<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Signposting the occupation]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p class="headline_meta">by <span class="author vcard"><span class="url fn">Eleanor K</span></span> on <abbr class="published" title="2011-01-03">January 3, 2011</abbr> <span> </span></p>
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<p><img src="https://i1.wp.com/mondoweiss.net/images/2011/01/elly.jpg" alt="elly" width="511" height="288" /><em>My senses let me down</em>.</p>
<p>On Friday 31 December – the day Jawaher Abu Rahmah was murdered by  the Israeli army – I thought I smelt manure in the village of Bil’in,  but it was the skunk truck (The Boesh), used by the Israeli military to  crush peaceful protest. Back in 1994 I thought I lived in one nation  called Israel, with an Arab minority – no one had told me about the  military occupation and I failed to see it. That year I witnessed one  minor and one major event: on a Saturday morning near the Damascus Gate  (Bab al-Amoud) in East Jerusalem, a jeep brakes abruptly as a young Arab  man jumps out of the back; two soldiers give chase, hit him with a  blunt weapon and drag him back into the vehicle, which then drives on. I  watched it happen and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know what it  meant. On 25 February that year, newspaper vendors near and within the  Old City thrust images of a massacre into my face; I learn that a Jewish  settler and medical doctor Baruch Goldstein has entered the Ibrahim  mosque in Hebron and opened fire on worshippers before being beaten to  death. I looked at the gruesome photos and winced, feeling sorry for the  Arabs, but I still didn’t understand. What I could not see with my own  eyes did not occur to me at 18 years old: that I was witnessing a brutal  occupation of an indigenous people called the Palestinians.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was entirely alien to me, and  ‘occupation’ was only familiar to me from history lessons on the Nazi  occupation of France. The family I worked for in Tel Aviv certainly did  not tell me. Instead, they only warned me each weekend to be careful in  Jerusalem because &#8220;it is full of Arabs&#8221; and “they are like animals”. As  the child of British liberal, middle class parents, I dismissed this as  the vulgar racism and populist sentiment of the barely educated lower  middle-class.</p>
<p>The year 2010/11: “Look over here, I want to show you, can you see  the settlement of Har Gilo, can you see the Israeli-only road and  tunnel; can you see the new construction of the wall just below?” M.  always insists on pointing out all the signs of the occupation during  our walks through Beit Jala, and sometimes I think it’s unnecessary, yet  I have missed so many signs before. Last week during my bespoke tour of  West Jerusalem, O. asked me if I had seen The Russian Compound leased  by the Israeli state, also used as a detention and GSS interrogation  centre holding many Palestinian political detainees. I had walked past,  around it, perhaps sensed the rings of barbed wire in the periphery of  my vision, but I had not been told its purpose, so no, I had not really  seen it. T, a Jewish Israeli activist now in her 60s who was born in Tel  Aviv, tells me she used to walk to school with a group of friends  through a ruined Palestinian village and not ask who had lived there  before. Present-day Tel Aviv has been cleansed of almost all obvious  signs of Palestinian presence and dispossession except for the  omnipresent young Israelis in military fatigues who serve the occupation  but whose olive green uniform signals to most of the public, simply –  and absurdly – benign, patriotic duty. Traveling to Bil’in from Tel  Aviv, or leaving al-Quds to visit surrounding areas I see other signs –  ordinary road signs in Hebrew, transliterated into English and Arabic.  They are signposting war crimes: the illegal settlements beyond the 1949  armistice ‘Green’ line that proliferate, indeed flourish. What kind of  criminal signposts his or her own crime? Where a hand-made sign or a  placard would have little legitimacy in the eyes of a public distrustful  of amateurishness and the absence of recognizable branding, mass  produced government ministry signs with the purported mandate of  informing the public give comfort to the Israeli and foreign driver and  pedestrian.</p>
<p>Today, as I write this, the signs of occupation are too clear to me; I  want to go to al-Quds for the afternoon but I would have to take a bus  through a military checkpoint and I need a day without seeing an Israeli  military uniform and without witnessing further outrages to human  dignity: outrages and war crimes that are perpetrated so casually and  defended so unthinkingly by a coalition of the willfully ignorant and  defiantly racist. At the Tel Aviv protest against the murder of Jawaher  on Saturday, I hold up a borrowed sign: ‘Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, killed  by Israel’, a driver shouts back: ‘She shouldn’t have been  demonstrating’.</p>
<p>We need to be educated before we can read the signs of Israeli  occupation. I fantasize about how an illegal settlement might be  signposted if the Israeli state were not the driving force behind the  settlement of Palestinian land – a war crime under International  humanitarian law. Perhaps it would be black spray on cardboard and it  would read: ‘Come and live here – it belongs to us, not the Arabs. Tell  your friends too. We have called it ‘Holy Mount of Ancient Something  Beautiful’ “. Visually suspect as well as recognizably criminal.</p>
<p><a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2011/01/signposting-the-occupation.html">Signposting the occupation</a>.</p>
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