WHAT IS THE EAPPI?

The EAPPI is run by the World Council of Churches. In Britain, the programme is managed and financially underwritten by the Quakers. The request for accompaniment has come from the Palestinian people themselves, who asked for 'people from the international community to stand alongside us.' EAs provide one such service.

The programme's purpose is:

"to accompany Palestinians and Israelis in their non-violent actions and to carry out concerted advocacy efforts to end the occupation. Participants in the programme monitor and report violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, support acts of non-violent resistance alongside local Christian and Muslim Palestinians and Israeli peace activists, offer protection through non-violent presence, engage in public policy advocacy and, in general, stand in solidarity with the churches and all those struggling against the occupation."

All EAs wear a marked waistcoat while they are in Palestine, so they are clearly identifiable and a visible presence.

A BIT OF HISTORY, CURRENT SITUATION AND SOME STATISTICS

Ann outlined some of the history of the occupation, focusing on the West Bank where EAs operate. Since 1967, Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories on the West Bank has removed all but 22% of the land from the Palestinian people. Much of the 723km long separation wall being built by Israel at a cost of over $1 million per km is not built along the 'Green Line' boundary, but is on Palestinian land, depriving people of their farmland, olive groves and water and preventing contact with people on the other side of the wall, often preventing access to work, education and healthcare.

All the water in the West Bank is now controlled by Israel, with Israeli companies selling water which rightfully belongs to the Palestinian people back to them... if they can afford to buy it. Most of the water goes to Israeli settlements which boast swimming pools and beautiful displays of flowers, kept in top condition thanks to sprinkler systems, while many Palestinians don't have enough water for their basic needs. Ann described how, in Hebron, she saw water tanks used by the Palestinians for collecting rainwater peppered with bullet holes. They had been used for target practice by Israeli soldiers, deliberately depriving people of their only source of free water.

There are now half a million Israeli settlers living in settlements on the West Bank, with their own network of roads, in accommodation subsidised by the Israeli government. Not all settlers are Zionists; many have moved for economic reasons, enticed by the subsidies. Numbers of settlers continue to increase, although their presence contravenes international law. Under the 4th Geneva Convention, it is illegal for a country to put its own people into land it is occupying.

Meanwhile, many of the Palestinian families who were displaced (evicted) from their homes in 1948 still live in refugee camps managed by the UN. In many cases, those living in the camps are the children or grandchildren of the original refugees. They are born, grow up and die as refugees with no country status. They have no right of return to the land from which they were evicted. Around the refugee camps are pictures of the houses and farms they were evicted from and nearly every family has a large, old fashioned key to the door of the family home they have lost. There are three such refugee camps in Bethlehem, full of people living in extreme poverty under extremely cramped conditions and with few facilities.

The West Bank contains over 600 checkpoints preventing Palestinians from travelling around their own country. In addition, temporary checkpoints can appear on any road at any time.

Demolitions of Palestinian homes by Israeli soldiers are an ever-constant threat. Palestinians can appeal against demolition orders but most lose their appeals, following which they have a choice of demolishing their own home at their own expense or waiting until the IDF demolish it, for which they will be billed. Report on a number of recent demolitions here.

Much of the land taken from the Palestinians on the West Bank is now used by Israel for growing fruit, vegetables and herbs, often in huge polytunnels and very often using exploited Palestinian labour. Many Palestinian workers queue for hours each day to be allowed through checkpoints to work for the Israelis under appalling conditions for next to nothing on land that is by rights their own - in some cases it is actually their own family's land. Such work is universally hated but with unemployment sky-high, many feel that they have little choice if they are to be able to feed their families. The produce grown under these circumstances often ends up on our supermarket shelves, not always properly labelled. Carmel Agrexco is the main exporter from Israel and is majority owned by the Israeli state. Ann spoke about the Boycott Israeli/Settlement goods campaigns and the need to keep the pressure up on British shops to trace and account for where their produce comes from, since it is often sent to other countries first for packaging to obscure its true origins, packaged as 'produce of more than one country' or labelled as produce of the 'West Bank' without making it clear that it comes from occupied land. Ann recommended buying produce that is guaranteed to have been produced by Palestinians where available, for example Zaytoun olive oil, but pointed out that it is virtually impossible for Palestinians to get their own fresh produce out of the West Bank to sell.

AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT

It was Ann's stories of places she had visited, people she had met, their lives and suffering, accompanied by a slide show of photos, that brought the talk alive and made it real for me.

YANUN

Ann talked of the fear under which many Palestinians live of their homes being demolished and their possessions lost. In the village of Yanun where Ann stayed as an EA, people had temporarily abandoned their homes en masse in 2004 because of threats of and actual violence by settlers and Israeli soldiers against the villagers. The first people to respond to this forced mass removal were Israeli peacemakers. EAs later took over responsibility for providing nonviolent presence in the village and there is always a team of accompaniers here. One mother who lives in the village, Najir, said of the EAs: "When people see you and when children see you, we know we are safe."

Palestinians living in the village now have access to less than a third of their land. All roads to the village have been cut off bar one. People cannot walk on the hills behind their homes. They cannot grow crops on their own land. They don't have adequate grazing land for their sheep and goats and they cannot access their own olive groves. Olive trees need to be tended to thrive. The year before last, Rashid, the village's mayor, described how they were given two days to get onto their land and harvest their olives. There were so few that he brought them home in his pockets.

The first thing anyone is shown when they arrive in the village is where the artificial boundaries imposed by the settlers and IDF have been set. Any Palestinian or visitor who crosses the boundary is risking their life. Settlers, meanwhile, stroll through the village at whim and come to the village well to make the point that they consider it to be their land. In one conversation with such a settler, a father with young children, Ann was told that Palestinians could go to any Arab land but this father considered this land on the West Bank to belong to his people, given by God. Ann was particularly upset by the attitude of the settler children, who had been taught to hate the Palestinians and were full of anger towards them. "If they are like this now, as children, how are they going to behave as adults?"

ABU AL AJAJ

In a herding village in the Jordan Valley, Abu al Ajaj, Israeli soldiers had demolished much of the village the week before Ann arrived. Ann showed a photograph of a makeshift shelter with no tarp over the top. The missing tarp was down to the IDF; soldiers had taken exception to the presence of a tarp to protect the family and their few possessions from the rain and bitter cold and had forced the family to remove it. All over the West Bank, Israeli soldiers make a point of destroying anything which might be used as a shelter. Many families have resorted to sheltering in caves. Their main concern is often for their animals, their livelihood, which need to have shelter from the weather. Animals have been killed in the Israeli attacks on the village. As one village said in despair to Ann of his Israeli attackers, "What have we done to them?"

One man told Ann how he had not even been allowed to remove his possessions from his shelter before it was demolished. In this village, the IDF returned for the eighth time in March 2011 and demolished every shelter, even though many families have papers which show the demolition orders for their homes are under appeal and they should therefore be left alone. Young Israeli conscripts ignore all pleas and trash the homes regardless. In such circumstances, EAs monitor and report, to the UN, to the Consulate in Jerusalem, to Human Rights Watch and other international organisations.

REFUSENIKS

There are some young Israelis who are refusing to be conscripted to the IDF, even though there is huge pressure on them to conform and to refuse conscription means imprisonment. Ann has met 18 year olds who have been to prison several times already over their refusal to be part of this brutality. They need our support and solidarity too.

JERUSALEM

Jerusalem is a divided city with checkpoints to get in and checkpoints within the city itself. Palestinians who are Muslim and who live elsewhere on the West Bank can never go to Jerusalem. As a Palestinian, you are prevented from travelling even in your own area. The separation wall cuts people off from their neighbours. One huge monstrosity of a checkpoint is simply never open. At a convent Ann has visited in the past, there used to be three large classes full of young children. Since the wall has gone up and with the checkpoint closed, there are now just a few children in one class as all the others are cut off and cannot get through without taking a detour of miles. In addition to permanent checkpoints and those which are checkpoints in name only (ie closed), flying checkpoints can appear anywhere at any time, making it even harder for people to move around in their own country.

BETHLEHEM

Bethlehem has been completely cut off, surrounded as it is by the Apartheid wall with checkpoints and people let through, or not, at the whim of the Israeli forces. Ann spoke of one house surrounded on three sides by the wall with cameras looking straight through its windows. No Israeli Jews live in Bethlehem. Christians with passports can generally get in and out, but for Palestinians it is a different matter. Tourists who sail through checkpoints in their coaches have no idea what the wall means for Palestinian people. Ann described how tourists are often completely unaware of the existence of the wall, let alone its effect on the lives of Palestinians in Bethlehem. Tourists and pilgrims to Bethlehem may be told to hurry to visit the church and to get back on the bus quickly because it is so dangerous, but Ann's own experience is that this is misleading propaganda as the town is generally safe and a place where Muslims and Christians live together in peace and harmony. Israeli tour groups make a point of missing out Bethlehem altogether on their itineraries.

At the wall, Palestinians have to queue behind grilles on both sides to get in or to get out, like caged animals. The wall totally imprisons them and some people have never been beyond it. Palestinian men may queue from 2am each day to get through the checkpoint, to be exploited in low paid jobs working for Israelis, either on the land or building the hated settlements. Only desperation could make people accept such work. Those who do it feel they have no other options.

THE WALL

Ann described how the wall looks from the Israeli side, often landscaped so that it is hardly visible, while on the Palestinian side no such trouble is taken and it towers over towns and villages, with armed soldiers in the watchtowers, CCTV and razor wire all adding to the real feeling of imprisonment. However, the wall has been widely graffiti'd and decorated with slogans and artwork, variously angry, beautiful and humourous. Some years ago, Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum made a graphic of what Wrexham might look like divided by a separation wall, cutting Hope Street in half (see photo). If you were on the side of the wall illustrated, you may not be able to get your children to their schools, young adults would not be able to get to college, you may be cut off from your workplace and you would not be able to access the local hospital, even in an emergency.

Last week, I met up with a doctor and university lecturer, Joseph O'Neill, who has an interest in human rights in Palestine, especially the issue of access to health care, and who has recently set up a regular discussion group to allow Christians, Muslims, Jews and others to meet to talk together about the occupation of Palestine and its effects. He told me that he had been shocked to learn of the infant mortality rate in Palestine; a large number of these deaths happen when women are prevented from gaining access to medical care on the other side of the wall and end up giving birth at checkpoints without medical attention and under conditions of extreme stress and discomfort. Sometimes the mothers lose their lives too and Ann spoke of one man she knew of, desperate to get his wife to medical care in childbirth, who was shot at a checkpoint.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY

This being a meeting organised by a Christian faith group, Ann put some emphasis on the Christmas story and the difficulties Joseph and Mary would have had if attempting their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem today to Joseph's ancestral home to complete the Census. Bethlehem is closed to Israeli citizens unless they have a special military permit, so it's likely that Joseph and Mary wouldn't be allowed in. Although the Magi would probably sail through with their international passports, the local shepherds would quite possibly be denied access. Local artisans in Bethlehem are now making wooden nativity scenes that feature the separation wall.

Ann encouraged church groups to use the Christmas nativity story to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine and to encourage action against the occupation. Suggested actions included selling Palestinian made Christmas goods such as wooden tree ornaments; sending messages of solidarity to Bethlehem; studying the Kairos Palestine document, a call from Palestinian Christians behind the separation wall for the world to take action; including the separation wall in a church nativity scene.

CENSUS REFUSERS

At the end of the meeting, I spoke briefly about the 2011 Census in England and Wales and the census contract with Lockheed Martin, the arms company which manufactures many of the weapons used by Israel against the Palestinians, including the F-16 fighter jets which were used to bomb civilians in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2009. Sarah Ledsom, one of the resisters who is being prosecuted for her stand, also came along to yesterday's meeting. She cites the use of Lockheed Martin weaponry on Palestinians as her main reason for her refusal to comply with the 2011 census. Those present yesterday were invited to join the vigil and demonstration outside Liverpool Magistrates Court next Thursday 8 December from 9.30am. Many of those present came up to Sarah after the meeting and wished her well for her court hearing. Sarah plans to use a human rights defence in explaining to the courts her decision to boycott the census.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Although brought up a Catholic, I am now extra-faith (extra being outside, not more!) There seem to be plenty of inter-faith initiatives, promoting understanding between those from different religious backgrounds, but the matter of promoting understanding between individuals from faith groups and those of a secular persuasion is more neglected. The arrival of the Occupy camp on the steps of St Paul's has perhaps helped in this regard, particularly the offer by Christian activists to create a ring of prayer around the camp to prevent its eviction. See also this article.

I therefore offer this essay as an invitation to secular activists to read about and appreciate the real, practical and supportive actions of Christians such as the Ecumenical Accompaniers in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their efforts to continue the campaign against the occupation once they return home. If we're going to be effective, we all need to learn to work together.