Posted
17th July 2001
Hell's Grannies Heaven
Sent
by George Monbiot,
Tuesday August 14, 2001, The Guardian Women in Black put us
to shame, facing down ethnic cleansing and nuclear criminality
Special report: Israel and the Middle East.
Ariel Sharon's decision not to blast the Palestinians out of
existence after last week's suicide bombings is, at first sight,
mystifying. While jets blew up the Palestinians' police station
in Ramallah and Israeli soldiers occupied their East Jerusalem
headquarters, these reprisals were far less bloody than most
people had predicted. Several hypotheses have been advanced
to explain this uncharacteristic restraint. Sharon is seeking
to keep faith with his more conciliatory foreign minister, Shimon
Peres. He is hoping to collect some moral credit, which he will
use to defend much fiercer intervention at a later date. The
seizure of Palestinian offices does more to hurt their cause
than the murder of prominent figures. All these explanations
are plausible, but there is another possible interpretation,
overlooked by almost everyone. In killing Palestinians, Ariel
Sharon can no longer be sure that he is killing only Palestinians.
For the past few weeks, foreign peace activists belonging to
the international solidarity movement have been arriving in
Jerusalem and the West Bank, joining demonstrations, staying
in the homes of threatened Palestinians, turning themselves
into human shields between the Israeli army and its targets.
A few days ago they were joined by one of the most remarkable
forces in British politics, a group of mostly middle-aged or
elderly campaigners called Women in Black UK. These Hell's Grannies
have moved straight into the front line, ensuring that the brutality
with which the Palestinians are routinely treated now has international
repercussions: Israel can't hurt local people without hurting
them too.
For
the past few nights, members of the solidarity movement have
been sleeping in the homes of Palestinians in the Bethlehem
suburb of Beit Jala. Eight hundred and fifty homes here have
been shelled by soldiers stationed in the neighbouring Jewish
settlement of Gilo, as the army seeks to expel the Palestinians
in order to expand Israel's illegal plantation. The foreigners
have been standing at army checkpoints, photographing soldiers
when they stop people trying to leave or enter their communities
and recording the names of those they arrest. The soldiers hate
this scrutiny, but whenever the monitors arrive at a checkpoint,
there's a marked reduction in the violence there. The Women
in Black also helped to organise the demonstrations outside
Orient House, the Palestinian headquarters seized by Israel
on Friday. They established the physical and political space
in which Palestinians could protest non-violently. Arrested
and beaten up with the local people, the women witnessed the
torture of Palestinian prisoners in the police station, which
would otherwise have gone unrecorded.
In short, these volunteer peacekeepers are seeking to do precisely
what foreign governments have promised but failed to do: to
monitor and contest abuses of human rights, to defuse violence,
and to challenge Israel's ethnic cleansing programme. Their
actions put us all to shame. As well as seeking to enforce peace,
they are trying, hard as it is in the current atmosphere, to
broker it. They have been suggesting to their Palestinian hosts
some of the novel means by which injustice can be confronted
without the use of violence. They have plenty of experience
to draw on.
Some of these activists have been involved in the Trident Ploughshares
campaign which, over the past fortnight, has been running rings
round the marines guarding the nuclear submarines in Scotland.
To the astonishment of the guards, the protesters there have
managed to evade the tightest security in the UK, swimming into
the docks in which the submarines are moored and spray-painting
the words "useless" and "illegal" on their sides. They have
launched canoes and home-made rafts into the paths of submarines
trying to leave their berths. They have cut through the razor
wire and roamed around the base, hoping to arrest its commander
for crimes against humanity. A few days ago, they blocked the
main gates of the nuclear warhead depot, their arms embedded
in barrels of concrete, bringing work to a halt as the police
tried to figure out how to extract them.
Two years ago, three of these women climbed into the Trident
programme's floating research laboratory on Loch Goil and, as
a delightful new video commissioned by the Quakers shows, threw
all its computers into the sea. In Greenock court, they were
acquitted of criminal damage, after the sherriff accepted their
defence that the Trident programme infringes international law:
rather than committing a crime, they were preventing one. Soon
afterwards, the women "borrowed" a police boat from the Trident
base in Coulport and drove it into the submarine docks at Faslane.
Among them was one of the women who were also found not guilty
in 1996 after smashing up a Hawk aircraft bound for East Timor.
The subsequent publicity forced the government to stop exporting
Hawks to Indonesia.
Though they're acquitted as often as they're convicted, Hell's
Grannies have spent much of the past few years in jail. They
take full responsibility for their actions. If the police fail
to spot them, they ring them up and ask to be arrested. Their
candour, clarity and humour have played well in court, but the
risks of this accountable campaigning are enormous. The prosecution
began yesterday of 17 British and American Greenpeace activists,
who are being tried on terrorism charges after peacefully occupying
the Californian launch pad being used for George Bush's missile
defence tests. In the Middle East such tactics are likely to
be still more dangerous, as Israeli soldiers have shown no hesitation
in killing protesters in cold blood. But, as Gandhi recognised,
the brutal treatment of non-violent campaigners can destroy
the moral authority of the oppressor, generating inexorable
pressure for change.
The Women in Black are clearly prepared not only to die for
their cause, but also to make what Dostoevsky correctly identified
as a far greater sacrifice: to live for their cause. They are
ready to lose their homes, their comforts, their liberty, to
be vilified, beaten up and imprisoned. Their accountable actions
require a far greater courage than throwing bricks at the police.
Most importantly perhaps, these campaigners never cease to acknowledge
the humanity of their opponents. They seek not to threaten but
to persuade. The results can be astonishing. The MoD police
who pulled the Trident swimmers out of the water ferried them
back to their camp, rather than arresting them, while massaging
their legs to stop cramp. When Angie Zelter, one of the coordinators
of Women in Black, was on remand for her attempts to demolish
the British military machine, she was visited in prison by a
timber merchant whose business she had once tried to shut down.
He had, as a result of her campaign, stopped importing mahogany
stolen from indigenous reserves in Brazil, and started refashioning
his business along ethical lines, and now he needed her advice.
.
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