Democratic Palestine : 29 (ص 15)
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- Democratic Palestine : 29 (ص 15)
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By purchasing the produce directly from the local farmers, the
cooperative allows these products to be used. When providing
employment and playing a major role in dealing with the social
integration of women into the production process, into the
work force, and taking on the questions of women’s oppres-
sion that exist within Palestinian society in the context of
challenging the occupation.
It’s very exciting to see how the women are responding and
how they are leading this struggle. Of course, there are dif-
ferent women’s organizations with different views of the role
they play. But there is a very high degree of unity on the im-
portance of integrating the social needs of the women’s
movement (kindergartens, child-care centers, literacy classes,
etc.) with confronting the occupation. So the political and
social character of the women’s work have become very in-
tegrated. That is a very exciting development.
Another example of women’s participation, and of
cooperative and committee work is the community project in
Jerusalem’s Old City, that has been going on for the last year.
It began as a means of developing collective protection for
people living in the Old City who were faced with massive set-
tler encroachment. The area abuts the quarter that Jewish set-
tlers are renovating. There was a serious problem of settlers
buying up the top apartments in a bunch of buildings and
physically attacking the Palestinians living below them with
rocks, fire bombs, molotov cocktails, etc. The project began as
a sort of community guard duty and protection group, but has
since expanded into a much broader committee to take on
community development. What they have done is to buy a
couple of abandoned buildings. They have built a very big,
modern clinic. They are opening a dental clinic in the next tew
months as soon as they get the money for the equipment. They
have a full-time staff of doctors, nurses and a pharmacist.
They are now working on a community center with a library, a
meeting hall, a lecture room. Women are very much in the
forefront of this committee.
THE INSTITUTIONALIZED CHARACTER
OF THE UPRISING
The institutionalized, organized character of the uprising is
deeper than ever. For ex nple, the question of. self-
sufficiency, which has been part ot the call of the leadership,
has resulted in a massive move towards community gardens. In
Ramallah, we saw everybody digging gardens. Of course, part
of this is symbolic, but everywhere there are huge plots where
people are picking up the stones, clearing the land, digging it
up and planting tomatoes and cucumbers and potatoes. In
small gardens in apartment buildings, gardens are shooting up.
There are gardens everywhere now. It is springtime - the spring
of the uprising and everyone is growing things.
I think the leadership has a mature understanding of the
boycott issue, so the call is to boycott Israeli goods when there
is a national product available to substitute for it. No one is
saying, «Don’t use medicines made in Israel,» if the medicine is
needed. It is not that kind of ultraleft moralism. That’s one
thing that has been very impressive. There is no hint of
moralism - it is very political, very grounded. the various calls
are rooted not in moralism or eliciting guilt, but on the basis of
what can be accomplished by doing or not doing various
things.
The few, small-scale Palestinian factories that exist in the
territories are trying to expand their production to 24-hour
shifts, to hire more people and produce more so there will be
more products to compete with the Israeli products... mean-
while providing employment.
Looking at the next stage which is likely to be an increase of
the civil disobedience - opting out of the occupation ad-
ministration, there are some very interesting examples of
popular organization. For example, the medical relief com-
mittee is rooted in the medical association that existed in all the
towns and villages before the uprising. With the uprising, there
was more need for emergency services as the result of the
widespread casualties. Then later, the health effects began to
be felt in the camps in particular when curfews were imposed
for long periods of time; kids were getting sick from bad water;
there was lots of diarrhea; people got skin diseases because there
was not enough water for washing, etc. The medical resources
were stretched pretty thin. Many new people, paramedics, had
to be trained to take responsibility. We met a second-year nur-
sing student, who was in training at Al Ali hospital in Gaza city
(private hospital), who lives in Khan Younis with his family.
He described his work in Khan Younis during a six-day curfew,
when a number of people had been shot. He had to do minor
surgery. Though a second-year nursing student, he was the best
equipped there to do the job, and he did it.
Responding to the needs creates a stronger bond between the
medical personnel and the community; it strengthens their
sense of responsibility. A doctor we met in Ramallah was
describing the phenomenon of a number of doctors who or-
dinarily work in clinics in Jerusalem and just come home for
weekends, who now suddenly feel that they have a respon-
sibility to stay in their home town or village, because that is
where they are needed. So the uprising has a cyclical effect
where more people take responsibility to build these commit-
tees to ensure that the work gets done. In the process, they
develop a stronger commitment to their people; they con-
solidate their own political role in the uprising.
On the local level, food distribution is handled by the
popular committees during curfews, to insure everyone gets a
fair share of what is available. In the cities it is not the same.
There is what appears to be a self-imposed tax on the factories
that are trying to expand, stay open longer,hire more workers
and lower their prices, because they will still be making a profit,
presumably a higher one with the expansion. They are expected
to pay a tax to the uprising, matching the call for them to stop
paying Israeli taxes. Those exempted from the commercial
strike - the bakeries, pharmacies and taxi drivers - are also ex-
pected to pay a tax to the uprising. I think this is fairly infor-
mal now but how it develops is of course an internal matter for
the Palestinians to determine e@
15 - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 29
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