From Occupied Palestine

Palestinian displacement: a case apart?
University of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre
Forced Migration Review 26 (September 2006)

complete issue: PDF; Doc; single article PDF

Awakening the resistance
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Counterpunch, 10 August 2006

Thousands of Lebanese, Palestinians and others made a kind of pilgrimage to Fatima's gate in the summer of 2000 to celebrate the end of Israel

A Journey to Rafah
"We will destroy you, if not in death then in life"
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Counterpunch, 28 March 2004

The Gaza Strip is far more than a prison. One need only spend time in Khan Yunis or Bureij, Jabalia or Nuseirat, Gaza City or Beit Hanoun to recognize the flaw in the prison analogy. In Gaza you are more than an inmate in a giant penitentiary. You are a walking human target, shadowed by hired killers who can destroy you and your surroundings at will. Your home belongs to bulldozers and dynamite, your cities and refugee camps to F-16s and helicopter gun ships. In Gaza your livelihood is diminished each day by an impoverishment that is as deliberate as it is merciless. There is neither escape from desperation nor refuge from terror. Nowhere is this more evident than in Rafah.

Return to Rafah
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Znet, 13 February 2004

Said Zoroub drives a white pick-up truck with the words "Rafah Municipality" painted on the driver's side in Arabic and English, a gift from the Norwegians.[1] Less than an hour after my arrival in Rafah, Zoroub, the mayor, receives an urgent call on his cell phone. An Israeli bulldozer has struck a water main eight feet under the earth in the process of demolishing homes along the border between Rafah and Egypt. This has cut off the water supply to the western half of the city. From the passenger side of the municipality truck I get to survey the latest damage.

Bombing Syria: A strategy for self-defense
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
CounterPunch, 9 October 2003

Israel made a wise decision when it decided to bomb Syria on October 5th. As a result, the Palestinian terrorist organization Islamic Jihad has called a halt to all suicide bombings. The parents of the 29-year-old female suicide bomber who blew herself up inside Maxim's restaurant in Haifa on Saturday have sent a letter of apology to the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and to the Mayor of Haifa. In their letter they state explicitly that they would have expected no more fitting a punishment than the demolition of their family home, the measure taken by the IDF after the bombing, and that they are saddened and bewildered by their daughter's action. "We accept our displacement with dignity and take upon ourselves full responsibility for our daughter's senseless action," they wrote. In response to this unprecedented letter, Israeli military authorities stationed outside Jenin offered relatives of the dead woman a thirty-minute reprieve from all travel restrictions, issuing them temporary passes for free travel throughout the northern West Bank if curfew is lifted within the next 24 hours.

Resistance and collaboration
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Znet, 22 September 2003

As early as 1996, three years after the signing of the Oslo 'peace' Accords, Israeli military leaders drew up contingency plans for the re-conquest of the West Bank and the destruction of the Palestinian Authority. They called their plan "Field of Thorns" and in the spring of 2002 Sharon's government began effectively to carry it out under the name "Operation Defensive Shield". This series of military operations nullified the administrative distinctions for joint and separate rule over segments of the West Bank (Areas A, B, & C) that were established under the Oslo agreement, and dealt a near deathblow to the leadership of the PA. In the name of security the IDF also caused irreparable damage to Palestinian popular and democratic civil society fostered by numerous NGOs, educational and political institutions. Soldiers ransacked offices, destroyed computer hard drives, stole, and in some cases burned, decades' worth of statistical, sociological information stored in paper files and on software disks. In some cases they wrecked the offices and headquarters of these organizations, including Palestinian TV and Radio stations, so thoroughly that even the most hardened citizens were left stunned.

Suicide's most willing accomplice
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Palestine Chronicle, 14 June 2003

Razor wire, electrical & steel fences, concrete barriers and road blocks, watchtowers and tanks, helicopters, drones and F16s overhead, and the looming gray wall of separation encircling us - these are the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. Jennifer, these are what imprison us on our ever-shrinking land, what scar and desecrate our towns and villages. Bulldozers maul the earth and eat away at our homes and orchards. Hideous robotic claws tear up our land and the pavement on our streets and even walking becomes impossible. How can I run away? The borders around me trap me at every bend. Worst of all is that when I close my eyes the same barbed wire cuts across my mind so that I cannot escape. Not even in my dreams.

Khan Yunis: Before the juggernaut
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Counterpunch, 9 October 2002

A mobile watchtower, lifted into the air by a crane, surveys Khan Yunis day and night. An ambulance from the city waits behind a nearby concrete building day after day; it waits so that the next child shot for playing too close to the wall can make it to the local hospital before dying. The wall is a vast, menacing construction stretching down the coast as far as you can see, separating Khan Yunis from the Gush Katif settlement block in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers sit poised with machine guns in the cylindrical bunker at the northern edge of the wall overlooking the ruins they've made of the Khan Yunis refugee camp.

Days of darkness, days of awe: Yom Kippur in Palestine
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Electronic Intifada, 15 September 2002

Yom Kippur in Palestine and the Palestinian people are again atoning for Israel's sin of occupation.

The lockdown in Gaza and the West Bank is complete: for three days no Palestinian will travel past a checkpoint; no swimmers will be allowed on the beaches, more heavily patrolled by gunboats than ever; the electric fence around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip and the wall already built in Khan Yunis are manned with armed soldiers as are the borders all around the West Bank.

Rising up from the dust: Report from Gaza City
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Eyewitness Report, 23 July 2002

Gaza City -- Heaps of concrete, broken pillars with wire sticking out, people's shoes, clothes, bedding, strewn haphazardly among the rubble, dust everywhere, a hole in the landscape where a two-story apartment was just yesterday: the hardest part for me is how familiar it has all become. Jenin, Rafah, Nablus, Khan Yunis, Ramallah, Gaza City. The Israelis are masters in the art of destruction. And as I wander through another mass of wrecked lives I'm struck by the sense of deja vu that comes over me.