G. Roger Denson

Summary

Writer and curator whose essay “Know Thine Enemy: Americans Face the Palestinian Intifada” opens the edited volume Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the Intifada, the record of a delegation to Palestine between March 28 and April 24, 1989, analyzed in Chapter 1 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.53).

Denson gives the delegation’s opening statistics: between December 7, 1987 and April 1989, 681 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip had been killed, 34,000 wounded, 5,800 permanently disabled, 30,000 detained or imprisoned, and 3,700 miscarriages reported as a result of the gas; “What every American should know is that this had been accomplished with the aid of 3.1 billion American dollars—1.8 billion of which is apportioned strictly for military operations” (PDF p.53).
He then narrates the conversion Kelly analyzes: “But by the trip’s end, these statistics no longer reflected impersonal numbers; now the Americans thought of the statistics entwined with the names, faces, families, homes, and friends they met while in the West Bank and Gaza Strip” (PDF p.54).
On al-Am’ari: “It was at Al-Amaari, in the first house to host the delegates, that they met Amel Habid, a sixteen-year-old boy active in the intifada who would end up dead just four days after their visit”; “the delegates realized they might be endangering the Palestinians when taking such liberties” (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.58-59).
Denson (named “C. Roger Denson” at PDF p.62) describes delegation participants giving blood in Palestinian hospitals, and explains that West Bank blood was kept in mobile “floating blood banks” for fear Israeli military patrols would confiscate supplies found on a hospital’s premises (PDF p.62-63).

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