Kalamazoo Gazette · 21 December 1989

CP-1989-045

Friends of Beit Sahour work for justice for Palestinians

Andrea Tally

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Transcribed from the clipping

Felicia Langer is an Israeli lawyer, a Holocaust survivor and a woman who has devoted her professional life to defending Palestinian human rights. In her office hangs a picture of an Israeli soldier brutalizing a Palestinian youth. Underneath is the caption “Don’t say you didn’t know.”

We, members of a delegation of about 120 U.S. human rights activists who recently traveled to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, write to share what we have come to know about the brutalization and dehumanization of the Palestinian people in that area. The occasion of our visit was an attempt to break the siege of the small Palestinian village of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem.

We met the people, walked their streets, slept in their homes, listened to their stories, witnessed their oppression and marched with them in the first demonstration there in 16 months that didn’t end in tear gas, beating or shooting.

The people of Beit Sahour have refused to pay taxes since July 1988 on the principles that there should be no taxation without representation, and the Israeli tax policy is in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. In a letter of Nov.

5, the people wrote: “We strongly believe that every citizen has to pay taxes for his national government to enable it to perform its duties and obligations, so we enquire ‘Where is our national government?’...We refuse to pay taxes to the occupier of the land because we consider it a symbol of slavery and oppression.”

Besides, the 4th Geneva Convention mandates that taxes may only be levied on an occupied territory if the tax money is returned in services to the people of that area. “Where are the services?” the people of Beit Sahour ask, “They are almost non-existent.

There is no social insurance, no houses for the old or handicapped or orphans...The health system in the West Bank goes back to the 19th century. There is no free education...For all these reasons and as a result of our full conviction the money collected...goes to the purchase of bullets and tear gas to kill our children, we have decided not to pay taxes any longer.”

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