feet long. “Did you hear what happened?” N. asked me. When I shook my head, N. explained. “The day before yesterday, in the morning, settlers set a fire here.” N. told me that F., another neighbor, had seen them. “When he started yelling, the settlers left. Here, “continued N. “Take my picture.” N. stood in the burned patch and posed. I took some video. Then it was time to start working again. When in another hour, the field was harvested and the burned patch ground was barely noticeable. With the farm work for the day done, N., his four year old son, and I walked home. “Come on, let’s run!” said the little boy. N. and I laughed.

“What an evil waste,” said a friend of mine when she heard what about the burnt wheat. We’re not the best people to ask, but one of my teammates estimates that settlers have destroyed 30 to 40 percent of this year’s crop, mainly by grazing their sheep in Palestinian fields. “It’s just plain theft,” remarked another of my teammates. “It’s more than that,” I quipped. “This is ethnic cleansing.”

Still, I can’t help but think about the sound of our laughter as the A. family and I picked barley together. I’m drawn back to the same contradiction I seem to always write about. The occupation is indeed an evil waste. Nevertheless, Palestinians are stronger than this attempt to drive them off of their land. The power joy and beauty – of life itself - remains undaunted.

Yeah, so, I've been pretty quiet lately. Things in my personal life have been really busy, but I'm hoping to make it back to Tuwani (there's a slow down with my passport at the moment) soon. You'll hear more from me then. Take care.

And that's the way it's done:

♫ "Suddenly a flock of Palestinian sheep made a non-violent dash for the razor wire to cheers and whoops from the protesters. In a slickly co-ordinated move, protesters lifted the roll of razor wire and the IOF soldiers watched powerless as the Palestinian sheep rushed past them chanting Baa. It is hoped that other sheep in the international community will now follow this brave lead.”

Hope this puts a smile on your face. It certainly put one on mine. Thanks to @USCampaign

Amira Hass covers the attack on the Raba'i family

If you've been keeping up here, you've read all about the day on which soldiers attacked the Raba'i family and torture Musab Raba'i for several hours. Amira Hass is now writing about the incident and her article is worth a read: Settlers' call sends Palestinian shepherd to IDF beating - Haaretz - Israel News

Here's the bit of it I love, describing the police integration of Musab's brothers following the incident:

They say the military policewoman asked them, "Which terror group do you belong to?" Juma answered: "I don't understand." She said: "To Hamas, to Fatah?"

And he replied: "No, I'm in a third group."

"Which?" she asked, her eyes lighting up.

"The group of the small farmers."

By the way, I'm home in the States right now, so this blog is going to be a little quiet for a while. Take care of yourselves.

Israeli Apartheid Week: Guess who's on the boycott list!

Guess. Really, guess. Come on.

You might be thinking boycotting Israeli apartheid doesn't have anything to do with you. After all, you're not going to be building a building a renting a CAT bulldozer (CAT manufactures bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes) and you don't have the money to buy your mom Ahava (which steals dead sea resources from Palestine). So think boycott doesn't have anything to do with you, right?

No, guess. Just guess who you could be boycotting right now.

How about Blockbuster? Yep, there are blockbusters in illegal Israeli settlements. You could make your movie night a night for justice just by boycotting Blockbuster. Pretty cool, right?

Or how about Ace hardware? Yeah, Ace makes money off of Israeli apartheid too. They're selling in settlements built on Palestinian land, so buy from somewhere else when you're building your new deck.

And then there's Motorola. Now there's a company who really deserve to be the target of our boycott. Motorola provides communication equipment to the Israeli military. Let's hang up on them.

So, congratulations. You - yes you! - can boycott Israeli apartheid. Join the campaign!

Israeli Apartheid Week: Take some Action!

Here's an idea for what you can do for Israeli Apartheid Week. I've stolen this shamelessly from a US campaign to End the Occupation staff member:

Write letters to the editor in response to this one: http://tinyurl.com/y9vx5a5

Here are resources for your letters: http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=2552

Just do it!

Israeli Apartheid Week 2010!

So my friends, it's Israeli Apartheid Week. Yep, you heard what I said. And here's my question for all of you - what will you be doing to mark it? Seriously, leave me a comment and let me now what you'll be doing this week to let people know about the crimes of apartheid that Israel is committing against Palestinians. Inspire me! The best answer will receive a fabulous prize. I'm not joking. :-)

Reading and Writing, Dignity and Resistance


“They said there are twenty-one kids,” said my teammate Jessica. Jessica and I were sitting on the top of Khourbah hill, waiting to finish what we call school patrol. She had finished speaking with our fellow CPTers in the village of At-Tuwani. They were waiting for the Palestinian school children to be dismissed from school and gather to to walk to their homes in the villages of Tuba and Maghaer al Abeed. Our teammates had called to let us know that the Israeli military had arrived to escort the school children past the Israeli settlement of Ma'on and Havat Ma'on settlement outpost and we could expect to see the children soon – all twenty-one of them.

“Twenty-one kids?” I asked, dumbfounded. “Where on earth did they come from?”

“They say that Mohammed* brought them,” Jessica replied. I shook my head disbelievingly, still a bit stunned. “Wow,” I said. Then we looked at each other and grinned.

That morning, my teammates and I had observed only five children arrive at school. A larger group of children had gathered at the appointed location and waited for the Israeli military to arrive to escort them to At-Tuwani. Every school day, these children walk between Ma'on settlement and Havat Ma'on settlement outpost and are regularly attacked by adult Israeli settlers. “Settlers sometimes catch us, hit us with rocks, and knock us down,” described one child. Because these attacks on the children have come to the attention of Israeli and international media, the Israeli military escorts the children and is supposed to ensure their safety. My teammates and I monitor the escort. Usually that means calling the military and asking, entreating, and cajoling them to escort the children in a timely fashion. All too often, the army refuses to respond and the children are left to face the setters on their own. It's a maddening situation.

This morning after my teammates made several calls to the military, the children were still waiting. It was 8:10. School had began and the children would be late. My teammates watched them walk from the appointed meeting place to the village of Tuba. Most of the children returned home, and a very small group started to walk through the hills unescorted. The path they took was very dangerous. Settlers frequently attack and harass the children when they walk this way, when the military fails to escort them. Thankfully, no settlers approached the children, but my teammates and I felt deflated. Only five kids, it seemed, would make it to school on this day.

But while we trudged back to the village of At-Tuwani, Mohammed, the father of some of the children, gathered the fourteen remaining kids together. Abandoning his own plans for the morning, Mohammed walked with them along through the hills along a safer path, out of sight of the settlement. It must have taken them over an hour to reach the At-Tuwani, but they did. Thanks to Mohammed, fourteen more children had the opportunity to learn that day.

The bravery and determination of the school children of Tuba and Magher Al Abeed and their parents always impresses me. But as I watched all twenty-one the kids make their way home that day, I realized just how highly these families value education. When these children go to school, they're learning more than reading, writing, and math. They are learning what they will have to do to live with dignity. They are learning the meaning of resistance.

*Name changed

Interview with Tamer of DAM on Democracy Now



I'll admit it, I'm being a lazy blogger. The truth is, the last couple of days have been overwhelming and I don't know what to say about them. But Tamer has some good comments, as per usual.

Um...here's that video without typos!



Yeah, thought it would be best just to be direct about that. Cheers!

When I told my mother what that our friend Musab was attacked by soldiers and then tortured for four hours, she started to cry. When she stopped, she asked me, “Is there someone where that he can go? To have a break and rest?”

“Mom,” I said, “He's Palestinian. Where could he go?”

Today, Musab was attacked again. Settler came out of the Havot Ma'on settlement outpost and threw rocks at him. They threatened him and tried to provoke him, to no avail. Attacks like these are terrifying. They're dangerous. And they happen so frequently that I can't summon up the energy to write a press release about it and even if I did, no journalist would care. The Israeli police certainly don't care. In the end it's a simple story. Musab is Palestinian. He has no where to go.

Video of the Attack on the Raba'i family



By this point, I feel like I've said everything that I can say about this attack. I edited this video as well and it was one of the more difficult things I've done here. So I'm going to stop writing. Just watch the video. :-)