Report from Saturday's Forum on Palestine

Saturday's Forum on Palestine featured two powerful, moving and thought-provoking speakers, Marlene Eid and Emma Franks. This was the sixth in a series of forums, presented on the first and third Saturday of each month by the Palestine Action Group. About forty people attended.

Marlene spoke first, on the effects of war on Palestinian children. She was born and raised in Jerusalem, left in 1979, and now teaches psychology at PSU and PCC. In 1990 she went to the Gaza Strip and helped found the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

She started by describing the living conditions of Palestinians in the refugee camps: there is no electricity and no clean water; 80% of the population relies on UN relief for food; the average family has about eight people sharing a very small space; people suffer harsh conditions in winter. There are eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, which has close to a million people and is the most densely populated area in the world.

Israeli soldiers regularly "search" the homes of Palestinian families, usually between midnight and 2:00 am, when the media isn't around to document their brutalities. Soldiers look for any males in the family, even as young as fourteen, and generally terrorize the families. Children have watched soldiers beat their parents with butts of guns, knocking them to the floor. Even when families aren't experiencing these invasions themselves, they can hear the screaming and crying of neighboring women and children as soldiers invade their homes. Some children have seen their parents or friends shot to death in front of them.

Many children have also been directly targeted by Israeli soldiers. Marlene witnessed a four-year-old child handcuffed and blindfolded as punishment for throwing stones at a jeep. Many children have been arrested. "A lot of times we want to make sense out of something illogical," she said, but "it's the law of the most powerful that rules - and they have the right to do anything."

Marlene spoke about the impact of these conditions on Palestinian children, a subject that is rarely addressed. "When September 11th happened, everyone was saying, What about the children? But nobody talked about Arab children." She said that developmentally, most Palestinian children are at a much lower level from where they're supposed to be. Many suffer from phobias, nightmares, and bed-wetting; some become more aggressive, while some become completely withdrawn and stop talking altogether. "Palestinian children have seen nothing but destruction."

She also talked about the impact on parents: men suffer from depression because of feeling helpless that they can't provide for their families, and women have anxiety disorders and panic attacks because they are so worried about their children. Fathers are often unemployed, in prison, or deported, so that women become the main breadwinners for the family. Due to the oppressive living conditions under the Occupation, there is increased domestic violence and incest. Because of economic oppression, the average age of marriage for women has dropped from 19 to 14.

Palestinian people are subjected to curfews, which can last for as long as six months, without any breaks. Marlene spoke about her experience living under a curfew while she was there: "I lived through one week of curfew and I went crazy." She described how people survived the curfews, by establishing a communication network between houses (mostly via children), sharing what food supplies they had, and creating committees to take care of different needs. "The way people kept connected was through caring for each other. That's what keeps you alive and it gives you hope. Solidarity was there between people to keep everything going."

Marlene passed around drawings by Palestinian children that she collected while she was working in the refugee camps. I noticed that a lot of the pictures included the Palestinian flag. Other recurring images were Israeli flags, helicopters, and trees.

Emma addressed some similar issues in her talk, which was titled "Where are the women?" Emma is an anti-racist, feminist and solidarity movement activist who visited Palestine on a delegation during the Gulf War. She has also visited East Timor. Originally from Uganda, her family relocated to the UK when she was nine years old, and she just recently moved to Portland.

Emma feels a strong identification with Palestinians due to her experience living through a violent coup in Uganda as a child. "I know what war can do. I know what violence can do. I learned it at a young age." She said that visiting Palestine in 1991 felt very familiar: "I know what army repression meant." She found further identification with Palestinians when an Israeli, on finding out that she was from Uganda, said, "You know, we nearly had your country." His comment refers to the fact that Uganda was one of the places considered by the founders of Israel.

Like Marlene, Emma emphasized the human element in describing the situation in Palestine. "Palestine is a beautiful place. The women, in my experience, make it beautiful. We miss the humanization of Palestine." She gave the statistics that, since 1967, 8,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished and 40,000 Palestinians have lost their homes, and said that many Palestinian women describe losing their homes as a rape. For most Palestinian women, who don't work outside the home, their household is their entire world.

Women have been "instrumental in maintaining the links" with the land and history of Palestine. The Israeli army is engaged in a "strategic destruction" of these links, working to "eliminate Palestinian history" by taking away names of villages and destroying thousands of trees, among other practices. Emma spoke strongly and passionately about the situation and the necessity for action: "This is the moment to fight and to focus on Palestine. It's not an ambiguous situation and it's not difficult."

One of the most moving stories Emma told was about visiting a hospital in Nablus soon after an attack by the Israeli army. A twelve-year-old girl had just had her leg amputated, after being shot by a soldier. Emma explained that the Israel soldiers have a "deliberate strategy" of firing at children with bullets that splinter in the body, so that they have to have their arms and legs amputated. The girl had been throwing stones at the soldiers' vehicles. When Emma asked her if the consequences had been too harsh for her actions, the girl said she would do it over again, and held up her hand in a victory sign. Emma was profoundly affected by this and other experiences in Palestine: "When I came back I was in shock, I was crying all the time."

Emma said that despite these horrors, "people were able to celebrate: there were weddings, there were births." She said she also felt encouraged by Israeli Jewish women who are making connections "across the divide" and trying to find ways to create peace. "However horrendous the situation, people find ways to make links, people find ways to communicate."

Having also traveled to East Timor and Northern Ireland (during "difficult times of British rule"), Emma pointed out the similarities between the daily conditions of women and children living under oppression in these different countries. The presence of the occupying army, helicopters and military checkpoints were all common experiences. And, she said, in these situations women are often "the backbone of the struggle." She linked the struggles of women in East Timor to those of women in Palestine, and talked about how, in the UK, Palestinian women have been very active in both the anti-racist and the feminist movement.

These links between different movements against oppression and between different communities and nationalities are at the heart of Emma's political analysis and activism. "Race often means black men and gender often means white women. The collusion of patriarchy and racism make it harder to be visible," she said. "As women of color, we have to forge a new path against patriarchy, racism, imperialism and capitalism... . We have to be making links in a situation of despair."

Along these lines, Emma discussed her experience of attending different political meetings and events where everyone was talking about one issue but not making connections to other issues. She said that it's our responsibility to speak up at these events and say, "Excuse me, you've forgotten something." In fact, my first moment of appreciation for Emma was at an earlier Forum on Palestine, where, in the question and answer period, she stood up and asked, "What about the women?" It was this questioning that led to her being booked as a speaker for this Forum.

During the question and answer period (which tend to be lively and engaging at these forums), an audience member from the UK said he noticed that in the US these forums and similar events were attended by very few Asian Americans and African Americans. He said that was "one big difference between what's happening here and what's happening in the UK." Emma seconded his reaction: "It surprises me that there aren't more links here. We don't live in compartments. Just because I've been involved in the anti-racist movement doesn't mean I'm not a feminist." In response, one of the organizers of the forums said, "We don't know how to make those links. We haven't been able to address it properly." There was further discussion of the issue among audience members and participants, with suggestions made to hold forums in different locations around the city, and to ensure a safe space for people of different backgrounds to voice their opinions. No one came up with a brilliant strategy to deal with the problem, but I felt encouraged by people's genuine concern to address this recurring issue.

When the discussion inevitably turned to the question of "What can we do?" and "How can we have any hope right now?" one audience member suggested the World Social Forum (website) as an international organizing tool that gives her hope and a feeling of connection. 61,000 people attended their meeting in Brazil last year. Another audience member announced that there will be a conference on Palestine October 11-12, sponsored by Arabs Building Community and the Portland Peaceful Response Coalition.

The next Forum on Palestine will be held on Saturday, July 20th, 6:00 pm at the Campus Ministries Building at PSU (corner of SW Broadway and Montgomery). One speaker has been confirmed, Jan Abushakrah, who will speak about the Arab media. I strongly encourage people to attend - even, and especially, if you don't agree with what's being said. The Forums provide a great opportunity to raise consciousness about the issues and to forge the kinds of links that I believe are essential to building a movement against oppression in all its forms.