Sequoia rises to a new day, still alive!

[here is a recent, rather sad account by friends of mine who volunteer as observers of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, in its most illegal and confiscatory form, settlers who do what we did to the Americas, plant ourselves as the new "owners" of land where Palestinian Arab families have lived for centuries, as in our American case we did that on land that Native Americans had lived on for millenia, after their eerlier migration from Asia, but in gentle, smaller ways, by gfoot, with few if any weapons, and simply settling on land that was pretty vacant.
Read this report on Israeli settlers, often American Jews of very orthodox or conservative stripe, who are claiming ownership by right of God's gift of this land centuries ago to the early ancestors of 21st century Jews, like my four grandkids.
Native Americans have not followed their bad example and pitched tents or trailers on lovely hilltopsin California or New England, and claimed it from their ancestors early occupation in Biblcal days. Many of our suburbs would be Native American settlements by now if they had sone so. --Bob F.]

CPTnet 7 August 2009 SOUTH HEBRON HILLS: Israeli police and military use settler's map to restrict Palestinians' access to their land
[Note: According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and numerous United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian territories are illegal. Most settlement outposts are considered illegal under Israeli law.]
TUBA, SOUTH HEBRON HILLS, PALESTINE – During the morning of 31 July 2009, Israeli police detained Palestinian shepherds, CPTers, and Israeli activists for over two hours while Palestinians attempted to access their land in the Umm Zeituna area, located near the Israeli settlement of Ma'on.
Palestinian shepherds from the village of Tuba were grazing their sheep in Umm Zeituna when the Israeli military arrived, followed by an Israeli settler from the Israeli outpost of Havat Ma'on, a settler security agent from Ma'on, and Israeli police.
The police took the IDs and passports of the Palestinians, Israelis, and CPTers (respectively) and detained the group for over two hours.
The Israeli District Coordinating Office (DCO) arrived and the settler from Havat Ma'on then produced a map, claiming that it forbade Palestinians from grazing their sheep in the area. The DCO, army, and police refused to show the Palestinians the map, which the Israeli authorities claimed showed the boundaries of where Palestinians could graze their sheep. Instead the police gave verbal direction to the shepherds, saying they were allowed only in the valley nearest Tuba. The shepherds insisted on seeing the map to know the boundaries of where they could go, but the police continued to refuse. Instead, they insisted that the entire area of Umm Zeituna was closed to Palestinians.
Palestinians from Tuba use a foot path through Umm Zeituna to go to the nearby city of Yatta. Several years ago the DCO declared the public road that once connected Tuba to Yatta (through the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani) off-limits to Palestinians. When he heard the foot path through Umm Zeituna was also closed, one of the shepherds asked, "How should we go to Yatta? Should we fly?" The police then took this shepherd to the Kiryat Arba police station. A police officer told CPTers that he was "helping" the shepherd get to the police station, because he had "too many questions" that he needed to ask the police commander.
By the evening of 31 July, the shepherd's family members had still received no word of what happened to him in the Kiryat Arba police station.