Snapshots of Return

Dear all,

First, a note for those in Boston: I think there will be an article about Birthright Unplugged in the magazine section of this Sunday’s Boston Globe. If anyone could save a copy for my parents, they would appreciate it. : )

We ran our Re-Plugged trip out of Jenin refugee camp last weekend, and start Unplugged tomorrow. Re-Plugged was bittersweet and wonderful as always. We took 20 kids from 11 different villages to Jerusalem, the sea in Haifa and their villages which all lie somewhere between Haifa and Jenin. Dunya and I will write more about the experience in our communiqué after the summer ends, but for now I’ll just share a few stories:

-We meet 85-year-old Abu Omar in his village of Na’ura, a village that his family has lived in for centuries. He will get on our bus and accompany us to Zir’in and Qumiya, two destroyed villages very nearby where 7 of the children are from. Before we leave, we sit with him at his home and drink juice, and he tells us the history of the area. He asks each child his or her name, and as soon as he hears the family name, he tells the child where his or her family is from. There is not one village he does not know. A walking encyclopedia.

-As we are leaving in 3 buses for the villages, one boy gets on a bus that is not going to the village his grandparents are from. We ask him why he has switched groups and he won’t tell us, but says he wants to go with this other group. We assume it is for social reasons. When that group arrives in Um Il Fahm, a thriving Palestinian city, his reasons become clear. A woman runs toward the bus crying and holding children by the hand. It is his sister, whom he hasn’t seen in 5 years because she is married and living in Um Il Fahm. They have only a few minutes together.

-We meet youth from Baladna, a Palestinian organization inside ’48 (Israel). They join us for much of the trip. One young man tells us he is studying theatre and sociology at Brandeis. We ask him how that is for him – not surprisingly, it isn’t easy for him to be one of few Palestinians at a school that is predominantly comprised of Zionist American Jews. We mention the name of our organization in passing and he says, “Birthright Unplugged?! I have your postcard hanging on my dorm room wall!” He’s been promoting us (mostly unsuccessfully) around campus since he found our old postcard lying on the floor at Brandeis more than a year ago.

-We arrive at the sea. The Israeli police see girls in hijab and approach the group in a classic case of racial profiling. Our Palestinian hosts are indignant; because of the way they dress, this doesn’t usually happen to them. The Jenin kids are thankfully unaware of the incident.

-We split into small groups for dinner with host families. Our host family is politically active and last summer participated in demonstrations against the Lebanon war almost daily. One night, the mother told us, there was a knock on the door and someone yelled in heavily Hebrew-accented Arabic, “Iftakh ilbaab!” (Open the door!). When she opened it, a masked man clubbed her on the head and ran. Her daughters saw it. There was blood everywhere. The neighborhood they live in is entirely Palestinian, so it wasn’t a neighbor. They are convinced it was someone a bit more official sending them a warning about their activism. This happened in Haifa. They are Israeli citizens.

-I ask the host mother whether she is originally from Haifa city itself, and she says no, her family and her husband’s family are each from two different villages destroyed in 1948. The house they currently live in, she tells me, is an old house. They do not know the names of the Palestinians who used to live there. They heard once that the family went to Syria in 1948. Nobody has come back since.

-One girl is from Ayn Hawd, a village that was occupied but not destroyed in 1948. The expelled villagers fled to other countries, to Jenin, and to a hilltop just a couple kilometers away. The new Palestinian village on the hilltop is also called Ayn Hawd, though it is only partially recognized by the Israeli government. The original village is now inhabited by Israeli artists. The whole group plans to meet in the new Ayn Hawd to eat dinner at a restaurant owned by this girl’s cousin, whom she has never met. First, her group visits the original Ayn Hawd. She has directions to her house from her grandmother. They find it. A Dutch man and Israeli woman live inside now, and invite the group in. The girl stands aside and begins to cry. The Dutch man says, “It’s okay, you can come back another time, it’s no problem.” One boy responds, “Actually, it is a problem. When she turns 16 next year, the Israeli army will not let her come.”

-Two brothers are from Braika, a village that was turned into an Israeli military base for years and is now a trash dump. The boys walk among the trash looking for any traces of their ancestors’ homes. They are on the phone with their grandfather in Jenin refugee camp, who is directing them toward a particular tree that he says was in front of the house. After climbing under barbed wire and walking through trash, the boys find the tree. How did they know it was the same tree? As he was fleeing in 1948, the grandfather quickly carried out a last act in his village: he carved his name in the tree. Almost 60 years later, this tree is all that remains of their property.

I told this last story to a friend last night who lives in a house surrounded on all 4 sides by Israel’s wall. She sighed and asked, “When will the right of return come?”

Before it is too late, inshallah.

Palestinian presence

Dear all,

There are, as always, many things I could share about my first days in Palestine this time around. I have a whole host of lovely stories I was hoping to write about (spending time with friends), as well as a few disturbing stories (going through 6 checkpoints between jenin and ramallah, one of which had soldiers pointing guns directly into each of the cars), but what came out below formed itself a bit differently than I’d expected. I do want to share a one-sentence anecdote, though: My friend Fatima and her family were held at a checkpoint for a half hour the other day because the youngest daughter (12-yr-old Bara’a) stuck her tongue out at a soldier. : )

On a different note, I want to acknowledge that Gaza is in an extremely desperate situation right now with Israeli military attacks and closures the likes of which they have not seen in some time, and the world seems to be forgetting about them because they don’t like the political party that is currently in charge. I am not in Gaza and cannot get there, but I try not to forget it and hope that you don’t either.

Okay, onto my other thoughts…

From Ramallah with love,
Hannah


As I exited the plane and walked through the narrow hallway towards the airport, I stared at the advertisement on the wall: photos of famous people and art from centuries ago, with “the first _____” written above them. Example: “the first Italian lady” was the Mona Lisa. The final one, of course, was “the first Israeli.” The picture, a cactus.

For years on my trips to Israel I would ride through the countryside taking in the landscape absentmindedly, oblivious to the stories of the places I was passing. Now that I know more, it seems impossible to ignore the cacti, fig trees, and pomegranate trees that signify the entrances to destroyed Palestinian villages. Often times building walls remain nearby, if not whole buildings. When they are too obvious to ignore, they are labeled as old Roman ruins, with no acknowledgment at all of the continued lived experience of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Every time I arrive in Palestine, it takes me a few days to detox from the airport and the hours after. It takes a visit to my host family in Dheisheh refugee camp to remember that the cactus is not “the first Israeli”. It takes a free ride halfway from Ramallah to Haris (“But this is your work”/ “Yes, but you’re a friend to the Palestinian people, and money isn’t everything”) to overshadow the conversation in the airport taxi between two Americans going to study Torah in occupied land (“Everywhere you go you can dig an inch under the ground and find remnants of ancient Israel…”).

There are two competing realities of permanence here. I can only hope that the one based on presence, and not the one based on absence, will prevail.

A friend of mine asked me the other day how I see the situation here, whether I have a positive outlook on any of it. This friend has a public job with the Palestinian Authority in which people come to him every day with their problems and he can do nothing about them. He tells me it drives him crazy. He tells me he doesn’t want life to be a series of choices to kill or be killed, imprison or be imprisoned, make people afraid or be afraid. His son is in Israeli prison, and he is hoping he is on the list of 250 Fatah prisoners to be released in Olmert’s new plan. But what about the other thousands and thousands of prisoners? he asks. And what about those who are not Fatah? His wife tells me that their 3-year-old daughter, who has only known her brother in prison, has been dreaming of his release. She woke up a few mornings ago and said, “The soldiers opened the door and took his handcuffs off and he left, so why isn’t he home yet?”

So when this friend asked how I see the situation, whether I see any of it positively, it was hard to know how to answer. All I could think to say was what I usually say to that question, as far removed from his experience as I knew it was. I do not see much hope in the current situation, I told him, but it cannot continue forever. The idea that there can be a Jewish state and a democratic state at the same time is unsustainable, and unless Israel completely wipes out the Palestinian people, this idea will continue to be challenged until Zionism comes to an end. It will not happen soon, and it is too late for true justice in any case, but someday the state will adopt true democratic laws (if not practice); someday military occupation will come to an end; someday refugees will have the right to return; someday this contradiction of a democratic Jewish state will die.

I hope you are right, he responded, and I think you are right, but ultimately I am not looking for their end, I am just looking for our beginning.

Here’s hoping for beginnings and continuations grounded in presence in this land.