"I Wasn't Going to Submit to Israel": Palestine Solidarity Activists to Speak in Minneapolis

During the second anniversary of Israel's assault on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians, three events featuring Palestine solidarity activists will be held in Minneapolis.  On January 6 and 9, Gal Lugassi of the Israeli direct action group Anarchists Against the Wall will speak at the U of M and at a benefit for the Minnesota Break the Bonds campaign, respectively.  Anarchists Against the Wall was in the news this week as activist Jonathan Pollack was sentenced to a three-month jail term for his participation in a Tel Aviv critical mass-style bicycle protest during the January 2008 siege of Gaza.

 

Meanwhile, on January 2, Ryan Olander will speak at Walker Community Church.  Raised in Cottage Grove, Olander worked with the International Solidarity Movement fighting illegal home evictions in East Jerusalem before he was arrested and targeted for deportation late last year.  "I was arrested illegally, and I wasn't going to submit to what Israel wanted to do to me," he says.

 

In the interview below, Olander gives a preview of his presentation about the joint struggle for Palestinian liberation and his efforts to end complicity with the occupation and apartheid wall.
 

 

Tell us about what led up to your decision to leave home for Palestine last year.

 

I guess it began when I started organizing against the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and doing that kind of work it's really hard to ignore the proxy occupation the U.S. is engaged in in Palestine.  The more you look into it, the more you realize how complicit you are.  You can't even hold a job here without your tax dollars going to fund the $3 billion that we give to Israel each year to prop up the occupation.

 

So I didn't want to be complicit anymore. 

 

Had you done antiwar organizing in the Twin Cities or elsewhere in America before you left?

 

You know what, the Twin Cities is one of the only places I've ever lived that I haven't done any organizing.  I did a lot of organizing in Madison and on the east coast, but actually, the Republican National Convention here was kind of a watershed experience for me.  Getting out, being a part of that convergence and being arrested for the first time--shortly thereafter is when I decided I needed to go to Palestine.

 

And you decided to work with the International Solidarity Movement.  How did that come about?

 

I worked with the ISM in Palestine - a few of my friends had went there before, so it was pretty easy to go to Jerusalem and plug in with them, take their training.  The training is a two-day training that takes place in Ramallah with the ISM.  They want to prepare you the best they can for what's going to happen to you in the field, doing direct action in solidarity with the Palestinians.  So they give you as much training as they can.  And after I was done with the training, I went to East Jerusalem and I was working in Sheikh Jarrah.

 

Sheikh Jarrah is a community of about 28 families; all of these families are refugees from the Nakba of 1948.  This was still when Jordan held Jerusalem, so when they came, Jordan gave them some land to set up a refugee camp.  The United Nations gave them some food aid for the first eight years they were there.  They later got subsidized housing and lived there for about 50 years.

 

Now the settler organizations - ideological Israeli settler organizations - are coming in.  What they're doing is they're either just evicting the Palestinians outright, or they're using some of the racist laws in Jerusalem to evict Palestinians.  And the Palestinians aren't going quietly - they're staying in the streets, living in tents across from the homes they were evicted from.  So it creates a very, very tense situation.

 

Sometimes international presence can dispel some of the violence, sometimes it doesn't.

 

What was your relationship with the Palestinian families like, being an American who had never been to Palestine before?

 

There are a lot of Americans who've worked with the International Solidarity Movement, so they had been acquainted with some of them before.  Usually the line they gave me was, "the American government is bad, but the people are okay."  So I was always welcome in Palestine, just like all the rest of my comrades who came from all different parts of the world.

 

But you weren't there long before you were arrested.

 

Well, in my first three weeks in Palestine, I was spending about 16-18 hours a day in Sheik Jarrah, so the police got to know my face a little too well.  In those three weeks, I was arrested three times, and the third time I was sent to Ramle Givon Deportation Center, where I spent four weeks resisting deportation.

 

The time leading up to that was very, very intense - the settlers would come and sometimes attack the Palestinians, or threaten to kill them.  Police were constantly there; sometimes they would come up and beat up Israeli activists, pepper spray other people, international activists too - so it was a very, very charged situation in Sheik Jarrah - and in most of East Jerusalem, generally.

 

What were you thinking about in prison?

 

It was very difficult - one of the big things it did for me was it made me realize the immense amount of privilege I had coming from the west.  At any point in time, I could sign a piece of paper and Israel would pay for my flight back to the United States.

 

So why didn't you do that?

 

Well, I was arrested illegally, and I wasn't going to submit to what Israel wanted to do to me.  I wanted to continue my work standing in solidarity with the Palestinians.  But many of the men I shared my cell with were refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Israel just didn't know what to do with them, so they locked them up and pretty much threw away the key.  All of their sentences were indefinite.  It took a toll on them.  All they could do was sit in prison.

 

Were there any other western activists in that prison, or were you the only one?  How many Palestinian prisoners are there?

 

I was about the only activist. Shortly before I got out, the woman who was on the outside coordinating the legal work between the ISM, our lawyers and me was arrested in an illegal night raid - so she was there at the same time, but I never saw her.

 

I believe there's about 8,000 Palestinian prisoners.  Israel uses imprisonment as a tool of control.  A lot of times they arrest young boys, take them in, beat them, torture them, hold them for three months, get them to give up some names of their friends whether they're doing anything or not.  Then they go and arrest them.  And when they're released, a lot of them, their will to resist the occupation is broken.  So it's actually contributing to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

 

Hear more of Ryan's story on Sunday, January 2 in Minneapolis.