West Bankrupt?

Kate Sorensen says it was her friend being shot at that did it. That friend, Jordan Flaherty, who is from Brooklyn, is in the West Bank with a group of more than 400 international civilians to protest the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories. On the phone with Sorensen over the weekend, he told her about dodging Israeli sniper fire while attempting to get to the Palestinian refugee camp where he is staying, in Bethlehem. According to Sorensen, Flaherty said, “And it’s my tax dollars that are paying for the bullets.”

As a result, Sorensen, who has been following activist reports of Israeli brutality, firmed up her decision to turn her thoughts on the war in the Middle East into action. A Philly resident perhaps best known for her arrest during the Republican National Convention in 2000 (accused of leading disruptive demonstrations, she was originally held on $1 million bail), she is on her way to the West Bank. “I’m going there because I feel strongly that I need to go do what I can. What [our] government has been doing to support Israel is wrong,” says Sorensen.

She is one of several activists leaving this week to join the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a loose coalition of groups acting as human shields for Palestinian communities particularly hard hit by the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Many Americans, and a few Philadelphia residents, are already part of the ISM.

ISM members have been sending reports back to the U.S. describing aspects of the current Israeli military incursion: assaults by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the Palestinian Authority’s civilian institutions; IDF attacks on several refugee camps; the killing of Palestinian police officers, who were, by several accounts, surrendering; and scenes not normally included in U.S. news reports of the conflict, such as, in Bethlehem and Ramallah, IDF soldiers firing on Red Crescent ambulances and preventing medical workers from helping wounded civilians.

According to reports from Huwaida Arraf, an American ISM organizer on the ground in Ramallah, a New York activist was in Yasser Arafat’s compound on Friday, negotiating for medical aid for wounded Palestinians. On Saturday, she reported, 60 activists in Ramallah defied curfew and marched through the streets to the local hospital to give blood, coming under fire from the IDF; 70 activists and doctors formed a human chain around the hospital, blocking the IDF from entering.

Sorensen admits gunfire and the IDF give her pause. “This is all very scary. I certainly do not want to be shot or killed. I don’t believe in violence. What I believe in is the U.S. should force Israel to pull out.”

Addressing the Palestinian suicide bombings that get so much play in the news, she says, “I don’t think that blowing yourself up at a Seder is something someone should be doing. But the mainstream media hasn’t been telling the whole story.”

Giora Becher, consul general of Israel in Philadelphia, says claims about the IDF are largely “propaganda.”

He says, “We’re now in the middle of a war, and in a time of war, innocent people are hurt. I feel very sorry that these people are going to Israel for the wrong cause. I would urge them to devote time also to the families of victims of terrorism in Israel.”

Sorensen says her plan is to “bear witness, come back and do speak-outs,” in an effort to get Americans to re-evaluate the Israeli occupation. She explains, “I’d like to get people to start thinking critically. I think people have not been allowed to have an opinion on this.”

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