Dear friends,
I feel like my mind is already halfway back home, which I suppose would put it somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, but I’ll try to keep you posted on my next few weeks nonetheless. Before beginning this report, I want to ask you a favor. I’m wondering what questions and topics you’d most like to see addressed in a presentation from me about Palestine. I’ve started to think about what I’d like to share with people, and I want to make sure I have the right pictures, stories, and information with me before I go. So if you have any thoughts, please respond to this e-mail and let me know.
I picked my first olives of the season last week. It was nice to be out there again, to think about where I was last year at this time (only physically in the same place). I wonder if Palestinians use the harvest as that kind of marker for them – a time to reflect on the year as they bond with their land. Although I suppose they have an almost constant connection to the land, not only during the time of olive harvest… that is, when they can access their land.
So many physical, legal and mental barriers exist in this place that I think every olive picked by a Palestinian farmer (and not stolen by a settler or left to sit on the branches until dead) is an act of resistance. On Monday I picked olives with a family from Azzawiya who has land inside the settlement of Shaarei Tikvah. What I should say is that the settlement of Shaarei Tikvah has been built on land stolen from families of Azzawiya. Ah, the difficulties of language. In any case, the family was attempting to enter through a gate in the Wall (which is fence in this area) that has not been open in almost a year. The army opened it for the first time on Sunday, but only for people with permits. The people in Azzawiya do not have permits, so Ismail and his family did not get through on Sunday, but on Monday the border police who opened the gate in the morning decided to do the farmers a ‘favor’ and let them harvest their olives. The family entered the settlement with no problem, only to find that a new road had been built and the settlement parking lot had been expanded – destroying at least 20 of their olive trees. Additionally, a new fence had been constructed, blocking the family from reaching half of the trees that remained, and also confiscating a working water well. Perhaps the most offensive destruction, however, was the new landscaping along the main entrance road. The settlement had cut down Palestinian olive trees in order to plant imported palm trees along the sidewalk. The olive trees are native to this land; the palm trees have come from outside to replace them, they stand taller and look down at the remaining olive trees, and they’re a bit prickly. Draw your own parallels.
The reason internationals accompany farmers to their groves is to stand in solidarity and possibly to intervene or document abuses by settlers and soldiers. About an hour after we began picking on Monday, we noticed a settler and Ismail having a conversation. The settler’s wife came out to her porch as well. I walked a little closer, only to find that the settler was offering Ismail the olives from the 3 olive trees in his yard. He didn’t need them, he said, so Ismail was welcome to pick them and take the fruit. Ismail said thank you, but we have our own olives to harvest. I asked the man how long he had lived there. Twenty years. How old is the settlement? About twenty-five years. All of the land was bought, he insisted, and not stolen. Ismail said differently. Some of the land was bought, he admitted, but certainly not all of it, and not his family’s land. The woman then offered us water. Ismail accepted, and she brought a pitcher of cold water with cups. Ismail’s wife was approaching at this point, and turned to me to comment, “They take our land and give us a glass of water.” What to do? Many of the individual settlers are fine human beings, as Ismail was so intent on reiterating to me all day, but what good does it do when they’re part of a system that steals tree after tree, life after life? I think of the American parallel of a white person trying to disassociate her/himself from institutional racism by claiming, “I’m not racist; I have a black friend.”
Monday was actually a wonderful picking day. For the first time in the olive groves, I was able to have full and deep conversations in Arabic and to translate for a non-Arabic speaker. The family asked me what my work is in the US, which is even a more complicated question these days than “where are you from” or “where do you live”. I told them about the afterschool program I worked with last year, and that this time when I return I hope not to need much money and to speak about Palestine as much as possible to as many people as possible. They were curious about this, but their question was different than the first question I usually get from people. Usually people ask me, “What do you say about Palestine?” Perhaps this family trusted me enough not to ask that question, and instead asked, “What do people in America say when you tell them about Palestine?” I explained that there are activists and others who understand the situation, and they appreciate hearing more information. I also explained that I’m Jewish, and that I think it’s very important for me to talk to American Jews, but that it’s difficult. They immediately began giving suggestions: “You have to show them photographs and videos so they can really understand.” I responded that this is exactly what I do, and that certain people thank me and tell me they’ve never known anything about Palestine before, while others call me a self-hating Jew. [For those of you who speak Arabic – I was quite proud of myself for thinking of the following: ‘Inti yahudiyye, bass inti dud ilyahuud. Inti maa bithuubi nafsik.’]
David, the other international picking with us that day, commented that he had travelled through Israel about 20 years ago, before knowing too much about the situation. He could have sworn he was in the West Bank, he said, but he didn’t remember any checkpoints. I asked the family. No, they said, 20 years ago there weren’t any checkpoints. They could go to the beach in Tel Aviv and come back home at 1:00 am. They could go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and easily make friends in Israel. The permit system was first introduced during the first Gulf War, they said. Early 1990s. The end of the first Intifada, the beginning of the Oslo process that turned out to be so disastrous for the Palestinian people. I’ve heard people talk about going to the beach late at night, even in the late 1990s. I suppose they had to have permits at that time, but the point is that they felt at least a bit more free than they do now. Abu Rabia told me recently that he doesn’t feel any differently now than he did when he was in prison for 13 years.
Often I wish I would have come to Palestine earlier, or had some of the awareness I now have when I spent a year in Israel in 1997-1998. I want to understand how things have changed in a way I can’t quite understand by reading and talking to people, or even by seeing pictures. What does it mean to have your land constantly disappearing before your eyes? I think often of Munira and Hani Amer, who live with their 6 children in the house in Mas’ha that is enclosed on all four sides by fences and walls not of their making. Recently I’ve looked through their photo albums at some incredible pictures taken just 5 years ago of the greenhouses in front of their house. There are no longer any traces of these greenhouses, and a monstrous concrete wall stands in their place. My favorite picture is one of Munira lying on a hill posing for the picture amongst flowers and grass. The picture was taken during her first week of marriage, about 20 years ago. Now the houses of Elkana, a settlement established in 1986, sit on that land.
There’s one amazing Israeli organization I know that goes back even further in history and confronts its nation’s own birth – Zochrot. Their brochure explains the name: “In Hebrew, ‘Zochrot’ is the plural feminine form for the words ‘remembering’ or ‘rememberers.’ Although Zochrot activists are men and women, we chose the feminine form of this word to represent an alternative, less militaristic, and more humanly inclusive conception of collective remembering.” Zochrot (www.nakbainhebrew.org) works to raise awareness of Al Nakba (‘the catastrophe’ – referring to 1948) by visiting and marking destroyed Palestinian villages within the current boundaries of Israel (although I can’t quite say ‘boundaries,’ since Israel is still the only country in the world that has not declared its borders).
A few of us in IWPS went with Zochrot to the village of Al Lajun on Tuesday. Megiddo kibbutz now sits on some of Al Lajun’s land, and the rest of the land remains unoccupied. We were joined by over 100 Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens, several of whom were born before Israel and remember being kicked out of their homes in 1948. They didn’t even know about the war until it came to them, the Palestinians told us. They had little awareness of Europe’s plans for the area, and simply lived their lives. They were mostly farmers, but were also quite ‘advanced’ for their time, running a bus company that travelled to all parts of Palestine – Jenin, Tulkarem, Haifa, Yaffa, Jerusalem, etc. Hearing about pre-1948 life in Palestine is a simple act, but one that remains so important for me. I still remember the Zionist education that taught me that no people, no towns, no civilization was here before the Jews came. I looked around at all the trees that had been planted on this ‘state land’ in the last 56 years in order to ensure that the Palestinians can never return. I wonder if any of my tzedakah money given to the JNF (Jewish National Fund) years ago planted any of these trees, or whether that money went to the theft of a different piece of land. (Over 90% of Israel’s land is considered ‘state land’ and is mostly owned by the JNF. Non-Jews are not allowed to purchase or build on this land.) I looked into the eyes of the men from the village who live only a few kilometers away now, but who still remember their childhood in Al Lajun and still have dreams of returning. And hope. Something I noticed among the Palestinian population of Israel that day, at least among the folks that joined us, was a true hope, and even a certainty, that things will change and that Palestinians and Jewish Israelis will live in peace someday. Perhaps the urgency isn’t as great as in the West Bank, perhaps there’s another explanation, but for whatever reason, a certain calmness (even if a little sad, even if a little eerie) filled the air of Al Lajun as we planted signs of recognition in the ground and listened to traditional Palestinian music. Zochrot has published an account of the day with pictures on their website: http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/index.php?id=168.
So what’s my conclusion? It’s all about land. Um Rabia asked me the other day if I can find her a copy of the Torah in Arabic. She wants to understand how much of this conflict is religious, to know whether the Jewish scriptures really tell Jews that this land is theirs and only theirs, and that removal of Palestinians by any means necessary is a religious mandate. I told her that people use religion in different ways, but that at its roots I think this conflict is more about land than religion. And goddamn, this land is precious.
