Reprinted with permission from http://www.spearheadvibrations.com/diary.html
American recording artist and activist Michael Franti recently traveled to the Middle East. In this diary excerpt, he describes conditions in East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) - Palestinian land that Israel has controlled by force since 1967.
Yesterday we traveled to the old city of Jerusalem. We saw the place where Jesus was marched wearing the cross and jailed. We saw the wailing wall where Jews write prayers and place them in the wall erected during the time of King Solomon. We saw the mosque of Al-Aqsa, a giant gold dome in the center of Jerusalem.
The startling thing for me was to see how many Israelis there had weapons. At the wailing wall there were hundreds of 19 and 20 year old young men with M-16s. There were Israeli tour guides carrying 9mm handguns, which they carried at the ready... fingers on triggers. No Palestinians carried weapons; they are not allowed to anywhere in the nation.
Israel is a militarily controlled apartheid state. Everywhere you travel there are checkpoints on the road. Some checkpoints are permanent military bunkers, others are called flying checkpoints: completely random spots where soldiers wave you over and you must stop. Old people who are tired must wait for hours. Students trying to get to school must wait for hours. Trucks loaded with fruit wait for hours only to be told that they must send for another truck to come from the other side of the checkpoint, then they must unload the fruit crates one by one and carry them across the checkpoint to the truck waiting on the other side.
There are two different license plates given in Israel. Jews are given one plate, Palestinians are given another. People with Jewish plates are waved through the checkpoints while those with Palestinian plates are pulled over, made to show their ID cards and wait. Sometimes they are detained and interrogated for hours, only to be told they cannot pass. 75 Palestinian women have had babies at checkpoints. Two-thirds of them have died.
Wait it gets better! There is now a wall being built across the country. Some of it will surround Palestinian villages and cities, effectively making them giant prisons with Israeli checkpoints that control who can go in and out and when they can do it. In rural areas the wall will be an electrified fence dividing vast quantities of land between towns; in other places it will be a 29 foot concrete wall--with gun towers every few hundred meters--designed to surround and divide Palestinian neighborhoods. To build the wall, soldiers simply enter a Palestinian home, tell its residents that they have ten minutes to leave, and then bulldoze it into rubble while the families stand screaming.
Wait it gets better! In addition to demolishing homes to build the wall, the Israeli state is destroying orchards that have been in the hands of Palestinians for generations. They are forcibly seizing the land and with it all the water of the most fertile regions. Palestinian families are forced by necessity to build water tanks on the roofs of their homes, so that in times of 24 hour curfew they can have water to drink. After having paid for the water, which costs four times the price for Palestinian families as it does for Israelis, soldiers shoot holes in the tanks for fun.
And here is the kicker. The apartheid wall being built stretches for over 470 kilometers and is being paid for by guess who? The good people of the United States of America! That’s right, US tax money is given to Israel to fund the apartheid wall, the checkpoints, the soldiers and their weapons.
What’s goin' on? It is time America wakes up. We are giving support to the apartheid tyranny in this beautiful nation in the same way we did to the Apartheid of South Africa.
Peace, Michael
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