Los Angeles: Jewish Activist Denounces Israeli Brutality
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News That Doesn't Fit
JEWISH ACTIVIST SPEAKS OUT FOR PALESTINE RIGHTS, AGAINST ISRAELI
BRTUALITY
by Jon Hillson
LOS ANGELES, August 10 (NY Transfer)--Already the property of
humanity, the struggle for Palestinian freedom finds a new voice in
the heart of this city's biggest Jewish neighborhood when Tamara
Rettino speaks to a standing-room-only crowd of 150 people at the
Workmen's Circle on August 8. She delivers an unsparing eyewitness
account of Zionist brutality in Gaza and the West Bank, from where
she's just returned after a month-and-half stay.
Rettino, a health-care worker, was a participant in the International
Solidarity Movement's Freedom Summer; its most prominent
representative is Adam Shapiro, a New York Jew whose identification
with the Palestinian people earns enmity and harassment from Tel Aviv
and death threats that forced his parents to move from their Brooklyn
home to Long Island. In her August 8 talk, Rettino explains her
service as a "negotiator" for embattled refugee camp residents facing
occupation forces, and as an ambulance technician for the Red
Crescent Society.
The meeting is sponsored by Los Angeles Jews for a Just Peace, which
supports the "right of return" for Palestinians, demands an end to
U.S. military aid to Israel, and calls for the removal of Tel Aviv's
occupation army in the Palestinian Authority. Formed six months ago,
the group emerged in action on July 25, bringing 200 people, including
dozens of Palestinians, to a spirited picket line at the Israeli
consulate in Los Angeles. Activists in camouflage briefly enacted an
Israeli army checkpoint in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard. A
Zionist counter-demonstration attracted 100 people, many of them
furious at the display of Palestinian flags and banners across the
busy street. Los Angeles cops barred a second "checkpoint."
Eric Gordon, director the Workman's Circle, whose space serves as an
art galley and center for Jewish and Yiddish culture, welcomes the
crowd, while explaining that his organization does not endorse the
meeting. In fact, it is divided over the expected content, with "only
a few of its members" present. The room is filled with scores of
young people who are Jewish, along with a variety of political
activists, older liberals, Israeli and Palestinian immigrants, a few
Blacks and Latinos. Political activists also serve as security, since
the organization, Gordon says, has received "many hostile
calls." Still, dozens are turned away at the door for lack of
space inside. Across the street, Hassidic families pass a small
Orthodox temple on a quiet Thursday evening.
Rettino, 25, is the mother of three children. Originally from Orange
County, she lives in Los Angeles. She and other Jews served in
"non-violent direct action" in support Palestinian human rights and
to gather information on the character of the Israeli occupation,
to build opposition to Washington and Tel Aviv's policies. Rettino
speaks for nearly an hour, narrating slides, which alternate between
images of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) practices -- evictions of
Palestinian families from their homes, military checkpoints, the
results of the assault on local villages and the massacre at the
Jenin refugee camp, "where you can still see bodies that can't be
retrieved because of unexploded bombs" -- to descriptions of the
Palestinians she meets. These include wounded victims of Zionist
military assaults to doctors, ambulance drivers, housewives,
students, many of them activists whom, she says repeatedly, "I am
proud to call my friends."
She supplements her report by reading from a journal she kept during
her six weeks, words that reflect the impact of the graphic and
life-threatening days and hours Rettino and her young -- and not so
young -- Jewish co-workers spend under curfew and occupation, and the
deep changes they forge in her thinking.
"I went there without much of an idea of the situation, naive, with
little background," she says. But the sum of her experiences -- above
all the "brutality of the occupation" and the discovery of
Palestinian humanity -- convinces her of the justice of their cause.
Midway in her narrative, she stops for a second, as if changing
gears. "I want to talk about the fighters," she says, her emphasis on
each word punctuating the still air in the hall. "Lots of people
won't talk about this, they will tell you about the suffering, the
pain, but this is important. I'm opposed to all killing. But under
international law, the Palestinians have the right to resist." A
majority of the crowd, for the first time since she began her talk,
bursts into sustained applause.
"How would you feel if your house in Palms [a nearby, middle-class
neighborhood], was bulldozed, destroyed? If your children were killed
before your eyes? What would you do? You would fight, I hope,"
Rettino says.
She shows a slide of graffiti on a house destroyed by Israeli fire.
It reads, in English, "If you destroy our homes you will not destroy
our souls."
She details the violent routine of evictions, after which homes are
marked by the army; the fear the occupiers seek to instill with the
curfew; the destruction of neighborhoods and seizure of prime land
for the handful of Zionist settlers, protected by omnipresent IDF
firepower; the agonizing, day-long delays at checkpoints in hundred-
degree sun; the forced denial of access to wells for drinking
water; the imposed food shortages; the bombing of ambulances; the
child who survives six bullets wounds, a result of Israeli soldiers
engaging in target practice.
Despite such oppression, there is resistance, Rettino says, by "the
fighters," and by the community as a whole. Pride and defiance reach
from grandparents to children, who are determined to win their
homeland. Once, while she was sick and bedridden, Rettino says, she
was "fed, by hand, by a Palestinian woman, whose family had almost no
food. I told her, 'You know, I'm Jewish.' And she said to me, 'You
are our sister.' I found this solidarity everywhere."
Rettino also encountered young Israeli conscript soldiers, who chafe
at carrying out their orders, and young Israeli women about to enter
military service who had little enthusiasm for what they would be
expected to carry out. Palestinians she met, she says, are aware of
IDF resisters, and heartened by this development. Israeli civilians,
she says, see little if any of the horrors of occupation that have
become commonplace for Palestinians.
Only one person in the audience is moved to an outburst, a
middle-aged woman who shouts out, "This is all such bullshit." She
finally exits the meeting, finding no echo in the crowd.
"What is the solution? How will this end?" asks another woman,
troubled by what she's seen and heard.
Rettino pauses for a second, shakes her head almost imperceptibly.
"Let me tell you what an old man who came up to me said: 'There
will only by peace where there is one land, the Holy Land, where all
can worship equally in peace, Muslim, Jew and Christian.'"
"What can we do?" someone else asks.
"Organize," Rettino says to applause, then a standing ovation as she
concludes, "Protest, get the truth out."
It is an unusual meeting, important not so much for the powerful
facts Rettino presents -- the faces and lives of the Palestinians and
her chronicle of occupation terror. It is her defense of the fighters
and the conviction this young Jew displays on behalf of a people
whose battle has become universal. Her stance is shared by
compatriots who faced the same circumstances and underwent a similar
political evolution during their voluntary work Palestine.
The public embrace of that cause by those for whom it is supposed to
be anathema thus becomes for them a liberating act. This stand levels
a morally powerful blow against the lies at the core of Zionism:
that it speaks for Jewry, embodies the promise of Jewish survival,
and that the reactionary utopian state wrought by its
settler-colonial protagonists is synonymous with both. The protests
and actions of such young Jews is a necessary and inevitable element
of the unraveling of the Zionist monolith worldwide, a symbol of its
weakness -- in Israel and the United States -- and registers the
inability of Washington and Tel Aviv to crush Palestinian resistance.
Only a few years ago, Tamara Rettino's experiences and the event at
which they are conveyed, in this neighborhood dotted with synagogues
and kosher markets, would have been unthinkable. Today, they are
further proof that the allies of the Palestinian people are
everywhere.
-30-
Copyright (c) 2002 by Jon Hillson and NY Transfer News. Non-profit
redistribution without alteration is permitted and encouraged.
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