Challenge to Bush:  Enough Violence!
     In the dead of the night of Monday, July 22, a one-ton bomb dropped from an Israeli F-16 fighter plane fell on a home in Gaza City. The giant blast killed a suspected Palestinian terrorist leader and 16 others, including nine children, wounded 150 others and wrecked a Gaza City neighborhood.
     Two days later, a group of 13 American United Methodists arrived in Gaza, midway through a 10-day fact-finding tour of Palestine and Israel. Among them was Phil Wilson of Pittsburgh, a retired United Methodist minister and board member of the Thomas Merton Center.
     Following their visit to Gaza, the group composed a bitter letter to President George W. Bush, expressing "outrage" at the attack and pointing out U.S. responsibility in supplying the weapons "which killed and maimed so many."
     "How many such massacres must occur before the U.S. government says "Enough violence!" the letter challenged the President.
     The letter urged Bush to stop financial aid to Israel until Israel ends its occupation of Palesinian lands and stops building settlements, demolishing Palestinian homes and committing other human rights violations.
     Throughout their tour, the United Methodist group had been shocked by what they saw of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

"I’ve read and tried to keep up with things, but it was far worse than anything I had imagined," said Phil Wilson. "It’s like entering a war zone, almost a concentration camp, when you go into these Palestinian areas. Everything is surrounded by tanks and soldiers and barbed wire and check points and things like that."
     Wilson described the process the group followed as they traveled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, Hebron, or other Palestinian towns on their agenda.
     "You can’t drive through a checkpoint, so you have to leave your car or taxi and walk and wait in line at the checkpoint, and you wait until the Israeli soldiers feel like it. You’re totally at their pleasure. If they’re in a bad mood they’ll just let you stand, or they’ll pick on things and check every little bit you have. Then you’ve got to get another taxi to go to the Palestinian section."
     As a result, Wilson said, a trip that would normally take 20 minutes might become an ordeal of four or five hours, or possibly no trip at all.
     The soldiers at the checkpoints are "very threatening," Wilson said. "You’ve got guns pointed at you the whole time you’re standing in line. There are tanks. There are soldiers on top of a hill with machine guns pointing down at you, and other soldiers patrolling with rifles."
     Wilson was also surprised by the harshness of the curfews imposed on the Palestinians.
     "I had thought that when there was a curfew everybody had to be off the streets at nine o’clock at night, like the curfews we have here for teenagers.
     Curfew there is that noone can leave their house until the Israeli government says they can. This can be days. It can be four days in a row that noone is allowed out. That means that children can’t play in the streets, they can’t go to school, women can’t shop, people can’t go to work, everything comes to a complete halt."
     One afernoon the group was leaving Bethlehem for East Jerusalem, hurrying to beat a 3 p.m. curfew that the Israelis had abruptly moved up from 5 p.m.
     "It was like a mad dash to get to the check points, because you didn’t know how long it was going to take and what was going to happen," Wilson said.
     As the group waited, they saw a woman get out of a car and rush toward the checkpoint.
     "She was carrying a baby in her arms, and she kept saying ‘Are they going to shoot me? Will they shoot me?’ because she was afraid if she was there a minute late that they might just turn on her."
     At another checkpoint, the group saw a woman who might have been going into labor waiting for an ambulance. "She was holding her stomach in tremendous pain," Wilson recalled. "We were up on a hillside looking down, and it took a long time to get an ambulance. They say sometimes it takes hours to get an ambulance, because the soldiers won’t let ambulances go through, and they have to be stopped and checked. Sometimes they hold them up for hours, and a number of ambulances have been fired upon.
     Fear is everywhere, Wilson said. "It isn’t just people in Jerusalem afraid of a bomb, but people who wonder if somebody’s going to shoot them at a checkpoint, if they’re going to be able to get through. And then there’s the wonder if somebody’s going to come with a bulldozer and knock their house down, or drive a tank down the street in the middle of the night and maybe knock over a few homes, or whether there will be planes flying over."
     The group heard about fear from mothers at a well-baby clinic run by churches in Gaza.
     "They said their kids regularly scream in the night and come running into bed because they’re afraid there will be an airplane or a tank coming down the street," Wilson said. "We talked with the head of a community mental health center, and he said that the psychological problems with the children are just amazing. Bed wetting has gone sky-high."
     The only rememedy for these problems is an end to the occupation, Wilson said.
     "The Israelis control things, and this sense of controlling their lives being controlled just drives people crazy."
     The group also saw effects of the devastated Palestinian economy.
     "We saw farmers who have not been allowed to pick their own plums off the trees for a month, and one man lost one ton of plums because they all rotted," Wilson said. "He also was not allowed to dust his grapevines, and he wasn’t sure whether they would be good after two months of not spraying them."
     During their tour, the group met with religious leaders of all faiths and directors of many social and human rights organizations.
     "All of these folks kept saying, ‘Go back, speak to the American people and to President Bush and your political leadership about justice, and to be aware what’s going on, and why can’t you at least be even-handed?"
     "Everyone we talked to condemned the suicide bombing," Wilson said. "They were opposed to violence, but then they would say you need to understand why this is happenng, the sense of desperation these people have."
     The Anglican bishop for Jerusalem and the Middle East, Bishop Riah abu-al-Assal, a Palestinian born in Galilee, "was very emotional about this," Wilson said. "He said all the Palestinians may be lost to emigration or warfare if things don’t change soon. I remember him saying that in 30 years or so we may not have any Christian churches left in Jerusalem, the birthplace of Christianity - they’ll all be closed down. But he was mainly concerned about these people - how long can you stand being occupied and locked up in your homes? Will they break down; what’s going to happen?"
     Among the Palestinians, "we met some really good leadership, people who are level headed, concerned and committed," Wilson said.
     Among those Palestinian leaders was Dr. Ziyad Abu Amrou, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council — the elected legislature - whom they interviewed in his office in Gaza.
     Dr. Ziyad reported that the legislature had not met in 22 months because its members could not travel. "How can we have democracy if we can’t meet?" he said.