Small victories

Sept 12, 2007

Dear friends,

Both Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah will start this evening. Tomorrow morning the West Bank and Gaza will change their clocks back an hour; Israel will do it next week (and the US not until early November). The weather is getting slightly cooler, at least here in Ramallah. Each day the news seems to get worse – more Israeli invasions into Jenin, Nablus, Gaza, and even Syria this week than usual – and there are Abbas and Olmert on the front page of every paper here talking about peace. It’s hard for people not to be skeptical.

One recent victory can give us hope, or at least a nice celebration. Bil’in, the village that has come to exemplify recent Palestinian nonviolent resistance, won a huge court victory last week. After two and a half years of weekly demonstrations against the wall, the Israeli high court ruled last week that the route of the wall in Bil’in is illegal, and that the purpose of it is not for security but for land annexation. Of course, the same decision legitimized most of the settlement that is built on Bil’in’s land, ruling against only the small part that is being expanded upon right now. Still, it is a huge victory. A practical one for those farmers whose land will be saved, and a symbolic one for the rest of the village and all of Palestine.

I attended the weekly demonstration after the decision, which was more of a celebration. Instead of chanting and marching, people were singing and dancing. Mustafa Barghouti was sitting on the shoulders of another man, dancing and holding a Palestinian flag. Salam Fayad (the acting Palestinian prime minister) made a brief appearance with his entourage of bodyguards. One larger man was being held up by two other men, dancing around with an Israeli newspaper whose cover was about Bil’in.

The day after the decision I asked a few friends in the north if they had heard. Some had, some hadn’t. One said excitedly, “They deserve it.” Another friend in the south said, “Bil’in and Budrus are the best villages in Palestine. Nobody here in the Bethlehem region is even fighting at all.” Which, of course, isn’t true, but the persistence of the weekly demonstrations in Bil’in (and Budrus before that, as well as a few other villages) seems to have paid off somewhat. Most of the court victories so far, of which there have only been a handful, have been in places where the wall was not yet complete; here, theoretically, the army will take down the wall and move it closer to the Green Line.

In any case, these reactions might be the most exciting part for me. I half expected the cynicism I am so used to around here. When I heard the decision, I myself asked, “Will they really take it down?” And then even if they do, it’s only being moved a little, etc. But the fact that the usually cynical friends I spoke with were truly filled with nothing but respect for the people of Bil’in was heartening, and gave me a glimmer of hope that this might serve as inspiration for others (and, legally, as a precedent). For more on Bil’in (including a lot of great footage and photos): www.bilin-village.org.

My personal victory of the week, resulting in a slightly smaller celebration, was smuggling three friends an hour away to the sea, where they hadn’t been in years (the 18-year-old had never been at all). As soon as we crossed into ’48 (Israel), one friend began pointing at open fields and hills on the side of the road and in the distance, naming each village that we passed. His own ancestral village that his parents were expelled from in 1948 is about 15 minutes from his home, but across the Green Line and therefore forbidden to him. He angrily and passionately talked about the Jews living there now, having no idea of the history of the place. Many of the Arabic names are completely erased from the map; the ones that are not have been Hebraized.

We arrived in my other friend’s village a few minutes later, one that has been both Hebraized (the name) and Judaized (the population). The mosque, school, and one old house still stand. Other buildings have been destroyed and a new Israeli town/settlement sits there. We passed through the “Do not enter” sign on the fence surrounding the mosque, waded through trash, and climbed to the top. We looked out over the land. “Look at that old woman,” my friend said, watching a woman who was watching us from her porch in the distance. “There she sits happily on her porch, no worries, sitting in front of her house on this beautiful land, no checkpoints…”

We drove slowly through the village so we could stop and pick fruit from old trees as we saw it – pomegranates, pomelos, olives. We left the village and continued to the sea. Every time I drive inside ’48, I look to both sides and wondered how I could have ever come and not known the history. Remains of buildings from 60 years ago get transferred in the Israeli narrative to “Roman ruins” as though the past 2,000 years did not happen.

I see all the open space and say to my friend, “They say there’s no room for refugees to return.”

“Of course there’s room,” he responded. “There’s room for all the Palestinians and all the Jews in the world to be here, living side by side.”

We arrived at the sea, where Palestinians and Jews were swimming side by side. One man started talking to us in Hebrew until he realized my friends were Palestinian and then he switched. This happened several times throughout the day, as Yaffa is largely a Palestinian city (although the Israeli government continues to demolish Palestinian homes there and shift the demographic, though all of the inhabitants have Israeli citizenship).

We swam for hours, ate food, got sunburned, had fun, and then returned to the refugee camp.

Someday my friends will have the choice of whether to return to their refugee camp or not, whether to stay in Yaffa, return to their villages, move abroad, etc. Until then, I will do my best to continue to give them brief glimpses of their land when they ask.

Someday there will be no wall running through Palestine, stealing land and separating people. Until then, the Palestinian people will continue to resist, with solidarity from Israeli and international friends.

Ramadan karim, shana tova, and happy fall to all,
Hannah