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?