From: abas@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Jasem Alhumoud)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: U.S. Aid To Israel?????
Date: 8 Apr 92 02:23:30 GMT
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Computing & Information Services


Subject: U.S. Aid To Israel?????
                

           Discovering the Victims of the U.S. Aid to Israel

                  " By Eleni Katsoulakis"


  When I was a little girl with a serious illness, my mother made a pledge
to Jesus that if I survived, I had to visit the Holy Land where He was born
and light a candle in the Church of the Nativity. So, to keep my mother's
sacred promise, I set out a few weeks ago to visit the path of Jesus and
feel His agony.

  Even before entering the Holy Land, I was startled by Israeli security.
At John F. Kennedy Airport in New York I was detained in a private room
and interrogated for four full hours! This was followed by a humiliating
body search, while 400 Jewish passengers went through relatively quickly.
All this was still on American soil.

  Israeli security precautions in New York seemed minuscule, however, in
comparison with the massive military and police presence on every street
corner in Tel Aviv. Perhaps I would have become accustomed to it if I had
not traveled to the West Bank.

  There, despite warnings from local Palestinians that, after 6 pm, no one
was safe outside except the Israeli army, I walked one evening to a Christian
church. Suddenly, a young Palestinian boy around 12 years old darted into the
empty street and started to spray paint an Arabic word on a wall. Later I was
told that the word he tried to write was "Palestine."

  He had not even finished one word, however, when armed Israeli soldiers
appeared. The boy started to run away from them, but other soldiers appeared
in front of him. Surrounded, he raised his hands in surrender, shaking
terribly with fear.

  As the soldiers shouted angrily at him, one of them came closer and then
said something loudly to the other soldiers. In the next moment, before I
could comprehend what was happening, the solider shot the boy in the face,
not once, but two or three times.

  The defenseless Palestinian boy fell on the street, bleeding heavily from
his face and screaming like a wounded animal. Several other soldiers then
started to beat him savagely with clubs and fists, taking turns, for a long
time, until the boy fainted. Then the soldiers pulled him to his feet, and
held him as they continued beating him with extraordinary rage and hatred.
When they let the unconscious boy fall again to the street, his tiny, bleeding
body lay there, motionless.

  Then a young solider noticed me for the first time. I was standing only
a few feet from the boy, but behind a building. I was too panic-stricken
to move, but the solider heard my uncontrollable sobbing. Pointing his
automatic weapon at me, he yelled furiously, in a language which I did
not understand. Then he pushed me violently against the wall. I was sure
that, since I had just witnessed a horrible crime, he would kill me in order
to seal my lips.

  "I am American, I speak English," I said desperately.

  "You are an American whore," he replied in an English accent made sinister
by his hatred. "Only prostitutes feel sorry for Palestinians!" When he didn't
shoot I fled, expecting a bullet in the back to bring me crashing down on
the street next to the bleeding boy.

  The next day, I heard that, in the hour that elapsed before an ambulance
arrived, the soldiers pulled the wounded boy by his feet around the streets
in order to terrorize the neighborhood. Torn between relief that I was alive
and guilt that I had not been able to save the boy, I decided to stop visiting
monasteries and churches. Instead I would go to the refugee camps of the
West Bank and Gaza to see with my own eyes the reality of this unholy
terror in the Holy Land. So the remainder of my visit was spent in the homes
of families from among the more than one million Palestinians living today
in the humiliating refugee camps of the Isreali-occupied territories.

  In open disregard of international Law, the Israeli authorities collect
heavy taxes from some 1,800,000 Palestinians living under military
occupation. These Palestinians, in turn, must seek but seldom get Israeli
permission to dig a well, plant an olive tree, sell fruit in the streets,
repair a roof, or build an addition to a home or business. The Israeli
government does not provide even such rudimentary services as garbage
collection in occupied areas, and restricts the sale or lease of land to
Palestinians while half of the West Bank and most of its water has been
confiscated by Housing Minister Ariel Sharon for the eventual use of
Jewish settlements!

  Every Palestinian I met had his own tragic tale to tell. A Christian
Palestinian shepherd told me that in 1988, early in the intifada, he
witnessed Israeli soldiers ordering three young Palestinian men to dig
their own graves, in a bare field a few kilometers outside of his village.
After a ruthless beating, the Palestinians were ordered to lie down in
the graves. Then a bulldozer buried them alive. As the soldiers left, the
shepherd, who had watched from a nearby hill, alerted nearby villagers
who rescued the buried Palestinians. Later, when Isreal's Shin Bet secret
police learned the identity of the shepherd who had organized the rescue,
they attacked him in the mountains and brutally broke his bones with stones!

  A priest who was teaching in a church sponsored school in the Old City
of Jerusalem described for me another incident that took place in 1973,
14 years before the outbreak of the intifada. A little Arab boy of six or
seven years wearing a green T-shirt and holding a tiny stone taunted some
Israeli soldiers on patrol in East Jerusalem. The soldiers went after him,
but the little boy disappeared in the side streets. The angry soldiers started
searching nearby homes and stores, and stormed into the school.

  In one classroom they saw a student wearing a green shirt. Although the
student was 11 years old and had nothing to do with the little boy in the
Old City, the soldiers grabbed the boy and smashed his head against the wall
several times. Another unit of soldiers arrived and systematically began
to beat the students in one classroom after another. Two hundred students
were beaten, and three were critically injured.

  When the priest tried to stop the frenzied soldiers, they seized him by his
hair and pushed him down the stairs. He was seriously injured and hospitalized
for more than a month. Later in the same day, the soldiers returned to the
school and ordered all the students to kneel on the floor. They were
terrorized for hours with guns pointed at their heads while the soldiers
photographed them

  Such experiences, the priest told me, explain why hundreds of Palestinian
children are suffering such post-traumatic pathological and mental problems
as haunting fears, anxiety, phopias, insmnia, frustration, insecurity,
prolonged depression, helplessness and aggressive antisocial behavior.

  An 84-year old West Bank villager showed me deeds to land he has occupied
for his entire life, and which he says has been in his family for more than
1,200 years. Now Israeli authorities have informed him that his property is
being confiscated for a Jewish settlement.

  I saw with my own eyes the bus stops at gas stations where desperate
Palestinians gather looking for work. Israeli businessmen hire them for
day labor at one-third of the wages paid to Jewish workers. When a job
is completed, some unscrupuous Israeli employers, instead of paying
pre-agreed wages, report to the police that these workers have been working
without permits, and have slept overnight on Israeli soil. As a result, the
Palestinians lose their wages and may be jailed and fined.

  I met a pretty little Palestinian girl, blinded by an Israeli plastic
bullet. Some years earlier, a Jewish settler had attacked her father with
a knife and gravely wounded him as he was returning from work. Israeli law
provides little protection from such attacks. Foe example, if a Jewish
settler kills a Palestinian, he may get less than six months in prison.
A Palestinian killing a Jew can expect a life sentence.

  These are just a few of the things I saw before returning to the United
States, my mother's pledge redeemed. But now I've made a vow of my own.
Paralyzed by fear, I failed to act when I might have saved a child.
I won't fail again, while there are so many more lives still to be saved.

  I ask, in God's name, is there any possibility that our government will
guarantee $10 billion in loans to Israel to enable it to steal more lands
from their owners, and destroy and Muslim, Christian or Jew who opposes
the building of the Jewish settlements our own government calls 
"obstacles to peace"? ten billion dollars from the taxes of decent Americans
to carry out a morally reprehensible program in violation of every single
human right and every tenet of my Christian beliefs?

  No, there is no such possibility, if I and the millions who share my
beliefs have the courage to express them openly and not turn our backs
on the oppression of our fellow human beings. There will be no more subsidies
from moral  American taxpayers for immoral Israeli purposes. That is my
pledge to my God.

  "Eleni Katsoulakis, a journalist in her native Greece, is a free-lance
   writer presently living in New Jersey."


                  Jasem (Dr. J.)

        
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