Jennifer Loewenstein

” I left for Rafah on 11 January 2004 as part of a three-person pilot delegation to the city. We represented the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, an organization founded in February 2003 to establish people-to-people ties between our two communities. Sistering projects are well known in Madison, Wisconsin —a Midwestern University town north of Chicago. Madison has official, City Council-approved sister cities with El Salvador, Nicaragua, East Timor, Cuba, Vietnam, and Lithuania among others. It seemed time, some of us thought, to build ties with a city in Palestine.” Jennifer Loewenstein reports on a trip to Rafah.

“Here is a disturbing ordeal that has not yet been mentioned in any mainstream US papers or media. It exposes some shocking aspects of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian political prisoners, including the use of a gas that impacts the nervous and respiratory systems. It should be noted that Israel has denied using nerve gas against Palestinians, even though one account of its use has already been documented in James Longley’s searing film, ‘Gaza Strip’.” Jennifer Loewenstein and Angela Gaff report from London.

It�s déjà vu in the Gaza Strip: more incursions, more firing, more dead, more dazed children, more grieving relatives, more wreckage in the wasteland of the Strip….What are we turning the full-time inhabitants of this hell into? Jennifer Loewenstein reports.

“I was afraid you’d gone to Rafah”, I say to Ahmad over the wires to Gaza City. More families in Rafah lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers this past week and a young man died for objecting to the zillionth incursion onto his land. I worried that Ahmad had gone to investigate. His extended family lives there. “No one is going anywhere”, Ahmad responds cynically. “It’s Yom Kippur”.

There is a bouquet of plastic purple flowers in the center of a cheap wooden table. It’s easier to stare at it than into the faces of either of the men speaking. The air is suffocatingly hot — no breeze passes through the half-open window. I’m thirsty but won’t drink the orange soda our host passes around in paper cups.

F-16 Warplanes zoom overhead daily. In Rafah they’ve been breaking the sound barrier. At night you can watch flares light up the sky.

The last thing I saw when I left the Jenin refugee camp this past April was a large black flag placed triumphantly atop a heap of ruins at the camp’s entrance. It was the flag of Islamic Jihad. If there was any sign that Sharon’s military blitz into Jenin had been an utter failure, this was it.

“They raise their children to hate.” That’s what we’re told about the Palestinians. Watch the TV news. Listen to the radio. Pick up the dramatic US news magazines. Ask the intellectuals and the political pundits.

There is a halo of blood on the ground where Huda died while sleeping last Tuesday night (4/30/02). Toddler-sized diapers lie strewn on the ground among the concrete heaps where the bedroom wall once stood, and a single blue sandal, tiny as my fist, sits perched in a corner of the room on a wooden slab. Huda was 11 months old.

I heard the shooting from the balcony of my apartment. Ismail, Yusuf, and Anwar tried to infiltrate the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night.