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CIAO DATE: 07/04
Return to Rafah: Journey to a Land Out of Bounds
Jennifer Loewenstein
*
This personal account by an American woman returning to Rafah after several years illustrates the extreme conditions that characterize daily life in the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip and the difficulties getting in to witness what is happening.
SAID ZOROUB DRIVES A white pick-up truck with the words “Rafah Municipality” painted on the driver’s side in Arabic and English, a gift from the Norwegians. 1 Less than an hour after my arrival in Rafah, Zoroub, the mayor, receives an urgent call on his cell phone. An Israeli bulldozer has struck a water main eight feet under the earth while demolishing homes along the border between Rafah and Egypt. This has cut off the water supply to the western half of the city. From the passenger side of the municipality truck I get to survey the latest damage.
Outwardly Zoroub looks unperturbed, but his words belie the appearance. “We live each day here in a state of emergency.” On either side of the road, the homes and buildings are dotted with bullet holes, as if suffering from a contagious disease. The nearer we get, the more ravaged the buildings—crumbling from disrepair, caved in where tank shells and mortar fire have struck during the night; their inhabitants are busily fashioning make-shift roofs, walls, and doorways as needed. Lines of drying laundry hang outside the windows, and political graffiti and posters of martyrs decorate the walls. Poverty and ruin define the city landscape. The edge of town is a no-man’s-land of rubble torn up and rolled over by the heavy tracks and claws of the armored vehicles that rule the terrain.
Puddles, stones, and broken glass adorn the path alongside the homes on the city’s perimeter that the Israeli army has blasted into gaping gray caverns too treacherous to stray into for long. More and more children appear from the alleyways of the neighborhood to our left, following us curiously toward the end of the street. Men and women come out to greet the mayor as we pursue the sound of the tank in the distance that is flattening everything in its path, its guns pointed toward us as we approach. A bulldozer is pushing up mounds of dirt and rubble with a steady roar: more homes gone, and there will be no water in western Rafah until the Israeli authorities give clearance for the municipality to send out a repair crew that won’t be shot on sight. A boy points to a hole in a wall from where I can snap pictures without being easily detected. From the same vantage point, children can watch the progress of the demolition. I have only taken two photos when the mayor says, “Get away from there now, it’s dangerous.” It is Thursday afternoon, the 15th of January 2004.
Tall IDF watchtowers are everywhere along the Egyptian and Israeli borders with Rafah, as well as between Rafah and the Gush Katif settlement bloc on the southeastern bend of the Mediterranean Sea. The beaches of Rafah, a short walk away for most of the city’s residents, have been off limits to Rafah residents since the beginning of the second intifada, denying them what had been their only relief from the unbearable squalor of the Strip. Driving past the edge of Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan district, the area exposed to the settlement watchtowers, the mayor picks up speed, sensing our vulnerability. Many people have died along this stretch of road, hit by bullets fired randomly by soldiers in the towers. The local boys nevertheless still attempt to use open spaces like this one as a soccer field on “quiet” days.
Farther on, Zoroub points out an orphanage and new, pre-fab homes put up by UNRWA after the IDF incursions of October 2003 that left 1,780 people homeless, 15 civilians dead, and dozens wounded. 2 There are people still camped out in tents, and converted public buildings still serve as emergency shelters.
Northwest of the town are the two fresh water wells rebuilt with emergency funds from Norway after the IDF destroyed them in January 2003. 3 A caretaker shows us fresh bullet holes in the walls of his trailer-like quarters and in the big blue sign along the fence outside announcing the gift of the new wells. He recounts how bullets have of late been ricocheting off the sides of the wells and advises us against standing outside for long.
The day before, in East Jerusalem, a man named Roger from Save the Children warned me against going to Rafah, telling me it wasn’t safe. “I was there just two weeks ago working on a water project. I was talking to a guy manning a water pump. He was wearing a helmet and a jacket identifying himself as a city worker but he was so exposed, you know—in full view of a watchtower. Two days later he was shot dead.”
On the way back to the mayor’s house we pass fields of multi-colored carnations and stop at a primitive flower factory. The flowers are cut and bound together for export to Holland—if the Israeli port authorities allow them to pass. If the flowers don’t get out within a few days, they wilt and die, even in the cold trucks. A man in the factory offers me a bouquet of red carnations. Driving back, Zoroub waves his hands in the direction of the field: “I wanted you to see something romantic in Rafah.”
Confronting the Wall of Denial
I left for Gaza on 11 January 2004 as part of a three-person pilot delegation to Rafah. We represented the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, an organization founded in February 2003 to establish people-to-people ties between our two communities. Sistering projects is well known in this university town, which has official City Council-approved sister cities in El Salvador, Nicaragua, East Timor, Cuba, Vietnam, and Lithuania, among others. It seemed time, some of us thought, to build ties with a city in Palestine. We were not prepared for the obstacles we encountered trying to get into the Gaza Strip.
Since the deaths of Rachel Corrie, Thomas Hurndall, and James Miller at the hands of the Israeli military in Rafah last spring, 4 entrance into the Gaza Strip has been increasingly difficult. What became clearer than ever to me as I struggled to get permission to enter Gaza was that internationals are being kept out for two key reasons: to hide as much as possible what is taking place daily and to avoid further “mishaps”—i.e., the killing or wounding of internationals and the unwanted publicity that results.
The Israeli military forces kill Palestinians nearly every day in cruel and horrible circumstances. Most of the reports about these deaths and the unending atrocities against both the people and the land never make it into our media. When they do, they are packaged as justifiable violence against “terrorists” and “militants,” as “retaliatory strikes,” or as actions of “self-defense.” With the U.S. and Israeli media and foreign policy establishments spotlighting the “War on Terror,” few stop to question the reduction of entire groups of people into often grotesquely caricatured national foes bent on destroying “freedom” and “democracy.” One result has been that nearly 3,000 Palestinian deaths have made no impression on the majority of Americans—most of whom have no idea what is happening in the occupied Palestinian territories—even though their government is indirectly responsible for these deaths. When an international dies, however, especially a young American girl like Rachel Corrie who was in Rafah to engage in nonviolent resistance, damage control becomes necessary—despite concerted attempts by some to portray Corrie as a “terrorist sympathizer.”
On 4 January 2004, Israel issued a new series of restrictions designed to isolate further the Palestinian people and to make sure that the situation in the territories is as free of formal or informal international monitoring as possible. The restrictions require prior written authorization for all citizens attempting to enter areas which have technically been under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) since the 1993 Oslo Agreements. Persons wishing to enter Gaza “are required to fill out a form requesting entry and to submit it to the Foreign Relations Office in the Coordination and Liaison Administration in the Gaza Strip, situated at Erez Crossing.” 5 These requests take a minimum of five business days to process, can be rejected at will, and often require repeated and frustrating attempts. Trying to get into areas under PA control without Israeli permission can result in legal action, deportation, and the prevention of future entry into the State of Israel.
The excuse for these restrictions, which have been more or less in place since the spring of 2003 but codified only recently, is to ensure the safety of foreigners entering the Palestinian territories, routinely described as “dangerous.” The real reason, however, is to keep away from the Strip not only activists like those belonging to the ISM, but just about anyone, sometimes including even aid workers. These restrictions follow other equally unsettling policies, such as the requirement issued last spring that all visitors to Gaza sign a waiver absolving Israel of all responsibility for death or injury caused by the Israeli military. 6 International humanitarian aid organizations and foreign journalists have sometimes, but not always, been exempted. Nevertheless, the short-term effect of such policies has been to discourage all but the most determined from attempting the journey. My own saga in reaching Gaza from Jerusalem is too long to recount here; suffice it to say that even with a valid press card from WORT radio station in Madison and a letter of support from U.S. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin, a long-time supporter of Israel but also of Madison’s sister cities), getting into Gaza required three days of anxious waiting, several visits to the Israeli press office in Jerusalem, the American consulate in Jerusalem (not helpful), tens of phone calls to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv (ultimately more helpful), countless calls to the United States, a second intervention by Congresswoman Baldwin, and a stream of faxes and phone calls by WORT both to Israel and to the Israeli consulate in Chicago. My two companions had less luck than I and were never able to gain access to Gaza despite repeated and frustrating attempts similar to my own. Leaving aside the personal inconvenience to those who try to get into the Strip, the long-term effect of putting Gaza virtually “off limits” is potentially devastating for the inhabitants, leaving them even more exposed and without protection.
The “Terrorist Infrastructure”
Bullets flew at us like hailstones when we left Naila’s home my first evening in Rafah. For two hours I’d sat with Sumaiya, the mayor’s wife, her sisters Naila, Muna, and Sabrin, and all their children, watching their wide eyes and smiles as, one by one, they stood before me to attempt a sentence in English, looking to me for approval and then running away in gleeful embarrassment. The older girls passed around plates of food for dinner, pastries, and coffee. Noof, Said Zoroub’s beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter, asked me what I thought of Islam and if I would tell her what the bad things were that people in America said about it.
Some of the kids were roughhousing in the background when the power went out, leaving us in darkness. The littlest boy, Karim, cried out for his mother, and someone went to look for a battery-operated lamp. Electricity, like water and phone lines, is never taken for granted here.
When the lights came back on, Talal, the mayor’s friend, came to pick us up. We tried to leave but had to cram ourselves back into the doorway when bullets flew at us from the watchtower in the distance, hitting the side of the building or shooting past us into the night. I would never have left that doorway had I been alone, but for the others the routine in these episodes of indiscriminate firing is to pause for a moment, wait for quiet, and then dart into the car, ducking down below the windows as the driver speeds away. Up the road, two cars had collided racing away from the same scene, their drivers standing dejected in the middle of the dark street surveying the damage.
Back at the mayor’s home, I received a call from Laura Gordon, the only remaining American ISM activist in Rafah. 7 Would I come by the office and meet her friends? They were planning a demonstration for Friday. Had I heard that Tom Hurndall had died? Ten months in a coma and peace finally came. The martyr’s posters had already been printed with his young face looking out at us. Now they would be plastered along the city walls next to all the others. The demonstrators would march up Keer Street the next morning to stand at the place where he’d been shot in the head attempting to pull two children out of the line of fire.
Tanks barrel down Keer Street when major invasions into Rafah begin. It is a wretched slum-like street that dead-ends in a large mound of earth, stone blocks, and rubble across from the no-man’s-land that separates it from the IDF’s positions. On Friday morning, I stood on top of that mound gazing across at another fortress-like bunker harboring Israeli guards. I couldn’t see them, but I sensed their eyes on us. The demonstrators, almost all children, wore bull’s eye placards on their shirts and carried the banners, “Palestinians and Internationals are Targets for the Israeli Army.” A young girl pointed to a small hole in the wall of a building at the end of Keer Street, the mark of the bullet, I was told, that struck and ultimately killed Hurndall.
The Gaza Strip is often described as a prison with the sky for a ceiling. Its inhabitants live surrounded by electrified fences, motion censors, barbed wire, and metal barriers, except along the sea coast where Israeli gunboats patrol the shores. Israel prevents most Gazans from leaving the territory or even from traveling freely between its overcrowded camps and towns; the roads are controlled by extensive checkpoints that can turn a half hour’s travel into a four-day journey. The military can choose to close off sections of Gaza from all contact with the rest of the Strip whenever it pleases, though residents of the seventeen illegal settlements, which take up more than a quarter of this tiny area, can travel with ease to the other settlements in Gaza and back and forth to Israel on the Jewish-only roads. 8
The Gaza Strip is far more than a prison, however. One need only spend time in Khan Yunis or Bureij, Jabaliya or Nussayrat, Gaza City or Bayt Hanun, to recognize the flaw in the prison analogy. For in Gaza you are not just an inmate in a giant penitentiary. You are a walking human target, shadowed by snipers who can obliterate you and your surroundings at will. Your home belongs to bulldozers and dynamite, your cities and refugee camps to F-16s and helicopter gunships. In Gaza, your livelihood is diminished each day by an impoverishment that is as deliberate as it is merciless. There is neither escape from desperation nor refuge from terror. And nowhere in the Strip is this more evident than in Rafah.
Since 29 September 2000, the Israeli army has killed 275 people in Rafah, more than three dozen since October 2003. Seventy-six of the dead have been children. It has destroyed a total of 1,759 homes, 430 of them since October 2003, displacing a total of 12,643 residents, 2,894 since October 2003. Unemployment is nearing 70 percent in Rafah, with a poverty rate of 83.4 percent as of the end of the third quarter of 2003. 9 Malnutrition affects a large number of Rafah’s children, as does post traumatic stress disorder. 10 Rafah, a city with a population of about 120,000 (smaller than Nablus, Gaza City, and Hebron), has lost more people than any other city in the occupied Palestinian territories since the beginning of the second intifada. It is the poorest of all Palestinian cities, and its Shabura district is the poorest section of Rafah. There, whole families are crammed together in one-room shacks made of corrugated iron with dirt floors and sheet metal, cardboard, and tarpaulin roofs. Children run barefoot in the streets, ill-clad and ill-fed. Nowhere in Palestine will one find conditions as miserable and destitute as they are in Rafah, approximately 80 percent of whose citizens are refugees, sometimes two and three times over. 11
When Israeli tanks came rumbling through the streets of Rafah in October 2003, the western media reported that they were looking for tunnels linking homes in Rafah to Egypt for the purpose of smuggling weapons. The Palestinian leadership had failed to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure,” so Israel had to do the job itself. We are supposed to accept unquestioningly that such tunnels and the trickle of weapons they deliver pose a threat to Israel’s massive military arsenal and that searching for these tunnels requires the destruction of 2,000 homes and everything in them. To doubt this could jeopardize the logic of continued occupation and of the wider “war on terror” Americans and their Israeli allies are fighting together. It could even lead to suspicions that the levels of death and destruction routine in Rafah are part of Israel’s plan to clear—at whatever cost to the inhabitants—a wide area between Rafah and the Egyptian border in order to make it a closed military zone (CMZ), thereby putting it under direct Israeli control officially and permanently, rather than, as now, de facto and “as needed.” Establishing a CMZ would remove the last international boundary between Palestinian territory and a country other than Israel, guaranteeing that the Gaza Strip would be permanently quarantined. It would complete the destruction of the Gazan economy, since trade with Egypt would for all practical purposes cease. Most importantly, by removing the last vestige of constraint on the IDF’s intimidation of the Palestinian population, it would advance the process of gradual, internal flight from Gaza’s border regions into the already overcrowded refugee camps and cities of the interior. Devastation and the implosion of an entire society would be accelerated, and with the blessing—at the very least implicit—of the United States.
Just after the October incursions, Amnesty International issued a statement labeling Israel’s actions a war crime and calling for a halt to the extensive demolition of family homes. During the two weeks of destruction, dispossession, and death, the Israeli forces found a grand total of three tunnels and no weapons. 12
“Gaza is a Dangerous Place”
Heavy tank and machine gun fire blast the nights wide open in Rafah. For six hours straight I listen to the nonstop pounding of bullets and tank shells outside my window. Now and then an unidentifiable explosion interrupts the shooting, a silent pause creeps over the skies, and the routine begins again. But the silence is not absolute: in the distance I can hear the unending rumble of machines at work—bulldozers devouring the edges of the town.
On the morning of 17 January, Arij, the mayor’s fifteen-year-old daughter, knocks on my door to find out if I am all right. She wants to know if Irsquo;d been afraid. I tell her I had been angry. How can I explain the feeling of being transported into a nightmare world where you expect the next blast to come through your wallmdash;and where you almost wish for it so you can end your powerless seclusion?
On the roof of the mayorrsquo;s house, Arij points past the homes behind us to survey the nightrsquo;s damage: The familiar flattened landscape gapes back at me like a dead manrsquo;s eyes. More homes gone, and part of a mosque destroyed. Dozens more people displaced. Disproportionate force unleashed against pitiful guerrillas, ragged partisans shooting from shadowy, cracked-open homes, determined to fight back and to drag all of Rafah in with them if necessary. What difference will it make? Israelrsquo;s message is clear: we will destroy you, if not in death, then in life.
In the two weeks following my departure, at least 30 more homes vanished from Rafah and nearly 600 more people were made homeless. Seven more people died, including an infant, while two more men were victims of Israel’s “targeted assassinations” policy. Both were unarmed when they were executed. 13 A photojournalist contact sent me photos of the latest violence. These are the images that best summarize life in Rafah, the kind of images that clutter my memory when I think back to my stay this January, even after the hours of working visits to the municipality, youth centers, women’s organizations, the ministries of health and education, popular refugees’ committees, and a rehabilitation center for the deaf; after days of note-taking and conversation about moving forward and building bridges between communities. 14
Before leaving Gaza City I’d found emailed messages from U.S. Congresswoman Baldwinrsquo;s office waiting for me. Her aide, who had been so friendly and so eager to help back in Madison, had received correspondence from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and was now sternly ldquo;urgingrdquo; me to get out of Gaza, conveying the State Departmentrsquo;s concern that American citizens not be “exposed” to such “potentially dangerous areas and situations.” She had attached three documents: a letter from Alison Dilworth of the American consulate in Jerusalem informing her that American citizens should not be traveling to the Gaza Strip; a “Public Announcement: Warden Message” issued by the U.S. government on 15 October 2003 (just after an official American convoy traveling in the Gaza Strip had been hit by a bomb) recommending that all Americans in Gaza leave immediately, their evacuation to be facilitated by the Israelis; and a “Worldwide Caution” issued by the U.S. State Department on 22 December 2003 warning American citizens abroad about the potential threat to their lives from al-Qa`ida. 15 It seemed the office of our U.S. congressperson had been made to fall into line with the U.S. policy of sanctioning Israeli actions.
When I went to leave Gaza through the Erez Crossing, Israeli soldiers ordered me to stop before I passed the last barricade. I was left waiting for more than two hours in the dark, surrounded by concrete blocks. If I moved forward, I knew I could be shot. I shouted repeatedly at the soldiers in the Israeli bunker at the checkpoint to please let me through because I had a flight to catch. My shouts were met with sarcastic remarks and threats, “Erez is closed, go back” and “We heard you the first time! You can be quiet now.” Only after continuing to holler that I was an American citizen and needed to leave was I finally instructed to proceed through the electronic security gate. At the window of the bunker, a helmeted young soldier grabbed my passport and stamped it huffily, saying that he hadn’t been able to let me through before he’d gotten clearance from a higher authority. A voice behind him echoed guiltily, “We are just little screws in a big machine.” Would this be the justification years hence for the horrors of the Israeli occupation?
The air was cold when my taxi drove me off into the night.
Endnotes
Note *: Jennifer Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and human rights activist who has lived in the Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and worked for the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City. She teaches professional communications at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Back.
Note 1: Norway has provided development assistance to Palestine since 1993 to “help prevent any further disintegration of the political, social and economic basis for the peace process,” according to www.ud48.mogul.no/cgi-bin/wbch3.exe?p=1662. From 1999–2003 Norway pledged NOK 1.3 billion in aid to the Palestinian territories, making these areas one of the single largest recipients of bilateral aid from Norway since 1994. There is evidence of Norwegian development assistance all over Rafah: the two new fresh water wells on the outskirts of town are one example of emergency Norwegian aid. Back.
Note 2: A 28 January 2004 report on the consequences of IDF operations in Rafah by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) found that, “Some of those made homeless by IDF operations moved into smaller units, which in most cases are insufficient for the size of the family. Others have migrated northwards in search of accommodation, or—in exceptional cases—moved into abandoned dwellings adjacent to the buffer zones that were left by other families fearful that their homes would be targeted. An increasing number of families whose homes were destroyed are relying on tents for shelter. Tents are being provided by UNRWA and [the International Committee of the Red Cross].” (OCHA, “Humanitarian Consequences of Israel’s Military Operation in Rafah”) The homeless figures I quote above are from this report. Others estimated the number of people made homeless during the October 2003 raids at around 2,000. Back.
Note 3: For a report on the destruction of Rafah’s two fresh water wells in January 2003, see “Danger: Rafah’s Fresh Water Wells,” by Amira Hass in Ha’Aretz, 5 February 2003. The wells provided about half of Rafah’s drinking and household water, and Hass suggests they were deliberately destroyed. Back.
Note 4: Rachel Corrie was an American International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist who was crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer in Rafah on 16 March 2003. She was standing in a flat, open area wearing a bright orange vest and shouting through a bullhorn to the bulldozer driver to stop the demolition of family homes. According to an Israeli investigation, her death was an accident. Tom Hurndall was a British ISM activist shot in the head on 11 April 2003; in January 2004 he died in the UK after ten months in a coma. Like Corrie, Hurndall had been wearing a bright orange vest with reflective stripes. He had been trying to move children away from an area where there was active IDF firing. Back.
Note 5: To view the document on the 4 January 2004 Israeli restrictions on travel into the Palestinian territories, go to: www.palsolidarity.org/pressreleases/entryrestrictions.php Back.
Note 6: To view a copy of the Gaza Waiver absolving Israel of responsibility for the deaths of internationals at the hands of the Israeli military, go to: www.electronicIntifada.net/v2/article1452.shtml Back.
Note 7: Laura returned to the U.S. on 21 January and has been on a speaking tour across the country since that time. Back.
Note 8: Much has been made of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s February 2004 announcement that "I have given an order to plan for the evacuation of 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip." The prime minister elaborated that, "It is my intention to carry out an evacuation—sorry, a relocation—of settlements that cause us problems and of places that we will not hold onto anyway in a final settlement, like the Gaza settlements." (Yoel Marcus in Ha’Aretz, 3 February 2004.) It should be noted, however, that an order to plan for the evacuation is not the same as an order to evacuate, which is yet to be given. Nonetheless, it has long been known that Israel has no “need” of Gaza and that giving up the settlements there could provide some strategic leverage for Israel, enabling it to annex more Palestinian land in the West Bank for its settlements there with Washington’s approval. Back.
Note 9: The statistics listed here were compiled by the Mezan Center for Human Rights based in Gaza City, Gaza. They do not include statistics on the number of homes destroyed or the number of people killed or displaced between 16 and 22 January 2004. During this time 1 woman was killed and 8 people were injured. Seventy-two more homes have been demolished since the beginning of January 2004, and an additional 684 people have been made homeless. See “Report to the LACC on Humanitarian Consequences of the Israeli Defence Forces Operations in Rafah, Southern Gaza Strip,” published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 28 January 2004. Back.
Note 10: On malnutrition in the Palestinian territories, see, for example, “Palestinian Malnutrition at African Levels under Israeli Curbs, Say MPs,” by Ben Russell in the Independent, 5 February 2004. British MPs on a visit to Israel and the occupied territories are quoted as saying, “Rates of malnutrition in Gaza and parts of the West Bank are as bad as anything one would find in sub-Saharan Africa. The Palestinian economy has all but collapsed. Unemployment rates are in the region of 60 to 70 percent. . . . .It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a deliberate Israeli strategy of putting the lives of ordinary Palestinians under stress as part of a strategy to bring the population under heel.” On the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder among Palestinians, especially Palestinian children see “An Interview with Eyad El-Sarraj,” (of the Gaza Community Mental Health Center in Gaza City, Gaza) in Tikkun, by Julie Oxenberg and Dan Burnstein, Nov.–Dec. 2003. Back.
Note 11: Information on the situation of Rafah’s refugees was obtained in direct conversation with Zeyad Sarafandi, president of Rafah’s Popular Refugees Committee, on 17 January 2004 in the main Rafah office. Back.
Note 12: Amnesty International, Israel/Occupied Territories: “Wanton Destruction Constitutes a War Crime,” press release, AI Index: MDE 15/091/2003 (public); News Service no. 234, 13 October 2003. Back.
Note 13: See the UN’s OCHA reports for February 2004; also “Israeli Troops Kill Palestinian in Raid,” Al-Jazeera, 8 February 2004 at www.english.aljazeera.net Back.
Note 14: Brent Foster’s photographs can be viewed at www.sportsshooter.com/members.html?id=1966 A detailed description of the people met and organizations visited during this trip to Rafah can be found at the MRSCP Web site at www.madison-rafah.org Back.
Note 15: See attachments with correspondence from U.S. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin’s office on the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project’s Web site at www.madison-rafah.org Back.