magazine - Somerville College - University of Oxford

16 | Somerville Magzine
Powers of Observation
SUSAN LOURENÇO
(Loewenthal,
1954, History)
Humiliation and
harrassment
at the hands of
conscript soliders
the age of our
grandsons.
Sunset at A Ras
seen through razor wire
An Israeli citizen describes her
involvement in an extraordinary
group of women who are upholding
the human rights of Palestinians –
simply by watching.
Throughout my career as a university
administrator, I had little time or inclination to
volunteer for anything unconnected with my work,
much of which dealt with social justice and outreach to
Chicago’s African American and Hispanic minorities.
My passion for equity and justice led me to continue
the struggle for human dignity when I moved to Israel.
I agreed, when approached by an Israeli NGO ‘A New
Way’, to serve as their chair in bringing together Jewish
and Palestinian-Israeli children in Jaffa where I live. And
a member of A New Way took me the next step – to
MachsomWatch.
In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank
and Gaza. Years went by, but voices raised in Israel and
abroad against Israel’s occupation went unheeded. Jewish
settlements grew like mushrooms, while international laws
on the occupier’s obligations were ignored. The results
were two Palestinian Intifadas – popular uprisings, the
second of which began in autumn 2000. Early in 2001,
a group of Israeli women began to check rumours
circulating in Jerusalem about violation of human rights
at newly created checkpoints around the city. They drove
out to these checkpoints (machsomim), stood there,
monitored and reported what they saw.
Today, from these unassuming beginnings, 250 to
300 Israeli women observe and report, day in day out
throughout the year, in words and pictures, protesting
the checkpoints, mounds and ditches that hamper daily
life across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). We
document conduct of the Israel Defense Forces soldiers,
Border Police and Israel Police (and violence-prone
settlers), protect the human rights of Palestinians and
assist them wherever possible.
I joined MachsomWatch five and a half years ago, after
becoming an Israeli citizen. Though I had worked for civil
rights in the US, I had never been involved in a conflict
arena, or engaged in human rights – certainly not one as
basic as freedom of movement.
MachsomWatch is entirely volunteer-run, a grass roots
organisation, no membership fees, no formal hierarchy.
Women drive deep into the West Bank, around Jenin
in the north, Hebron in the south, the cities of Qalqilya,
Tulkarm and Nablus in the centre and around Jerusalem:
a minimum two women to a shift, morning and afternoon,
and before dawn to monitor the newly privatised access
‘terminals’ to Israel proper, where thousands of Palestinian
men and women lucky enough to get work permits line up
at 3 am hoping to reach their jobs in Israel.
A report written after each shift, in English or Hebrew,
translated by volunteers into the other language, is posted
on www.machsomwatch.org. We have no office, just an
official address. When MachsomWatch became a legal
‘charity’, just about when I joined, I offered to write funding
proposals and liaise with embassies and foundations.
When not driving to checkpoints and writing reports, I’m
busy seeking funds to carry on (we spend over £90,000
a year on transportation alone: some women won’t drive
in the OPT, so a Palestinian Israeli driver ferries them). I
drive about 130 miles a shift, once a week, in summer
heat and winter rain, frequently with visitors – mostly
from abroad – who invariably find it hard to digest what
they see: thousands of lives disrupted by humiliation and
harassment at the hands of conscript soldiers the age
of our grandsons, withholding of permits (to work, trade,
study, get medical treatment or attend family celebrations)
– with a sickening callousness. A Palestinian friend, owner
of a ‘seam line’ plant nursery between the 1949 armistice
Green Line and the newly built Separation Wall (a land
grab rather than a security need) told me recently that
a young soldier made his 77-year-old father take off his
shoes and walk barefoot through a muddy checkpoint.
Over the years, we’ve done what we can on behalf
of our Palestinian friends, people met on our forays,
at the checkpoints or along the way. We tried to prevent
the cutting down of olive trees to build a ‘security’ road
around a settlement; we’ve picked olives with a family,
joined in happy events like weddings or the birth of a baby,
made endless phone calls to the army and its so-called
‘humanitarian centre’, often to no avail, but with occasional
success in our attempts to ease life under occupation.
The Palestinian landscape is dotted with roadblocks,
apartheid roads, Separation Wall, military lookout towers,
razor wire and ‘rolling’ checkpoints – a military jeep or
Hummer suddenly across the middle of a road. The
occupation is often mindless in its unpredictability.
Checkpoints and barricades are put up, taken down;
checkpoints are manned one day, unmanned the next.
Added to this, the occupation’s bureaucracy has created
a system, connected to ‘security’, overseen by the secret
service which ‘blacklists’ people trying to get permits to
work in Israel, to visit an ailing relative, to go to a hospital
in another West Bank city, etc., who refuse to become
informers. No wonder Palestinian society is disintegrating;
no wonder the Palestinians are dependent on the
subjugator: there is little work within the West Bank itself.
In brief, much of what we see, and report, has little to
do with security or a path to peace, but much to do with
man’s inhumanity to man.