At the end of June, a delegation of 2/ people (17 men, 4 women) from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign who visited Palestine. The majority of the delegation were students, including some who had been involved in the recent successful campaign that saw Mordechai Vanunu elected as Rector of Glasgow University. Resistance supporter Campbell Macgregor was one of those who went and reports below on some of the highlights of the trip. As the Israelis control entry, it is not possible for political delegations to enter Israel/Palestine openly, so we went in in small groups, posing as ordinary tourists.
We visited the West Bank and East Jerusalem as it was completely impossible to enter Gaza.
Getting around the West Bank can be difficult, since it is covered by Israeli checkpoints, including flying checkpoints which they sometimes put up, seriously disrupting traffic. In several places there are fixed checkpoints, where you have to get a bus or taxi to one side, walk through the security, and get a bus or taxi at the other side. It is normally difficult to enter Nablus if you don't live there, but our Palestinian contacts got us in through side-roads. Getting out was not easy, it was like getting on board an aeroplane, going through metal detectors.
We went through in small groups, being a bit vague about where we had been and where we were going, and avoided wearing political T-shirts. Even so, the Israelis seemed quite surprised to see us, I was told "Do not enter Nablus again during your stay here".
In Ramallah, we met several people, including Rafid Husseini, a minister in the Palestinian Administration (PA).
I don't have the scope here to discuss his political approach in depth but he did come across as more open and honest about problems faced by the PA than I would expect from most ministers in most governments. He admitted that there had been a lot of problems with corruption and mismanagement in the PA.
I raised the question of the planned Israeli pullout from Gaza. He said the PA did not ask the Israelis to come out of Gaza, they would prefer it if they came out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem first and he suspected some ulterior motive.
This was the only time the question of the Gaza pullouts came up in our discussions, indicating that Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem are not expecting further settlements to be disbanded, let alone the Israelis to concede the right of return.
In Ramallah we also met a representative of the campaign to free Marwan Barghouti, an important Palestinian activist (see: http://www.FreeBargho uti.org for further information about the campaign.)
One of the most dramatic moments in the trip was in Jenin refugee camp. Some people from the camp were welcoming us in a community hall when a man wearing a holster and a pistol quietly came into the room and started shaking hands with the delegation.
After a few seconds most people rose to their feet and started applauding him, this was Zakaria Zubeida, a leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades and one of the most wanted men in the
He came forward and made short speech through a translator, saying that he welcomed the role of internationals in supporting the Palestinian struggle, and mentioned the role of international solidarity activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall.
The he took us on a short tour of the and showed us houses which they had rebuilt following an Israeli incursion.
We met an old guy who had a handicapped son who was killed in an Israeli house demolition, they hadn't managed to get him out of the house before the Israelis demolished it. There wasn't a lot I could say, I just shook his hand and said "salaam aleikum". Then Zakaria took us all to a meal in a restaurant in Jenin city. Some people found it a bit strange having a meal where the host had his sub machine gun sitting next to him. However he seemed a rather mild-mannered person
He said that he didn't get to see his family much, but he showed some of us a photo of his son he carries about with him. In Jenin we also visited a children's centre and a school for deaf children.
In Balata refugee camp near Nablus we met two old guys from villages ethnically cleansed in what Palestinians call the "Nakba" (catastrophe), the war of 1948 which created the state of Israel. One came from a village near Tel Aviv which he had evacuated under Israeli fire at the age of 16.
I said to him "The Israelis have claimed that the Palestinians only evacuated their villages in 1948 because they were told to by radio broadcasts from the Arab countries. What would you say to this?" I think he had heard this one before, he said "This is a fabrication. Actually, you were lucky to even have a single radio set in most villages in Palestine at that time. They were mostly in the cafes." We visited several places close to the Israeli security wall (although in rural areas it's really a large fence with a security road), see: http://www.stopthewall.org. It looks like something out of the land of Mordor. If it was meant to be a purely security measure then the Israelis would build it on the pre-1967 border, but in places it wanders about the West Bank like a snake with a bad case of indigestion.
page 19 of the scan
Ariel Sharon: Israel will not dismantle settlements in the West Bank