DATE: Sunday, September 7, 1997             TAG: 9709050028
SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: BY CLAIRE L. MILLER 

                                            LENGTH:   56 lines

SUFFERING OF WEST BANK PALESTINIANS IS REAL

I feel compelled to respond to G. Will Brown's letter of Aug. 17 (``In West Bank, how quickly we forget''). He trivializes the suffering of Palestinians affected by the closure of the West Bank by naming it ``inconvenience,'' not realizing, perhaps, that such daily inconveniences and frustrations have a lot to do with the despair leading to terrorist acts such as the recent suicide bombings.

As a pacifist, I deplore the use of violence for any reason. However, after speaking with a number of Palestinians during a recent trip to the West Bank and Israel, I and other members of the human rights-monitoring delegation I traveled with began to understand the hardships of everyday life in the occupied territories.

We spoke with the headmistress of a girl's school in Hebron whose students are regularly harassed and assaulted by Jewish settlers, both adults and children. The Israeli soldiers take no action against the settlers, but the woman's 14-year-old daughter, after trying to defend herself, was hauled into jail for six hours of interrogation and punched in the face by Israeli policewomen.

Another woman we spoke with, whose family has the misfortune to live across the road from Ibrahami Mosque, must endure Israeli soldiers regularly using their rooftop as an observation post. While we were there, the soldiers insulted her and urinated in her water cistern. When she expressed outrage, this petite elementary school teacher was arrested for threatening a soldier.

We visited the village of Beit Miersum, 15 miles from Hebron, where 15 houses are slated for demolition, ostensibly for being built without proper permits. The catch is that such permits are virtually unobtainable in the 70 percent of the West Bank still under full Israeli control. Besides this, the Israeli military has already bulldozed the village cemetery, uprooted 1,200 olive trees and sprayed the wheat crop with herbicide to destroy it. This is not a matter of the proper regulation of home-building. It is a systemic effort by the Israeli government to force people off the land so it can be confiscated for their purposes.

When we were in Israel and the West Bank in June, Palestinians, Arab Israelis and Jewish peace activists alike expressed hopelessness over the peace process. The U.S. congressional resolution on a united Jerusalem added to the atmosphere of gloom. Now the recent incidents of violence and the closure of the West Bank have accentuated the despair on all sides.

We in the United States don't help the cause of peace when we refuse to recognize the real hardships and frustrations experienced by thousands of Palestinians who have been trying to live normal lives under conditions of occupation for 30 years. It is certainly not appropriate for us to unquestionably continue to support a state engaged in systematic oppression with billions of our tax dollars annually. MEMO: Claire L. Miller is a volunteer at Norfolk Catholic Worker, a

charitable organization serving food to the hungry. In June, she toured

Israel and the West Bank with a delegation sponsored by the Christian

Peacemaker Teams.

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