By Louis Pasek, Special to JTNews
The talk, called “Reporting Back From Palestine,” occurred June 25 at a small gathering place near Seattle Center. Approximately 25 attendees, mostly between the ages of 30 and 55, sat in a small conference room. Various literature had been set out, including a series of maps depicting Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in different demarcations and boundaries along the Green Line, before and after various wars and peace agreements.
The speakers’ purpose was to promote the International Solidarity Movement, which calls itself “a Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian and international activists.” The group names Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King, Jr. as role models in what it calls a peace-making campaign to “raise awareness of the struggle for Palestinian freedom and an end to Israeli occupation.”
The ISM Web site reports that the group employs “nonviolent, direct-action methods of resistance to confront and challenge illegal Israeli occupation forces and policies.” Volunteers travel to the territories, where they protest home demolitions and escort children to school.
However, both British and American sources had suggested the ISM helped smuggle the suicide bombers who killed several people at a Tel Aviv bar in April into Israel. In addition, Charlotte Kates, the leader of ISM’s Rutgers University chapter, was quoted in July in the New York Post as saying she “[supports] Palestinian resistance in all its forms, from armed struggle to mass protest.”
Until March 16, when Evergreen State College student Rachel Corrie was struck by an Israeli bulldozer and later died, the two-year-old ISM had been largely unknown to the mainstream population. The disputed circumstances surrounding Corrie’s death, however, changed that in an instant.
So what is the ISM, and what is its mission?
Volunteer Carla Curio, who spoke at the June meeting, spent three weeks in the Gaza Strip, in the city of Rafah, from December 2002 to January 2003. Raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, Curio felt a certain calling to Israel, saying she grew up fantasizing about traveling to the Holy Land.
She also said she has had a lifelong interest in social justice. As a 50-year-old graduate student in psychology at Antioch College, she is especially concerned about the welfare of Palestinian children in the territories.
At the meeting, Curio called the Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza strip an “occupation…total and complete.” She reported statistics like 85 percent of Palestinians killed in the intifada met their fates in “non-combat situations.” She did not distinguish between Palestinians killed by Israelis,by other Palestinians, or during so-called work accidents — explosives that detonated prematurely, killing the bomb makers.
Curio also noted that while the opinions of ISM volunteers are uniformly stacked against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, they diverge widely beyond that point.
“There are some people — I even talked to some very radical Palestinians,” she said, “who believe that eventually there would be a one-state solution.”
ISM volunteer Sooze Bloom de Leon Grossman did not attend the June meeting because she feels the ISM fails to fully examine and convey the complexities of the conflict.
“People like simple views,” she said, but added that her condemnation extends to all sides of the argument.
Grossman, who is Jewish, said she has been an activist for social justice her entire adult life. As a teacher with the Kadima organization for the past 10 years, she said she has become more invested in the Jewish community and in her love for Judaism.
That investment has made her very concerned about Israeli Jews’ treatment of Palestinians.
“The occupation corrupts Judaism,” said Grossman, who visited Israel and the territories in August 2002 Among her reasons for going, Grossman wanted to see Palestinians’ olive trees being bulldozed. “It’s so clear in the Torah that you don’t cut down trees, even in times of war,” she said.
Grossman spent a week touring in Israel and a week working with the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic unit. In the West Bank, Grossman accompanied paramedics as they picked people up to take them to hospitals.
Grossman called the many checkpoints the ambulances had to pass through ineffective, with endless delays.
However, the treatment the ambulances received at these checkpoints varied widely.
“It’s not a monolith,” Grossman said, referring to the Israeli army. “Some of them will just tell you right out that they’re really sorry, that they think it’s stupid and that they don’t want to be there. And then other soldiers will be, like, very argumentative and very angry.”
Grossman also said she did not see the Israeli Defense Forces as inherently bad.
“It seemed like an awful lot of soldiers on the checkpoints were not representative of Israelis as a whole.”
Grossman knows this conflict is extremely complex, and said it is no less so for Jews who volunteer with the ISM.
“It was deeply complicated and painful, because for a lot of people it is black and white,” she said. “In me is still that little girl who wanted to go live on a kibbutz.”
Before ISM volunteers can work in the field, they must first spend time training. ISM leaders are Palestinian, and they provide the instruction.
“Because we [stayed] in Palestinian homes,” Curio said, “they [trained] us in their culture.”
That also included what Curio called the values of the ISM and how to communicate non-confrontationally with IDF soldiers via role-playing. Volunteers do not receive a contextual history of the conflict, however.
Curio personally wanted to protect Palestinian homes from being demolished. During her time in Rafah, she said “tanks [would] go up and down this security zone, and they [would] just stop and fire on neighborhoods.”
Curio called IDF actions in Rafah unwarranted, because she never heard fire coming from the Palestinian side. Curio did not believe the IDF was searching for smuggling routes between Egypt and Gaza. When asked about these tunnels, she said, “I didn’t see any myself.”
Curio also said the Israeli army targets Palestinians deliberately. “They just sit up in those towers [around Rafah]…there were days where they just started picking off people,” she said. She said afterward, however, that she did not witness this event herself.
So is the IDF the bad guy? According to Curio, “It kind of looks like that, doesn’t it? From my perspective it looks like they have orders to terrorize the Palestinian population.”
At the June 25 meeting in Seattle, keynote speaker Mike Johnson — who according to the Seattle Times had been arrested and detained by the Israeli army in May — spent the majority of his address speaking against Israel’s policies and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Toward the end of his talk, Johnson compared the security wall being built along the Green Line to the fences around the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nobody attending refuted his comments. Curio, for her part, compared what she saw in Rafah to the Warsaw ghetto.
On July 28, another Evergreen student was shot while protesting at the Green Line wall. Sam Tsohonis, 26, of Wenatchee was injured in the leg by rubber ammunition and released from the hospital several hours later. Of the reported 200–300 protestors, five sustained injuries. According to the movement’s Web site, they were all ISM volunteers.