War has erupted in Palestine -- a one-sided war, in which the Israeli Defense Forces, buttressed not only by "settlement" security forces and vigilantes, but by the very latest in U.S.-made kill toys, have attacked the Palestinian civilian population and a handful of gunmen living among them.

The result -- in terms of the tactics used by Israel against a largely unarmed, unresisting civilian population -- have been bloodcurdling. They have been exhaustively reported in mainstream media around the world.

Those abominations have also been carefully excised from almost every U.S. media account of the "fighting."

The attacks doubtless seem to many Americans like just another war -- more tragic, perhaps, because "they're always fighting over there," but basically an unsolvable mess the U.S. is only tangentially related to. It's not, of course. The United States is inextricably linked -- by weapons sales, aid programs, investment, and the eyes of the world -- to whatever Israel does. And this is no "ordinary" war; it is not even a war, because with few exceptions the "enemy" is not shooting back, is not even present. And in the course of the resulting death and destruction, Israel is violating just about every known convention for how humanity has agreed to conduct itself during its most inhumane moments.

Here at ETS!, we have both a personal interest and an inside track on what's going on ten time zones to the east: two of our regular volunteers, Jackie Wolf (our distributor in the San Juan Islands, and a tireless ETS! promoter and human rights activist) and Jake Mundy (who has written several excellent pieces for us, most recently on Algeria) are both, as you read this, in Palestine. As of today (Monday, 4-8) both are in different parts of Bethlehem.

Before we get to Jake, Jackie, and other activists we've talked with who have Northwest connections and are now on the scene, let's establish what that scene is. Consider these reports from a 48-hour period last week, representative of dozens coming over e-mail and on the web (for a good list of web resources for current reporting, see box on p. 2):

"The Israeli air crafts have already started firing at Aida Refugees' camp....The Israeli soldiers do not care anymore at whom their guns are pointed." --George Rishmawi, Bethlehem.

"More than 150 Israeli tanks invaded Bethlehem area from all directions. Heavy shooting and shelling is regular all morning long. The Israeli army is moving towards the Church of Nativity. Bethlehem is sliced into a dozen of isolated areas. Soldiers and Apaches are shooting at any moving target." -- Ghassan, Bethlehem

"Tonight we have heard numerous reports of 30 Palestinian policemen executed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers in a building where they sought refuge on Irssal street in Ramallah. This was after five Palestinian officers were executed by being shot to the head and then had their corpses thrown on the pavement for hours on Friday. Ambulances are prevented from reaching their destinations and two hospitals have either been broken into (Arabcare) or shot at (Nazer Maternity Hospital)....One of the employees of the Sakakini Center had the Israeli army burst into his village (Kobar) yesterday, destroy belongings and arrest his younger brother, alongside 30 other young men from the village.

"The cleaning lady of the Center lives in a house with an outhouse for toilets. For three days the Israelis have been posted by the door to her house and preventing all exit. When the eldest today sneaked out to the outhouse, the Israelis caught him and beat him. His school teacher father tried to intervene, the Israelis beat him and arrested him.

"One of the board members of our center was arrested with all the employees of the office building where he was working late Thursday night. They were all blindfolded and had their hands tied and placed in one room for 16 hours. The Israelis destroyed some office furniture and stole hard drives from computers. They all untied themselves once they realized the Israelis had gone on to bigger prey.

"My next-door neighbor's 70+-year-old father lives near Yasser Arafat's office. The Israelis broke into his home Friday, broke everything with the butts of their rifles (TV, sinks, furniture, etc.. ) and then stole some money.

"There are reports also of Israeli soldiers breaking into banks and change offices and jewelry stores and stealing money and jewelry...." --Adila Laidi, Director, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah

"Israeli tanks were waiting outside the front of the house. Israelis have been going into houses taking food and leaving. Also, they have been going into houses and taking all men ages 15 to 50. Some have been taken away. Others have been stripped and left in the street for several hours in the cold and rain.

"This morning the President of the Red Crescent Society (Red Cross) (Younis Al-Khatib) was taken from his office by Israeli soldiers, made to crawl on his hands and knees in the street in the rain, and then arrested. Many medics have been arrested. PRCS officially announced that there is no ambulance service for the sick and injured in Ramallah. Israelis will not let ambulances pass, and the medics are taken away." --Caroline, Ramallah, as told via phone to a Seattle friend

"Things here are shifting again slightly, but not enough. There are still large numbers of wounded in Manger Square in the centre of the old city, and many dead lying in the streets or in houses from which they cannot be removed [update this second; the family who had two members killed by a tank shell have managed to get them out]. The mosque, in which people were hiding, was shelled by tanks, and there are 150-200 holed up in the Church of the Nativity; we've just spoken to one of them and no medics have been allowed through but nuns have been attending the injured. Injured in Deheishe refugee camp have also been denied access to hospital, and we've just watched from our window as Israeli troops surrounded and searched a Red Crescent ambulance. Another ambulance was crushed by a tank this morning in Beit Kala. A group of internationals attempted to accompany an ambulance to Manger Square to get humanitarian aid to those trapped, but they were fired on; apparently the Israelis had chosen (without telling anyone) that they would use their clocks and not Palestinian time to time the curfew and thus decided to shoot at people....

"In Ramallah, a group of 2,000 Israelis (Gush Shalom) and Arab Israelis attempting to deliver food and medical supplies were stopped and heavily teargassed. One truck of aid was allowed through, but the soldiers then emptied it and stamped on the medical supplies, leaving the food on the ground." --Sarah Irving, International Solidarity Movement, Bethlehem

The ISM, quoted last, is a group organized relatively recently by the Center for Rapproachment, a Palestinian NGO based in Bethlehem. On its first tour for activists in January, one of the visitors was Trevor Baumgartner, who wrote about his experiences for ETS!. Jake and Jackie are on the third ISM tour, and were to similarly write (before their access to e-mail was cut off by war). They and a few hundred other "internationals" from Europe, Asia, and North America are nonviolent witnesses to the occupation -- human cameras, doing the work U.S. media mostly won't. They have also become human shields as war erupted in front of them, a war that has flowed naturally from the conditions of the last 35 years of military occupation.

Here's what happened to Trevor's host family in Ramallah last week:

"Our friend Mahmoud (47 years old) and his son Majd (18 years old) were arrested and taken out of their apartment in Ramallah this morning....All the other Palestinian males in their building were also arrested. Israeli soldiers have been going from house to house for days arresting all Palestinian males under 45 -- and apparently some that are older.

"At this writing [Tuesday] there have been at least 14 summary executions of prisoners in Ramallah, with reports of many more than that. One report describes prisoners in a large room being roughly divided into two groups, one group to be held, one group to be shot.

"Mahmoud...was released tonight. Mahmoud is currently in too much pain to stand up. After being beaten and kicked in the back while in custody, he was released and allowed to walk home -- about seven miles....Several older men were released with him. Mahmoud's son Majd is still in custody, along with all the other young men. It is Majd's first arrest. The family is hoping he will come home alive."

Meanwhile, on Monday, Jackie was shot by the Israeli Army. She was among the nonviolent activists attacked by the IDF, with eight seriously wounded. Jackie was grazed by a bullet fragment and only slightly injured.

"There's no doubt that the presence of internationals here has made a huge difference," she says. "It's unbelievable; there's still a lot of brutality going on, but they aren't as willing to be as brutal when we're around, although they did fire on us, when we did the march to Beit Jala....It was really a walk more than a march; we walked into Beit Jala, which is sort of asmall area within Bethlehem, and we walked within about 10 feet of the tanks, which are American -- everything is American -- and they just started rolling at us, and they opened fire.

"They used bullets that are called dumdum bullets, and when they hit, whatever they hit, there are fragments everywhere, and they shot at the cameramen. That's their main tactic is to shoot at the journalists. They shot at the wall next to the cameraman. He got hit with several pretty big fragments. He moved back toward us, a few other people and I went to him to see if he was OK, so they fired at us, I got hit with some fragments...and then the tanks pushed us back down the road.

"That was our one attempt at a march."

Wolf is, seemingly perversely, glad she's there. "It means so much to the people here to have some of us willing to go through this with them, especially people from America, because America is responsible for so much of this, it's paying for the whole thing. If they have one word to people in the U.S., it's to stop it."

Of her own wound, Wolf says it "hurt like hell." But she's staying put for now.

Some internationals have left -- not expecting to be dropped into the midst of a war zone, not prepared for the terror of it. Some have been expelled, including David Solnit (of WTO/Direct Action Network notoriety), who accompanied a delegation led by Frenchman Jose Bove. Others are now trying to get into Israel (with mised success at this writing), including ETS! co- founder John Reese.

More have not left. Former Seattle activist Rich Wood, for example. Wood now lives in the Bay Area; he helped Wolf start the Center for Palestinian Information in a tiny Oddfellows Hall office on Capitol Hill in the late '80s. When I talked with him on Sunday, the ISM delegation was mostly cooling its heels, and he was frustrated: "There's really very little we can do here, that's the problem. People here are scared to go outside the door. The last few days we haven't been able to do anything." He was also here the last time around. "It's extremely different from the last intifada. This is armed. Last time it was mass actions. Now, there are hundreds of armed [Palestinian] fighters in every city, it's a very different feeling."

People are scared to go outside their doors because they'll get shot. For that matter, they can get shot inside their houses, through windows or doors, by the omnipresent Israeli snipers. Here's Kristen Schurr, another former Seattle activist (and Seattle Weekly worker, which is how I connected with her) who now lives in New York:

"The first night I was here, just crossing the alley in front of the apartment, I was shot at," she says matter-of-factly. "They showed me how to duck and run." She's used her new skills regularly in the past few days. "Just today, I went into a little shop inside of camp, we got shot at."

"Palestinians are forced to live in unimaginable conditions. Just to cross the street they have to duck and run, that's life here. There are no schools here, people aren't able to work, we have two or three days' worth of food left inside the camp. Israel has been continually attacking Palestinians and putting them in a humiliating position where they're supposed to beg for the most basic human rights."

"This camp is made of stone buildings with narrow alleyways. There's no room to build out, so they build up, generations of families living on top of one another. The Israeli military comes in sometimes and rounds up men and disappears them. Sometimes some of them come home, sometimes not. It's not safe to sleep at night, so we sleep in the early light hours; we get shot at in the night, and have to run from one room to another. With the U.S. weapons, they have night vision, they have access to weapons....I don't know how to say it.

"Just passing from the door of the apartment to the stairway, inside the house, we get shot at through the door. All the windows have bags of sand stacked one on top of another inside. This is how they live their life. This is constant."

Schurr was also among the group of internationals and Israeli peace activists set upon in a separate incident in Ramallah: after soldiers, in their American-made tanks, attacked the group as it tried to deliver food and medical aid, it destroyed the aid. The bullets fired at the group hit the ground in front of them and richocheted into the crowed; Schurr is convinced that had the front row been Palestinians, the soldiers would not have aimed at the ground.

As for Jake? He and Kristen were part of a group of seven ISM activists that pointedly refused the first U.S. embassy offer of an evacuation, and issued astatement explaining why:

"We wish to demonstrate our solidarity with the Palestinian people who do not share the choice we have to go to safety. We are here to act as witnesses to the persecution of the Palestinians and to provide an accurate and reliable source of information for the rest of the world and to represent the support of the international community. It is important to realize that our presence is known and is a concern to our ambassadors. The U.S. consulate's offer is an indication to the danger we are in. We hope the United States' commitment to our safety extends to that of the Palestinian people."

As reinforcements join the internationals, their stated purpose, while there, is to witness, to act as human shields, and to tell the world what is happening on the ground, away from the ministerial briefings and White House declarations. "I'm documenting this trip so much," Schurr says, "Just to get reality into peoples' heads. Any time I don't have my recorder going or my camera, there's something I miss. But sometimes if I whip something out of my pocket I'll get shot by an Israeli soldier."

For all of their activities, they are targeted by an Israeli army determined to keep the details of its work quiet; their survival is no assured thing. But their presence, they feel, helps increase the chances of survival for a mostly secular civilian population that largely only wants the violence, and the occupation, to end.

What It Adds Up To

In working on accounts for this and other publications, I've put at least three dozen phone calls in to Palestine in the last few days (ouch!). The resulting descriptions of what's happening are all pretty consistent, and with Ariel Sharon's stated intent to sweep through every single Palestinian city, village, and refugee camp in the coming weeks, unless or until international pressure stops him, they ain't good. They are an unrelenting, and at this writing continuing, nightmare: "disappearings" of all Palestinian men between the ages of about 15 and 45, with some being beaten and released, the rest beaten and not released, or beaten and shot, or simply shot; arrests of ambulance and medical personnel while the injured lie dying for want of simple medical care; whole cities running out of food, medicines, and other basics of life; widespread reports of soldiers destroying or stealing simply for the apparent viciousness of it. Sniper fire and tanks directed at the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. An economy destroyed, a people who will never forget nor forgive this latest escalation of what British journalist Robert Fisk last week called "the world's last colonial war -- between a settlement-planting nation and an occupied people." This is Ariel Sharon's version of reality.

And then, the same day Fisk wrote, there was the Seattle Times, whose version of "reality" is so completely out of sync with that of Sharon, Jackie, Kristen, or even British and European media as to be surreal: a 20-paragraph front page headline story, a mixture of numerous syndicated reports, in which the on-the-ground realities of what Israel is doing are not mentioned once -- only an analysis of which towns the army has occupied (as if the order matters) and what it means to the future prospects for implementing the Oslo accords, for which the Seattle Times must be nominated for some sort of anti- Pulitzer for complete irrelevance. The one Palestinian voice quoted was an Arafat aide venting his hatred for Israel; none of the bountiful present-day reasons for that hatred were cited. Nor was any connection to America.

And it didn't improve. This Monday (4-8), kept separate from a page one article, with, as usual, no mention of field conditions beyond absurdly low (Israeli) numbers of (Palestinian) dead and arrested, we learn very briefly that: Israelis shot and killed a Palestinian policeman trying to put out a fire when the IDF hurled a stun grenade 30 feet from the Church of the Nativity, where at least 200 Palestinian civilians (and no gunmen, according to most witnesses) took refuge (that'll teach 'em, trying to save the Church of the Nativity!); Reporters Without Borders "accused" the Iaraeli army of shooting at journalists to intimidate them, with five wounded and 35 others expelled or threatened in a week (Israel denounced the group as "anti- Israel," ducking the issue of whether they were right); and that 350,000 (their number) marched in Morocco in advance of a visit by Colin Powell.

This trivialization or ignoring of what's happening outside White House and Israeli sources is the sort of dreck most people not only in Seattle but around the country are being fed as the "objective" truth about what is being done with our tax money and, effectively, in our names. The United States is, alone in the world, remarkably oblivious to how the rest of the world perceives that connection. It starts with George W. Bush, who has effectively cast his lot with Ariel Sharon and thus solidified his place as a figure despised by much of the world, at a time when his constituents, you and I, are at particular risk when he pulls such stunts. Bush condemns suicide bombings, which is reasonable enough. (Too bad he's inviting more, in this country.) He expects Yassar Arafat, from his newly elevated stature in the Arabic world as prime-time martyr, to not only reverse course and simply capitulate, but to then control the radicals who have hated him nearly as much as Sharon and who will never capitulate. That's delusional, and it's also the Israeli line, but it's not unexpected from the cue-dependent Dubya. The men doing the cueing, particularly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, despise Yassar Arafat, and it shows.

What is truly astonishing is that Bush and his handlers, for the first four days of this round of violence, backed one of the most barbaric military attacks in memory. Even when he "flip-flopped" (we wish), as the world noticed, it was for political and tactical reasons, not moral repugnance at Israel's tactics. For a simple reason: America, should the need arise, would do no different. This particular series of attacks is coldly, intentionally, repeatedly flouting just about every known standard for conduct in war, behavior against a civilian population that no provocation -- not even suicide bombings -- can possibly justify, behavior that in some cases -- as with "camps" surrounded by electric fences, and herded-up Palestinian men with numbers written on their forearm -- is eerily reminiscent of the horrors that preceded Israel's founding. Bush seems especially unable to comprehend that when such an attack is carried out with American approval, American money, American weapons, and American advisers present, the rest of the world leaps to conclusions.

Not so the antiseptic evening newscasts or morning papers in the United States. It is difficult for Americans to understand the barbarity of what is going on, or its centrality to American affairs, when we're not being told, when the folks who would normally tell us either don't get it or won't say it.

Which brings us back to people like Kristen, Jackie, Jake, Rich, John, David, and the countless other heroes now putting their lives on the line in Palestine to accompany ambulances, help the injured and released-from-jail (an overlapping set) get home without being shot, confront roadblocks and checkpoints, and other public services. But mostly, to be there, to help remind Palestinians that even Americans care, and to remind America that Palestine awaits our activism. Only that can get the U.S. to stop funding Israel until the occupation ends.

For all of the Palestinian families hoping their sons, husbands, and fathers will survive, there is something we can do. The United States still has, if it so chooses, tremendous influence over this situation. If these scenes, and countless more like them, do not fit your idea of civilized behavior -- let alone democracy -- call the White House. Call your congresspeople. Call your local talk shows, write and e-mail letters to the editor, get in touch with international aid groups. This is a horror unfolding before our eyes, and the United States, alone among international actors, has the power to make it stop; we, alone among outraged people around the world, have the power to petition a government (outside Israel) that can make it stop. Let's use that power.