Personality Profile : George Rishmawi

It's my honor to introduce my friend George Rishmawi as the first in a series of profiles of friends and colleagues living here in the West Bank. I'll try to include a variety of people that I think you should get to know.

George and Neta Golan at a TV studio

Before I left home for the West Bank, several people in Virginia asked me if I would be working with George Rishmawi. Then I went to New York to learn more about my assignment, and everyone told me how great it would be to work with George Rishmawi. So I was really curious to meet this guy.

My assignment was to assist George with technology-type projects -- websites, databases, and teaching. But to be honest, I learned a heck of a lot more from him than he learned from me. He taught me a lot about developing websites and photoshop tricks. The guy is busy working for peace, but he still finds the time to keep up with new technology developments. If I need to know what's current, I'll ask him.

I deferred to George in teaching Photoshop

Recently I brought a broken piece of computer equipment to George to see if he had a friend who could repair it. I had tried unsuccessfully to repair it myself, and it had sat for months in my apartment. George took a quick look at it, started disassembling a few pieces, and within minutes, had it working again. Grinning, he handed it back to me.

In the local community, George is also very well-regarded. He serves Beit Sahour and Bethlehem by organizing community service projects. Projects that he helped organize include programs to assist the homeless, to clean refugee camp areas, to educate young people in areas like human rights, international law, English, and website building. In all of my talks with co-workers, community volunteers, activists, and family, I've never heard a bad word about the man.

Recently George made a lot of the young women in the community unhappy -- he got engaged. His fiance is a charming young woman named Fida, and I'm sure they will have many, many happy years together.

The following is the text of a speech George gave on a recent peace tour of North America:

George leading a peace march in Bethlehem.

Thank you for being here. My name is George Rishmawi and I was born in 1973, in Beit Sahour. Parts of Beit Sahour are in what's known as 'Zone A', other parts are in 'Zone C', zones of occupied Palestine as designated by the Oslo agreement. It's a town of 13 000 people. 80% are Christians, and 20% are Muslims, but everyone is related and everyone knows each other. People know each other so well that it can take 15 minutes to walk 100 metres in Beit Sahour, because you are always running into your cousins, friends, and you have to stop and talk. Beit Sahour is also one of the sites of a nonviolent resistance movement against the Israeli occupation, a community that refused to pay taxes to Israel in 1989, which I'll talk more about.

I have to say that it is a very different feeling being here in Canada. When I travel here, or in the US, or in Europe, it's a different feeling because I'm able to drive for hours and not be stopped at a checkpoint. It's a different feeling because here you don't feel like someone is constantly trying to push you out.

I didn't really understand that I was living under occupation until I was 8 years old. When I was 8 years old my cousin was kidnapped and killed by the Israeli army. He was 24 years old, and because he was a close relative, the 'mourning house' was our house. Many people visited us in those 40 days of mourning, because at the time such a killing was still an unusual and rare event. It was then that I understood that we were living under an occupation: an occupation that steals your land, your freedom, your cousin away-and one day it could steal you away as well.

The first intifada started in 1987, and I was old enough then to participate in it. For a young person in Palestine at the time there were all kinds of options as to how to participate. Which party to join? Which tactics to apply? There were many different parties with many different ideas as to how to win liberation. I was attracted to a group that believes in education, in nonviolence. We worked based on the belief that by educating ourselves, we would give ourselves the power to face the situation, and the more knowledge we had, the more power we would have as well.

But of course I started by throwing rocks, chasing soldiers and running away from them, like everyone else. Like everyone else, I was arrested, in 1989. I'm a bit shy to talk about my experience in prison because I was only imprisoned for two months. My experience was not tough at all compared with my cousin's, or another cousin who was in prison for 7 years.

Based on my experiences though, if I were the Israeli authorities I would not send any Palestinians to prison. Because it's in prison that you learn how resistance is absolutely necessary. You learn because in prison you feel the occupation even more intensely. I was in prison and missed university. I missed Christmas, New Year's Eve, and my birthday. On New Year's Eve we were gassed by the army, in prison, because January 1 is the anniversary of the Fatah movement's founding in 1967, associated strongly with the movement for Palestinian Liberation. The prison authorities were worried about how the prisoners would react to the anniversary, so they put us under curfew and gassed us. We were under curfew in prison. It's strange, but true.

But before long I was out of prison, and back in the intifada. Around Christmas of 1991 there was a candlelight procession in Beit Sahour. I heard that there would be Palestinians, internationals, and Israelis taking part in this and I knew I had to join it. I wanted to join it so that I could talk to the Israelis, specifically, and tell them about the different kind of Christmas that I had had in prison. So I went, and I met those Israelis, and I did tell them about my experience, and they listened. I found out who organized the procession-it was the Center for Rapprochement Between Peoples, that I had heard of because of the tax revolt in 1989. I joined it immediately.

I appreciated the idea of rapprochement because it gave me a chance to tell Israelis, without using violence, what I thought of the occupation and what I had gone through. I believe that in some sense the violence that we are living comes about because people don't have a way of communicating this pain, these experiences, without violence. Palestinians are shooting in order to say 'we don't accept the occupation, we have a bad experience'. The rapprochement center provided another way for people to say this. So we organized dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis, but since 2000, with the second intifada, we have also been doing a lot of direct action, nonviolent direct action.

One of the important initiatives that rapprochement was involved in was the tax revolt in 1989 that I mentioned. In that year Beit Sahour refused to pay taxes to Israel, and they did so under a slogan. The slogan was: "No taxation without representation." This slogan might be familiar to you, but what happened next had a strong impact on me. Beit Sahour was seized by Israel. The army arrested 89 people and besieged the town. There was a resolution in the United Nations condemning Israel's actions in Beit Sahour, and it was vetoed by-the United States of America. That was a clear message from the United States that what is good for us isn't good when other people do it, and it had an impact on me personally.

Israel confiscated goods, machines from small businesses, ovens right out of people's houses, in order to 'collect the taxes' that Beit Sahour was refusing to pay. They took $5 million worth of goods and left the town with a damaged infrastructure. There was a loud cry among Palestinians then, because our nonviolent resistance was met very violently. There were Israelis coming in to break the siege and be with the Palestinians. That was part of an effort against Prime Minister Rabin's policy of 'breaking the bones of the Palestinians'. Our initiative was called 'Break bread not bones'. One day the military ordered the evacuation of all the Israelis in the town on the grounds that it was 'dangerous' for them. Luckily some of the Israelis visiting us were rabbis, and they argued. It was Shabbat, they said-was the Israeli government going to be the only government in the world that impinged on the religious freedom of Jews by forcing them to travel on Shabbat?

In 2000, the rapprochement center had another candlelight procession, the biggest since 1991, with 8000 people. After our demonstration there were several houses that were demolished by shelling. Why? The army claimed that there were snipers who were hiding out in the houses. But there were 160 houses destroyed, 240 families displaced-because when you destroy a home you displace more than one family. When your house becomes the source of your fear, when the children are afraid to stay in the house, you will want to leave, and so many people left even though their houses weren't destroyed.

On December 28 of 2000 we marched for removal of the military base near Beit Sahour. There was no justification for this base even in terms of protecting Israeli settlers. There were no Israeli civilians in the area. It was also an ancient site of graves dating back to the Byzantine era, of historical importance. 350 of us marched to the base, and there were no guards at the gate because marching to a military base was not something that was done, it wasn't something they were expecting. So we walked right in, and gave them our message: we meant them no harm, we intended no violence, but that they had to evacuate the base. They were shocked. This wasn't something that happened! They said they would consult with their superiors. On our way out, one protestor-an international, who they say was French but I still remember as a Canadian-climbed up to a watchtower and planted a Palestinian flag. Palestinians wanted to do that but couldn't because they would have been shot, but this international managed to do it. This was a victory. There were 350 people marching, people of all ages, including kids, internationals, Palestinians, some Israelis, no one even threw a stone.

The Israeli media put this on the 7pm news-most people watch the 7 o clock news. The commentary that went with it was: how did the army allow them to do this? This question was asked over and over. When the IDF spokesperson was interviewed, he said the base had been moved-200 yards away. Now 200 yards is not a major victory but it shows that they were concerned. We thought we could build on this. There were examples of successful nonviolent action, like the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron, so why couldn't we do the same? We planned for a campaign in April 2001.

In that campaign we had 3 major actions targeting the daily problems of Palestinians under occupation. The roadblocks, for example. These were a major problem, dividing the West Bank into 64 separate cantons. They make 15-minute journeys into journeys of 3 or 4 hours. Babies have been born at these roadblocks. People have died in ambulances at them. The roadblocks are for the settlers. The settlers can drive straight through them while Palestinians have to wait. So we did direct actions to take these roadblocks down. We had other campaigns of direct action.

Since April 2002-well, March 29, 2002 to be exact-the ISM has managed to establish a permanent international presence in some Palestinian areas. Staying in homes, in Balata in the houses of martyrs that are targeted for demolition. Riding ambulances and acting as a human shield, for students and teachers in schools. Sometimes internationals have been shot at. In Beit Jala, there was some shooting even though the army knew there were internationals in the crowd. We have been training people in nonviolence and in action in the Palestinian situation, and we've seen great improvements in the performance of our activists as a result. So today training is a fundamental part of what the ISM does.

The ISM is today a Palestinian led, nonviolent movement. It isn't that Palestinians are the commanders. We have a consensus-based structure, with a core group that meets once a month but with the details left to the affinity groups. We have regional coordination, and a decentralized structure that depends on the local communities. Our goal is to help Palestinians do nonviolent resistance because when they do it without international accompaniment they are met with terrible violence. The international presence enabled many families, this October, to go to their fields and harvest their olives, and open roadblocks. When the army sees that they're watched, they are less free-handed in how they treat people.

You are all invited to Palestine. When they see internationals who have come, Palestinians feel hope, that others have come to share their hardship. Hope is very important for a people who feel their pain ignored, their voice unheard, their land taken away every day. Thank you very much.

George cuts the Engagement cake with a sword. Fida watches.