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

from the army and the people

Aug 31, 2007

Dear friends,

First a big thank you to all of you who responded to my last e-mail with news about your lives. I feel more grounded knowing you’re all out there in your own corners of the world as I am in mine.

Many of you have written asking what the word on the street is about Fatah and Hamas. I haven’t written about this not only because the internal split has inappropriately replaced all news of occupation in western media, but because I’m not hearing anything terribly new on this end. I have been writing for more than a year about most people’s disillusionment with the main two political parties and some people’s frustration that the smaller parties don’t work together more. I would say this is still the case, although unless asked, people tend to talk about this less than before, not more. For the most part people are simply trying to keep their lives together, to survive against all odds.

Of course no political developments go without analysis, and the recent buzz about renewed peace talks is no exception. Most of my friends and colleagues here are worried that the upcoming conference in Washington DC will either lead to another “generous offer” refused by Palestinian leadership, or perhaps worse, one accepted by Palestinian leadership. Israel is undergoing a massive road project to connect the settlements to each other and to Israel, while building tunnels for Palestinians,; the concept of territorial contiguity has been replaced by transportational contiguity. Olmert has promised never to give up the Jordan Valley, and all the numbers coming out of the Israeli side (“We’ll return 95% of the West Bank”) do not include East Jerusalem. Not to mention that whatever percentage Israel takes will include the most fertile land and water resources and all control over borders. As a good friend says, prisoners may occupy 95% of the prison, but does that mean they have control?

My Palestinian friends inside ’48 (Israel) are worried that the plan to give a new Palestinian state an “equivalent” of all West Bank areas occupied in 1967 will go through, and their current city of Um Il Fahm will be transferred to the West Bank and they will be stripped of their Israeli citizenship. They don’t mind Israeli rule, they say, they simply want equal rights, including the right to return to the village they were expelled from in 1948. Lajjun is only a few miles from their home, and each time we take a group there our host takes us to their old spring, cemetery, and the place where his old house used to be and now stands a forest planted by the Jewish National Fund. Kibbutz Megiddo is built on parts of their land now, and even Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are forbidden from returning to the place where they were born.

The best political analysis I’ve seen recently is also not new, but bitterly amusing. My 12-year-old host brother showed me a video on a cell phone last night. The background: The popular Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram has a video that plays constantly on music tv channels these days, called “Shater shater” (Clever, clever). In the video she is the teacher and a group of school children is sitting around listening to her and bobbing their heads obediently back and forth. She sings lines like, “If you listen to me and do as I say, shater shater…” Do you see where this may be going? The video my host brother showed me last night was a classroom with the American and Israeli flags hanging, and Condoleezza Rice as the teacher singing “Shater shater” to a group of head-bobbing Arab leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah, Fouad Siniora, Hosni Mubarak and others.

Some of you asked me to write about the current manifestations of occupation in the West Bank, nonviolent resistance, and the role of art. Why do I group them all together? Because they continue, all of them, ever-present and occasionally inventive. I read every day of more people arrested and killed in Israeli army operations in Gaza, Nablus, Qalqilya, and Jenin. I’m sitting here writing this instead of attending any number of weekly Friday demonstrations against the wall and settlement expansion in villages near Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Khalil (Hebron). I think about my friends who are trying to keep art, music, and dance alive and growing among children (girls in particular) in spite of direct repression from the army as well as difficulties they face within their own villages. The internal struggle I see is not about Fatah and Hamas; it’s about the fabric of a society being threatened directly and indirectly by the effects of a persistent military occupation.

Yesterday I was stuck at the Container checkpoint for about 45 minutes. This is one of the major checkpoints Israeli leaders always talk about removing, because like many checkpoints, it is deep within the West Bank and there is absolutely no way to get anywhere near Israel by passing through it. Soldiers there only occasionally check people's IDs, and even rarer is a check of people’s bags or cars. Still, people are made to wait sometimes for hours at a time. Yesterday we waited for about 20-25 minutes in a line of cars approaching the checkpoint, while every few minutes the soldiers would wave forward another car without even a glance inside. After we passed through we were stuck for another 20-25 minutes in a checkpoint-related traffic jam caused by cars trying to pass each other on a too narrow road. The driver who was stopped in the other direction pointed to the mass of cars and asked, “Min il jaysh willa il naas?” (From the army or the people?). Part from the army, part from the people, our driver explained. But all caused by the checkpoint, I thought.

So the occupation is still at it, creating problems partially from the army and partially from the people. I don’t know which is more frustrating.

I’ll try to write again soon. Dunya and I will send our summer Birthright Unplugged communiqué out shortly. I will also ask a few Palestinian friends if there is anything they want to say to people in the US, so hopefully one of my next reports will include some Palestinian voices.

As always, please keep in touch.

Love from Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem,
Hannah

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.

Commemorating the Nakba

Dear friends,

This week marked the 59th anniversary of the Nakba, the displacement and dispossesssion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people. Friends of mine all across the US engaged in Nakba Day commemorations, remembering the destruction of hundreds of villages and the painful fact that 3/4 of the Palestinian population are refugees even to this day.

We've been publishing photos of actions in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Minneapolis throughout the week on a blog: questionisrael.blogspot.com. The culmination, for me, was today, when 50 of us went inside the "New England Celebrates Israel" event to commemorate the Nakba there. We were able to stand silently with banners, and stickers with names of villages, for about 5 minutes (much longer than we were expecting!). The statement from our group is below.

Again, please visit the blog for photos and links to more. A video will be ready in a few days as well.

questionisrael.blogspot.com

Lots of love,
Hannah


STATEMENT FROM OUR ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

We are here today to commemorate the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland and to protest this celebration of Israel’s Independence Day. We stand here to remind those inside and those in our larger New England community that Israeli “independence” equals Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe.

We are a diverse group of people who support the application of human rights for all people. We are painfully aware that the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948 led to the largest and most persistent refugee problem in the world. In 1948, 800,000 Palestinian people were driven from their homes in a process of ethnic cleansing that continues to this day.

Today, almost 60 years later, more than 6 million Palestinians still wait to return home. Three quarters of the Palestinian population are displaced. One out of every 3 refugees in the world is Palestinian. Many live in refugee camps. All are denied the right to return to their land simply because they are not Jewish.

The right of return for refugees is an international law that applies to all refugee populations in the world. The United Nations has reaffirmed this right specifically for Palestinian people every year since 1948, yet the Israeli government has consistently refused to implement this right. Billions of dollars of US aid give Israel little incentive to conform to international standards of law and justice.

Those of us who are Jewish say, “Not in our name!” The organized Jewish community that has planned this event does not speak for us.

As US taxpayers we say, “Not with our money!” The 15 million dollars PER DAY that the US government gives to Israel does not reflect our desires or our priorities.

As people who care about equality, justice, and human rights, we say, "Not on our watch!" Israel must respect international law, including the right of return for refugees.

We are here today to declare that Palestinian experience cannot be forgotten, that Palestinian history cannot be erased, that Palestinian voices cannot be silenced! Never again should this kind of catastrophe happen to any people in the world.

And we are here to let the organizers of this event know that they will never be able to celebrate the establishment of the state of Israel without protest until the Nakba is acknowledged and reparations are made.

The Search for 1948

Part 1:

“Where do you want to go?” asked the taxi driver, expecting to give me a short ride and collect a few shekels.

“Baqa’a,” I replied, “but it’s a bit of a project.”

The West Jerusalem neighborhood of Baqa’a is only a 10 minute drive from the place in East Jerusalem where we were, but time travel takes somewhat more imagination.

“I’m looking for a house from 1948,” I told him, and handed him a diagram of a house that looked similar to hundreds of other old houses in the Jerusalem area.

“Is it yours?” he asked.

“No, a friend’s.”

Only a few months ago I found out that a friend of mine in Boston, who I’d always known as Lebanese, was actually born in Jerusalem. In 1948, at the age of four, he and his family, along with 800,000 Palestinian people, were forced out of their home by pre-Israeli forces. They fled to Lebanon, where his father had lived before moving to Jerusalem 20 years earlier. Nobody in the family has been back to Palestine since 1948, so I asked my friend if he would like me to try to find his house. He gathered some information, including a few nearby landmarks and a diagram of the house, and I set off on my search.

This brings me back to Abed’s taxi, where I sat hoping he knew the neighborhoods well enough to help me. I had planned to seek out an older taxi driver, and possibly someone who spoke English so I could make sure to communicate every little detail I knew. Abed is a young guy who speaks very little English, but he seemed interested in and moved by the project, and immediately began to call all the older people he knew.

“Do you know where the Jordanian embassy was before 1948?” he would ask, as this was our major landmark.

“Yes,” one man told him, “but it wasn’t in Baqa’a.”

“No,” said a couple people, “there was barely a Jordan at that time. How could there be a Jordanian embassy?”

So we began to drive, looking for the other smaller landmarks, or for people who might recognize the name of my friend’s father. Abed would pull over next to every older person he saw (Palestinian or Israeli), and ask about the Ummah school, the Jordanian embassy, and the British army women’s headquarters. Some people were vaguely helpful, some not, and some would inform us in a slightly insulted way that they weren’t alive in 1948.

We left Baqa’a and crossed the street to another neighborhood that is still mostly Palestinian, thinking we would have a better chance of finding both people who wanted to help and people who could help. Not two minutes later, we passed an old man and Abed stopped. We got out of the car, said hello, and explained what we were doing. “You’re in luck,” replied the old man, “I know more about these neighborhoods than anyone else in the area.”

Before I knew it, his wife was serving me coffee in the middle of the street and the man was telling his wife and daughters to go ahead to the hospital because he would come in the car with us as long as Abed agreed to drive him to the hospital afterwards. Abed agreed, and we continued on our journey, this time with a new passenger.

We drove for about a half hour with little success, and then the man (whose name I never learned) suggested we stop at an old house on the corner. We knocked on the door, and an old Israeli man answered. He took one look at us and asked, “Are you looking for someone who used to live here?” as he opened the door and let us in. “You’re in luck,” he said, “I know more about these neighborhoods than anyone else in the area.”

So here I was inside a house with Abed the taxi driver, and two older men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who said they knew everything about the area. They talked for a few minutes and argued amiably for a few more in a combination of Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The interaction had an air of pre-Zionism to it that is difficult to explain. The men were interacting like any two older men would, both trying to be helpful and both trying to prove what they knew. They used language of “Arab” and “Jew” instead of “Palestinian” and “Israeli”, which many people do, but it just seemed right in this situation. Like nationalism and the way it has played out had nothing to do with this simple human search for an old home.

I had started the trip too late, so by this time it was getting dark and I was running late for a meeting. We had gotten some information that might help us for next time, I had a few questions to go back to my friend with, and we took the name and phone number of the Israeli man so we could try again another day.

Part 2:

Two weeks later, the only day out of several that wasn’t pouring rain, I met Abed in Jerusalem. I had received more precise directions from my friend in Boston, including names of other people who lived and worked in the area and, most importantly, a photograph taken from the house in 1940.

Abed met me and told me he knew where the house was, that he had gone back there after our last search. I showed him the photograph and we drove towards the area where he thought the house was. We parked and began to walk around, holding up the photograph to each gate and entrance. We found one house that looked quite similar and currently has a huge construction project going on directly on top of it. The managers were Israeli, the workers Palestinian. We went in and asked the workers what they knew about the house, which wasn’t much. We were stopped on the way out by a manager. Abed explained in Hebrew that we were trying to find a house. The man
glanced at the photo and said, “Yes, this looks like the house.” Another manager came out and ordered us off the property. “This isn’t the house,” he said. “There was nothing here before 1948.”

We stood outside for a few minutes as Abed explained to me (as though explanation was needed) that the Israeli man felt threatened by us. “We need to find an Israeli to help us,” said Abed. “They think you and I are here to claim the house because I’m Arab and you have papers in your hand. They don’t know we’re only here to look and photograph.”

“We should take the house,” I replied, only half joking.

By that time we had realized this was probably not the house we were looking for. The gate looked the same but we couldn’t figure out the angles in the photograph and it just didn’t seem right. Another older Israeli man on the street asked if he could help. Abed explained that we were searching for a house, and the man joined us for the next 20 minutes as we walked around the neighborhood. We kept finding similar sights, but none of them fit together right. Finally he asked, “Are you sure the house is in the German Colony?”

“No,” I replied, “it’s in Baqa’a.”

Apparently the older Israeli man who had helped us the first time had convinced Abed to come to this area. So we got back into the car and headed back up to his house. He answered the door and I shared all my new information with him. It’s near the Trans-Jordanian consulate, I told him, not the Jordanian embassy. There’s a road that goes down from the main street towards their house. Well, these two pieces of information were all he needed. He followed me out to the street, pointed, and said, “Go two more traffic lights. The Allenby building is probably what you mean, and
that’s on your left. There’s a street that goes down from there on the right.”

Something felt right about this, so I got back in the car excitedly and we drove those two blocks, turned right, and got out and started walking. The streets were different than they were described to me, and the building supposedly on the corner wasn’t there. But sure enough, after a few minutes of meandering, I found myself in front of a large building that was in the background of the photo I was holding. I positioned myself exactly at the angle that the photo was taken from, and looked around. One street continued to go down, so I took it. To my right was a synagogue that I guessed was either my friend’s property or his neighbor’s. I hoped it was
not his, that his house had not been completely destroyed and replaced by a synagogue.

We passed the synagogue and stopped in front of the gate to the next house. This was it. Different from the photo, but with the same dimensions, and seemingly the right distance from the larger building up the street. We entered and found ourselves on the stone path described in the e-mail I had in my hand from my friend’s older brother:

“…continue along the stone-paved path… some 8 meters, you reach the level of the house… Move some 10 more meters and you will have the six stone steps (to the left) that lead up to the veranda and you will then be facing the main door, entrance to the house.”

I was facing the main door, the entrance to the house. I wanted to knock on the door, but wanted to take in as much as possible first. I walked around the house, wondering which plants and trees had been there when my friend lived there and which were new.

Finally Abed knocked. No answer. We waited a few minutes and then left. I came back about five minutes later to photograph more and the door to the house was open.

I went to the entrance, knocked, and said “hello?” A man appeared.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“A little,” he replied, which turned out to mean a lot.

“My name is Hannah, I’m from the United States, and I have a friend who I think used to live in this house before 1948. Can I come in and look?”

He seemed hesitant but let me in. I asked if I could photograph and he was slightly more hesitant, but again agreed. He asked if I was sure this was the house, and I told him about the description of the path, stairs, and entrance. I asked how long he’d lived there, and he told me only a couple years. He rents the place from a French Israeli man who has owned it for about five years. Before that, the building was owned by a Moroccan Israeli family.

“Since 1948?” I asked.

“Well, the Israeli government probably had it first and then gave it to them, but yes, for a long time.”

I kept photographing. I was a bit hesitant to have any meaningful conversation with him because I was afraid it might spoil my ability to be filming. As I was getting ready to leave, though, he began a conversation:

“The reason I let you in,” he told me, “is that one time my sister went back to Morocco to find our family house. The man currently living there wouldn’t let her in. She cried and cried, and finally he let her in, but he wouldn’t let her photograph. This is why I let you in and let you photograph.”

“Do you want to return to Morocco?” I asked.

“No,” he said, almost laughing at the suggestion.

“If the situation changed?”

“No, Morocco is for the Moroccans and Israel is for the Israelis.”

“What about the Palestinians?”

“We were here first,” he said, “thousands of years ago. This is our land, it says so in the bible.” I had noticed all the torahs and other religious texts in the house, so it did not surprise me that he was religious.

“Sixty years ago my friend was living here,” I said.

“History doesn’t start in 1948,” he answered.

There was no use arguing with religion. We said an awkward goodbye (what I would usually say when someone has let me into his house would be “thank you,” but it didn’t seem right in this situation), and I left.

My search for 1948 was over, and amazingly, it was a success. As I returned to East Jerusalem with Abed, I thought about how many people we had involved in this project, and how important a project it is, both on personal and national levels. I thought about some of those people, and how their names suited the story perfectly:

The sweet and helpful taxi driver is Abed, “one who serves.”

The man currently living in my friend’s house is named Israel.

The old Israeli man who helped us find the house is named Shalom.

Perhaps if more people named Shalom helped refugees find their homes, the word “peace” would have true meaning.

the blood of the people

Just a quick note about the incredibly sad internal Palestinian violence... and a hopeful response. I probably don't know more about the fighting than you all do, because Gaza is just as inaccessible from the West Bank as from the US, where most of you are. Perhaps I hear news with less sensationalism and more emotion, though - people here are really sad and frustrated. So yesterday, at 10 am, I got a call that there would be a demonstration and human chain in Ramallah at 11. I was already in Ramallah, so I decided to go, thinking it would be tiny.

The event was organized by the Farmers' Union and the idea was to include farmers and workers in the political process and involve people in a grassroots process to take back Palestine from those who seek power at the expense of the people. I arrived and saw hundreds of women and men of all ages, girls from school groups, etc.

We began at the parliament building (Hamas-controlled) and the idea was to make a human chain to the PA headquarters (Fatah-controlled). We didn't quite reach it, but we did reach to the center of town, after which time the crowd just started marching and chanting.

"Ya Haniye, w ya rais, dam ilshab mush rhiis" (Hey Haniyeh, and hey president [Abbas], the blood of the people isn't cheap)

"Wahde wahde wataniye, Fatah, Hamas w'shiuiye" (one one nation, Fatah, Hamas, and the communists)

We marched to the PA headquarters and went inside. The guards in their uniforms and guns shook people's hands as we walked by and let us in without protest. I said to a friend, "This is amazing that they're just letting us in."

"They have to," he replied, "We elected them, we put them there." Can you imagine that happening in the US? A group of people marching to the Whitehouse and the guards letting us in...

I felt a little strange going as an international, since I think there's enough foreign meddling in (and foreign reasons for) the internal violence. But as soon as I arrived it was clear it was Palestinian-led, I was one of only a few internationals, and several people thanked me for being there with them. In that moment, being there felt like solidarity. And like an important story to share.

There was tons of press there, but I worry that it was all Arab press. I'm curious if it got any Western press.