Part One of the Series: Eyewitness Report
Part Two: Interview with Ghassan Andoni
Part Three: Hebron - The Christian Peacemaker Team and Displaced Arab Farmers

Published May, 2004

(January 3, 2004) My wife Carol and I traveled to Israel/Palestine with seven New York Jewish American civil rights activists including Dorothy Zellner and Constancia Romilly, who worked in the Southern civil rights movement and whom we have known for 40 years. The other members of our independent delegation were Yoram and Felice Gelman, who have family in Israel, and Robert Apter, all activists in the anti-war and civil rights movements.

Our first visit was with Dr. Ruchama Marton, 65, an Israeli psychiatrist who founded Physicians for Human Rights - Israel, an Israeli/Palestinian organization, 16 years ago. Now it has 700 members, and 27 staffers including physicians, nurses and administrators. Most of its funding comes from Europe, with a small amount from the United States.

Dr. Marton is a short, intense woman with a good sense of humor. She has thinning dyed dark red hair, chain smokes (like many Israelis), and speaks with a charming accent. Besides Hebrew and English, she also speaks some Arabic. She lives in Tel Aviv.

Dr. Marton said while the Israeli press generally has been unsympathetic to PHR the American and European press has been supportive. Their critics call them traitors and self-hating Jews. She said that if PHR members work in a government hospital they are pressured not to work in the Occupied Territories or to sign petitions in support of human rights there.

We asked her why she founded PHR and after explaining the terrible health care crisis for Palestinians since the Occupation, she added: "I hate when people lie to me, the TV, the government. The truth of the oppression was so overwhelming that I had to do something. I thought that if the truth were known people would wake up and they would do something. What motivates me is shame and anger."

Dr. Marton says that the left in Israel and Palestine is tiny and powerless. "In the 1960s we on the left favored a one state democratic, secular country. Things have changed so that this dream is no longer realistic. There is too much hatred, blood and resistance and this makes it impossible to have a one state solution. But Sharon's idea of a Palestinian state is a joke. It is too tiny and cut up like the Bantustans in South Africa to be a real viable state."

She says that since Sharon came to office things have got even more polarized. Now, all Palestinian kids from three feet high belong to a political party such as the CP, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Brigades and the Palestine Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They are desperate to do something and they despise the Israeli government.

We drive from Tel Aviv to a gas station to the Israeli border town of Tabiya and then take a Palestinian van to one of the most militant and organized refugee camps in the West Bank.

Dr. Marton says "We don't like to ask permission from the IDF to get into refugee camps because we think that health care should be a human right, but sometimes we are required to." The IDF accompanies us with automatic rifles which causes problems. There is no danger from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, our danger is from the IDF.

Every Saturday PHR visits a different camp. They visit camps only when camp leaders invite them. The leaders make arrangements and publicity to recruit patients. The PHR brings medical supplies in a small trailer. On our way to Jenin we stop at a gas station in Tabiya where we are joined by six van loads of PHRers plus an Israeli reporter and photographer for the Boston Globe.

At the gas station, a Palestinian surgeon, Dr. Hassan Matani, joins us. He lives in Tabiya and works in an Israeli government hospital. He has volunteered with PHR about two Saturdays a month for several years. He was trained as a doctor in Czechoslovakia and was helped financially by the Israel Communist Party (now called the United Front; it elected three Arab members to the Knesset. Few Jews are currently active in the party).

Dr. Matani says that there is little social integration among Jews and Arabs; kids go to separate schools until they enter a university. Virtually no Jews attend Palestinian universities and only about ten percent of Israeli Arabs go to Israeli universities. "There is too much pressure from both sides to have social integration," he says.

At our first checkpoint outside Jenin we are allowed through in a few minutes. But at the second check-point, although the PHR had written permission from Tel Aviv to visit the camp, the IDF makes us wait for hours. The PHR decides to find a road around the check-point and drives through an olive grove and then up a windy, steep gutted, muddy road to enter the city of Jenin. It was amazing that our van made it. Several times we thought that we would have to get out and push but somehow we made it.

It took five hours from the time we left Tel Aviv until we reached the city of Jenin. Without the check-point delays, the ride should have taken an hour.

The city of Jenin is bustling, dirty and unpainted, and is filled with shops, stores, cars and vans. The Jenin camp seems to be part of the city, as we see no signs designating it as a refugee camp. It is hard to see where the city ends and the camp begins. The camp which began as a tent city 50 years ago is now a permanent town, cramped with concrete block buildings, two or three stories tall.

Dozens of buildings lay in ruins. The streets are muddy and unpaved. It is estimated that over 485 houses were destroyed, 55 people were killed, and thousands were left homeless. The bombed out town reminds me of the vacant land that once was the World Trade Center.

We pull up to a three-story kindergarten that is unheated and full of books, chairs and tables. The doctors set up equipment and begin treating 30 or 40 people, mostly women and children, who have waited for several hours.

In the school yard five young militants join us. Z, a Jenin Resistance leader is 26, lean, smiling, and does not blink when we tell him who we are. Dr. Marton has known him since he was a kid. Now he speaks perfect Hebrew and she says he is the king of the Jenin camp. A week before when she spoke with him about coming to Jenin, Z told her that he did not want Israelis or Americans there. It was his way of showing his rage and his humanity. But we worked it out.

Z welcomes us and we chat for almost an hour. He was a cop before he joined the Resistance. He says he likes us even though we are Jewish because we are helping Palestinians. "I will protect you here. You are my guests. I hate the American government, but not American people," he says. He says that the US government cannot broker peace because it is controlled by the Jewish lobby.

He supports Arafat even though he disagrees with him for supporting the Geneva Accords because they don't allow Palestinians who fled Israel an unlimited right to return there. In addition, like many Palestinians, he says that there will be no peace unless Israel returns to the 1967 borders and leaves the occupied territories.

Four days after we left Jenin, Dr. Marton told us that Z was shot three times by the IDF during a raid there and one of his deputies was killed.

--Charles Horwitz