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. 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