Israeli settlers seek asylum with PA

"If the state of Israel doesn't want us, we don't want it," 28-year-old Drori Stuan told Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot. His family has lived in the Kadim settlement in the northern West Bank since 1983. It is one of four small settlements in the West Bank that the Israeli government is planning to evacuate later this year. Drori's family has applied for political asylum in the Palestinian Authority: "We are people who intend to carry on living in Samaria under Palestinian rule and not under Israeli rule." He continued: "Palestinian sovereignty does not scare us. We believe that everything will be OK and we will live in security like other Jews around the world."

I think this is an incredible positive development, though I doubt the PA will be able to grant the request, given that its authority is heavily limited by Israel. The desire of religious Jews to live in areas of historical significance is understandable - providing they do not do so at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population, as is currently the case. If the Stuan family is truely prepared to live as Palestian citizens, rather than as agressive and exploitative colonialists, then this is the attitude which could finally bring a lasting peace.

The only long term solution, in my opinion, is a single pluralistic state, perhaps called something like"The Holy Land of Palestine & Israel", in which all citizens have equal rights and a fair distribution of wealth. There is a precedent in the 1 million Israeli Arabs, decendents of the Palestinians who remained within Israel during the Naqba (the 1948 war), who in theory have the same rights as Jewish Israelis. The barrier to the establishment of this state has always been Isarelis democraphic fear of living in a country with a majority Palestinian population, as well as the economic benefits they gain from exploitation of Palestinian land and water. But it looks like some settlers are finally realising that their ability to live in the Land depends on a good relationship with Palestinians, and that it is okay even to live under the authority of a majority Palestinian governmetn.

Please pray that the Stuan family could indeed become citizens of the PA and thereby demonstrate to other settlers and Israelis that there is nothing to fear from Palestinians when they are treated with justice and respect. May this lead to a lasting peace in which Palestinians are granted full citizenship rights in a new united state.

Addicted to Iraq

Apologies to friends/readers for not posting for a while. I've had a hectic month, a week in Basra for a trade union conference against privatisation, a week back in Palestine supporting people being terrorised by settlers and the apartheid wall, a few days back in the UK (sadly for a funeral)... and now, of course, I'm on my way back to Iraq!

I'm afraid I'm hooked on this bleeding, welcoming, disastrous, cultured, impoverished, wealthy, hopeless, hopeful country. I'm sure my family would prefer it if I took up a safer and more socially acceptable addiction like crack cocaine, but I'm afraid I'm already suffering from withdrawal having been away for only 3 weeks.

I can't say too much about what I'm doing this time, as I need to keep a low profile and don't want to endanger the people I'm working with. But I'd appreciate all your prayers that I can find ways to usefully support and empower Iraqis doing positive things and contribute in small ways to promoting genuine self-determination, ending the occupation and restoring a healthy economy.

I helped organised a 2 week Fast for Economic Justice in Iraq, which is happening right now in Geneva in the run up to the final meeting of the UNCC, the body which awards war reparations against Iraq. It was opened on Thursday by Hans von Sponek, the courageous former UN Humanitarian Coordinator who resigned in 2000 to protest the sanctions regime.

Free Burma and Kim's mum!

Today Burma's democratically elected leader, Nobel prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, turns 60, after 15 years under almost permanent house arrest. Her party won a landslide 82% victory in the 1990 elections, but the military dictatorship refused to recognise it and instead increased the repression of their rule.

My international focus has been largely orientated towards the Middle East, but many of my close friends at university were very actively involved in the Free Burma campaign. I was busy with other campaigns and never learnt in depth about the situation in Burma, but the photos of Aung San that many friends had on their walls are fixed in my mind. Typically she is photographed with arms crossed and often a flower in her hair. Firm and defiant of injustice and at the same time gentle and open. Of all the iconic portraits of heros and revolutionaries I find Aung San's the most human and the most inspiring.

When in 1999 Aung San's English husband Michael Aris died in Oxford, I realised that I had actually been at school a decade before with their younger son Kim. We were contemporaries at the Dragon School, a boarding school designed originally for the children of Oxford dons. My memory is pretty awful so I only have a few snapshots of him in my head. For whatever reason we both kept pet gerbils in the school's biology classroom, and I can remember discussing with him the intricacies of constructing elaborate runs for our rodents. I certainly had no idea that his mum was under house arrest at the time in a country I'd probably never heard of. Probably the anonymity was a good thing designed to give him a degree of normality at school, but I seem to remember he was treated quite badly at school, and I wish I had shown him friendship. Today he is receiving the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh on behalf of his mother. I don't know how long it is since he saw her last, probably 3-4 years. I haven't seen him now for almost 14 years, but he's in my prayers.

Please pray and campaign for freedom for Aung San and freedom for the people she has come to represent. As she says: "Please use your liberty to promote ours".

Happy blogday to me!

So this blog is 2 years old as of 7.08pm today. I turned 27 (ich, that's ancient!) last week. A lot has happened in the last two years: I've been to Iraq four times (and met many groovy Iraqi bloggers) and also to Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, France, America and India campaigning on Jubilee Iraq; I've made two trips out to central africa to research HIV/AIDS; changed jobs three times; fallen in love with a wonderful American girl; and made 130 blog entries, just over one a week. Here's my not very exciting first entry.

Smell the jasmine

"Marhaba. Smell the jasmine and taste the olives. Jawwal welcomes you to Palestine," said the automatic text message as my phone roamed onto the Palestinian network, and the welcome has already been echoed by dozens of impoverished, abused and occupied people who have piled me with tea, food and kind words in the 24hrs I've been here. I had a marathon trip on Monday, driving from Basra to Kuwait, flying to Amman, flying to Tel Aviv and (after 3 hours of interrogation) driving to Jerusalem. Yesterday morning I came down to Khalil (Hebron) where I'll be staying for a few days.

I've just returned from a morning visiting families in Wadi al-Ruz, a beautiful fertile valley which is now surrounded on all sides by illegal Israeli settlements (Kiryat Arba, Harsina - here is the settlers' website, a scary read) and army and police posts. Palestinian cars have been bared for four years from the one remaining road into the village (and a chunk of the road has been fenced off and annexed to Kiryat Arba), meaning that the people have a half hour walk to get to the nearest shops. It gets more serious when there are medical emergencies. We visited one family which suffers daily abuses and rock throwing from the settlers across the street and the military checkpoint next to their house. The 75yr old grandfather had fallen while praying at the mosque and broken his arm and leg. He was unable to go to hospital because he can't walk and no doctors will come to him because they are afraid of the soldiers. His wife has diabetes and had just been to hospital after an attack. We met her sitting by the roadside in the blazing sun, exhausted and shaking having only walked about 20% of the distance to her home. I stopped a passing police car which luckily turned out to be driven by a Palestinian mechanic who had fixed it and was returning it to the station, and he agreed to give her a lift home. [PHOTO: The road to Wadi al-Ruz. The red-roofed buildings and everything to the right, including all the construction sites, are the settlement of Kiryat Arba. Many of the houses are empty but they are building at a frantic rate to grab more land. The concrete blocks on the road are U-shaped sniper posts, while the camo-netting of the first military checkpoint is visible. The Palestinian village is still half a mile walk away.]

We carried along on foot but were summoned in for tea and breakfast when we past the old lady's house. Her 2yr old granddaughter was terrified of me, but after about 15mins of her father reassuring her "mish Yahud" (he's not a Jew) she finally came over and greeted my shyly. How horrible that her entire life experience (the children get stoned by settlers if they step outside their front door) has taught her to quiver in fear at the sight of Jews.

Another family we drank tea with, further down the valley, told how their 15yr old daughter had stopped going to school after being searched and repeatedly groped by the soldiers at the checkpoint she has to pass every day walking to school. Their 8 yr old son had huge cauliflower ears (bent so they are perpendicular to the face, as some Rugby players develop from scrums). Two days ago the soldiers grabbed him by the ears and picked him up so his full weight was hanging from them. The same family regular gets raided at night by the military post overlooking their house, 5 days ago soldiers were banging at their door at 3am and firing off gunshots.

These stories are just a tiny sample from the lives of Palestinians in Hebron, the only city in which settlers have stolen houses in the centre of town (normally they just ring around the outside, as at Bethlehem, turning the town into a big prison), as a result life is particularly hard for the local people as they are terrorised not just by the settlers but the police and soldiers as well (who steal yet more land for their bases). Nevertheless I still get greeted in the street with a "shalom" by Palestinians who assume I'm Israeli, and receive a kings welcome when they discover I am here in solidarity with them. The hospitality of the Palestinian people is the jasmine which I can smell everywhere I go.