It was just another day in East Jerusalem.
Debbie Hubbard was in the old part of Jerusalem in Israel – a place of old stone and old blood.
In front of her was a group of unarmed Palestinian schoolchildren, chanting protests over the Israeli military's efforts to keep them out of the famous Al-Aqsa mosque. Looking down on them was a pair of Israeli soldiers armed with machine guns.
Suddenly, there was a concussive, earth-shaking bang, followed by a second one. The soldiers had thrown a pair of what were likely flash-bang grenades at the children.
They scattered, leaving Hubbard stunned with disbelief.
"They were just chanting. They're just a bunch of school kids," she says.
And yet armed men in a democratic nation had thrown bombs at them.
"It goes against everything we as Canadians believe."
It was one of the many outrageous acts Hubbard says she and her husband Dean Reidt witnessed this winter during a three-month stint as human rights observers in the occupied Palestinian territory in Israel – acts they now feel compelled to speak out about.
These same acts were a part of everyday life for thousands of Palestinians, they learned.
As one Israeli peace activist told them, "Leave all your rationality and logic behind when you come to this country, because what you are about to experience is not rational or logical."
Eyes on the ground
Hubbard and Reidt are members of the United Church who live in St. Albert. They recently hosted Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper during his cross-Canada speaking tour on the Palestinian occupation.
The two of them had previously visited Israel and were appalled by the human rights violations they witnessed.
"It was the first time as Canadians, and we've travelled extensively, that people said, 'Where's Canada (here) as peacemakers?'" Hubbard says.
Israel has occupied much of the Palestinian territory since 1967, says Bill van Esveld, senior Middle East researcher with Human Rights Watch, speaking by phone from Israel. That puts certain obligations on Israel as occupiers toward the Palestinians under international law.
van Esveld says a "whole laundry list" of human rights violations by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities has piled up since 1967, including arbitrary arrests and torture (by the Palestinians) and house demolitions (by the Israelis). Thousands on both sides have died from attacks linked to the occupation.
Hubbard and Reidt signed up to be observers under the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel – a program started by the World Council of Churches in 2002 at the request of Israeli and Palestinian churches. They were part of a team of about 36 observers stationed throughout the West Bank region (which is near Jerusalem) from Oct. 18, 2014, to Jan. 17, 2015.
"Our role isn't to be activists, but to be a presence on the ground," Hubbard says – one that would hopefully deter or at least shed light on rights abusers.
As observers, they took head-counts in lineups at checkpoints, attended house demolitions, and monitored hot spots such as the Al-Aqsa mosque. Their days often started before 4 a.m. and stretched far into the night, and involved long talks with furious and grief-stricken residents. Their observations helped form the basis of reports by international organizations such as the UN.
"The three months were very, very stressful," Reidt says.
The wall
Hubbard says she and her husband spent most of their time in Bethlehem and Jerusalem monitoring the separation barrier between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Israeli government built the barrier in 2002 in response to violent attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. Now 62 per cent built, it will be about 712 kilometres long when finished.
Most of the barrier consists of barbed wire and trenches, but parts of it are thick concrete walls that are up to eight metres tall, says the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (or B'Tselem), a prominent Israeli human rights group.
Reidt monitored Checkpoint 300 – an opening in the barrier in Bethlehem where some 6,000 people pass through every day to get to work or school.
People line up hundreds at a time in narrow "cattle chutes" made from steel fences at checkpoints and are herded toward the turnstile. There they present their IDs, fingerprints and work permits, pass through metal detectors and get their bags x-rayed by armed soldiers, Hubbard says.
It takes anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes to get through, so most line up at 4 a.m. Residents might reach the end of the line only to find that their permit has expired, or that they've been blacklisted, or that the soldiers decided to close the checkpoint.
"It was very unpredictable," Hubbard says.
Delays in the line can lead to clashes with the guards. You feel squeezed and stressed by the crush of people, Reidt says – one Palestinian died of a heart attack at one of the checkpoints he monitored.
Palestinians will often climb over each other and along the fences to get ahead in line, Reidt says.
"It's mayhem," he says.
"They simply have to get to work."
In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the parts of the wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violated international law and called for the wall to be removed.
Eitan Weiss, head of public diplomacy at the Israeli Embassy in Ottawa, says the barrier is needed to stop terrorist attacks.
"We're talking about people, terrorists, who were sent to kill Israeli women and children and civilians. Because of the threat of those terrorists, we needed to find the best way to protect ourselves."
The barrier could be justified if it was built on Israeli land, but it's not, van Esveld says. About 85 per cent of the wall and its proposed route is on Palestinian territory, cutting Palestinians off from schools, hospitals, neighbours, and, in many cases, their own farmland, reports the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Some villages are entirely encircled by it.
Passage through the barrier is controlled by a complex permit system run by the Israeli military. About 11,000 residents who reside between the wall and Israel's border need permits to even live in their own homes.
Permits for farmers are issued in fewer and fewer numbers each year, van Esveld notes – there was an 83 per cent drop in the number of permits issued from 2006 to 2009, reports B'Tselem, citing Israeli government records.
B'Tselem says these and other movement restrictions have caused major increases in poverty and unemployment in Palestine, blocking access to jobs and trade.
There are psychological effects as well, Hubbard says.
"I saw five-year-olds go through the checkpoint," she says – alone, as their parents didn't have permits to cross. If the kids got sick at school, the parents couldn't pick them up. She saw other kids who, when asked to draw a picture of their life, would draw things like guards arresting someone at gunpoint.
One woman told her that her boss started paying her an hourly instead of a fixed wage as, due to the randomness of the barrier, he could never tell when she'd arrive for work.
"She had no control over her life."
Demolitions
Another common human rights issue witnessed by Reidt and Hubbard was house demolitions.
UN statistics show that Israeli authorities destroyed about 103 Palestinian homes in the West Bank during the time Reidt and Hubbard were in Israel, displacing some 279 people.
Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions estimates that some 48,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967 – equivalent to all the homes in St. Albert twice over.
Hubbard says demolitions happen with little to no warning, often at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. to avoid traffic and the media. She's seen cases where 50 soldiers accompany the demolition crew. Residents will get maybe 10 minutes to get everything they can out of their home before the bulldozer goes to work.
"The first ones are shocking," she says.
"You're watching someone being made homeless."
Some homeowners actually choose to destroy their own homes, Reidt notes – if they don't, they have to pay for the cost of the demolition.
Emotions on the scene of the 12 demolitions Hubbard attended included fear, anger, hopelessness and bewilderment.
"One lady said to me, 'What will I do when winter comes?'"
Another man told her how he had just finished his home after five years of work before the military destroyed it.
"I said, 'What are you going to do?' And he said, 'I'll have to build again.'"
The Geneva Conventions forbid occupying powers (Israel in this case) from destroying private homes unless there is a military need to do so, van Esveld says.
B'Tselem reports that some 1,239 homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were destroyed between 2006 and 2014 not for military reasons, but because they were built without permits.
This is a rights issue because the Israeli government refuses to give housing permits to Palestinians most of the time, van Esveld says – the rejection rate was about 94.4 per cent from 2000-2007, suggests a study by the Israeli NGO Bimkom.
"If you can't get a permit in the first place, then it seems unfair to demolish the house because you say it didn't have a permit."
While Weiss initially said "houses are being knocked down only if these houses were occupied by terrorists," he later clarified that some were destroyed due to permit issues.
The terrorism-related demolitions are meant to deter future attacks, Weiss says.
"If you kill Israeli civilians, we will destroy your house."
B'Tselem reports that the Israeli government have destroyed 671 homes in the occupied territories since 2001 for punitive/deterrence reasons.
van Esveld says this is a form of collective punishment, which is against international law. These demolitions punish not just the terrorist (who is often already dead or jailed), but also anyone else who happens to be in that person's house, like the person's family.
"They're not accused of doing anything wrong, but they're suffering from punishment," he says.
"You're not just punishing the guilty person. You're punishing innocent people."
A 2005 study by the Israeli military also found no evidence that these punishments worked, he continued.
"On a practical level, their own evidence indicates it's not working."
Why rights matter
The United Nations has repeatedly denounced the separation barrier and house demolitions in the occupied Palestinian territory as obstacles to peace.
Even though both the Israeli and Palestinian governments are violating human rights, "abuses by one side don't justify abuse by the other," van Esveld says. Both sides need to trust each other if they are to find peace, and continued violations undermine that trust.
"We need to see accountability, impartial accountability, not just for one side … but for any violation by anybody."
Reidt says he went to Israel as a neutral observer, but that when it comes to human rights, there's nothing to be neutral about.
"If it's wrong, it's wrong."
Reidt and Hubbard say they want Canada to put more pressure on Israel to uphold human rights laws and end the occupation of Palestine.
Palestinians and Israeli peace activists truly believe peace is possible, Hubbard says, but only with the support of the international community. One of her fellow observers (a South African) said what was needed was an international lobbying campaign like the one that ended apartheid.
Extremists on both sides of this conflict want to make it about religion, but Hubbard says that's not what it's really about.
"This is not about religion, about Jews and Muslims … This is about the violations of basic human rights and right and wrong."
