The realities of the Israeli Occupation
Are shown in this Haaretz article:
All the grapevines in the garden have been cut. The entrance to Hashem al-Gaza’s house is blocked with piles of garbage and junk tossed by his neighbors from above. For several years now, he hasn’t been able to enter his house from the street. He has to take a rocky path up a hill that is hidden from the neighbors, hurry inside through the back door and hope for the best. Every trip outside to the yard is rushed and anxious.
Talking is done in a whisper, lest the neighbors hear. Al-Gaza is the chairman of the neighborhood committee, or what’s left of it.
He shows his guests a videotape filmed here four months ago. You won’t see it on any of the Israeli television stations: The images are those of a pogrom. Here a row of schoolgirls from the Cordoba elementary school is returning home, young girls dressed in the same school uniform, while young settlers – female ones in particular – wait in ambush for them every day to violently attack them. You see the schoolgirls fleeing, and the settler girls kicking them and throwing stones and garbage at them. The soldiers watch the scene with bored expressions, though one can see them smile sometimes.
Now the mini-pogrom arrives at the home of Dr. Taysir Zehadi. Hundreds of settlers in white Shabbat shirts, as befitting the festive occasion, break into his house and wreak havoc and terror. The desperate doctor tries to call for help on the telephone as hundreds of settlers close in on the house. Finally, they break down the gate and burst inside. Soldiers from the Nahal Brigade and a company of Border Police look on without lifting a finger. Now the settlers are inside, wrecking whatever they can get their hands on, as the doctor watches and hoarsely describes the mayhem as he speaks into the telephone receiver. “Everything is destroyed,” he says quietly from inside his home, which a gate and iron gratings couldn’t protect.
After the settlers vent their anger in the doctor’s house, they leave, smiling, on the way to the next target. No one stops them. Except for the iron door of neighbor Ayoub Awawi. The door doesn’t give in to them and they remain outside. Meanwhile, the camera shows the destruction in the doctor’s home: From the solar panels on the roof to the potted plants in the living room, everything is smashed and shattered.
The movie ends and we come back to reality. Al-Gaza’s daughter comes running into the living room. A third-grader in pigtails, on her second day of the school year, she looks terrified. She always crosses the road at a run. Yesterday, on Saturday – the day of the Sabbath Queen – the settlers threw stones at them. One student was hurt in the arm. But today she completed the trip in peace. A small group of international volunteers escorts her and her friends to school and back every day. This morning the IDF issued an order declaring the neighborhood a “closed military zone” in a move aimed at the international volunteers two American women and a British citizen in their 20s, who came to live here as brave human shields. The IDF claims they constitute a “provocation.?