My Brother in Palestine

Dear friends,
In February, as you know, my mother came to visit me in Palestine. She wrote reflections and I sent much of her writing to my list. Just last month, my brother came to visit also (he's studying Russian in Moscow for a few months, so it was relatively easy for him to come). Below is some of what he wrote, both simple stories and political reflections. It's long (perhaps not quite as long as what I sent from my mother a few months ago, but long nonetheless), so take a few days to read it. Included is one particularly disturbing checkpoint experience that I did not write to you all about, so here it is, in Ben's words...
-Hannah

As I was waiting for my plane to Israel, I was surprised that I felt a strong connection with the other people waiting for the plane; I could tell they were going home. Suddenly all I had been told about Jews and Israel over my lifetime entered my head. They had a place to go and be safe. Yet I felt more unsafe in Israel than in Moscow or the US, or a lot of places I have been. This was probably also due to things I have heard about Israel, from many of the same people, saying how dangerous
it is there, asking several times if I was still planning to go. What can explain this dichotomy between Israel being a place for Jews to go to be safe, and people who care about me being worried about me going to Israel?

When I arrived at the airport in Israel, it was impossible to tell that the country was at war, a war in which Northern Israel was being hit by rockets daily. But everyone in the airport seemed completely
normal. It was a completely western airport and feeling. I went through security, said that I was visiting my sister, that I would be meeting her in Jerusalem and then traveling around to see her friends. I got right through, as I did not mention that many of these friends were Palestinian. I followed the directions that sis gave me to exit the airport and turn left, and I saw the Jerusalem sherut. I was the first one there, so it took a while for the sherut to leave, but eventually I arrived in East Jerusalem, went into the cafe she told me to, and there she was, dressed in her Palestine outfit. It was good to see her. I was excited for the next 9 days; I would finally get to see all this stuff she has been writing about for years. My desire for a schwarma had preceded me, and we left the cafe to get me a schwarma. It was good. We met two of Hannah's friends, Ari and another Hannah. Eventually we headed to the bus station and took the bus to Ramallah.

Ramallah seemed like a normal city. There were differences of course with American cities, but it was difficult to tell that it was living under occupation. Of course Ramallah is one of the better off cities
in the occupation, but I was still surprised that the occupation was not apparent.
…
[In Salfit region, Mas’ha village] We first went to a house that is entirely surrounded by the wall or
security fence. The owners of the house now have a key to a gate in the fence, which they can go in and out of, but before that they had to get the army to open up a large gate for them. It is clear that the fence and wall around the house is purely to make it unpleasant for them to live there. The only part where there is wall rather than fence is the direction of the Palestinian village which they are part of, so they can not see it. It is pretty amazing that they still can live there. Their attachment to the land and the house is very strong. Two children were there in the house, and it was refreshing to see them because they didn't seem to realize or acknowledge the situation
they were living in. They seemed just like normal kids. Hannah seems to really enjoy the kids in Palestine. She enjoys kids other places too, but I think the kids in Palestine are especially refreshing
because you can temporarily forget about the situation they are living in. We brought the daughter in the house pictures of a trip Hannah took her on to Jerusalem and to the Sea. She seemed very happy with them, especially when her parents saw them. Hannah runs some trips with Palestinian children to go to Jerusalem and the Sea and possibly their families' old villages because children under 16 are allowed to travel freely. While we were there, the father came home from working as a farmer. He works on land owned by some Palestinian in the States. It takes him a while to get to the land, because he has to walk around the settlement built next to his house.

We then went to lunch back in Hares at Abu Rabia's brother's, Issa's, house. This was my first taste of a Palestinian lunch that I would have several more times. I really enjoyed several aspects of
Palestinian lunches. First of all, there was always a lot of food, and it was good. I also liked the part of lunch where Hannah would be made fun of in Arabic for being a vegetarian; it's good to see that
Palestinians can hassle her about it too.
…
After lunch we went back to the IWPS house. Hannah went to a party I wasn't invited to that night, because it was a women only party, and I stayed in the house and studied Arabic and watched part of a movie. When she got back, we went downstairs where the family I was staying
with was sitting outside. We both sat there for a while, had some tea, and chatted. Huda (the youngest daughter) gave me several things that night including a leaf, a plastic bag, a shoe, and a broken necklace. Hannah talked to Um Rabia for a while and I talked to Abu Rabia. His English is good enough for us to carry on a conversation. We talked for a bit. I remember him saying that he hopes that one day there will be peace and no more bloodshed. He did not mention anything about taking over Israel. I think most Palestinians would be eager for a fair peace, but it is becoming more and more difficult over the years.
…
We then went back to the IWPS house for a bit. They were talking about things that have happened to Palestinians recently, attacks by soldiers and also by settlers. I was a bit shocked how they talked about them and no one was really surprised because it is regular for them. But we never hear about these things in the States. If it was a Palestinian doing the same thing to an Israeli I have a feeling we would hear of it. We then went downstairs to Abu Rabia's. Hannah did not stay long because it was very late, but in the meantime we gave a Russian nesting doll to them. Sajid, the young boy, enjoyed playing with it, but he did not understand the concept of putting it back together in the correct order.

The next morning Abu Rabia drove us to Nablus. We drove through many villages to get there and the scenery was very beautiful. The road just winds through the hills rather than cutting straight through them. It is also much smaller than the roads Israel builds in the West Bank. You know I am not one for keeping the old rather than embracing the new, more efficient roads or society, so I do not say this road was better, it was just different. We drove around Nablus which was a very beautiful city. We drove past an apartment that Abu Rabia owns, and I believe rents out. We went up to the highest point so we could look over the whole city. Then we drove to the center of town and walked for a while through a market. It was very crowded, but interesting. You could tell that tourists do not go to Nablus because we did not have anyone trying to sell us something in English. The only English we heard was little kids saying hi or hello, which occurred a lot in all of the West Bank. We stopped and said hello to some store owners that Abu Rabia knew who all offered us tea, but we declined. Finally we headed out of the city, but we still had to get past the checkpoint.

Going in, we got through the checkpoint rather quickly. I think there might have been only one car ahead of us, and we showed our ids and then were allowed to pass. Going out was a different story. We drove up to the checkpoint and got into a line of cars maybe 10 or 20 long, but they were not noticeably moving. All the people from the cars were standing outside of their cars. We all got out because we were going to have to wait a while. Hannah and I walked up to the checkpoint to have a look and Abu Rabia stayed back with the car. When we got up there we saw many people, maybe 100-200, waiting under a covered area, but there were even more people that did not fit in and were in line outside of that area as well as occupying the side of the street where
cars came into Nablus. When we first got up there, some cars were coming in and people would move out of the way, but soon after, there were so many people in the street that the cars could not get through and the soldiers stopped letting them pass. Getting into Nablus is much easier than getting out, but even so, I think this was bad for going out.

Out of the covered area there was a small exit in which one person would come through at a time and one soldier, of the 10-15 or so that were there, would look at his id and let him pass. It was going very slowly, and I believe more people were arriving to exit the city than were exiting, so there kept being more and more people waiting. People who were sick or injured with doctor's notes would go up to the soldiers and beg to get through without waiting in line. All were at
first refused, whether the note was real or not, but most kept persisting and after a while would be allowed to pass, though some were not and it seemed a bit arbitrary who was allowed to pass and who not. At one point a woman passed out in the covered area. It was very crowded so I imagine very hot even though it was covered. People were shouting at the soldiers to try to tell them that a woman had passed out and eventually she was carried out and given water. The street became more and more crowded (this was where we were standing) and every now and then several soldiers would yell and hold up their guns and force people to move back. Hannah and I had more freedom to move about than the Palestinians did. We were also told to move back, but they did not persist as much as with the Palestinians, and they were also much more polite with us. One of the soldiers spoke English relatively well, and Hannah conversed on and off with him. He said he was a good soldier, not a bad one, and only following orders. I am sure I have heard that excuse before, can't seem to place it right now. At some point the checkpoint was closed, which meant that they
were not regularly checking id's, but that people would still go up to the front and beg to be let through and some were let through, but not as many as when it was open. Hannah asked the soldier why the checkpoint was closed and the soldier said because of people like him, pointing to a guy who had been in a shouting match with the soldier about getting through. Hannah suggested just letting everyone through and then there would not be people like him.

As you may have guessed, but apparently the army does not know, closing the checkpoint did not alleviate the problem of hundreds of people waiting. At one point a Palestinian woman asked us why we were waiting and said that we could just go through because we were not Palestinian, which was probably true. Hannah told her she did not like going through when other people had to wait, and I sort of felt the same way. Eventually we went back to talk to Abu Rabia. He also urged us to just go through, since he would not be able to get through with his car for quite a while, and we were supposed to go to someone's house for lunch. Eventually we decided to go and got our bags and said goodbye to Abu Rabia. It was not exactly under the best circumstances we said goodbye, but I guess it might have been fitting for the situation there. We stayed around the front of the checkpoint for a while longer after we got the bags, mostly because the situation was getting worse, and though we were not sure, perhaps we kept the army from being more aggressive than they would have been by us being there.

The street became very crowded, and I, and I think Hannah too, hopped to the other side of the street where there were not many Palestinians. The soldiers were yelling at everyone to get back. A
couple times the crowd would come forward a bit, there would be yelling and brandishing of guns and people would move back. At one point a soldier, the good soldier, yelled at a family and a girl got very frightened and looked sort of like she was in shock for a couple minutes. The soldier did not understand why she was upset with him yelling at her mother and lifting his gun. Eventually one of the times that the crowd pushed forward, 30-40 people actually got past all the soldiers who were in the meantime yelling and putting the clips into their guns (I noticed the clips are usually set off a few inches from where they would have to be to shoot). One soldier shot in the air and every one got very scared and moved back. After this incident, one of the female soldiers was standing on the street crying, and she was yelled at to go inside. It was a very emotional situation, and I teared up at several points - when the Palestinian woman told us we could go through because we were American, when Abu Rabia told us to go through and we left him there, and at some other points just realizing that this situation is a reality for these people rather than just a one time occurrence for me.

More soldiers arrived at the checkpoint, and basically just stood where the other soldiers were standing to create an increased presence. I pointed out to a couple of the soldiers that a fellow
soldier was crying (she was in a glass enclosure so still visible) and they all pretended not to understand. One soldier that arrived who spoke English asked me what I was doing there. I don't recall what I said. I asked him if this was why he joined the army, and he said "Not for this," and said it in a way that seemed like he was really reflecting about it, not just saying I am just following orders like the good soldier. In general I feel that many of the soldiers did not want to be doing what they were doing, but did not know of any other options. I saw even some of the meaner soldiers have human moments. When one woman was crossing a barrier, her daughter was still on the other side, and the soldier lifted her over as if it was his own daughter. Hannah was upset she did not have postcards of the Refuseniks, which are Israelis who refuse to serve in the army for
reasons regarding the Israeli army's treatment of Palestinians, among other reasons I would suppose. If you refuse to serve in the army, rather than just go and say you have depression in which case they will just let you out of it, you are put in jail for 6 months. I think I would rather that than do what these soldiers do for 6 months.

Eventually the many of the soldiers on the street started checking ids, I believe in order to alleviate the situation. It worked better than closing the checkpoint. If they had only had 5 soldiers instead
of 1 checking ids from the start, or better yet no checkpoint at all, there would not have been a problem in the first place. After a bit of this, Hannah and I just walked through, without ever getting our ids checked on the part of the road where only cars were, past several soldiers.

It is a bad situation, for the Palestinians as well as the soldiers. Now I do acknowledge that it is worse for the Palestinians, since the soldiers can get out of it by being in jail for 6 months rather than dying. But it is still bad for the soldiers that they are forced to do this or face time in jail, as if refusing to oppress people is worthy of jail time. There is also no need for the checkpoint. There is no way you can argue it is for security of Israel. It is a checkpoint between one part of the West Bank and another, and not even the old West Bank, but inside the new one created by the wall. If Israel wants to have borders like these on its international border, it would be reasonable, though it should probably be more efficient. But this checkpoint is not on their border, you have to go through at least one more checkpoint in order to enter Israel. That checkpoint, ironically, is much less guarded than the one at Nablus.

We then went to the house of a woman whose husband is in jail. Hannah met her through the ordeal when he was arrested. He was the one who had meningitis when he was arrested and Hannah struggled to get him proper medical care. We had a nice time. There were several kids there that were running around. One of them was trying to eat a candy bar with the wrapper on because his mother told him to. After she took the wrapper off it was evident why - he didn't so much eat the candy bar as much as smear it on his face and on the ground. We had coffee and
tea as usual…
…
The next day we headed down to Bethlehem where Hannah has a host family in a refugee camp there. We took a shared taxi from East Jerusalem, and by the time we got to the wall around Bethlehem, there were no more Palestinians on the service because access to Bethlehem, or more accurately, access out of Bethlehem is severely limited. The whole area we were driving through, while east of the Green Line, is west of the wall and considered part of Jerusalem. We walked through the checkpoint, which is a large indoor structure, but aside from the girl sitting in the soldier booth, we were the only ones in there that I could see. It's weird they have such a huge structure here, very advanced, but since they don't allow anyone through, no one uses it. We just walked through holding our passports, but not opening them. On the other side of the wall was a lot of graffiti. Some of it was very good. We took a cab to the refugee camp we were staying in. We dropped our stuff off and I met Hannah's host father and saw some host brothers sleeping.

Then we went to Hebron. We exited a different place from Bethlehem, still in Palestinian territory, but the army has put large blocks in the road so it is closed to cars. There are services waiting on either side of the roadblock to take passengers to and fro. Upon arriving in Hebron we first went to a part where there is a checkpoint to get in because a lot of settlers live there, so they only let the
Palestinians who live in there get in, and internationals I guess. Hannah had brought many CD's of pictures from a trip she took many kids in that area on to the Sea and to Jerusalem. She gave many out on the street before we went up to the International Solidarity Movement's and Tel Rumeida Project's office, where she had planned to leave the CD's. Many of the internationals were sitting outside their building with some Palestinian kids. I think that is their main function there, to sit outside and try to keep army and the settlers from doing anything too bad to the Palestinians. The army is not like a police force. They do protect the settlers like a police force, but they do not protect the Palestinians living there like a police force. Settlers can harass Palestinians and they might be told to leave by the soldiers, or the Palestinians might be told to leave. I think you can imagine what happens to Palestinians if they think of harassing the settlers. I don't see why Israel can't protect these people equally, or at least attempt to. I can see why some Israelis and some
Americans resist Israel pulling settlers out of the West Bank, even if I disagree, but I can't see why anyone would think that there should be a "policing" force that only protects the settlers and not the Palestinians. It's not like the Palestinians have the option of making their own police in that neighborhood, or any of the others that the army occupies.

Afterwards we went to meet a friend of Hannah's, Hisham, for ice cream. We went up to the top of a building with a really great view, and it was still pretty cheap. Hisham is an editor of a small
newspaper. It was very interesting to hear all he had to say. He seemed very educated, and it was my only interaction with someone that was involved in running a private enterprise in Palestine. He talked about the war, and we learned a lot from him about that. My favorite part, which is a bit unfortunate for him, is that he got a visa to go to the States, but once he got there he was refused entry because he "falsified" his application. The application asked if he had ever been
arrested for a crime, and he said no, even though, like many Palestinian men, he had been arrested, just not for a crime. Maybe next time he will be clearer on his application, though that could mean he does not get the visa. He also said that he was translating my mother's impressions about Palestine into Arabic and was going to publish them.
…
[Back in Bethlehem, Dheishe refugee camp] After dinner Abu Rabia (Hannah only has host fathers named Abu Rabia) took Hannah and I on a tour of the camp. We walked around the whole camp, saw the school, and interestingly enough saw a wealthy part of the camp. It was not originally part of the camp, but people expanded the camp and made some really nice houses with really nice views. It is weird that these are still basically in a refugee camp. The other houses are very simple, but still nicer than I had expected for a refugee camp. The camp started out as tents in 1948 by the UN, because they thought that the refugees would be able to return once the 1948 war was over. Well they weren't allowed to return, and after a bad winter in which many people died, the UN built small permanent structures. This was in the early or mid-50's. These were where people lived until they started to build better structures in the 80's. I am not sure if they waited so long because building these structures made this living situation more permanent and hence made returning seem more far off, or that they just did not have enough money (what Abu Rabia said). The houses are very close together, and almost all are three on top of each other.
…
Hannah and I went out to a concluding dinner at the same place we ate the first night. We talked for a while about the situation and what she thought the future would look like. When we got back to the apartment, we packed and cleaned. I eventually went to sleep, but Hannah did not because she was leaving very early for the airport. The next day, Dunya and I left at about 8 for the airport. We went with a Palestinian driver who had a car that was able to go into Israel. At the airport there is security outside that stops all the cars. For all of the cars in front of us, the soldier would say a few words to the driver and then let them pass. We were not so lucky because our driver had a Palestinian accent so we were sent off to the side. Then another soldier asked where we were coming from and the driver said Ramallah, which made more problems. The soldier started talking to Dunya and I, mostly to me, and asking me questions. I gave a lot of nondescript answers, and once the soldier realized that I was visiting my sister who worked with Dunya, he started talking to Dunya hoping she would answer more questions. Eventually he took our ids inside a little building. He then came out a few minutes later and said he had to look through Dunya's bags. She is on a list because she works in the West Bank. The driver and I sat outside and eventually Dunya came out with her bag and we went off. While we were sitting there no other cars were stopped.

When we got to the airport, Dunya and I split up and she went to check in. My flight was not until much later (and was delayed as well) so I could not check in yet. I went down to the arrivals area and sat around. Looking at the people arriving and the people greeting them, I did not have the same feeling as when I had seen the people before my flight to Israel. It seemed like they were people who had these privileges at the expense of the Palestinians whom I had spent the week with. They greet family at this modern airport, meanwhile Palestinians can not see some of their family because they are not allowed to travel or if they leave their hometown they would not be
allowed back. I listened to music for a while, pretended I was shopping in a book store while just reading the articles for free, and other such time consuming tasks. I got hungry, so even though Hannah did not want me buying anything at the airport, I went and bought some food at McDonald's. It was actually very good, a sandwich that I had never seen anywhere else. I was able to check in 3 hours before my flight was scheduled to take off originally even though it had been
pushed back two hours. In the check in line, I was approached by someone who started interrogating me about what I had been doing in Israel, why I was going to Russia, why I study Russian, etc. I never said that I was in the West Bank, so I was able to pass with out much
trouble. The metal detector security was incredibly lax for me. I did not take off my shoes, or my belt, and they said I did not need to take change out of my pocket. I walked through and the detector did not go off. It seems like their airport security was much less of a physical security and much more psychological security. If I had seemed strange during my interrogation in line, or had looked Arab, or had said I went to the West Bank, I would have been taken off and put through heavy physical security, but since I was just a normal American Jew, I walked through with relative ease.

My flight was scheduled to leave from the same gate that Dunya's was, so I went to try to meet her, but by the time I got there, they had already started boarding and she had already gotten on. I slept a bit in the corner and occupied my time in other ways to pass the 4 hours until my flight. Eventually I boarded and headed back to the motherland from the "promised" land.

That is it for my summary. Now on to some more opinions. I think that it is pretty absurd for Israel to have the West Bank split up so that Palestinians can not travel freely within it. If they were just
guarding the border (the Green Line) it would be understandable, even though an open border would be best if they could get along. Israel having the right to defend itself gives it the right to guard its border, not to prevent travel in another territory. It does not keep Israel any more secure by not allowing certain people in Hares to go to Ramallah.

It does not seem to me like Israel as a state or government is trying its hardest for a peaceful 2-state solution. They were heralded for taking 8,000 settlers out of Gaza, they won't do the same with the 400,000 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And taking the settlers out of Gaza did not lead to an independent Gaza, not with Israel shelling Gaza daily (not just after Shalit) and withholding taxes from the Palestinian government. I think the Palestinian elections are good proof that the USA likes democracy so long as the winners are the ones we want. How democratic of us.

People often say the Palestinians were offered a state in 1948 and they did not accept the deal so that's their problem. This statement is not valid without even saying that the deal was not fair to split the land basically in half amongst a population 93% Palestinian and 7% Jewish. The Palestinians did not accept the terms of the deal, but I don't know that you can say Israel accepted the deal either. Look up a map of the UN proposed distribution of land, Israel did not take the deal. They agreed to it, but then took more. They have gradually and gradually taken more and more land that was not originally supposed to be theirs by the UN plan. But they are praised for being willing to
trade land for peace. If I steal your bike, I shouldn't be heralded for trading it back to you for something, if it is not rightfully mine. Especially if I only offer you the wheels and right handle bar.
If Israel had at any time in their history established a reasonable border for their state and for a Palestinian state, I think we might see two states now. But instead they continued to support settlement into area that was not theirs.

Many of you will read my e-mail and say that the things Israel does are bad and they should stop but also Palestinian violence should stop too. I agree with you, but I don't think Palestinian violence needs to stop before Israel changes their methods. Lincoln did not free the slaves on condition that they did not act up for years and then they would be freed. Slavery was not right so he freed them. What Israel does is not right so they should stop. If a Palestinian then commits a crime in Israel then they have every right to go after him and punish him, but not punish the whole population. Would it be ok if we stopped giving money to inner city schools and other institutions until blacks stopped committing crimes for some amount of time?

My trip to Palestine really opened my eyes to a lot of things. Hannah had already started opening them, but I really had to go there to open them all the way.

U.S. Jews act for Palestine and Lebanon!

Dear friends,
The coordinated actions among U.S. Jewish people of conscience are getting stronger and more inspiring by the week! Below are links to great photos and reports about actions in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York on Tuesday, August 22.
If you hear of other folks doing similar things, let me know... we have to keep building this network. And a reminder to all of you U.S.ers out there who aren't Jewish: The U.S. gives more than $10 million to Israel every single day, most of which is used militarily... You don't have to be Jewish to stand against Israel's war crimes! (But it helps with the banners...) :)
Struggling onward,
Hannah

Philadelphia banner drop (this is the one I took part in):
http://phillyimc.org/en/2006/08/28410.shtml

San Francisco lock-down at Jewish Federation:
http://freckle.blogs.com/

New York die-in at Penn Station:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/74947.html

And in case you missed it last time, here's a link to the action that Boston folks did a few weeks ago:
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/186754/index.php

creativity in action

Dear friends,

I want to say I'm home but I think it's more that I've moved from one semi-home to another. I'm back in the U.S. My experience leaving wasn't all that different than last time, in that the Israeli security check went pretty quickly and that the U.S. security check was far more intrusive. This time I didn't write "Palestine" on my customs form, I just wrote "Israel", but I was pulled aside anyway. I won't bore you with all the details now but I have to say it was really frightening, it IS really frightening, to think about the direction this country is going. They read every word of every piece of paper I had (including translating everything that was in Arabic), and asked me questions like, "Do you think this is fact or propaganda?" I shudder to think about what my experience would have been if I were not a white U.S. citizen. Please, let's all work towards not letting this country slip all the way into fascism.

But that's not why I'm writing. I want to give you a link to some photos of the past week. My brother came to visit and we roped him into some small actions that gave us a lot of pleasure. The photos have captions so I won't say any more about it now. I'm conscious of the fact that I've been sending more photos and reports of fun and creative actions that I've been a part of recently than reports of what's actually happening to Palestinians in Palestine. Unfortunately, you can always assume the worst. But for now, enjoy the photos...

http://community.webshots.com/album/553293200PVUIQa

Love Hannah

Carrying Wood

Photos of our Tisha Ba'av action mentioned in this report: http://community.webshots.com/album/552838558jiEfjj

It is said in the Quran that when the prophet Mohammad began to disturb the status quo by working for economic and social justice, many wealthy people tried to get in his way. There is one story I have heard a couple different ways in the past week, so apologies if I do not portray it entirely accurately (I have not read it). One way I heard the story is that there was a woman who did whatever she could to stop Mohammad from what he was doing, and that she literally stopped him on the road by building a roadblock out of wood. The other way I heard it is that a group of people was building a fire that they intended to throw Mohammad in, and that this woman was mainly responsible for gathering the wood to keep the fire going. Either way, they call her “hamelet ilkhasheb,” or “the wood carrier.”

Last week when Condoleezza Rice came to town, an Arabic news station announced, “The wood carrier has arrived.” She is trying to block all roads to peace and justice, my friends tell me. She is adding wood (and oil) to the fire, opposing a cease fire in Lebanon, my friends tell me. So the name is apt.

Yesterday I felt a bit like a wood carrier myself, although the purpose of my wood carrying was to disturb the status quo, rather than to maintain it. Yesterday was Tisha Ba’av, the Jewish holiday of mourning. It is supposedly the anniversary of the destruction of both the first and second temple, as well as the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman occupation. The holiday has come to encompass not only these events, but everything bad that has ever happened to Jewish people. It is, traditionally, a day of mourning for Jews who have died.

A group of five U.S. Jewish people took the responsibility to mourn seriously and extended it to mourn for the people who are dying today as well. We made a flyer/sticker saying “Today we mourn exile, persecution, destruction, and occupation for all people,” followed by a list of dates: destructions of the temples; crushing of the resistance against Roman occupation; expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain; the Nazi holocaust; the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948 for the Palestinian people; the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982; the Israeli massacre of civilians in Qana, Lebanon in 1996; the beginning of the construction of the Annexation Wall; Israeli re-occupation of Palestinian cities; and the current Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, as well as the continuation of policies of occupation, destruction, and murder in the West Bank. There was a photograph of this week’s massacre in Qana on the flyer, as well as a call for Israel and U.S. to respect international law and human rights for all people.

Three of us made our way to the old city of Jerusalem, more heavily policed yesterday than most days. The road to the Kotel, thought to be the outer wall surrounding the temple from 2,000 years ago, was packed with people. We handed flyers to people along the way, and hung stickers up on our way into the old city. We tried to cover every place we saw “Arabs out” or “Death to Arabs” but there were too many, we only had 40 stickers, and we wanted to save a few for later.

We arrived at the Kotel, a place I had a fraught relationship with even before I began to question Zionism. The dividing wall between men and women had been extended all the way through the plaza for the day, as they were expecting so many people. The women’s side was packed, since it’s only about 15% of the whole area. The men have more room to pray on the other side. People were crying, praying, leaning on the wall, placing their prayers into its cracks. I peeled a sticker off its backing and approached the Kotel. I took my glasses off, just in case I were to get attacked. I waited a few minutes before I found a place to squeeze in and touch the wall. I said the beginning of the Mourners’ Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and placed the sticker on the wall. The woman to my right glanced over, but everyone seemed too caught up in their own prayers to notice me. I walked away slowly and another woman quickly took my open spot, put her arm on the wall over the sticker seemingly without noticing it, and prayed. For just a few minutes, the sticker became part of the Kotel, part of the scene. Mourning for all death and not only Jewish death.

We returned to the plaza and hung a few more stickers. People began to notice, began to read. A few people approached us asking if we were Jewish and why we were not ashamed of ourselves for being traitors to our people. Others read it and moved on. One group of Canadian women loved it and chatted with us for a few minutes. It turns out they are on a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) delegation.

After the stickers were mostly gone, we began to flyer, thinking our work was mostly done. “Do you read English?” I would ask people, and then hand them the flyer. We were almost out of the plaza when a woman approached us and began to yell about her friends who are soldiers and have died in Lebanon in the past few days. Another woman began to yell about how she hasn’t been to her home in the north for more than a week because of fear from Hizbollah rockets. I listened to these women, to both their suffering and to the hateful venom that was coming from them about Arab people in general, and I did not feel hatred in response. I am not usually above hatred or violence in my heart, and these women were saying much more racist and hateful things than I have heard in a long time, but for some reason I felt only sadness and even pity. And a sense of righteousness. Every time one of them would say, “This is not the time or place to mourn others. We can only afford to mourn our ‘brothers’ right now,” I knew that we were doing the right thing. That this was exactly the time and place to mourn everyone because what sense does it make to mourn the soldiers who died trying to occupy southern Lebanon without mourning the people they killed in the process or the context surrounding the situation? It seems quite clear that if Israel stops sending soldiers to Lebanon, they won’t be dying there. But I didn’t say this. Out of respect for the women’s actual suffering, I did not say this. I simply said that we think it is important to mourn all people who are dying.

There were political arguments, there were discussions of facts, but not as much as I would expect. More than this was an expression of suffering and stories of pain. We got people to feel, and judging by the number of spectators and people who came up asking for a flyer because they wanted to see what the commotion was all about, we got people to think as well. To some degree, we stopped people from going about their normal business. To some degree, we added wood to a fire that needed stoking.

We left the Kotel area, borrowed a prayer book from one of the hundreds of people who were entering or exiting the Kotel, and said the Mourner’s Kaddish. Our wood carrying for the day was finished.

Jewish youth against Israeli attacks

Dear friends,
I'm proud to know these people. It's the same group I worked with on the Passover seder outside AIPAC and JCRC a few months ago. Please take a look at the photos, and I'm sure I speak for the group when I say you should feel free to take ideas, words, designs, and inspiration from this and replicate them.
Love Hannah

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Youth_Die_In_2006

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

Die In at South Station- Young Jews Denounce Israeli Attacks on Civilians!

Boston, MA – August 1, 2006 – A group of young American Jews staged a "Die In" this morning at South Station, and on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street in downtown Boston to demonstrate their opposition to recent actions by the Israeli government in Lebanon and Gaza.

"We want to break the false consensus of unequivocal support for Israel and make it known that many American Jews disagree with our government's support of Israeli aggression. We also want to call attention to the human rights crisis occurring in Gaza and Lebanon," commented group member Matt Soycher, of Jamaica Plain. "As young American Jews, we are outraged and frightened. Recent rallies called by Jewish organizations in support of Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza have not spoken for us. Now, we are speaking for ourselves."

Participants wore black clothing with stickers that read "Not all U.S. Jews support Israel's actions!" They fell to the ground in dead-like positions among the morning commuters to re-create the devastating effects of violent attacks on civilian populations.

Distinguishing themselves from other recent protests led by Jewish groups in the Greater Boston region, these American Jews take the position that Israel's attacks on civilians, UN observers, infrastructure, and refugees is unethical, counterproductive, and contrary to the Jewish tradition of respect for human rights. Since Israeli bombing began on July 12, more than 750 Lebanese and 51 Israelis have died in the violence. Over one third of the Lebanese casualties have been children.

Liz Jackson, of Cambridge, explained her motivation to initiate the action, "We mourn the Israeli dead, and our thoughts are with the people of northern Israel, Lebanon, and Gaza alike. Our concern for all people of the region moves us to question the utility of Israel's horrific aggression towards its own neighbors. If Israel is willing to kill UN observers, civilians, and especially children, how will the violence end?"

Participants began the action at 8:00 am, on Tuesday August 1st, inside the South Station commuter station, and ended on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street.

######

Stop the Massacres!

I'm visiting my family in Dheisheh refugee camp. I'm on the phone with a friend (about 10 minutes ago), trying to figure out plans for the day, and discussing the case of a Palestinian man who was badly beaten by settlers last night and then arrested for being beaten. My host father walks by and said "55 people murdered in Lebanon, another massacre in Qana!"

I hear televisions going on in the neighborhood. I walk inside and sit down on the couch in front of images of dead children. It looks like the images I've seen of other massacres in the area, in Sabra and Shatila, even in Qana so many times. It looks exactly the same. Does it matter that this one happened from the air, that the Israelis are no longer killing quite as many people in on-the-ground combat because they're afraid of losing some of their own? Does it matter that someone pressed a button instead, demolished an entire building on top of its inhabitants. The number of dead will grow. 55 have been found so far. Many more are believed to be trapped under the rubble. Probably dead. If they're alive, they'll die soon, since neither rescue equipment nor ambulances are allowed on the roads. Israel will bomb anything that moves if it doesn't have a "safe passage" guarantee, which isn't easy to come by if you're talking about trying to save Lebanese civilians.

I can't believe we're letting these massacres happen again. In Lebanon, in Gaza, on a smaller scale in Nablus and Jenin this week. I see more press coverage of European and American citizens being evacuated from Lebanon than what is happening to the Lebanese who must stay. Israel has killed close to 1000 people in the past month (mostly in Lebanon and Gaza, almost entirely civilians). The response to this mass murder has been disproportionately tiny. About 50 Israelis have been killed, and that includes soldiers.

If my language is severe, it's because the situation is severe. I don't think it's possible to be more extremist than the situation itself. And to think that those with power (namely the US) are pushing for more and more death, that Condoleezza Rice is calling the murder of civilians the "birth pangs of the new Middle East"... it's disgusting! And to think the media is reporting this war as a war of self-defense on Israel's part. I can't even imagine how anyone would say that Lebanon started this war. Lebanon as a country is barely even involved in this war, and has been begging the world for a cease-fire. They've barely even responded to Israeli aggression. Hizbollah, yes, they've responded to massive bombing by firing rockets across the border. But Hizbollah is not the Lebanese government, is not the Lebanese people, and is not the target of the Israeli army. A vast majority of the hundreds and hundreds murdered in the past few weeks have been civilians. Israel's excuse: "There might be a Hizbollah fighter in your neighborhood, you chose the wrong place to live." Can you imagine an entire city being bombed because one criminal is suspected to be living in that city? There is one word only to explain the acceptance of this collective punishment: racism.

I don't know what else to say. Please don't accept the premises that CNN and BBC base their coverage on. This is pure and simple murder. And the US is the main supporter. Please do everything you can to protest what is happening. There is no risk you can take that is more than the risk each Lebanese person is taking simply by living in Lebanon today. There is no risk you can take that is more than the risk each Palestinian person is taking simply by living in Gaza today.

I'm still listening to the news coverage in the background. A very angry Lebanese man is screaming something about George Bush. I am embarrassed to be American.

-Hannah

P.S. If you're confused about sequence of events, this is a good timeline of what has happened daily in the current Israeli war on Lebanon: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/35772526-C1A8-4599-868C-E513C4F29C9B.htm In general, I recommend the websites of Al Jazeera and Ha'aretz for detailed information about what is happening in this region.

Daily Pilgrimage

For photos relating to this report, see http://community.webshots.com/album/552434280awoKqs. Most of the photos are not mine.

1:45 am:

Najah knocks on the bedroom door. It’s time for the three of us to wake up. She’s probably slept for two hours at most, we’ve slept for about three. She’s dressed and ready to go, ready to begin her daily commute from Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem to Jerusalem. A distance of six miles becomes immeasurable. I am reminded of dozens of West Bank Palestinian friends who have told me that we in the United States live closer to Jerusalem than they do.

Najah has worked at an old age home in West Jerusalem for thirteen years. The first seven years she was able to reach work with little difficulty. Then the second Intifada came, and with it came checkpoints, roadblocks, and a strengthening and enforcement of the system of permits and ID cards. So she began to leave earlier for work. Then came the Wall, first in little sections around Bethlehem, and now completed. Then sections of the Wall east of Jerusalem. And now she’s left with one opening in the Wall that is not yet complete. She says when it is complete she’ll find new ways to get to work, that it just may get even more difficult and expensive. I can’t imagine it getting much more difficult than the four hours of driving and walking that she does each day, but a lot of things here are unimaginable until they happen.

Najah usually leaves for work around 3:00 am, to arrive by 7:00 or 8:00. Because we are accompanying her, we leave instead at 2:00, because the first car we take needs to return to pick up the rest of the women Najah usually travels with.

2:00 am:
We walk out the door into the night, and get in the taxi that is waiting for us. We drive out of Dheisheh, out of Bethlehem, through a few more villages and then a massive valley, the circuitous route that West Bank Palestinians must take to go anywhere north these days, since they are not allowed in any part of Jerusalem, east or west.

2:25 am:
We arrive at “Container” checkpoint. One large truck full of goods is stopped in front of us. We don’t see any soldiers. They’re probably sleeping, we decide. We sit and wait.

2:40 am:
A number of shared taxis drive through from the other side of the checkpoint. It seems the soldiers have waved them forward. The truck in front of us goes through and we do too. The soldiers are inside a small building, laughing with each other. They barely glance our way as we drive past.

2:45 am:
We arrive at our first destination, the taxi drops us on the street and turns around to go back for the other women. Several vans are parked on the side of the road, waiting to fill up and then veer off the road onto an agricultural path through the village’s olive groves. According to Israel, this Palestinian village is half in the West Bank and half in Jerusalem.

A few drivers are hanging around. Most workers have not arrived yet. We sit and wait.

3:20 am:
A car full of women and men arrives and the car we’re waiting in quickly fills up. Older women bring heavy sacs of vegetables that they’ll sell in the market of Jerusalem’s old city. The people and vegetables pile in the car and we begin to drive a road that we’re told is impossible to drive in the winter. It’s bumpy, rocky, dirty, and steep, and simply does not stand up to rain.

3:30 am:
The car drops us in what seems to be the middle of the path, on the outskirts of the village’s houses. We begin to walk. The older women on their way to the market pile their vegetable sacs on their heads and walk just a few meters before stopping at a place where they say another taxi will eventually come for them. They can’t walk further with all their goods. The rest of us continue on our way, seven Palestinian women, one Palestinian man, and three internationals. We walk on the path for a minute or two, and suddenly the group turns and walks down the stairs onto somebody’s porch, then out through their yard, down more stairs, and so on. We silently weave in and out of people’s porches and gardens, avoiding the checkpoint that is directly above us. We can hear the call to prayer beginning from the mosques in the distance. Najah tells us this is the place that soldiers often throw tear gas and sound bombs at them, that we’re lucky it’s not happening to us today, probably because we’ve come a little earlier than usual.

We continue to walk, up and down on uneven paths in the dark. The women are sure of their steps, having done this walk so many times. The other internationals and I are less sure, and stay near the back, probably holding the group up slightly.

4:00 am:
After about a half hour of walking, we arrive at the main road, where soldiers tend to patrol. The women and man run across the street and towards a bus that is waiting, engine on. They jump on the bus and it starts to move. The woman in front of me is whispering, “Come on, get on, hurry, we’re moving.” Najah and my friends are still behind me, so I tell the woman I’m waiting for them. The bus begins up the street, and suddenly people are emerging from all directions. They are running onto the bus from behind each olive tree, each stone, each house along the road. Within the span of 100 meters or so, the bus goes from nearly empty to overflowing with people. It speeds off.

I turn around and walk back to Najah and the others. She walks over to a nearby house, goes through their gate, and sits on the couch on their porch. The army drives by and we duck. Najah borrows my phone and calls the first taxi driver to make sure the other women had been picked up, dropped off, and are on their way to the spot where we now waited. We sit and wait.

I ask Najah if the people whose yards we sneak through know about it. “Of course,” she says. “Sometimes they take us in when the army comes looking for us.” She tells us that the army threatens them with a fine of 10,000 shekels (more than 2,000 dollars) for harboring “Arabs without permits,” but they do it anyway.

We see jeep lights on a road below and Najah tells me it’s the “security road” next to the path of the Wall. We see more jeep lights coming our way, and again we duck. It is clear that the army is not trying very hard to catch people. There is nothing sneaky about their patrol. We spot them from a distance and hide if necessary, and they simply drive up and down the road every few minutes.

4:45 am:
Another bus leaves suddenly, completely empty when it starts moving and then quickly filling up with people emerging again from the trees. We have missed the bus. Two other buses wait, one large and one small. Najah decides to get in the bus, so as not to miss it when it leaves.

4:55 am:
A jeep is driving down the road. Najah gets out to run back to the house where we’ve been hiding, tells us to stay because we have passports and it won’t matter if the army sees us. The jeep stops at the larger bus in front of us. We can’t see what they’re doing.

5:00 am:
People begin to tentatively get on our bus, Najah comes back, and the bus starts to go, hoping to drive past the other bus and the jeep without being stopped. No such luck.

A soldier stops our bus and Najah quickly takes her ID out of her purse and hides it in her shirt. The soldier boards the bus and asks for IDs. There are only a few of us on the bus at that point. My friends and I have passports so we’re fine. Najah tells the soldier she left her ID at home. She doesn’t want it taken or her name recorded. The soldier tells her to get off the bus and go home. She gets off, and we start to get off with her. The soldier tells us we can stay. The people on the bus tell us we can stay. We wait a minute and then get off. We see Najah, and she says, “Get back on, hurry, I’m getting back on.” We’re perplexed, but we board the bus again, and she comes with us. She has just walked around the bus. The soldiers are still right there, right behind us. They choose not to notice.

The bus begins driving, and once again the people are running towards it from all directions. It becomes crowded, and people are yelling, “Go, quickly, let’s go!” “No, wait for those people who are running this way!” The bus drives slowly enough that most of the people who want to get on manage to do so. The door closes and we speed off.

5:15 am:
We arrive at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem without encountering any more checkpoints. We get off the bus and see the two older women with the vegetables arriving at the same time. Their taxi did come after all. They ask why we’re so late. Najah tells them we missed the first bus and had to wait.

A woman approaches us and greets me warmly, then turns to Najah and says, “I told her to get on the bus with me, I said ‘Come, daughter, let’s go’ but she didn’t come.” I smile and say, “I was waiting for Najah, I wanted to go with her, but thank you.” She turns to us and says, “I watch the news each night and I weep. Children are dying, Arabs and Jews, and I just weep.” We listen, I offer her the cake Najah bought us for the journey, she offers us the bread she just bought, and she continues:

“I am 70 years old and I have seen war all my life. In 1948 I was a young girl. My brother was four years old. My mother strapped him to her back, took my hand, and led us out of our village.”

She pauses. I ask her where she is from. Elar. A destroyed village very close to Bethlehem, where she now lives. I ask her name. Fatima.

5:30 am:
Najah tells us it’s time to go, to walk up the street to catch the Israeli bus to where she works. We say goodbye to Fatima and begin to walk.

Najah removes her hijab (Muslim head scarf) and replaces it with a Jewish head covering, to look instead like a religious Jewish woman.

5:40 am:
The bus comes and we get on, riding out of East Jerusalem and into West Jerusalem, though the buildings are all old Palestinian neighborhoods and thus virtually indistinguishable from each other except for the newly placed Hebrew signs in West Jerusalem.

5:50 am:
We get off the bus and we’re in the Bukhari neighborhood, a religious Jewish neighborhood right next to the even more famous religious Jewish neighborhood Mea Sharim. Najah tells us the Bukhari area used to be part of the Bab al Amoud (Damascus Gate) neighborhood of Jerusalem, before 1948. Part of the area is also the land and buildings of people from the village of Lifta.

We see a few Orthodox Jewish men on the street but it’s still too early for most. One market vendor is beginning to set up. Najah greets him and tells me that all the market vendors in the Bukhari neighborhood are Arab, and all the people who live here are Jewish.

She shows us the building where she works, but we don’t get too close because she says they won’t let us in and she doesn’t want to get in trouble. She shows us back to the bus because she has an hour before she needs to begin work, and thus an hour before she can even enter the building. We part ways and get on the bus back to Damascus Gate, where we will then take another bus to the West Jerusalem neighborhood where one of us lives.

6:30 am:
We have left the second bus and are walking towards the apartment where we’ll crash for a few hours. We are across the street from the apartment. I see Palestinian people and wonder if they live in this neighborhood or if they just work here. We are walking past a house and a Palestinian woman says hello. We look over and it’s Fatima, the 70 year old woman we have spent half of the morning with. She is washing the stairs of a building. “This is where I work,” she says. “This is where I live,” my friend says. Fatima will be washing the stairs of a couple buildings and then cleaning a third house before going back home. We invite her to come over after work. She thanks us and we part ways. We know she won’t come.

7:00 am:
We are inside the apartment. We change into pajamas and get into bed. Our work for the morning is over. Najah’s is just beginning.

Juha's nail

“We have in Arabic a story about Juha’s nail.”

This is how Issa began. Issa, one of my favorite people in Palestine, the person I go to when I’m feeling violent and angry because his presence is so powerfully actively peaceful. One of many nonviolent activists who have been severely affected by occupation, shot and paralyzed by the Israeli army five years ago while he was trying to help children in his village find safety in their homes.

We were discussing the current situation in Gaza and Lebanon, the future of Palestine/Israel, hopes and fears and dreams and solutions.

“We have in Arabic a story about Juha’s nail,” he told our group, and began with one of his many pearls of wisdom I’ve been privy to over the years:

Juha had a house. A man asked if he could buy the house, and Juha said, “Sure, I will sell you the entire house, except for one nail.” The man was a bit perplexed, but agreed. What difference could one nail make?

So the house was sold, Juha moved out, and the man and his family moved in. A few weeks went by, and the man heard a knock on his door. It was Juha, coming to visit his nail. This began to happen more and more, and when the man complained, Juha said, “This nail is mine, and I have the right to see it any time I want.” Juha came during the day, during the night, when the family was out, and when the man was sleeping with his wife.

One day Juha came to see his nail, and the man and his family stormed out of the house in frustration, saying, “Take your nail and take your house! I don’t want it!”

The story ended, and Issa waited a moment before continuing.

“We can’t have a partial solution,” he said. Israel cannot keep offering partial solutions to Palestinians, and in the meantime taking more and more from Palestinians.

The problem, as I see it, is even more insidious than this. The problem is that the “house” was not Israel’s to begin with. The house belonged to another family that was forcefully removed, mostly to the lawns of other houses. Those who remained in certain rooms of their house were beaten and broken so much that they agreed to let the new family keep the majority of the house. The new family agreed in theory but continued to knock down doors and build new ones, forcing the old family into tiny corners of their house. Every few years, the new family “generously” offered back one half of one bedroom, and another half another bedroom.

All the hallways and doors will of course always be under the control of the new family, for security reasons. The new family has guns, the old family cannot. Security reasons. The new family eats all the food, uses all the water, and arrests or kills anyone who questions this. Security reasons. The old family members are allowed to leave and not come back. They are not allowed to have visitors or new inhabitants. Security reasons.

It is not surprising that some Palestinians are starting to say to Israel, “Take your nail and take your house!” and storming out. It is not surprising that some choose to stay, remembering the initial takeover of their house and vowing not to disappear altogether. It is not surprising that some choose to defend themselves by force.

It is not surprising that some Palestinians responded to continuous Israeli attacks on civilians in Gaza by kidnapping a soldier. It is not surprising that Israel used this as an excuse to unleash a war against the Palestinian people and government. It is not surprising that the small amount of attention raised about Palestinian political prisoners inspired others to carry out similar actions, that Hizbollah is demanding the release of Lebanese prisoners from Israeli jails the way Hamas is demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. It is not surprising that Israel is destroying the infrastructure of Lebanon and bombing civilians. It is not surprising that they claim that Hizbollah missiles and rockets are manufactured in small villages and therefore the Lebanese population should carry the responsibility for the death of their people when Israel attacks indiscriminately.

It did surprise me, though it probably shouldn’t have, to hear that Israel dropped thousands of flyers on southern Lebanon warning people to leave their villages, and then fired directly on the trucks as they were fleeing north, killing entire families.

It did not surprise me to hear from a Palestinian friend in Haifa that she had to turn on Lebanese news to see any reports of Lebanese casualties, and that when she turned on CNN they were speaking only about Israel and from an Israeli perspective, ignoring the people of Gaza and Lebanon except when talking about the rockets and missiles that a few of them have responded to Israeli attacks with.

Racism is so entrenched in global policy and consciousness that many people don’t even question attacking an entire country as a response to the actions of a few people. When they try to question, to pass tame resolutions in the UN saying “Maybe Israel shouldn’t respond quite so drastically,” the US vetoes them. People here know this. They know that the United States and Israel are the pariahs of the world community, and they know why. They know that one day it’s going to come back and bite these countries in the ass. I imagine the whole world knows this, that most people are waiting patiently and others may take active steps toward this eventuality.

I don’t know how to turn this course around, I don’t know if it’s too late to do so. I do know that I will continue this work, continue to support those whose voices are silenced, and trust that if the tables are ever turned, I will be given refuge here in Palestine.

And meanwhile, the US and Israel continue to try to sell the world and Palestinians the houses they stole from them, except for one or two nails.

1948, every day

For photographs of the past couple weeks: http://community.webshots.com/album/551493898liIGUc

After a week of traveling with a Birthright Unplugged group, I’m sitting in a beautiful apartment in Ramallah, watching the BBC report about Israeli incursions into Gaza.

And staring at a blank computer screen.

What is happening to the Palestinian people is so wrong, so clearly wrong, that it’s hard to know what to say.

Because I can’t just start at the Israeli bombings and cutting of electricity, food, and water, and the abduction of more than 25 Palestinian parliament members and a third of the cabinet, which is in response to the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of one, which was in response to the killing of dozens of Palestinian civilians, including Huda’s family on the beach.

I can’t just start at the lack of salaries for one third of the Palestinian population, which is a result of the government having no money to pay its workers, which is a result of the banks refusing to transfer money into Palestine, which is a result of the United States’ direct threats to banks and the rest of the world’s complicity in that, as well as the worldwide boycott against the democratically elected Palestinian government.

I can’t just start at the world’s unequal and mostly unconditional support for Israel, the media’s participation in the propaganda war, the fact that the law of force has consistently trumped the force of law, as a Palestinian friend often says.

I can’t just start at Israel’s refusal to engage in real negotiations with Palestinians over the years, the constant expansion of settlements and working out of agreements with the US that are then offered to Palestinian negotiators on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

I can’t just start at the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in 1967, which continues until today.

The truth is that 1948 is a tragedy unfolding every day. The expulsion of at least 800,000 indigenous people from their land, and the establishment of a state based on religion and ethnicity, is an injustice that plays out in each moment of each day in this land.

This is not a political doctrine. This is not rhetoric. When I say that the events of 1948 continue to unfold each day, it is not a figure of speech. Yesterday I sat in the living room of a man who was in first grade when Zionist forces came to the outskirts of his village and began to shoot. He recalls bullets flying over his head, the killing of two of the village’s residents and the resulting fleeing of the rest. He remembers his father gathering up the family and the donkeys and leaving their ancestral lands, only to flee a few kilometers to where he now lives, as an Israeli citizen with fewer rights than other Israeli citizens because of the simple fact that he is not Jewish. He spoke about the land in the village, the places he played at 6 years old, and his eyes welled up with tears.

We then went to visit his village, Al Lajun, which has been taken over by Kibbutz Megiddo. We walked with him and two men in their 80s, along paths whose stones had been the stones of the houses. Each place we walked, one of these men, who were in their 20s in 1948, would point and say, this is where the Jabrin family lived, this is where Mahajne lived, this is where Mahamid lived. The pomegranate tree remains, the cactus remains, but the rubble from the houses has been flattened into the landscape and covered over with pine trees planted by the Jewish National Fund.

The people from this village, even those who are Israeli citizens living just 10 minutes away, are disallowed from returning to their land. 1948 is a tragedy happening today.

I sit in refugee camps with people who dream of having the right to choose where they live. 1948 is a tragedy happening today.

I find myself in a conversation with a Jewish Israeli man who runs a restaurant and bar in a building that used to be a mosque. He knows the village’s history, he knows that the former inhabitants of the village, the builders of the village, live just up the hill in a new village unrecognized by the Israeli government. He knows all this and he says that the past is past, that we must think about the future. Which is what most people with power say. After you have stolen something, after an injustice in which force has made you the “winner” and someone else the “loser,” it makes sense that you would want to forget the past. 1948 is a tragedy happening today.

So as the Israeli tanks assemble on the borders of Gaza and begin a massive incursion, I think also of Adnan’s tears as he remembers a pre-Israeli incursion into his own village. And I wonder how we can talk about one thing without talking about everything. And yet I wonder how we can deal with anything when we’re trying to deal with everything. The state of Israel will not become secular or democratic by tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year. How do we stop this incursion into Gaza, or the next one, or the starvation of the Palestinian people by the world community?

I don’t have clear answers. I’ve been pondering effectiveness and frustrated with myself and the Palestine solidarity community for not figuring out how to mount an effective campaign about anything. Because things here only get worse and worse for the Palestinian people, and the Israeli government is quite skilled at keeping the Palestinian community in crisis mode. And the rest of us in reaction mode. So if Israel kills dozens of people in Gaza in the next few days, and then they stop, the world will thank them for stopping, justify collective punishment, and forget about anything that happened before.

So what can we do? In general, we need more creative and public actions, everywhere, to draw attention to the political crisis here that has led to a humanitarian crisis.

In the short term, let’s figure out how to get money here. Friends who have never asked me for anything before are starting to ask if I can help them or find others to do so. I have a critique of aid work and bandaid solutions both in theory and in practice, but when my friends can’t afford food and medicine, I’m not sure whether this critique can stand.

In the long term, please please please figure out how to isolate Israel from the world community, to force them to stop what they’re doing. I think the boycott/sanctions/divestment movement has some potential. It has worked in other places. Pressure your local supermarkets to stop buying Israeli goods or at least to label them so that consumers can choose which oranges to buy. Pressure your universities, religious institutions, companies, and municipalities to stop investing in Israel Bonds, Israeli companies, or American companies like Caterpillar who continue to supply Israel with weapons. Pressure the US government to let the banks transfer money into Palestine, to pay the public school teachers and all other government employees who have been working without pay for 4 months.

And if you have any creative ideas, please let me know. We can work together.

-Hannah

Did you see Huda?

“Did you see Huda?”

Everywhere I go, this is the first question people ask.

“Did you see Huda?” They are asking if I’ve seen the pictures. They are asking if I’ve seen the footage of the 12-year-old girl pounding the sand next to her dead father’s body. They are asking if I know that this girl lost her entire family while trying to have a nice day at the beach. They are asking if I know that the occupation in Gaza is more intense than ever, that the Israeli government/army murders more and more people each day without consequence, that the world continues to blame Palestinians for engaging in a democratic process.

“I saw her, yes.”

Twelve people killed that day, 6 the next, 14 the next. And the shelling and bombing continues. Fatah blames Hamas, Hamas blames Fatah, and young men from each party find themselves fighting each other in the streets of Ramallah as the cars drive around and the drivers laugh and say, “For about 2 hours each day it’s like this, then everything goes back to normal.”

I learned how to say “divide and conquer” in Arabic the other day. The Israeli government must be sitting back and laughing over how well things are going for them these days. Israel murders civilians, annexes land, builds the Wall, prevents money from entering Palestine, watches the Palestinian population slip into dire poverty and begin to fight each other, and the people have yet to rise up with violence against Israel. Or even any kind of effective nonviolent campaign. People are talking, sure, but that’s about it. They are talking, and they are trying to survive (its own form of nonviolent resistance). They are talking about how Olmert and Peretz are worse than Sharon and Mofaz, how people are unable to live now, how they don’t know how they will continue with no salaries and no cooking gas.

That’s right, there’s no cooking gas in much of the West Bank now (I don’t know about Gaza but can only imagine things are even worse there). One Israeli company supplied all the cooking gas for the West Bank, and announced last month that they would no longer do so. Most people I’ve talked with have no idea why. My friends in Dheisheh refugee camp said something about the Palestinian Authority owing money to the company and this is punishment. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. Either way, the people are suffering.

I was talking with my friends about the importance of boycotting Israel, both a worldwide boycott and a Palestinian boycott, and we repeated a conversation we’ve had many times before.

“We can’t boycott Israel,” they say. “We can’t live without Israel.”

“You can boycott some things,” I say. “You don’t need to buy Tapuzina [Israeli juice]; you have Marawi [Palestinian juice].”

“Sure,” they say, “we can buy Marawi, but what will that do? All the basic necessities come from Israel. They’ve taken our water and now they sell it back to us, the electricity is from Israel, the gas is from Israel, what can we do?”

And so, in the absence of any hope for change from external political campaigns, they blame Hamas. Not everyone, but some people. They tell me that Hamas is unwilling to compromise with Fatah, Hamas doesn’t want a solution, even that Hamas is starting to become corrupt like Fatah was. Or maybe not exactly like Fatah was, but apparently many Arab and Muslim countries have offered money to Palestine, and there hasn’t been a way to get it here. The United States has threatened banks that transfer money to Palestinians and people who have tried to bring large sums of money through Rafah have been turned away (so much for an “open border” that’s supposedly not controlled by Israel). So individuals have been bringing small amounts of money, not enough to help all the people, so Hamas takes the money and distributes it to Hamas members in the form of small relief items (again, I’m not sure how prevalent this is, it’s just what I’ve heard…).

And meanwhile, everyone says, meanwhile the children are suffering. “I didn’t vote for Hamas,” one friend told me, “and my children certainly didn’t vote for Hamas.” “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Even if you did, why is that a reason to make you suffer?” It’s strange to find myself defending Hamas to my Palestinian friends, but of course I’m not suffering from a lack of basic necessities. Most people here are more practical than ideological, so of course they’ll think about all possible ways to change their situation. They can’t change American foreign policy, they can’t change Israeli policy, so they look closer to home and wish that Fatah and Hamas could come to some agreement that might be accepted by the world.

I’ve asked people what they think of the proposed referendum. Most seem to think it won’t lead anywhere, for one reason or another. One friend spent ten minutes trying to convince me of something I already believe: that consensus is the best way to make decisions. If Fatah and Hamas agree on something, he said, there is some hope. If the proposal goes to the people without the approval of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, even if 99% of the people vote for it, one person blows himself up in Tel Aviv and Israel will call all Palestinians terrorists and Palestinians will find themselves in a situation they all too often encounter: They will have made huge compromises, put in writing their willingness to give up some of their rights for the sake of peace, and this will become the new status quo, the new bottom line, as Israel continues to refuse to give up anything because not every Palestinian individual is behaving as they think he should.

Of course, all of this is my thinking, my construction of the political story based on conversations with people who aren’t all thinking this way right now. They are thinking about where there next meal will come from. They are wondering when their next paycheck will come. They are trying to figure out how to get from one place to the next through roadblocks, checkpoints, rising gas prices, and a permit system that is more restrictive than ever.

And they are thanking God for what they still have, thanking God that they are not Huda.

Did you see Huda?

Passover means liberation for all!

PLEASE FORWARD! TAKE THIS TO YOUR SEDER!

Dear friends,
I'm writing tonight with great joy after helping to organize and participating in a protest seder today outside the offices of major Jewish institutions in Boston. Our group came together quite organically specifically to try to break open the false idea of "consensus" in the Jewish community when it comes to support of Israeli policy. Read our press release below, take a look at the beautiful photographs that a friend took, and most importantly - PRINT OUT THE ATTACHED HAGGADAH SUPPLEMENT to use at a seder if you're planning to hold or attend one. Or if not, please forward to everyone you know who is. The first seder is Wednesday night, so you don't have much time! :)
(A note about the attachment - it's formatted for legal-size paper, so make sure you fit it to page if you're not printing on legal-size paper. If you want the text from me in a different form, please let me know.)
Love and liberation,
Hannah

Young Boston Jews support Palestinian rights, challenge AIPAC and JCRC by holding seder outside their offices

Photographs available at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Passover_Means_Liberation_For_All_2006

On Tuesday, April 11, at 5:00 pm, 20 young Jewish people gathered for a seder (traditional celebration of Passover) outside 126 High Street in Boston, the building that houses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Boston's Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). The group expressed their support for Palestinian human rights and opposition to AIPAC’s and JCRC’s unquestioning support for Israel and its governmental policies. With a banner that read “Passover means liberation for all. Justice for Palestine,” they conveyed the message to the organizations inside and to the media that AIPAC and JCRC do not speak for all Jews.

The group set up a seder table and recited Passover's traditional four questions, with newly written answers that included facts about Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes, confiscation and destruction of Palestine's land resources for the expansion of settlements and the Separation Wall, and malnutrition and poverty in Palestine caused by Israeli closure and movement restrictions. (supplement attached)

According to Marjorie Kent, one of the organizers of the seder “During Passover, every generation of Jewish people is commanded to remember that we were slaves and to tell the story of the Exodus so that we can recognize oppression that happens today and work to stop it. Today we committed ourselves to this task.”

AIPAC pushes the US government to support Israeli policies which result in the brutal oppression of Palestinian people and denial of their internationally recognized human rights. JCRC, while claiming to speak for all Jews, invests enormous time and energy suppressing any voice of opposition to Israeli policies, especially Jewish voices. "Our generation has had enough of AIPAC’s and JCRC's complicity in Israel's human rights abuses of Palestinians," said Hannah Mermelstein, another seder organizer. “Their support of these policies betray the libratory message of Passover.”

The group called on people leaving the building to take the message of “liberation for all” home with them this Passover. They handed out supplements for people to add to their traditional Passover seders. The text of the supplement follows.

As the group left, the police arrived with specific instructions to arrest them.

Passover Means Liberation for All
Haggadah Supplement
Passover 5766/2006

INTRODUCTION:

Avadot hayinu. We were slaves. As Jewish people, our tradition calls us to remember that we were slaves. Each year on Passover, we retell the story of Exodus. We recall that our ancestors were held captive. We remember their courage in resisting; we retell the story of their flight to freedom.

But we must not simply remember this story. We are called to identify with our history of enslavement, and with the struggle for liberation. It is written in the Haggadah that: In every generation each person is obligated to see himself or herself as though he or she personally came forth from Mitzrayim. To fulfill this obligation—to stay true to the spirit of Passover—we must stand in solidarity with those who are oppressed now. However, inside this building are Jewish organizations that take part in the oppression of the Palestinian people. We gather today outside the offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Jewish Community Relations Council. As young Jewish people, we call on these groups to end their betrayal of the true meaning of Passover. We call on them to end their support for policies that violate Palestinians’ human rights.

This Passover, it is time for each of us to make a choice, to decide where we stand. We hope that this Seder will help our community return to the side of justice, loving-kindness, and tikkun olam. All of us must work harder to live up to the words of the Rabbi Hillel, who said: That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.

QUESTION 1

Question: On all other nights we eat leavened bread and matzah. Why on this night only matzah?

Answer: Avadot hayinu. We were slaves. In their flight from bondage in Mitzrayim, our mothers did not have time to let the dough rise. The hot sun baked the dough they carried into the flat unleavened bread we call matzah. Eating only matzah reminds us of the struggle of our ancestors. It also reminds us of the hunger faced today by Palestinian families. This hunger is caused not by natural disasters, but by the policies of the Israeli government. In recent months, residents of Gaza have faced rationing, bread lines, and hunger. This misery has been caused by the Israeli government’s prolonged closure of the Karni checkpoint. In 2003, a study funded by US A.I.D. found that more than 85 percent of four-year-olds in the West Bank and Gaza were not getting enough food. When we eat matzah, we think of this hunger and we dedicate ourselves to ending it.

QUESTION 2:

Question: On all other nights we eat all kinds of vegetables. Why on this night do we make certain to eat bitter herbs?

Answer: Avadot hayinu. We were slaves. We eat maror to remind us how bitter our ancestors’ lives were made by their enslavement. And we eat maror to remind us of the bitterness faced by those who are still not free. We think of the bitterness felt by Palestinian people who are forced to wait for hours at military checkpoints. We think of people who face intimidation, pain, and ridicule every time they travel to work, go to school, seek medical care, or visit loved ones. We think of the bitterness caused by Israeli-only bypass roads that cut through Palestinians’ land. And we think of the bitterness of 6 million Palestinian refugees who cannot return to their homes. When we eat maror, we think of the bitter suffering faced by Palestinians and we dedicate ourselves to ending it.

QUESTION 3:

Question: On all other nights we do not usually dip food once. Why on this night do we dip twice?

Answer: Avadot hayinu. We were slaves. The first time we dip our greens into salt water to taste the tears of enslavement. We think of the sadness of our ancestors. And today we also think of the tears of Palestinian families whose homes are demolished by the Israeli army, without warning and in violation of international law. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions reports that since 1967, Israeli authorities have destroyed over twelve thousand Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories. When we taste salt water, we think of these ruined homes and we dedicate ourselves to stopping the destruction. We also think of the tears of families who mourn daughters and sons lost to violence. Both Jewish people in Israel, and the far greater number of Palestinians killed by policies of the Israeli government. We dedicate ourselves to ending this violence, for the sake of all.

The greens that we dip into the water also remind us of life and growth. Even in a time of sadness, there is hope for rebirth. We hope for peace in the Middle East. But we know that peace will not come without justice. We dedicate ourselves to working for both.

The second time, we dip the maror into the charoset. The charoset reminds us of the mortar that our ancestors mixed as slaves in Mitzrayim. Today, it also reminds us of the concrete used to build the separation wall. We think of the division caused by the wall: the Palestinians separated from their land, the families separated from each other, the farmers separated from their olive trees. We think of the Israeli settlements, which violate the Geneva Conventions. We remember that settlements continued to grow even during the peace process. We know that despite the Gaza withdrawal, hundreds of thousands of settlers remain in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We remember that settlements steal water, steal land, and create terror for Palestinian people. We think of separation and terror, and we dedicate ourselves to overcoming them.

QUESTION 4:

Question: On Passover, we usually sit on soft chairs. Why do we stand at this Seder?

Answer: Avadot hayinu. We were slaves. Because this year, it is time for each of us to make a choice. Do we stand for justice? Or do we sit and do nothing as others are oppressed in our name? Do we stand against the oppression of our Palestinian sisters and brothers? Or do we sit and allow AIPAC, JCRC, and others to betray our traditions? Do we act in the true spirit of Passover, or do we allow this holiday to become a meaningless ritual? Do we sit silently and betray the meaning of our sacred tradition? Or do we stand up and speak out?

Today, we choose to stand!