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16 | Somerville Magzine Powers of Observation SUSAN LOURENÇO (Loewenthal, 1954, History) Humiliation and harrassment at the hands of conscript soliders the age of our grandsons. Sunset at A Ras seen through razor wire An Israeli citizen describes her involvement in an extraordinary group of women who are upholding the human rights of Palestinians – simply by watching. Throughout my career as a university administrator, I had little time or inclination to volunteer for anything unconnected with my work, much of which dealt with social justice and outreach to Chicago’s African American and Hispanic minorities. My passion for equity and justice led me to continue the struggle for human dignity when I moved to Israel. I agreed, when approached by an Israeli NGO ‘A New Way’, to serve as their chair in bringing together Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli children in Jaffa where I live. And a member of A New Way took me the next step – to MachsomWatch. In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Years went by, but voices raised in Israel and abroad against Israel’s occupation went unheeded. Jewish settlements grew like mushrooms, while international laws on the occupier’s obligations were ignored. The results were two Palestinian Intifadas – popular uprisings, the second of which began in autumn 2000. Early in 2001, a group of Israeli women began to check rumours circulating in Jerusalem about violation of human rights at newly created checkpoints around the city. They drove out to these checkpoints (machsomim), stood there, monitored and reported what they saw. Today, from these unassuming beginnings, 250 to 300 Israeli women observe and report, day in day out throughout the year, in words and pictures, protesting the checkpoints, mounds and ditches that hamper daily life across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). We document conduct of the Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Border Police and Israel Police (and violence-prone settlers), protect the human rights of Palestinians and assist them wherever possible. I joined MachsomWatch five and a half years ago, after becoming an Israeli citizen. Though I had worked for civil rights in the US, I had never been involved in a conflict arena, or engaged in human rights – certainly not one as basic as freedom of movement. MachsomWatch is entirely volunteer-run, a grass roots organisation, no membership fees, no formal hierarchy. Women drive deep into the West Bank, around Jenin in the north, Hebron in the south, the cities of Qalqilya, Tulkarm and Nablus in the centre and around Jerusalem: a minimum two women to a shift, morning and afternoon, and before dawn to monitor the newly privatised access ‘terminals’ to Israel proper, where thousands of Palestinian men and women lucky enough to get work permits line up at 3 am hoping to reach their jobs in Israel. A report written after each shift, in English or Hebrew, translated by volunteers into the other language, is posted on www.machsomwatch.org. We have no office, just an official address. When MachsomWatch became a legal ‘charity’, just about when I joined, I offered to write funding proposals and liaise with embassies and foundations. When not driving to checkpoints and writing reports, I’m busy seeking funds to carry on (we spend over £90,000 a year on transportation alone: some women won’t drive in the OPT, so a Palestinian Israeli driver ferries them). I drive about 130 miles a shift, once a week, in summer heat and winter rain, frequently with visitors – mostly from abroad – who invariably find it hard to digest what they see: thousands of lives disrupted by humiliation and harassment at the hands of conscript soldiers the age of our grandsons, withholding of permits (to work, trade, study, get medical treatment or attend family celebrations) – with a sickening callousness. A Palestinian friend, owner of a ‘seam line’ plant nursery between the 1949 armistice Green Line and the newly built Separation Wall (a land grab rather than a security need) told me recently that a young soldier made his 77-year-old father take off his shoes and walk barefoot through a muddy checkpoint. Over the years, we’ve done what we can on behalf of our Palestinian friends, people met on our forays, at the checkpoints or along the way. We tried to prevent the cutting down of olive trees to build a ‘security’ road around a settlement; we’ve picked olives with a family, joined in happy events like weddings or the birth of a baby, made endless phone calls to the army and its so-called ‘humanitarian centre’, often to no avail, but with occasional success in our attempts to ease life under occupation. The Palestinian landscape is dotted with roadblocks, apartheid roads, Separation Wall, military lookout towers, razor wire and ‘rolling’ checkpoints – a military jeep or Hummer suddenly across the middle of a road. The occupation is often mindless in its unpredictability. Checkpoints and barricades are put up, taken down; checkpoints are manned one day, unmanned the next. Added to this, the occupation’s bureaucracy has created a system, connected to ‘security’, overseen by the secret service which ‘blacklists’ people trying to get permits to work in Israel, to visit an ailing relative, to go to a hospital in another West Bank city, etc., who refuse to become informers. No wonder Palestinian society is disintegrating; no wonder the Palestinians are dependent on the subjugator: there is little work within the West Bank itself. In brief, much of what we see, and report, has little to do with security or a path to peace, but much to do with man’s inhumanity to man.
Somerville Magzine | 17 A quick step in Ethiopia’s slow lane NICK MARTLEW (2002, PPE) Oxfam’s humanitarian policy advisor in Ethiopia describes his patient, painstaking struggle against the urgencies of poverty. I’ve only just begun to understand this huge, ancient, devastatingly complex country It was in one of the regular one-on-one meetings with the Principal that I said it. Dame Fi (as we called her – affectionately, of course) was quite struck by the phrase: ‘how time can move both fast and slow amazes me.’ I didn’t tell her it was robbed from a song. My point back then was that an afternoon in the library could feel like an endurance test, while an eight-week term would be over before you could say ‘reading list’. Fast and slow at the same time. It’s a paradox that I’m still grappling with. These days I’m the humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam in Ethiopia. To decode that, I take the lessons from Oxfam’s work with livestock or water with half a million or so Ethiopians and try to persuade the people who matter – local government, the United Nations, Western governments – to put these lessons into practice for the millions that our programmes can’t reach. In my work, the quick-slow conundrum is at times painfully obvious. Oxfam, like other agencies and the Ethiopian government, has to react as fast as humanly possible to outbreaks of disease or reports of extreme water or food shortages. That is the fast. The slow is the change that is needed to stop these emergencies from happening in the first place. Disasters here are mainly a function of poverty (in all its dimensions), not of some external shock like a tsunami or earthquake. Poverty won’t be eradicated here quickly, so disasters will keep on happening. Put simply, we have to work at the speed of the hare and the tortoise at the same time. Looking at this from a more personal perspective, I’ve been in this job since March 2009 and the months have poured away. Yet I feel as though I’ve only just begun to understand this huge, ancient, devastatingly complex country. It’s a luxury to have an opportunity like this – to pause from the frenetic working life and reframe the fast-slow conundrum in a positive way: small decisions made in the rush of the day-to-day can have a truly lasting impact. A personal example: in the heady days of my first year at Somerville, I decided to apply to join a small HIV and AIDS project in Kenya. I was accepted and was able to take this first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa thanks to a travel grant from the College. That started a journey that has taken me here to Ethiopia, via the Sub-Saharan African politics paper as part of PPE, an MA course in International Politics at Sheffield, a hard slog up the ladder at Oxfam, and a year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1984, a spark burst into the daily life of Bob Geldof, ignited by Michael Buerk’s report from the famine in Ethiopia. Twenty-five years on, I chaperoned Sir Bob around Ethiopia. I had been 18 months old when that spark was struck. Now Geldof wanted to see the Ethiopia of the 21st century. Among Bob’s entourage were a couple of hedge fund managers. Though they saw the hunger and immediate suffering, they seized on the change of the last 25 years as well as the long term prospects for change: futures markets, commodity exchanges, communities being given the support to build their own visions of the future. Change, development, progress – it takes time. But we only get there by moving through the pressing, immediate decisions, taking – and giving – opportunities whenever and however we can. While visiting Oxfam’s work with honey farmers in central Ethiopia, one of the visiting hedge fund managers promised them computers so they could better link in with the private sector. Years ago, I was given a bursary by Somerville that allowed me to concentrate on studies rather than worry about money. Whatever the circumstance, opportunities grasped or given in time’s fast lane can show their value only with the passage of time – patient, slow time.
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