Eva Bartlett supports Palestinians on the firing line

This article was originally published in The Hamilton Spectator February 14, 2009

In a timeless ritual, farmers handpick bunches of parsley and load them into baskets on donkeys and the carts they pull. Suddenly, blasts from high-powered rifles cut through the air, and the Palestinian farmers hit the ground, seeking cover in the slight depressions between the fields.

The incoming fire originates from an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) post on the border between Israel and Gaza. The parsley fields are located less than one kilometre from the border, an area the IDF has declared a No-Go zone, closed to armed and unarmed Palestinians, militants and farmers alike.

But for those who have farmed here, leaving the crop of parsley means abandoning hefty investments and planned income. So they take the risk.

The scene is captured in a You-Tube video called Farming Under Fire. Standing among the farmers, wearing fluorescent yellow vests, with their arms raised, are a group of international observers here to witness the Palestinian situation in the West Bank.

As the sound of gunfire blasts and farmers hit the ground, one vested observer yells on a bullhorn that they are unarmed. The others flinch at each new sound of gunfire.

Among this group is a 30-year-old Canadian woman, Eva Bartlett. She was raised in Fergus, a small town north of Guelph where her mother still lives. Today she has gained some notoriety for her dedication to supporting Palestinian self-determination by acting as a witness to their daily lives.

She writes blogs detailing her views on what she sees in Gaza, sometimes accompanied by vivid photographs. Some are disturbing.

Bartlett has been detained for her actions, and sometimes places her life at risk. Her motivation, she said, is based on human rights and the need to show where she feels rights are being violated.

"We are free people living in a free society, we have the responsibility to be informed about and act to halt/prevent the indiscriminate bombing and violence against Gaza's civilians by the Israeli authorities," Bartlett said in a recent e-mail.

But how does a small town Ontario girl with no connections to Palestine end up becoming a member of the Palestinian-based International Solidarity Movement(ISM) a group described on its website as "a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods." Why does she chose to put herself in the line of fire by living half of the past three years in the West Bank and Gaza?

According to Kathleen Bartlett, Eva's mother, a cellist who has played with symphony orchestras throughout North America, her youngest of three has "always been very independent."

On completing high school she spent four months in Ireland. She has taught English in South Korea, trekked through the Annapurna range in Nepal, visited China and Southeast Asia, and spent time in Europe. She said that, having been raised in the security and affluence of Canada, she had "a late awakening to the injustices of the world," and that her "first awareness was poverty in Asian countries."

Her introduction to the situation in Palestine came in 2007 where she spent the eight months in the West Bank. In August 2007 she was detained while protesting an IDF roadblock that lengthened a 10-kilometre trip from the hilltop village of Sara to Nablus into a one-hour plus odyssey.

Bartlett was released two days later, but only on condition that she remain out of the West Bank cities of Bethlehem, Nablus and Ramallah for the next 30 days.

On Christmas Day 2007 she was arrested again, this time in Jerusalem, and deported because her visa had expired.

"I don't recognize Israel's right to dictate who and how long (they) can stay in the occupied West Bank," Bartlett explained.

She returned to the region in the summer of 2008 for a few months. Then personal affairs brought her back to Canada for the fall.

In November 2008, she returned to Gaza aboard the Dignity, a ship operated by the Free Gaza Movement.

Since returning to Gaza, Bartlett has worked on a part-time basis for the ISM and volunteered with the Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian support agency.

She returned as Israeli forces in late December launched a military offensive against Hamas in Gaza "to stop the firing against our civilians in the south," according to one military official.

Foreigners were encouraged to leave, but Bartlett was one of many Canadians who chose to stay, enduring shelling and rocket attacks. She documented her experiences on her blog (ingaza.wordpress.com).

A tentative ceasefire was declared on Jan. 18. The Associated Press reported that the 22-day offensive killed 1,285 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were also killed in the fighting.

In a recent posting, Bartlett wrote on her blog about the Palestinian farmers trying to harvest just outside of Gaza, in what is now called the No-Go zone.

She is outraged by what she says is happening here.

In an e-mail for this story Bartlett wrote: "It never ceases to strike me as absolutely ridiculous that we (observers and farmers) must exert so much effort to do what anyone around the world can do in a leisurely way, and with the aid of machinery and irrigation. The farmers here must scuttle and scurry to get their crops picked, if they can, and pay heavy consequences for being on their own land."

Amir Gissin, Consul General of Israel in Toronto, said the No-Go zone is "certainly a problem," but he called the area essential to Israeli security in that it pushes mortar-launching sites back from the border to better protect towns close to the Israel-Gaza border.

He said sporadic rocket and mortar attacks that continue are only "an attempt to destabilize and irritate. And an attempt to prove they (Hamas) have the ability to continue" to launch attacks against Israel.

From Bartlett's view it was a different scene.

She blogged on the incident: "I'm amazed no one was killed today, nor that limbs were not lost, maimed."

Excerpts from Bartlett's blog:

Jan. 4

I see it, as I saw the dead man in the ambulance. And I write it, because everyone must see it, hear of it.

But I cry, too, at the disfigurement of the young corpse, and the knowledge that he is one of so many ... killed in the last week.

The medics have seen ghastly things and urge me to keep it in, keep working. They must, and so I do.

Jan. 5

The stain of blood on the ambulance stretcher pools next to my coat, the medic warning me my coat may be dirtied. What does it matter? The stain doesn't revolt me as it would have, did, one week ago.

Jan. 27

There are many stories. Each account, each murdered individual, each wounded person, each burned-out and broken house, each shattered window trashed kitchen strewn item of clothing bedroom turned upside down bullet and shelling hole in walls offensive Israeli army graffiti ... is important.

Carter Still Seeking Solutions

This column was originally published in The Guelph Mercury, February 10, 2009

He left office in the midst of a mortgage crisis and economic free fall. A deeply religious president, his most memorable legacy was a failed venture in the Middle East. If you answered, "Who is George W. Bush, Alex," you are wrong.

I am referring to Jimmy Carter. Arguably, his failed mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran was not his most memorable legacy. That was an interview with Playboy magazine conducted before he became president.

The then governor was asked a loaded and leading question: "How will you be able to relate to them (the American people), when you consider yourself to be so much better than them?"

Having been led to believe he was off the record (the reporter had quite visibly turned off his tape recorder and the parties were taking leave of one another at the door of the governor's residence) Carter replied in a religious context, something he strenuously avoided in public and official pronouncements, that he was better than no one, a sinner as he believes we all are.

He concluded his answer by quoting from the Sermon on the Mount: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery'; but I say to you, that everyone who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her in his heart."

The interviewer, smelling blood, pounced as any good reporter would, and asked Carter if he had ever committed adultery.

Carter replied truthfully and precisely, "Yes I have lusted. . . ." Saturday Night Live, just starting its first season, seized on that line and it came to define an idealistic, hyper-religious, pie-in-the-sky, head in the clouds president.

By that standard, which Carter applied only to himself, I have committed adultery (lusted) and every other one of the seven deadly sins (at least in my mind) in the 40 odd days since I last sang Auld Lang Syne. So much for the media brouhaha that almost cost him the presidency.

Since leaving office, Carter's largest contribution to media frenzy has been his stand on Palestine, particularly the title of his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The title alone inspired outrage among the pro-Israel lobby and right-wing commentators across the world. It also, apparently, affronted these groups so much that while they freely condemned it they refused to read it. A similar response has greeted his most recent book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Works.

The situation reminds me of a close friend, a retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, with a deep and abiding hatred of Carter. In 1994, his platoon was locked and loaded aboard their hovercraft on the verge of invading Haiti. Carter's diplomatic intervention in the crisis denied him the only opportunity in a long career to actually practise his craft, to lead his men and to play with his 'toys' -- an intrusion he continues to resent.

Carter's arguments are painfully simple. Israel continues to occupy or control by military force territories occupied as a result of offensive military operations in direct violation of UN resolutions and international law. The wall currently being constructed is not contiguous with the Green Line established after the 1967 war and amounts to de facto annexation of large portions of the West Bank.

Looking to the future these annexations, coupled with a higher Palestinian birth rate, mean that Israel will become a democracy dominated by Muslim voters or a Judeo-fascist religious state. Carter is averse to either one of these outcomes. A man deeply committed to the Biblical narrative, he believes a two-state solution is the only sustainable and morally acceptable resolution to this demographically inevitable conundrum.

In closing, this column would not be complete if I did not acknowledge a potential conflict of interest.

In the mid-1990s I had occasion to work with president Carter and developed a deep and abiding affection for him. I first met him in 1993 at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. We were standing in line in the cafeteria. He turned around, introduced himself and invited me to join his party for breakfast.

The following summer I spent a week with him, as his nominal supervisor, building a Habitat home in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. He is a highly-skilled carpenter. He worked long days and met autograph requests with an admonition that both parties had work to do.

At the end of our last day together, I presented him with a 1984 edition of Popular Mechanics with his photo on the cover and asked for an autograph. As he signed it I mentioned that I had only asked for two other autographs in my life, and asked if he wanted to know who the other two were. Having come to regard me as his 'crazy' Canadian, he deferred, but one of his bodyguards piped up and I responded.

Desperate to have this copy of Popular Mechanics signed and determined to have a Canadian politician's autograph before an American president's, I had asked former governor-general Ed Schreyer for his autograph as we surreptitiously smoked outside a Habitat function the year before.

The other was John Carlos. My father introduced me to the Olympic runner while he played a brief stint for the Toronto Argonauts -- fast as a bullet, he never learned how to catch the football. Alone among our small group, only Carter also remembered the incident that made Carlos my idol.

As a seven-year old, I had watched him stand on the Olympic podium in Mexico City in 1968 with his black-gloved hand raised in a black power salute.

Four years later, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I wrote Carter and requested that he send a signed copy of his most recent book, Sources of Strength, to my father.

Within a matter of weeks it arrived inscribed, "To Donald Gordon, best wishes, Jimmy Carter."