Fwd: Walk the greenline - May 28-30, 2009 - sign up now!
Aimee Mayer
From: Gershon Baskin <Ger...@ipcri.org>
Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Subject: Walk the greenline - May 28-30, 2009 - sign up now!
To: IPCRI-Ne...@googlegroups.com
The Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information
Walk the Green Line 2009
May 28-30, 2009
Now is the time to sign up and make you plans!
Everyone is welcome
Photo courtesy of Alban Biaussat
The Green line is the basis for negotiating the Two States for Two peoples solution.
Come and witness first hand. See the separation barrier and its route. Meet Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. Learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace process by sharing in this active learning experience.
Your participation supports the work of IPCRI!
Walk. Learn. Add your voice to those calling for peace.
Two Ways You Can Help!
1. Walk With Us
Join us for three days of hiking along the green line (about 3-4 hours of walking each day) . We will be walking important sections of the line,
visiting Palestinian and Israeli areas, meeting with politicians from both sides, NGOs and those working for peace.
The event is also a fundraiser, with all donations helping support the work of IPCRI.
2. Sponsor a Walker
Consider sponsoring someone to walk in your stead. Your donation to IPCRI will help
provide an opportunity for others to be involved in this important event. Find someone to sponsor, or let us connect you!
If you are interested in joining in – write to"
Gershon:
Read what past participants have to say about "Walk the Green Line"
Dr. David Rush (Boston)
Monday, June 9, 2008
Walk the Green Line
At the end of May I joined a tour of border communities on
either side of the Green Line, which divides Israel
from the West Bank. From 1948 to 1967, the
West Bank belonged to Jordan,
with a different economy, road system and water infrastructure from Israel. Since
1967, however, all these things have become loosely integrated with Israel as Jewish settlements spread out and as
the Palestinians became one of Israel's
biggest markets.
The tour, Walk the Green Line, was
run by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, or IPCRI, a joint Israeli-Palestinian think tank. I
jumped at the rare chance to go to places like Bethlehem
and East Jerusalem. I was also eager to meet Gershon Baskin, one of IPCRI's two
co-directors.
Baskin grew up in the States, came to Israel for ten months after high school,
and then lived for two years in the Palestinian-Israeli village of Kfar Qara,
in Israel's North. His life at IPCRI began in 1987, when the first
Intifada erupted. He placed ads in the three major Arabic dailies that he was
looking for someone to talk to about peace, leaving his home phone number. The
calls turned into meetings, and eventually he found enough people to create
IPCRI, which drafts policy recommendations for resolving the conflict.
Baskin speaks fluent Hebrew and Arabic and since he moved to Israel in the
late 1970s, has positioned himself as an expert and a lynchpin of contacts
between Israeli and Palestinian civil society. He mingles with Palestinian
philosophers in Al-Quds University as easily as he chews the fat with
American tourists on their first trip to Israel, or with IDF soldiers.
He's also often quoted in news stories.
We were a group of about 15 tourists, mostly American Jews with a few
exceptions – a Swedish guy, an American pastor, and two American students
in Israel
for studies or an internship. Although the tour was called Walk the Green Line,
it could just have easily been titled Meet Local Peace Activists or The
Palestinians Don't All Bite. I got there for the second of three days; in
the first, the tour visited an Israeli kibbutz, spoke with the mayor of the
regional council in Israel's
North, and saw Nazareth.
Watching Baskin narrate an itinerary that wove back and forth across the Green
Line was a treat. He knows every village and settlement, as well as how much land
was lost and how many families moved in. As we drove from point to point,
Baskin and his guide, Uri, were quick to point out where the Green Line lies,
where the separation wall/fence runs, and which roads are for Jews only.
The trip was a metaphor for Baskin himself, who is trying to re-establish Israel's
border even as it gets more blurry by the year. When he went house shopping in Jerusalem, he was careful to only consider living in
Jewish neighborhoods that fell in the 1967 city borders, and to avoid the ones
that cropped up in and around Palestinian East Jerusalem. He boycotts anything coming out of
the settlements, including ultra-cheap olive oil and Mei Eden water from the Golan Heights. Yet Baskin, who served in the Israeli army
and did reserves, considers himself an ardent Zionist. For him, creating a
peaceful Palestinian state is the only sensible option for Jews who want to
feel safe in Israel.
Some of the highlights of the trip:
The West Bank village
of Umm Rehann has begun
processing its sewage with the help of an Israeli hydrologist and foreign aid.
Small-scale sewage treatment in the West Bank
is a win-win. Without treatment, Palestinian towns have raw sewage running in
the streets and streams, and the polluted water percolates into the groundwater
that Israelis drink and runs into streams that cross the border.
We visited the town(s) of Barta'a, which the Green Line bisected in 1948. When Israel conquered the West
Bank in 1967, the two halves were loosely reunited, but with wide
discrepancies between the Israeli and Palestinian sides. For now, residents on
either side can mix and go to school out, but no one knows what will happen in
a peace agreement. Here's the mayor of the Israeli side, Riyad Kabaa.
We went to Bil'in, which each Friday becomes the site of non-violent
protests against the path of the security barrier, which has sliced off part of
the village's farmland. (more about the protest here).
When we got there, the fence to the farmland was closed, and we wound up
standing on one side having a surreal chat with the soldiers who were keeping
us out on the other.
On
our way out, our bus ran into a roadblock that was the cause of many jokes
about having the "real" West Bank
experience.
Another stop was Wadi Fuqin, a Palestinian village sandwiched between the
settlement of Beitar Illit and the Israeli town of Tzur Hadassah. We spoke to a village teacher
there, who said that Wadi Fuqin residents are torn between wanting to put up
hothouses to increase their crop yields, or to stick with traditional
agriculture for its touristic value. He said the unstable political situation
makes the hothouses look like the better bet. Baskin pointed out the stench of
Beitar Illit's sewage, which overflows the settlement's treatment
system on Fridays and runs into Wadi Fuqin.Here's a section of the
farming area, with the high-rises of Beitar Illit on the hilltop.
We also visited Al-Quds University, a campus of 10,000 students in East Jerusalem. This included a stop at the
school's Israeli studies department, where students write theses on
topics like the Holocaust in Jewish collective memory. Outside the American
Studies department was a wall of relics, like this Jane Fonda advertisement.
Another stop at the university was the Abu Jihad
Center for Political Prisoners' Affairs, a space covered in letters from
Palestinian prisoners, memorabilia from their time in prison, and a wall of
those who died behind bars. At the end of our tour of the museum, Baskin
confronted the museum director. "I visited museums in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki,
where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and half the museums were
devoted to peace. There's not one word of hope in this museum.
Why?" The director didn't really have an answer, and it was an
interesting argument to watch. Here are "capsules" –
they're notes prisoners transported by coating them in some sort of
plastic and swallowing them.
Along the trip, we often encountered the security barrier in its concrete wall
format – grey slabs that stretch high around Palestinian urban centers
and have become canvases for graffiti artists.
Gershon Baskin.
The food on the trip was excellent, including a massive tray of kenafe –
a cheese pastry topped with sweet thin filo noodles.
We also saw a lot of traditional village scenes – boys on horseback, women
carrying trays of olives on their heads, fresh chickpeas sold by the branch,
and a flock of goats the same shade as the hillside rocks.
There is a certain purity in the West Bank
village lifestyle – the buildings are low, the streets are about the
width of a bus, and the undeveloped hills roll out into the distance.
Posted by EllaDan at 2:54
PM 
Jethro Eisenstein
Dear Friends:
Leo and I have just returned from Israel and Palestine
and we want
to report to you while everything is fresh in our minds. The experience
was
so rich and so gripping that we despair of being able to distill it for you
in this report. Perhaps the best way to convey the spirit is to start by
telling you about some people we met at the end of our trip.
We want to tell you about Bassam Aramin, a
Palestinian man in his
40's who spent seven years in an Israeli jail. In 2005, he helped to
found
an organization called Combatants for Peace. This organization is
composed
of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have agreed to
struggle together for a peaceful solution to the conflict in Israel and
Palestine.
As Bassam said to us, "we have been fighting each other for 60
years, but Israel is not
safe and Palestine
is not free." The members of
Combatants for Peace have not given up their struggle but have agreed to use
only non-violent means to achieve their goals.
In January 2007, Bassam's 10 year old
daughter Abir was struck and
killed on her way home from school by a rubber bullet fired by a member of
the Israeli Border Police. Bassam continues to work for peace in Israel and
Palestine.
He said about his daughter, "I want justice, not revenge." Leo
adds this comment: I am still so emotionally touched by meeting Bassam that
I can't bear not to include something about how deeply exhausted he looked,
how tired his eyes were, how in awe I was of his bravery.
We want to tell you about Yehudit Elkana, an
Israeli woman in her
60's. In February 2001, Yehudit helped found Machsom Watch, an
organization
of women who go every day to each West Bank
checkpoint to observe the
interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, to report abuses and
to intervene in emergencies. Yehudit also helped found an organization
called Yesh Din (There is Law) which monitors the response of Israeli law
enforcement to attacks on Palestinians by soldiers, police and settlers.
Yesh Din is supporting Bassam in his quest to bring to justice the member of
the border police who killed his daughter.
We met Bassam and Yehudit at the end of the
last day of walking
the green line. We also met with representatives of the wounded from both
sides, who have joined together to work for peace. These people seemed so
courageous to us both, and the experience of meeting with them at the end of
the walk was overwhelming.
Here, in summary form, are some of the
things we learned on the
walk. The green line, so-called because it was marked on a map in green
ink, simply marks where the combatants happened to be when the shooting
stopped in 1949. The line splits villages and families. There is no
natural border between the West Bank and Israel, and a cold peace such as
exists between Israel and Egypt will not
work because the two sides are too
intertwined.
The green line itself is some 300 kilometers
long. The separation
barrier that Israel has
planned between itself and the West Bank will
be
more than 700 kilometers long. The additional length is the result of
gerrymandering; instead of building the barrier along the green line, Israel
built it around, and incorporated into Israel, all of the settlements that
have been established in the West Bank, with
generous margins around them
that are described as "security zones."
The International Court in the Hague declared this appropriation
of additional land a violation of International Law, and the route of the
separation barrier has been modified in particularly egregious locations.
But the governing principle of Israeli government action is quick to grab,
slow to give back. For example, the Israeli government built the barrier
at
a Palestinian village called Bili'in in a location that separated the
village from hundreds of acres of its arable land. When the placement of
the barrier was challenged in Court, the government claimed the placement
was necessary for security, but lawyers for the village were able to prove
that the placement of the barrier was for the benefit of an adjacent
ultra-Orthodox settlement, Modi'in Ilit, that wanted land for expansion.
The Israeli High Court declared this expropriation illegal, but there is
"no
money in the budget" to take down the illegal fence and put it where it
belongs, so it stays.
There is no question that the separation
barrier was intended to
address security concerns. Gershon Baskin,
the co-head of IPCRI and our
guide, told us that there were several years when he would not allow his
children to ride on buses because of the risk of suicide bombings. The
separation barrier has made it more difficult for a bomber to get into
Israel, and since its
construction the number of attacks inside Israel has
gone down significantly. But the barrier as built and implemented has
many
pernicious effects. As noted above, its placement constitutes a land grab
by Israel
for the benefit of the settlements. The barriers separate
Palestinian farmers from their land and jobs. It separates families and
friends. It makes trips that should take minutes require hours to
complete.
After visiting the village
of Bili'in in the West
Bank, we headed
back on tiny roads to a four-lane highway to Jerusalem, which can only be
used by vehicles with Israeli license plates. We found access to the
highway blocked by huge concrete cubes. If we had been able to get on to
this highway, we were 10 minutes away from our destination. Instead, we
had
to make a u-turn and travel 90 minutes along the one-laned roads through the
occupied territories. This was a tiny taste of what Palestinians
experience
every day.
The separation wall blocks contact between
Israelis and
Palestinians, which is already abysmally low. In some ways that is the
most
disheartening effect. Less than 5% of Israelis and Palestinians have had
personal contact with each other. Contacts between Israelis and
Palestinians are becoming less frequent as a result of the restrictions on
movement caused by the separation barrier. By contrast, when a peace
agreement was reached in Northern
Ireland, more than 60% of Protestants and
Catholics had had personal contact with the other group.
The restrictions on contacts between
Israelis and Palestinians are
felt at every level of the two societies. We visited the nanotechnology
lab
at Al Quds University in the West Bank,
directed by Dr. Mukhles Sowwan, the
head of the university's Materials Engineering Department. Dr. Sowwan,
who
was born in Jerusalem, got his doctorate at the Hebrew University.
Because
he has an Israeli ID, he can attend conferences in Israel, but his graduate
students, men and women, cannot. It is easier for Dr. Sowwan to arrange
for
his graduate students to study in Holland than
in Jerusalem,
minutes from
their homes. Similarly, thousands of Palestinians who used to work in
Israel
no longer can.
IPCRI, the organization you have supported,
is engaged in
promoting contact between Israelis and Palestinians at every imaginable
level. Gershon Baskin, the
Israeli CEO of IPCRI, literally embodies this
effort. Gershon came to Israel
after graduating from NYU in the mid 1970s,
and spent two years living in a Palestinian village. He then went to work
on a Kibbutz, where the Palestinians were uniformly referred to as
"them".
When the residents of the Kibbutz learned that Gershon had lived with the
Palestinians, they could not stop asking him questions: what did you talk to
them about? What do they eat? What are their families like?
The estrangement between the two groups
living in the same land
was total, and no one was doing anything about it. As a frame of reference,
Gershon told us that in the late 1970's, the County of Los Angeles
itself
had over 160 employees working in intergroup relations, but the State of
Israel
had none. Gershon launched himself into a relentless effort to
change this, first through work in the Israeli Government and then as
co-founder of IPCRI. In 1988, after the PLO shifted its position on the
State of Israel,
Gershon rode his Vespa into a Palestinian refugee camp in
the West Bank and started a dialogue that he
has continued to foster ever
since.
At every stop on both sides of the separation barrier, local government
officials, village heads and people from NGOs took time out to meet with us
and answer questions. Hanna Siniora,
the Palestinian CEO of IPCRI is a
commanding figure in Palestinian politics. Gershon
Baskin is a relentless
optimist, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, who seems to know everyone in Israel
and Palestine.
Through them, IPCRI works effectively in the two
communities.
Here are a few examples of IPCRI's current
work to bridge the
divide. We saw a sewage treatment project in a Palestinian village,
designed by an Israeli water engineer, that IPCRI sponsored and pushed
through against Israeli government resistance. There is a conference
going
on right now that brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have been
wounded in the conflict. Gershon is a trusted intermediary between Egypt,
Israel
and representatives of Hamas in the halting, indirect negotiations
towards a ceasefire in Gaza.
The trip we took was the best possible
education for anyone
interested in understanding the conflict from both sides. We learned that
there are steadfast, engaged people working for peace in Israel and in
Palestine.
It is terribly important to support them, because the conflict
is a festering sore at the center of a volatile region. If you are
interested in learning more about the conflict (and hiking through beautiful
country into the bargain), we can't think of a better way to visit Israel.
Even if we cannot persuade you to walk the green line next year, we hope you
will continue to support IPCRI as it works for peace and justice in Israel
and Palestine.
Thank you so much for supporting IPCRI.
Leo and Jethro Eisenstein
Jethro Eisenstein
Profeta & Eisenstein
14 Wall Street
New York, NY 10005-2101
Statement by David Rush, MD (Professor of Nutrition, Community Health, and Pediatrics (emeritus), Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts), about participation in Walk the Green Line, 29-31 May, 2008.
For me this was the most illuminating immersion into the Israel- Palestine conflict that I have ever experienced. Indeed, I cannot conceive of any one being involved as a peacemaker functioning truly effectively without this or some comparable (try to find one!) experience. Unlike other study tours, we did not just meet "leaders": we met and talked with scholars and students, war veterans, young and old peace activists, villagers, politicians; in other words a broad spectrum of Israeli Jews, and Palestinian and Israeli Arabs, all of whom were deeply committed to a non-violent solution to the conflict. For me, this experience destroyed forever the myth that there are no people committed to peace on "the other side". And walking allowed us to experience such a strong sense of place in this beautiful and ghost-filled land (and all too trash-filled as well).
If you are serious about working for peace in Israel/ Palestine, be thankful to be able to "walk the green line". You may be changed forever.
--
(please use david...@tufts.edu)
SCENES FROM WALK THE GREEN LINE
Gershon Baskin, Ph.D. and Hanna Sinoira
Co-CEOs, IPCRI
Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information
P.O. Box 9321, Jerusalem 91092
Tel: +972-2-676-9460 Fax: +972-2-676-8011
Cellphone: +972-(0)52-238-1715