The occupation is alive and well in the northern West Bank. This is the first of several entries I intend to log on the atrocious state of affairs in Nablus and points north, where the open wounds of Israel's war on innocent civilians make all talk of peace seem a distant and dangerous fantasy.

Never mind that Palestinians continue to be kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces on a near-daily basis. Never mind that all roads into and out of Nablus, once the Palestinians' commercial heartland, are manned by Israeli soldiers accountable to no one here. Never mind that ambulances are made to wait for hours on end, while Israeli soldiers feed their dogs (see forthcoming photo). Pay these details little mind, but please: don't talk of peace to the people of Nablus. Their lives tell an altogether different story.

Consider the plaque pictured at the top of this page: in one week in April 2002, 91 people were killed in Nablus by Israel's war machine.

Pictured below, for example, is all that remains of a home in the old city in which 8 members of the same family were blown to bits by a U.S.-manufactured F-16.



As I stand before the ruins with my friend Feras, a volunteer medic who was shot while evacuating the old city's wounded, I can't believe that Americans would condone this kind of crime, much less count its perpetrator, the state of Israel, among our closest allies.

We do this at our expense, of course. I read today that the Israeli Shekel is the strongest it's ever been against the dollar, which continues to lose value here as elsewhere. Yet Israel continues to reap the rewards of billions of dollars in American "aid," most of it cash with no strings attached. Even so, as any American who dares live a day behind Israel's warped facade will tell you, my American passport earns me little more than scoffs and smirks from the Israeli soldiers that litter this Palestinian land.

This infuriates me not simply because I am Palestinian, but because I am an American. With millions of Americans struggling under the weight of the current economic crisis, with families losing their homes and children falling into poverty, what business do we have funding this occupation, its strangulation and bombing of innocent civilians, its cynical and calculated expropriation of an indigenous people's land? Surely we can find a better use for this money back home.

React: samer@helpupa.com