Denied Entry (Starhawk)

[icymist]

Today is March 16. Five years ago, I was in a small village in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank of Palestine with a group of volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. We had gone because the villagers were being menaced by tanks from the Israeli military, and wanted witnesses, but by the time we arrived, the tanks had gone. Instead we wandered through the olive groves, studded with pink cyclamen and blood-red anemones, and ate barbecued lamb in the courtyard of an ancient stone house with domed ceilings and arched portals. It was a strangely idyllic day—until on our way back to Nablus we got a call. Down in Rafah, in the Gaza strip, a young volunteer named Rachel Corrie had been crushed to death by a an Israeli military bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s house.

Today I sit in a room in Washington D.C. overcome by grief as in the next room my new friend Laurie writes out card after card with the names of the dead—American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, pile after pile of them. I’m grieving for all the dead, and a bit for myself, because I meant to be back in Palestine, or at least in Israel, now. But I have been denied entry and sent home, because of my past work with the ISM. I have been denied entry, even though my intentions this time were strictly to work with permaculture and ecology groups, including the three Israeli groups that have sent me formal invitations, and even though Israel claims to be a refuge of last resort for everyone born Jewish, as I am. The fact that I’m here, not there, is a measure of how much the Israeli authorities fear a movement of nonviolent resistance in general, and the ISM in particular.

Why is nonviolence so threatening? Violence attacks the body, but nonviolence threatens something deeper and more tenuous—the self-perceptions and rationalizations that let basically good people act in cruel and heartless ways. The Israel/Palestine conflict enacts on a mass scale some of the same dynamics as family abuse. Israel is like the abused child who grows up to be an abuser.
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[truedelphi]

1. We are so far removed from our true nature, the Inner Self

Even those of us who do not participate in war find it hard to remain in a flow of positive
joyousness.

Life seems so hard. Animosity seems to flourish.

Those in Gaza bear the brunt of a world gone mad. And if oil was not so necessary to the American people, Israel would find it harder to take the stance that it takes.