Category: Uncategorized

We don’t buy into the scary, Lou Dobbs paradigm, but we do appreciate the coverage that Accuracy in Media has given to a recent conference on emerging efforts to create a North American Community.

As we read the tea leaves, a North American Community is the drift of continental elites, and a serious contradiction to the logic of walls. The Trans Texas Corridor is not being planned for nothing.


Source: http://www.keeptexasmoving.org

The question is: how are elite powers planning to sustain hyper-velocities of container traffic while they continue to militarize barriers against the free movement of American peoples?

In an email on Monday, a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous compiled a set of recent readings on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which should be required reading for those audiences who love to suggest that Mexicans should solve their own problems at home before trekking Northward: FURTHER READING ON NAFTA:

A must-read NYT op-ed by Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz, who was also Bill Clinton’s chief economic advisor, titled “The Broken Promise of NAFTA”:

The celebrations of Nafta’s 10th anniversary are far more muted than those involved in its creation might have hoped.

…Growth in Mexico over the past 10 years has been a bleak 1 percent on a per capita basis — better than in much of the rest of Latin America, but far poorer than earlier in the century. From 1948 to 1973, Mexico grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent per capita. (By contrast, in the 10 years of Nafta, even with the East Asian crisis, Korean growth averaged 4.3 percent and China’s 7 percent in per capita terms.)

And while the hope was that Nafta would reduce income disparities between the United States and its southern neighbor, in fact they have grown — by 10.6 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, there has been disappointing progress in reducing poverty in Mexico, where real wages have been falling at the rate of 0.2 percent a year.

…In the long run, while particular special-interest groups may benefit from such an unfair trade treaty, America’s national interests — in having stable and prosperous neighbors — are not well served. Already, the manner in which the United States is bullying the weaker countries of Central and South America into accepting its terms is generating enormous resentment. If these trade agreements do no better for them than Nafta has done for Mexico, then both peace and prosperity in the hemisphere will be at risk.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/econ/2004/0106stiglitznafta.htm

An introspective op-ed by Brad Delong, a “Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley” and “Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration,” titled “Has Neo-Liberalism Failed Mexico?”:

Six years ago, I was ready to conclude that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a major success. The key argument in favor of NAFTA had been that it was the most promising road the United States could take to raise the chances for Mexico to become democratic and prosperous, and that the US had both a strong selfish interest and a strong neighborly duty to try to help Mexico develop.

…But the 3.6% rate of growth of GDP, coupled with a 2.5% per year rate of population and increase, means that Mexicans’ mean income is barely 15% above that of the pre-NAFTA days, and that the gap between their mean income and that of the US has widened. Because of rising inequality, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans live no better off than they did 15 years ago. (Indeed, the only part of Mexican development that has been a great success has been the rise in incomes and living standards that comes from increased migration to the US, and increased remittances sent back to Mexico.)

Intellectually, this is a great puzzle: we believe in market forces, and in the benefits of trade, specialization, and the international division of labor. We see the enormous increase in Mexican exports to the US over the past decade. We see great strengths in the Mexican economy – a stable macroeconomic environment, fiscal prudence, low inflation, little country risk, a flexible labor force, a strengthened and solvent banking system, successfully reformed poverty-reduction programs, high earnings from oil, and so on.

Yet successful neo-liberal policies have not delivered the rapid increases in productivity and working-class wages that neo-liberals like me would have confidently predicted had we been told back in 1995 that Mexican exports would multiply five-fold in the next twelve years.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong51

An excellent WP column by Harold Meyerson titled “NAFTA and Nativism”:

Over 40 percent of the Mexicans who have come, legally and illegally, to the United States have done so in the past 15 years. The boom in undocumenteds is even more concentrated than that: There were just 2.5 million such immigrants in the United States in 1995; fully 8 million have arrived since then.

Why? It’s not because we’ve let down our guard at the border; to the contrary, the border is more militarized now than it’s ever been. The answer is actually simpler than that. In large part, it’s NAFTA.

…But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, could not have been more precisely crafted to increase immigration — chiefly because of its devastating effect on Mexican agriculture…From 1993 through 2002, at least 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off their land.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020701272_pf.html

A critical op-ed by Jeff Faux, who is the founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, titled “NAFTA’s Failure and the Increasingly Desperate Mexican Economy”:

Thirteen years ago, when illegal immigration from Mexico over a less-protected border was half of what it is today, we were assured that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would transform Mexico into a prosperous middle-class society. “There will be less illegal immigration,” promised President Bill Clinton, “because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.” Mexican president Carlos Salinas told Americans it was a choice between getting Mexican tomatoes or tomato-pickers.

But NAFTA did not deliver. Mexico has grown too slowly to create enough jobs for its people, and the benefits of trade have largely gone to the wealthy, making it one of the most unequal societies in Latin America. Moreover, the agreement flooded Mexico with highly subsidized U.S. and Canadian grain, driving between 1 and 2 million Mexican farmers off the land and adding to the supply of desperate Mexicans looking for work.

http://www.counterpunch.org/faux05152006.html

FURTHER READING ON THE EVILS OF AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES:

Must-read Stiglitz op-ed titled “The Tyranny of King Cotton”:

Americans like to think that if poor countries simply open up their markets, greater prosperity will follow. Unfortunately, where agriculture is concerned, this is mere rhetoric. The United States pays only lip service to free market principles, favoring Washington lobbyists and campaign contributors who demand just the opposite. Indeed, it is America’s own agricultural subsidies that helped kill, at least for now, the so-called Doha Development Round of trade negotiations that were supposed to give poor countries new opportunities to enhance their growth.

Subsidies hurt developing country farmers because th
ey lead to higher output – and lower global prices. The Bush administration – supposedly committed to free markets around the world – has actually almost doubled the level of agricultural subsidies in the US.

Cotton illustrates the problem. Without subsidies, it would not pay for Americans to produce much cotton; with them, the US is the world’s largest cotton exporter. Some 25,000 rich American cotton farmers divide $3 to $4 billion in subsidies among themselves – with most of the money going to a small fraction of the recipients. The increased supply depresses cotton prices, hurting some 10 million farmers in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Seldom have so few done so much damage to so many.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz76

Very disturbing NYT story titled “On India’s Farms, a Plague of Suicide”:

Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing.

…Changes brought on by 15 years of economic reforms have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily opened the way to higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain.

Mr. Singh’s government, which has otherwise emerged as a strong ally of America, has become one of the loudest critics in the developing world of Washington’s $18 billion a year in subsidies to its own farmers, which have helped drive down the price of cotton for farmers like Mr. Shende.

WP A1 story titled “In Mexico, ‘People Do Really Want to Stay’” and subtitled “Chicken Farmers Fear U.S. Exports Will Send More Workers North for Jobs”:

But now, Martin worries that life in the central Mexican state of Jalisco is about to be shaken by globalization. Already much of Mexico’s farm country has been overwhelmed by an influx of crops from the United States in the years following the North American Free Trade Agreement. Over the next two years, the final provisions of the trade pact kick in, opening Mexico to unlimited imports of poultry from its northern neighbor. Mexican farms will compete directly with an American agribusiness nurtured by subsidies on the corn that feeds the birds.

“If a lot of chicken comes in from the United States, we’re not going to be able to maintain our farms,” said Martin, 39. “What’s going to happen? People are going to get fired. People are going to go north.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/06/AR2007010601265.html

Editorial

When six foreign ministers of the Persian Gulf met last week with their colleagues from Jordan, Egypt, and the USA they spoke also about a need to bring peace to Palestine.

A joint statement from the so-called six-plus-two ministers and the USA Secretary of State serves as a documentary reminder that there is no peace in Palestine and that the refusal of USA authorities to grant amnesty to Palestinian families in Texas is cruel and unusual punishment that criminalizes children born into Palestinian heritage.

The USA bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is therefore contributing to the scope and cruelty of the Palestinian conflict by inflicting imprisonment upon Texas children.

In this regard, we think especially about 8-year-old Maryam Ibrahim who nearly died from chemical warfare when she was a toddler in Palestine, who has since lived in fear of uniforms, and who is now being subjected to mental torture every evening at 10pm when she is taken by uniformed officials to a cell that she cannot share with her pregnant mother.

Nothing about this situation at the T. Don Hutto prison camp is tolerable. In light of the recent pleas jointly spoken with Persian Gulf diplomats, the USA Secretary of State should intervene directly in behalf of Maryam Ibrahim and signal the intentions of the USA to make peace for Palestinian children wherever they live. Notes

Excerpt from the Gulf Cooperation Council-Plus-Two Ministerial Joint Statement, Jan. 16, 2007, copied from USA State Dept. web site.

The participants agreed that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains a central and core problem and that without resolving this conflict the region will not enjoy sustained peace and stability. The participants affirmed their commitment to achieving peace in the Middle East through a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and noted that the foundation for such an outcome includes the Arab Peace Initiative, UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338, 1397 and 1515, and the Road Map. The participants called on the parties to abide by and implement previous agreements and obligations, including the Agreement on Movement and Access and to seek to fulfill their obligations under the Sharm el-Sheikh Understandings of 2005. The participants expressed their hope that the December 2006 meeting between the Palestinian President and the Israeli Prime Minister will be followed by concrete steps in this direction. The participants welcomed the resumption of the Palestinian-Israeli dialogue, and hope that it would lead to a full resumption of negotiations aiming at reaching a comprehensive peace agreement between them as a step towards achieving comprehensive peace in the Middle East. The participants affirmed their commitment to support development of the Palestinian economy, building and strengthening the institutions of the Palestinian state.

Excerpt from Salaheddin Ibrahim’s plea for asylum, archived at the Texas Civil Rights Review.

During summer 2000 the Israelis attacked Al Fandaqumiyah with tanks, airplanes and gunfire. I was away from the house when the attack started, and ran home. I went up on the roof. The Israelis fired gas bombs and one of them broke the window of my kitchen and fell inside the house. I came down from the roof and threw the bomb back outside. It was hot, but not too hot to scoop up and quickly throw out. The children were sick and Hanan and I ran with them out of the house. Maryam, who was two years old, was overcome by the gas and unconscious.

I ran with the children and my wife with shooting all around us, and the children were crying and my wife was crying. We stayed outside in the olive grove until the Israeli troops left the village. Then we went back in the house. Maryam had awakened but she was very sick. She had great difficulty breathing. I called my neighbor and asked him to come with me to the pharmacy to buy medicine for Maryam. I was afraid and wanted the neighbor Abdel Ba Set Raba to come just so I would feel safer. I intended to explain the problem to the pharmacist so that he could provide what Maryam needed.

I drove to the pharmacy. There were two others from my village in the pharmacy, but while we were in the pharmacy the Israeli soldiers came in and ordered us out. When we went out they confiscated our identity cards. The soldiers told me to go remove an object in the street, but I told them I had to take medicine to my daughter. They thought the object might be a mine or a booby trap. They cursed me and told me to do what they ordered me to do.

I refused and they shot near my head and demanded that I go. I went and recovered the object that was in the street. It was just a bag. Then they forced us to sweep the street clean. After about 45 minutes the soldiers left. I went into the pharmacy and got some pills that were supposed to enable Maryam to breathe. I gave her the medicine and she recovered. . . .

Maryam is 4 years old [in the year of the statement, 2002]. She is afraid of policemen in uniform, but the older children understand that they are safe in the United States. In Palestine, when the older children heard shooting or saw helicopters or Israeli soldiers, they would cry and run into the house and pull the bed clothes over their heads. They often were afraid to go to school, and, if they were too terrified to go, we would let them stay at home.

In November 2000 the Israelis attacked our village, while Hanan and the children were in our olive grove harvesting the olives. The children began to cry. Our neighbor had a small boy, Muraweih, 12 or 13 years old, and the Israelis caught him in the street. He was just about one meter tall. He did not run because he was afraid the Israelis would kill him. When Hamzeh heard that they had caught Muraweih, he was terrified, because he thought they would capture him, too.

Al Fandaqumiyah has a main street that runs the length of the town from the entrance. Our house was behind the entrance. The school was at the other end. Some of the Israelis remained at the entrance, and others stormed down the street. The Israelis took Muraweih toward the entrance to the town. The child was crying pitifully. His father Yousef, a man with white hair, tried to wrest his son from the soldier who was holding his arm. An Israeli officer saw what a little boy he was and ordered the soldier to let him go.

On another occasion, the Israelis came down the mountain behind the town, near the school. When they started shooting, all the children ran from the school. The young ones, including Hamzeh and Rodaina, ran crying toward home. I went toward the school and met them in the middle of town. They clung to me and would not let go, and begged me not to leave them, and I took them home. When they reached home, they said they never wanted to go to school again.

I was hoping the situation would improve. It did not improve, however, and the Israeli occupying forces continue to kill and dispossess the Palestinian people just for being Palestinian. My son Hamzeh, who now is 11, has nightmares and wakes up in terror in the night. Rodaina, who is 9, also wakes up in the night. They are fascinated by the news on television, and know the Israelis have killed many children. Hamzeh is terrified at the possibility of having to return home.

Sometimes the children cry while watching the television news. When I was told I could apply for asylum I decided to try to keep my family in the United States.

Of course, we would usually treat news from Gaza as, well, not Texas. But as Ibrahim family attorney John Wheat Gibson says: “This is what Israel plans for the Ibrahim children in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Therefore, we post this report from John Pilger–gm

New Statesman
Terror and starvation in Gaza
John Pilger

Published 22 January 2007

Pilger on the genocide that is engulfing Palestine as bystanders silently look on

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. “Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide,” wrote the former senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then foreign minister of Sweden, in Le Figaro. They described a people “living in a cage”, cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.
Egeland and Eliasson wrote this four months ago in an attempt to break the silence in Europe, whose obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year’s Palestinian elections. The horror in Gaza has since been compounded: a family of 18 has died beneath a 500lb US/Israeli bomb; unarmed women have been mown down at point-blank range. Dr David Halpin, one of the few Britons to break what he calls “this medieval siege”, reported the killing of 57 children by artillery, rockets and small arms and was shown evidence that civilians are Israel’s true targets, as in Leba non last summer. A friend in Gaza, Dr Mona el-Farra, emailed: “I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms [a collective punishment by the Israeli air force] and artillery on my 13-year-old daughter. At night, she shivers with fear. Then both of us end up crouching on the floor. I try to make her feel safe, but when the bombs sound I flinch and scream . . .”

When I was last in Gaza, Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable survey. “The statistic I personally find unbearable,” he said, “is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 per cent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed.” Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30 children, all of them traumatised. He gave each a pencil and paper and asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and of women streaming tears.

The excuse for the latest Israeli terror was the capture last June of an Israeli soldier, a member of an illegal occupation, by the Palestinian resistance. This was news. The kidnapping by Israel a few days earlier of two Palestinians – two of thousands taken over the years – was not news. A historian and two foreign journalists have reported the truth about Gaza. All three are Israeli. They are frequently called traitors. The historian Ilan Pappe has documented that “the genocidal policy [in Gaza] is not formulated in a vacuum” but part of Zionism’s deliberate, historic ethnic cleansing. Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are reporters on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In November, Levy described how the people of Gaza were beginning to starve to death: “There are thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people, unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions.” Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “[She] saw these German women looking at the pris oners, just looking,” she wrote. “This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”

“Looking from the side” is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many western Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism and say, “Not in our name!” are abused as “self-despising”. Looking from the side is what almost the entire US Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist “lobby”. Looking from the side is what “even-handed” journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.

http://www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/200701220021

forwarded by
John Wheat Gibson

Dallas, Texas

The following statement dated August 13, 2002 was provided via email by attorney John Wheat Gibson, so that readers may make up their own minds “whether the immigration judge Carey Copeland was right or wrong to deny asylum to the family that is in prison now in Taylor, Texas.” Hanan is pregnant with the family’s sixth child.–gm

STATEMENT OF HANAN ALHAJ IBRAHIM

WITNESS-CHRONOLOGY INDEX

I was born Hanan Alhaj Hamamri on April 15, 1972 in Jaba’a, Occupied West Bank. My father Nayef Hamamri was born in 1937. He is about 65. He is a farmer, with an olive grove, growing olives for olive oil. The Israelis confiscated some of his land for a military camp.

The Israelis arrested my brother Emad Hamamri several times when I was young. He received chemotherapy for a cancer in his neck, and died in 1987 when he was 28 years old. On one occasion, in about 1983, the Israelis came to the door at about 3 a.m. shouting and banging on the door. When my father opened the door, they demanded Emad. My father told them Emad was very ill. They dragged him out of bed and took him away blindfolded anyway. After more than three weeks he came home, I think because my father took them his medical file and convinced them that he was harmless because he was so sick.
The Israelis also arrested my brother Tarek Hamamri in about 1987, when he was 17. The Israelis came to the house and kicked on the door. My grandmother, my father’s mother, who was 85 years old, opened the door and some of the soldiers came into the house. Others remained outside. They searched the house. They blindfolded Tarek and took him away. He was gone 40 days. He came home with others who had been arrested at the same time. He looked very tired and there were bruises on his face. He said he had been beaten very hard. Another time the soldiers came and asked for Tarek, but he was not at home.

I also remember when the Israelis attacked our village that same year. I was at home when they began their assault. The people had no way to defend themselves from the Israelis. My friend Nea’am was about 20 years old, and she was very brave. Nea’am went into the street to search for her little brothers, and encountered two Israelis just in front of our house. I was up on the roof of our house with my brothers and sisters, but I was afraid to watch. They told me what happened.

One of the Israeli soldiers grabbed Nea’am’s relative Amin, a boy about 15 years old. The other screamed at Nea’am to go home. Nea’am pulled Amin from the grip of the soldier, and he ran away. The soldier started to shoot Amin, so Nea’am tried to hit him with her shoe. The other soldier shot her dead on the spot. Nea’am’s family did not let the ambulance take her body because they were afraid the Israelis would remove it from the ambulance. Sometimes the Israelis took the corpses of their victims from ambulances, apparently to prevent emotional funerals.

On the same day, the Israelis killed a 14 year old girl in her home, Shefa’a. I knew her, too. The Israeli soldiers broke in the door of her home and seized her brother Mohammed, about 25. Shefa’a tried to fight with the soldiers to keep them from taking her brother. Mohammed tried to run, but the soldiers shot him down there in the house. Shefa’a’s sister, who was about 16, brought out a knife and attacked the soldiers, who then shot and killed Shefa’a and arrested the sister, whose name I forget. She was in jail for three years.

They took the wounded brother Mohammed away. I saw him in Jeba’a about five years later, and heard he was released from an Israeli prison. He was walking with a limp.

The family also had a 4-year-old boy, and he was hiding in the closet while the Israelis were murdering Shefa’a, and the Israeli soldiers tried to kill him, too. They shot him in the stomach, but he did not die. An ambulance took him to the hospital. The children’s parents still live in the house in Jeba’a.

On July 25, 1989 I married Salaheddin Ibrahim, and went to live with his family in Al Fandaqumiyah. He worked in Kuwait, but he was visiting home. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, he came back to Palestine to live.

Although I do not remember the dates very well, I do remember that he came home several times badly bruised and feeling miserable. I have learned that there were many occasions when the Israelis abused him that he did not tell me about, since he did not want me to worry, and maybe he was ashamed that they would beat and humiliate him just for sport and he could do nothing about it. Once when Salaheddin came home beaten and feeble we took him to Dr. Ahmad, and on another occasion the doctor came to our house. I also remember that, some time after the Israelis attacked us with gas, he stayed at home for about 10 days because the Israelis had taken away his identity card and he was afraid to go out without it.

After Salaheddin opened his clothing wholesale store, I sometimes helped to clean it, but mostly I kept our house. On February 22, 1991 our son Hamzeh was born in Jordan. We went to Jordan because the medical facilities are better there than in the Occupied Territories, and the doctor told us that sometimes the birth of the first child could be a problem. We also knew that the occupying soldiers in Palestine sometimes enjoyed preventing Palestinian women in labor from reaching the hospital. They are bullies to women as well as to men. We were in Jordan less than a month.

On September 17, 1992, our daughter Rodaina was born at the hospital in Nablus. In 1997 Salaheddin built a large house on his family’s land, and his parents lived there with us. Maryam was born on May 6, 1998 at the hospital in Nablus.

During summer 2000 the Israelis attacked Al Fandaqumiyah with tanks, airplanes and gunfire. When the attack began I was in the bedroom with the children watching television. When we were aware we were being attacked, I closed the windows tight and sprinkled perfume around to mask the stink of the gas, and returned to the bedroom. We thought also that the perfume might alleviate some of the toxic effects of the gas. The children were crying and they were afraid. I told them not to be afraid, that the Israeli soldiers would leave.

The Israelis were firing gas bombs in the street, and some of the gas was leaking into the house and making the children ill. The gas made them drowsy, also. The Israelis fired a gas bomb through the window of my kitchen and it fell inside the house. Salaheddin came in to throw the bomb out. We all ran out of the house together. The children were sick and we had to wait in the olive grove on our land near the house until the gas cleared.

Maryam was two years old, and she was overcome by the gas. The other children were crying and I was crying. I tried to make Maryam smell the perfume I had brought out. We stayed outside in the olive grove until the Israeli troops left the village and the stink had subsided in the house, maybe half an hour or an hour. Then we went back in the house. Maryam had partially revived, but she was very drowsy and sick. She had great difficulty breathing.

Salaheddin drove to the pharmacy. I started the electric fans to blow the gas out of the house. I was worried about Salaheddin because it took him so long to get back from the pharmacy. The children cried and then I would talk to them and they would stop for a while, and then later they would start crying again. I tried to comfort the children until Salaheddin returned. We gave Maryam the medicine he brought, and she recovered. The children would not sleep in their own room that night, but slept with my husband and me.

A month or two after the gas attack, the Israelis attacked our village with tanks and soldiers in trucks. The soldiers knocked on the door of our house and Salaheddin’s father let
them in. The children and Salaheddin’s mother began crying with fear. The Israeli soldiers went about inside the house breaking our plates and cups and smashing potted plants. They kicked a can of olive oil around, splashing it all over the carpet and furniture. The soldiers took Salaheddin away. He came back later that day.

My last daughter Faten was born on April 29, 2001. I told Salaheddin it was time to go to the hospital, because I was in pain. He was driving me to the hospital at Nablus. His mother was with us. I was in great pain. At a checkpoint between Nablus and Al Fandaqumiyah, near a Jewish-only town, the Israeli soldiers delayed us about an hour, and then would not let us through. After an hour they told us to go back home, so Salaheddin tried to reach Nablus by a different route. There was another checkpoint and the soldiers would not let us through. The soldier said it was not his problem and ordered us to go back. My mother in law told them I was in pain and she was angry that the Israelis were indifferent to my suffering.

But then Salaheddin tried another route, an unpaved road, behind and over the mountain. I was afraid I would deliver the baby in the car, and I was frightened. My mother-in-law had brought scissors and string to tie up the umbilicus if necessary. But eventually we reached the hospital in Nablus. The doctor gave me two injections. Faten was delivered about half an hour or less after we arrived. She was blue. The doctor said she had ingested some fluid during the bumpy trip, and he suctioned out her nose. Afterward the baby was fine.

Before we left Al Fandaqumiyah, sometimes the children would be too upset to complete their homework. Hamzeh still has nightmares, and wakes up in the night afraid. Rodaina has sleeping problems, too, but Hamzeh suffers more. He is afraid of the prospect of going back. He knows that the Israelis kill children and he does not know the reason. He and Rodaina know that the Israelis killed a two-month old Palestinian child and they are preoccupied with it. They found out about it by watching the television news. Sometimes they cry while watching the news on television.

I first knew we were going to the United States when we obtained visas before Faten was born. We wanted to rest and let our children forget at least for a while the horror of daily life for Palestinian children under the Israeli occupation. I first knew that Salaheddin had decided to apply for asylum a month or so after we arrived, when he talked to an attorney.

HANAN ALHAJ IBRAHIM

Sworn to and signed before me this August 13, 2002 by Hanan Alhaj Ibrahim, to which witness my hand and seal of office:

Notary Public in and for Dallas County, Texas