semitism.net

As promised, here are the next two radio pieces by reporter and medical student Seema Jilani. She culled these from tapes she made traveling around the West Bank with the Jewish American Medical Project. There is a weath of amazing source material here - Palestinian and Israeli voices direct from the heart of the conflict, talking about things that are not discussed in media reports. I hope that readers will take a few minutes to listen to the reports - they are unique and wrenching…

To listen, just press the play button. You’ll hear a brief introduction, then the report. The tapes were made in difficult conditions with simple equipment, so the sound quality is variable - but, thanks to Seema’s careful engineering, it’s all audible. Each piece is thirty minutes long. They were broadcast originally on radio station KPFT in Houston.

Note: the first two pieces are here, and I’ll post the final installment next week.

Human Cost of the Occupation: Part III

[audio:Jilani.03.mp3]

This piece focuses on the separation wall. Seema begins with some statistics on the wall’s size and the damage it has caused. Rather than protecting Israel’s internationally accepted border, it extends deeply into the West Bank. Ninety percent of the wall stands outside the Green Line. A Palestinian medical student talks about how the wall affects access to health care and describes a nonviolent "sit-in" to protest the building of the wall across a children’s playground in East Jerusalem.

In Qalqilya, a large city that has been entirely walled in, a woman talks about how her family was rendered destitute when their small plot of farmland was seized by Israel. A Jewish woman, looking at the wall, asks how her grandfather’s dream of a Jewish state turned into this.

Seema reads from the Combatant’s Letter, a declaration by a group of Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories: "We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, starve and expel an entire people." She interviews a Refusenik, a former Air Force pilot. He talks with great passion about his experiences in the Territories, his moral development, and the price he has paid for his refusal to serve there.

Human Cost of the Occupation: Part IV

[audio:Jilani.04.mp3]

Here, Seema reports from the Gaza strip. She begins at the Eretz Crossing, the notorious checkpoint blocking pasage to and from Gaza. Often, it takes an entire day just to cross the checkpoint in one direction. Alice Rothchild describes the interaction between a group of elderly Palestinians and the soliders at this checkpoint. Seema interviews the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. She talks to a worker whose seven-year-old nephew was killed in an Israeli incursion. She visits the Jabalaya refugee camp, where thousands of houses were destroyed in "Operation Days of Penitance" in 2004, and the site where American activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the home demolitions.

After the Gaza strip, Seema goes to Jerusalem to conduct a remarkable interview with an Israeli psychiatrist who treats many Israeli soldiers with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He describes painful Holocaust associations experienced by soliders guarding Palestinian prisoners and serving and at checkpoints - they feel as if they, themselves, are in the role of Nazi soliders. He talks about the strain that the occupation has placed on Israeli society - the moral conflicts, the increase in violent crime and drug use. Please check back next week to hear the last of Seema’s radio series.