Robyn Long

If a just peace is to prevail in the region, Israel must agree to dismantle the Wall, return confiscated land to its owners, and compensate Palestinians for damages and lost income, argue Lucy Mair and Robyn Long. Israeli occupation has made the Palestinian economy dependent upon Israel. The wall would exacerbate that dependence and vulnerability.

Between walking among the lands in Qalqiliya, which Israel is confiscating for the so-called ‘security barrier’, and visiting the hospital where Jihad, a fourteen year-old martyr who was shot by Israeli ‘special forces’, was prepared for his funeral, one can easily understand why the residents of this caged city state there is an internal closure on their spirits. Robyn Long writes from Occupied Jerusalem.

On the 18th of March, three of Rachel Corrie’s friends from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) were delivering her body to Tel Aviv as three friends and I entered the Gaza Strip. Her brutal murder by the Israeli solider, fortified in a bulldozer, was the first topic of discussion with community members from the Palestinian police officers who checked our passports to the children in south Rafah who live beside the place where Rachel was killed.

Sundes, an eight year old girl living in Qalqiliya, lead me upstairs to the room where her mother, Suher al Hindi, was killed last fall when shot by Israeli soldiers through a window in their home.

Last Saturday the streets of Ramallah were charged with the energy of nearly three hundred Palestinian women and men, all demanding an end to the vicious Occupation of their homeland and asserting their opposition to a U.S. war on the people of Iraq.