The Stones Cry Out Delegation
From the Ground in Palestine to the US Government and Churches
February 27-March 4, 2024
Part 2 of 3 (The View from Palestine)
We met with Palestinian leaders – clergy, laypeople, civil rights lawyers, NGO leaders, and the director of UNRWA. We asked each one to share what they would say to policy makers in Washington DC, to our churches, to our communities in the US.
• The Palestinians with whom we spoke fervently believe in nonviolent resistance. They say, “Hear our voices.”
• They feel abandoned, forsaken by the world, to face the genocide of their people alone. Our visit and solidarity comfort them and gives them courage to carry on.
• The genocide in Gaza is now in its fifth month, and the world has done nothing to stop it. Palestinians are incredulous. There is palpable anger, righteous anger, even from clergy, from activists devoted to non- violence. They want no more high and mighty lectures from the West about values, democracy, equality, and human rights. The sheer tonnage of US hypocrisy is epic in its scale in the bombs paid for by the US that Israel drops on Gaza.
• We call for a cease fire now, including hostages held by Hamas and political prisoners held by Israel. No mincing words. No equivocation. NOW!
• We heard again and again that while our eyes are fixed on Gaza – and rightly so – there is a “slow massacre,” a “slow genocide” taking place in the West Bank. While there is genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing is exponentially increasing in the West Bank “under the radar.”
• End the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Stop illegal settlements. The West Bank is not Samaria and Judea. It is Palestinian territory and Palestinians cannot continue to exist as stateless people without human rights.
• Children as young as 5 years old are arrested, abused, tortured, and held in prisons without trial for months or years. Night raids into Palestinian homes occur every night. They are tried in military, not civil, courts. Confessions are extracted by torture.
• There are 700+ checkpoints in the West Bank, an area roughly the size of Delaware. Restricting freedom of movement is a tool of torment to make daily life unbearable for Palestinians. IDF teenagers with machine guns man these checkpoints and kill Palestinians with impunity.
• Home demolitions have increased. We visited a man whose home was demolished two weeks earlier. His crime: he was a spokesman for Palestinians in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. We sat under a tarp in his yard amidst the rubble. Israel is ethnically cleansing, stealing, and Judaizing his
neighborhood, Silwan, on the hills below Jerusalem. The large Silwan neighborhood has been zoned for demolition by the Israeli government to expand an archeological site and create a theme park. The home demolitions would displace hundreds of people from their homes. Israel uses home demolitions as a
potent weapon used for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We call for an end to Israel’s policy of house demolitions of Palestinian homes.
• We call for the full restoration – and increase – of UNRWA funding immediately. UNRWA is the only organization that can deliver mass human services to Gaza. The UNRWA West Bank Director told us the agency cannot continue unless donations are restored. To withhold food and relief from starving people is a war crime. It comes as no surprise that the accusations against UNWRA employees were levied just two days after the International Court of Justice announced its findings that Israel is credibly guilty of genocide, the crime of all crimes.