No Time To Celebrate: Jews Remember the Nakba

Dear friends,

I am so excited to be sharing with you the important effort outlined below. Please take a look, and for all the Jewish people out there, please consider signing this pledge and forwarding it to others. There are more of us than we know - let's show that to ourselves, to mainstream Jewish communities, to the Palestinian people we work in solidarity with, and to the world.

I'm also heartened to let you know that the Jewish Advocate, Boston's Jewish newspaper that is certainly not known for its support of Palestinian rights, has published an editorial that I wrote as part of a column reserved for young people's opinions. You can read it at http://www.thejewishadvocate.com/this_weeks_issue/opinions2/?content_id=4644 and if you feel compelled to write them a letter (to potentially keep the issue in the paper longer), please do.

Okay, now for the campaign and pledge...

Calling all Jews of Conscience!
Join "NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews Remember the Nakba"

"NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews Remember the Nakba" is a campaign organized by anti-Zionist Jews from around the U.S. and Canada to coordinate and make visible Jewish response to Israeli Independence Day celebrations and Jewish participation in commemoration of the Nakba. We invite you to join us in this effort:

1. Sign the NO TIME TO CELEBRATE statement and pledge of action (text below). Go to http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/notimetocelebrate/ to sign! All signatories will be sent additional information about how to get involved in the campaign.
2. Participate in NO TIME TO CELEBRATE's call for coordinated actions across North America by organizing an action or event in your city, such as peaceful disruption of Israel celebration events or Jewish participation in Nakba events and actions organized by Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement. Please contact notimetocelebrate+localaction@gmail.com to let us know what you are planning and to request resources/ideas for action compiled by the campaign.
3. Incorporate the Nakba remembrance Haggadah supplement into your Passover Seders. E-mail notimetocelebrate+haggadahsupplement@gmail.com to request the supplement be sent to you once finalized.
4. Take action in other ways to challenge the perceived Zionist consensus among American Jews through education of Jewish and broader communities about the Nakba; about the colonial nature of Zionism; and about the history of Jewish dissent and Palestinian resistance.
5. Spread the word about "NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews Remember the Nakba"! Pass this call on to your organizations, friends and family.

In solidarity with 60+ Years of Palestinian Resistance to Zionism,
NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews Remember the Nakba
notimetocelebrate@gmail.com
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/notimetocelebrate/

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NO TIME TO CELEBRATE: Jews Remember the Nakba
Statement and Pledge of Action

This May, Israel will mark 60 years of statehood. In cities across the U.S. and Canada, major Jewish organizations will sponsor celebrations of "Israeli Independence Day." Meanwhile, Palestinians around the world will mourn 60 years since the Nakba – Arabic for "catastrophe" – of 1948. Sixty years ago, Zionist militias destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages and made more than 800,000 Palestinian people refugees in order to create a Jewish state in a land where the majority was not Jewish. This does not deserve to be celebrated.

Today the Palestinian Nakba continues. In order to maintain Israel's artificial Jewish majority, the Israeli government has continued campaigns of ongoing displacement, violence, and occupation. Inside of the 1948 borders of Israel, Palestinian citizens are denied equal rights to Jews under the law. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are denied access to land, water, healthcare, and other basic resources. Palestinians throughout historic Palestine experience international isolation, economic devastation aided by the erection of a 730-kilometer wall, and continued closures and invasions including the current horrific siege of Gaza. Today there are more than 6 million Palestinian refugees around the world, all of whom are denied their internationally recognized Right of Return to their homes and land. Meanwhile, we are invited to live on that same land simply because we are Jewish. We renounce this "right" to "return" given to us by Israeli law.

In addition to 60 years of occupation and dispossession, this anniversary marks decades of creative and powerful Palestinian resistance to Israel's violence. With this statement, we support this struggle, which is so often ignored or vilified in the U.S. media.

As Jews committed to justice, we imagine an "independence" that does not depend on an ethnically or religiously exclusive state or on the displacement of indigenous people. As North American Jews, we refuse to celebrate the ongoing colonization and dispossession of Palestinian lives and communities funded by U.S. foreign aid. There has never been Jewish consensus around Israel: not in 1897, not in 1948, and not today. We reject the notion that we have been chosen to displace others. We support Palestinian people's right to return, individually and collectively, to the homes they lost in 1948 and in the violent decades since then.

In response to these historical events and a call from Palestine to mark their significance, we refuse to celebrate "Israel 60." We will take action to make our shared position clear and visible. In cities across the U.S. and Canada this year, we pledge to participate in and to support:

• Refusal to participate in Israeli Independence Day activities;
• Peaceful disruption of these events;
• Nakba commemoration events and actions organized by Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement;
• Incorporation of Nakba remembrance into our Passover Seders;
• The movement for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions of Israel;
• Other efforts to challenge the perceived Zionist consensus among American Jews through education of Jewish and broader communities about the Nakba, about the colonial nature of Zionism, and about the history of Jewish dissent and Palestinian resistance.

Together, we stand with Palestinians in mourning 60 years of al-Nakba and in honoring 60 years of vibrant resistance.

Nahr el Bared and the right of return

February 13, 2008

I left Lebanon more than a week ago and am only now starting to find words. I have never before been in a place that has seen so much war. Occupation, yes. Injustice, yes. Death and destruction and uncertainty, perhaps. But something felt different about Lebanon. I have not wrapped my mind around it enough to feel confident that what I write will accurately represent my own thoughts, let alone the actual situation. But I do want to tell you about Nahr el Bared.

You may have heard of Nahr el Bared, one of the Palestinian refugee camps in the north of Lebanon, when the Lebanese army almost completely destroyed it this past summer. All of the residents were forced to leave, made refugees for at least the second time, and most people are still forbidden by the army from returning. I visited the area with a friend who has spent a lot of time there. We stopped first at Bedawi refugee camp, where many of Nahr el Bared's residents are living inside the UN schools (because of this, the schools have been closed since the beginning of the school year). I have never seen such obvious displacement. People have reconstructed a sort of life in this school, with different families in different rooms, or often many families in one room with a tarp separating them. All their belongings are there, with makeshift closets and bureaus for clothes and small ovens to cook food. The schoolyard is full of clotheslines and small stores sell snacks at the base of the school. Life almost seems normal, the setting completely absurd. I could blink and imagine the people back in their camp, or even in their villages that they have not seen since 1948.

I think about my association with the word "refugee." It should, by definition and by international law, be temporary. And yet my experience with refugees has been with Palestinian people in West Bank refugee camps, relatively developed communities where people have been living for 60 years and which are not entirely dissimilar to the towns around them, with the exception of the narrow streets and fewer services. I realize that "Palestinian refugee" to me has been a stationary, permanent identity. This does not reflect justice or people's desires, but it does reflect a certain current reality. Not so in Lebanon, and most of all in the displaced communities of Nahr el Bared residents.

When we arrived in Nahr el Bared itself, it was like a ghost town. A deliberately created ghost town, virtually empty of people and full of shelled and collapsed homes. We stood on a roof near the entrance. To the left was a beautiful snow-covered mountain, to the right the Mediterranean Sea, and in the center thousands of empty, destroyed homes. The teenage boys who had invited us to the roof are among the few families who have been allowed back into the camp. "Even Israel doesn't destroy like this, does it?" they asked, as they watched their new pigeons fly in circles around the house. I thought of Rafah (Gaza), the only place I have been that resembles the destruction of Nahr el Bared. But even the destruction of Rafah was not of this scale.

We walked around the camp, which I dare to call beautiful in many ways. A river runs through the middle, and the camp is on the sea. There is more green than I have ever seen in a refugee camp. My friend described to me how Nahr el Bared is one of the more traditional camps, that many communities find themselves resisting with weapons or giving up altogether, but here the resistance has been in the preservation of culture and traditions, like wedding rituals at the river.

Again, I could blink and imagine the camp as the vibrant community that it was until May. And I could feel a taste of pre-1948 Palestinian life that I have only occasionally felt while walking through the lands of destroyed villages with Nakba survivors themselves.

A small block of temporary UN housing holds a few hundred people. We walked through the area, gathering a small entourage of children as we went. "Where are you from?" a little girl asked one of us. "Chicago," responded one of the members of our group. "I'm from Saffourieh," said the girl. I turned around and asked her, "From where?" I wanted to make sure I had heard right. This young girl had given the name of a destroyed village inside present-day Israel that not only has she never been to, but I have. While some of Saffourieh's residents apparently fled to Lebanon, others fled only a few miles away and currently live in Nazareth. I have visited the land with some of these people.

At the only public clinic in the camp, we met a man who told us he was the last doctor to leave the camp and the first to return. The clinic is open 24 hours a day, and the staff work as volunteers. They barely have money for medicine.

We began to talk with the doctors, and it turns out one of them is originally from Saffourieh as well. Which is to say that his parents were displaced from Saffourieh in 1948. He has never been. We told him that we had been there, and he began to ask questions: "What does it look like?" "What do the Israelis call it now?" "Do people live there?" We told him what we know. "If only I could go…" he said. When we left, he said he hopes to see us again, next time in his village of Saffourieh.

We walked out of the clinic, trudged through the mud away from the destruction and towards the checkpoint at the entrance of the camp. Refugees are refugees, I thought, people displaced from their communities by force. Whether they have carried this identity for a few months or several decades, whether they have been displaced once or twice or many times over, their right to return is sacred. Whether to Nahr el Bared or to Palestine, the choice to return should be theirs. Because, unfortunately, I can blink and imagine their settings transformed as many times as I want, but it is no more effective than clicking my heels together and wishing them home.

For more on Nahr el Bared, including photos, visit http://electronicintifada.net/lebanon.

For my RSS feed: http://hannahinpalestine.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

The End of Israel

December 10, 2007 (International Human Rights Day)

The End of Israel

I am feeling optimistic about Palestine.

I know it sounds crazy. How can I use “optimistic” and “Palestine” in the same sentence when conditions on the ground only seem to get worse? Israeli settlements continue to expand on a daily basis, the checkpoints and segregated road system are becoming more and more institutionalized, Israel is holding 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners illegally in Israeli jails, Gaza is under heavy attack and the borders are entirely controlled by Israel, preventing people from getting their basic human needs met.

We can never forget these things, we can never forget the daily suffering of the people, and yet I do dare to say I am optimistic. Why? Ehud Olmert. Let me clarify. Better yet, let’s let him clarify:

"The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights. As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

That’s right, the Prime Minister of Israel is currently trying to negotiate a “two-state solution” specifically because he realizes that if he doesn’t, Palestinians might begin to demand, en masse, equal rights to Israelis. Furthermore, he worries, the world might begin to see Israel as an apartheid state. In actuality, most of the world already sees Israel this way, but Olmert is worried that even Israel’s most ardent supporters will begin to catch up with the rest of the world.

"The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us," he told Ha’aretz, "because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."

Perhaps Olmert is giving American Jews too much credit here, but he does expose a basic contradiction in the minds of most American people, Jewish and not: Most of us, at least in theory, support equal rights for all residents of a country. Most of us do NOT support rights given on the basis of ethnicity and religion, especially when the ethnicity/religion being prioritized is one that excludes the vast majority of the country’s indigenous population. We cannot, of course, forget our own history of ethnic cleansing on this continent. But we must not use the existence of past atrocities to justify present ones.

I am optimistic not because I think the process of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Israel/Palestine is going to end tomorrow, but because I can feel the ideology behind these policies beginning to collapse. For years the true meaning of political Zionism has been as ignored as its effects on Palestinian daily life. And suddenly it is beginning to break open. Olmert’s comments last week are reminiscent of those of early Zionist leaders who talked openly of transfer and ethnic cleansing in order to create an artificial Jewish majority in historic Palestine.

“We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal.” – David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, 1937

So this idea of a “two-state solution” a la Olmert, which I would argue provides neither a “state” nor a “solution” for the Palestinian people, is the new transfer. It is no longer popular in the world to openly discuss expulsion (though there are political parties in Israel that advocate this), but Olmert hopes that by creating a Palestinian “state” on a tiny portion of historic Palestine, he can accomplish the same goal: maintaining an ethno-religious state exclusively for the Jewish people in most of historic Palestine. His plan, as all other plans Israeli leaders have tried to “negotiate,” ignores the basic rights of the two thirds of the Palestinian population who are refugees. They, like all other refugees in the world, have the internationally recognized right to return to their lands and receive compensation for loss and damages. This should not be up for negotiation.

So why am I optimistic? Why do I think Olmert will fail, if not in the short term, at least in the long term? There are many signs.

The first and most important is that Palestinian people are holding on. Sometimes by a thread, but holding on nonetheless. Despite the hope of many in Israel, Palestinians will not disappear. They engage in daily acts of nonviolent resistance, from demonstrations against the Wall and land confiscation, to simply remaining in their homes against all odds. Young people are joining organizations designed to preserve their culture and identity. Older Palestinians have said to me, “We lived through the Ottoman Empire, we lived through the British Mandate, we lived through Jordanian rule, and we will live through Israeli occupation.” This too shall pass.

In Israel, it seems that within the traditional “Zionist left,” Jewish Israelis are beginning to have open conversations about the exclusivity of Zionism as a political ideology, and are questioning it more and more.

In the United States, I have been traveling around speaking to groups about Palestine, and they get it. Even those whose prior information has come only from US mainstream media, when they hear what is actually happening, they get it. When we explain the difference between being Jewish (a religion or ethnicity), Israeli (a citizenship), and Zionist (an ideology), people understand.

Does Israel have a right to exist? people ask. What does that mean? Do countries really have rights, or do people have rights? The Jewish people have a right to exist, the Israeli people have a right to exist, but what does “Israel” mean? Israel defines itself as the state of the Jewish people. It is not a state of its citizens. It is a state of many people who are not its citizens, like myself, and is not the state of many people who are its citizens, like the twenty percent of its population that is Palestinian. So if we ask a Palestinian person, “Do you recognize the right for there to be a country on your historic homeland that explicitly excludes you?” what kind of response should we expect?

So when Olmert warns that we will “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights” and that “the state of Israel [will be] finished,” I get a little flutter of excitement. I think of the 171 Palestinian organizations who have called on the international community to begin campaigns of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel until Israel complies with international law. This is already a South African-style struggle, and we outside of Palestine need to do our part. Especially those of us who live in the US, the country that gives Israel more than $10 million every single day, must take responsibility for the atrocities committed in our name and with our money.

Ultimately, this is our role as Americans. It is to begin campaigns in our churches, synagogues, mosques, universities, cities, unions, etc. It is not to broker false negotiations between occupier and occupied, and it is not to muse over solutions the way I have above. But one can dream. And as a Jewish American, I know that while it might be scary to some, while it will require a lot of imagination, the end of Israel as a Jewish state could mean the beginning of democracy, human rights, and some semblance of justice in a land that has almost forgotten what that means.

Thank you to Anna Baltzer, my fellow traveler, for ideas and conversations that have led to this article.

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.