Things have been somewhat calm around us this week, and the creative energy continues to flow. I wonder if the slight lightening of the occupation in this area gives people the space to be more creative and hopeful. I used to think only desperation would breed the kind of resistance needed to end the occupation, but it seemed to me last year that as bad as things got, the people in the West Bank continued to repeat the mantra, “At least it isn’t Gaza,” or sometimes, “At least it isn’t Iraq.” There was always the fear of losing even more. It’s probably impossible to analyze social change in the present and with such limited experience as I have, but whatever the reason, I myself am seeing more creativity than I have in the past.
The situation has not improved everywhere. In Hebron and the surrounding areas, fanatical settlers continue to hold the city hostage with their presence and their violence. Last Wednesday, Palestinians discovered poison pellets spread around their land adjacent to an Israeli settlement. Several sheep and other animals have died, and dozens more are sick. The police took a report, but it is unlikely that they will actually try to find the people who did this. The next day, international workers who are in the Hebron region to provide a protective presence for villagers were attacked by a gang of settlers, one of whom was sporting a Halloween mask with a cranium on it. The internationals were subsequently arrested for being attacked, while the settlers went home. The upshot is that the following day in court, the judge let the internationals go and stated that international presence in the region is especially important because of the settler violence.
Moving north into the Ramallah area, the village of Bil’in continues to struggle against the Wall, and continues to be terrorized by the Israeli army. My favorite example of creativity this week comes from Bil’in: A few nights ago, villagers decided they were tired of the nightly army incursions, and called for a volleyball game from 11pm – 3am. Almost 20 internationals and Israelis joined a much larger group of villagers as they reclaimed control of their village and their land. I only wish I had been there.
My next piece of exciting news from this week comes from Jenin. I ran into a Palestinian from Tulkarem whom I had met last year. He’s studying and living in Jenin now, and has started a group at his university that deals with issues of nonviolence and conflict resolution. They’re currently working on a campaign to get the university to boycott Israeli products, particularly Tapuzina, the Israeli juice that apparently has a preservative in it that is banned in many countries. So it’s a focused campaign, and is both political and environmental. The group is working on setting up meetings with young Israeli activists, and is happy to receive internationals as well. I’m sure I’ll write more about this once I see them in action.
And then we come to Salfit. Wednesday was Palestinian Land Day, which commemorates the March 30, 1976 Israeli army killing of 6 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who were protesting the theft of their land. Consequently, Wednesday saw at least 5 or 6 demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel (and possibly Gaza, though I didn’t hear anything specifically about Gaza). We marched with Women for Life, a Salfit women’s group that formed in part to oppose the impending Wall in this region, to a polluted valley called Wadi Qana. Surrounded by settlements and outposts, this village was evacuated in the 1980s and most of the land and water has been stolen or completely contaminated by sewage from the settlements. The group of women was small, but the number of girls made me happy. When the army came to see what we were doing and parked at the top of the valley, it was the girls who faced them and began to chant and sing in their direction. Learning from their mothers.
Friday, in another Land Day demonstration, the village of AzZawiya hosted a march and prayers on their land. The old path of the Wall would have seen AzZawiya lose 90% of their land – it’s now somewhere between 50 and 70%. The villagers, through demonstrations and court decisions, are trying to get that number to approach zero, although hundreds of trees have already been destroyed to create the Wall’s path.
When we began to march on Friday, we fully expected the army to stop us with tear gas and sound bombs before we reached the land. But as we continued to march, flags of all political parties waving in the breeze, we saw the village of Kufr Qassem getting closer and closer. [Kufr Qassem is a Palestinian village just over the Green Line, technically part of Israel since 1948. Families in AzZawiya/Kufr Qassem were split by the 1948 war, and all the land between the villages is AzZawiya’s land.]
We reached the path of the Wall, the flattened rocky dirt that had previously been an olive grove. Villagers scattered for a few minutes to place flags on the tops of hills of cleared land (reminding me of Sharon’s message to the settlers last year to “claim every hilltop” before it was too late and Israel was forced to make some concessions). The sense of triumph was palpable as one of the leaders picked up a megaphone and began calling the group back together for prayer. The tone became serious, somber, sincere. I had seen pictures of prayer actions before, but I’d never attended one, and it was simply amazing. The call and response, the ritual, the chanting: all were both mesmerizing and familiar to me, being not unlike Jewish prayer I grew up with. Before Friday, I had thought that the idea of praying on the land was partially a media event, but when it actually began, I felt almost ashamed to photograph the men in prayer. As they put their faces to the earth, I wondered whether this would be the last time they would do so in this spot.
The prayer ended as quickly as it began, and people once again began to march, this time towards a couple trailers that were apparently brought there by settlers a few years ago after the army training base in the same spot closed down. Suddenly there was a lot of noise, and 11-year-old Andaleeb grabbed my arm in fear, whispering “jeysh, jeysh” (army, army). On my other side, an older Palestinian woman began to wail: this was her land, she cried. She had planted it, watched it grow, tended to it over so many years, and now it’s gone, just like that. I didn’t understand all of her words, but her gestures and emotions were unmistakable. Another villager explained that last year right after the construction began, this woman had dreamt that something was happening to her land, and walked several kilometers in the middle of the night to find that the bulldozers had started all-night work in AzZawiya. She slept on her land.
After a minute of confusion, we realized the noise was not coming from the army, who still hadn’t made a presence at the demonstration, but from Palestinians who had begun pounding on the metal trailers. Andaleeb calmed down, and we approached just in time to see one of the trailers tip over onto its side. A cheer rose from the crowd, and just as excitement began to sweep me away, the older woman, still next to me, cried “fadi!” (empty). They can knock over all the trailers they want, she said, but it won’t bring back the destroyed land. I felt slightly guilty for leaving her a minute later, but I didn’t want to miss what came next: The villagers quickly worked together to gather olive branches (probably from their destroyed trees) to use as kindling as they tried to set one of the trailers on fire. While they didn’t completely burn down the trailers, the damage was done, and people marched on along the path of the Wall.
Only at the very end, as we stood at the top of a small mountain, did several jeeps enter the area from below. Boys stood on a cliff, stones in hand, but as the jeeps drove past without stopping, the boys put their stones down and we began to walk back into the village, exhausted and delighted.
We were shuttled back to a Palestinian’s house with Israeli activists, the mayor of AzZawiya, and several other villagers. A few minutes after entering, someone asked if anyone spoke Spanish, and I immediately began chatting with the woman who lived there in a mix of broken Spanish and broken Arabic (broken on my end, that is – she’s fluent in both). She’s from Brazil, she explained, but speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese because she lived on the border with Uruguay. She returned to Palestine in 2000, after most of the Latin American Palestinians I know who came back during the Oslo period with hope that Palestinians would soon have an autonomous state. I asked her if she had Palestinian ID, familiar with the plight of so many who cannot get this ID and are technically living “illegally” in their villages, having come to Palestine (through Israel) with a foreign passport and a visa that expired about 10 years ago. No, she answered, she doesn’t have Palestinian ID, she has Israeli ID. Now I was thoroughly confused. Apparently she was living and studying (or working?) in Kufr Qassem for a while after returning. I love stories like this, stories that cross national boundaries and render Israeli ethnic-based law meaningless.
As we were leaving the house, all the Palestinian leaders were talking about the upcoming local elections (May 5). We asked Nada, a wonderful older woman who says she lives alone and has never been married because she loves her freedom, if she had registered to run for the village council. No, she replied, I’m too smart for that. I’ll work for the Palestinian secret police, the Shabak, the CIA.
One of our female friends here in the village of Hares has just registered to run for office. Um Fadi is a crucial member of Women for Life, and is currently the IWPS Arabic teacher. Our conversation during our last lesson ranged from the upcoming elections, to an analysis of Wednesday’s women’s demonstration, to Um Fadi’s history and travels. She spent many years teaching in Saudi Arabia because her husband had to be there for his job, and she gave birth to her children there. “Do they have Saudi citizenship?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “it’s mamnua” (forbidden). I asked her what she thought of this law, that Palestinians cannot get citizenship in most Arab countries. “It’s good,” she replied. “Palestine is our land, I was only a guest in Saudi Arabia.” “But shouldn’t you have the choice to get citizenship elsewhere,” I asked, “without having to give up your claim to Palestine?” She answered emphatically: “If they offered me citizenship elsewhere, I wouldn’t take it. I’m Palestinian.” I pressed once more: “But shouldn’t that be your choice, and not the government’s?” We talked about the political reason for the law, that if other Arab countries gave Palestinians citizenship, Israel would use it to say, “Look, Palestinians can go there, they don’t need to be here.” On the other hand, I pointed out, now Israel uses the argument, “Look, the other Arab countries don’t treat the Palestinians well, so why should we have to?” At this Um Fadi became more animated than I’ve ever seen her as she answered, “Because this is our land!” She then added with a smile, but probably only half-jokingly, “If someone said that to me, I’d choke them.”
Sometimes I think it’s humor that keeps people going here. I’ll close with a story from today: We went with a couple Israelis to meet a Palestinian activist in a nearby village. It was raining slightly, and our shoes were muddy as we hesitantly approached his house, trying to wipe our feet as much as possible before entering. “Don’t worry about it,” he said in Hebrew, “come in.” Smiling, he added, “It’s not only in my house that Jews are dirty, it’s all over the territories.” We shared a laugh, followed by tea, coffee, and conversation.
Let the humor, camaraderie, and creativity continue, and let the occupation fall apart at its seams.
